Ten Creative Projects from 2021

"The Children Who Played at Slaughtering"
(Art: Chris Gleason)

I’m not horribly prolific, but considering it took forty years before I decided it was time to call myself a playwright (as opposed to an actor or a director) I am at least gratified to create one play a year. Sometimes they even get produced. 

Last year I wrote Forget About Me (The Breakfast Club Play) and over the course of one year had submitted that one to forty-five different places; theaters, competitions, and festivals. Beginning January 1, I expect to receive a number of rejections and also a lot of silence.

No matter. As the man said, “Move on.” I have already begun submitting my new play, No One Wants To Work Anymore. I have a job. I have my family and my health. The work continues, and move on.

These are ten artistic projects I have been involved with in some capacity during 2021.

Mrittika Chatterjee
"What Happened"
(Chennai Art Theatre)

Savory Taṇhā (sixteen short plays performed by a rotating ensemble)

The year began with fully-realized Zoom performances of this piece, produced by Cleveland Public Theatre and presented over three weekends with the company performing different roles for four different iterations of the script. If it was possible to have a live theatrical event during the shutdown, this was it.

What Happened produced by Chennai Art Theatre 

As things began to open up in other parts of the world, a postponed performance of I Hate This, re-titled What Happened for Indian audiences, opened in Chennai. For the first time, this monodrama was divided between two actors. Chennai Art Theatre remounted the work in Pondicherry in October!

All-Ohio Thespian Show: Time Capsule 

This year the All-Ohio Thespian Show was an online collection of short films called Time Capsule, chronicling the year 2020, season by season. It was all-original, written and produced by the students themselves, directed by Chennelle Bryant-Harris. I was tapped as dramaturge and New York-based artist SMJ was the movement coach.

The Children Who Played at Slaughtering

The NEOMFA Playwrights Festival went virtual in 2021, short films were adapted from short play scripts. My piece was an animation from my take on the Grimm’s Folk Tale, The Children Who Played at Slaughtering, directed by Dan Riordan, animation by Chris Gleason. It’s a seriously bent piece of work and I fear that if it is ever posted online it may ruin my career as the writer of children’s plays.

The Negative Zone (comic book)

My final project for a course in Comics Studies and Queer Theory was a book adapted from a short play scripts about comic book shops from the early 1980s. Every Saturday for ten weeks I spent the entire day (or longer) creating one page. I’m pretty pleased with the result, which you can read as a digital comic for only $1.99.

I Hate This produced by Playhouse Square

Last spring we recorded an amazing filmed version of our story, performed by James Rankin, and also directed by Chennelle. Ananias Dixon as videographer also played a major role in the shape the work has taken. We are still trying to decide the best way to present this piece, but I am grateful that it is done. It’s something I have fantasized about for over fifteen years.

"Sherlock Holmes Meets the
Bully of Baker Street"
(Jupiter Christian School)

The Great Lakes Theater School Residency Program

For (over) twenty years I have been working with actors to bring the residency program into area schools. This year is different, for too many reasons. But the people are so good.

Sherlock Holmes Meets the Bully of Baker Street

Last Spring I was delighted to learn that not only was my Holmesian pastiche to be published by Pioneer Drama Service, but that the script had received the Shubert Fendrich Memorial Playwriting Award! 

Schools in the United States and Canada are now taking up their own productions of Sherlock and Vicky running down missing paintings and the bully of Baker Street (see photo from the Jupiter Christian School production, right). 

It is madness to think that only two years ago we were creating the original production for live performance in area schools.

School Residency Program
(Great Lakes Theater)

10 Minutes to Midnight: 9 Quirky Plays for the Holidays

There was a time when a major part of my creative output was shepherding writers to create short plays on a single theme, and I was very gratified to be one writer in such a project curated by someone else. Directed by Caitlin Lewins with Ananias, for Cleveland Public Theatre, this was a delightful way to end the year. 

NEOMFA Playwrights Festival 2022

The world is shutting down, again. Don’t act surprised. Last week there was a small gathering to read through those plays which (maybe, hopefully) will be presented at the NEOMFA Playwrights Festival at convergence-continuum in early 2022. I have a ten minute play which is (currently) titled The Ocean Breathes Salty. What’s crazy is that two of the four actors in this ten-minute piece attended Camp Theater! in years past.

However the new year shapes up, we will create. It's what we do, right?

The Negative Zone (comic strip)

From "The Negative Zone"

This is the foreword to "The Negative Zone", a sixteen-page comic created for my Comic Theory/Queer Studies course at Kent State, Spring 2021.

At the tender age of thirteen, I was frequenting coffee houses after dark with friends of friends, smoking cigarettes and consuming far too much caffeine, and listening as these strange cohorts discussed the philosophy of STAR TREK, made catty remarks about the entrances and exits of familiar faces, and whether or not “to pork” was an appropriate synonym for fucking. 

Pengo, age 14

No one described themselves as queer, but they weren’t exactly straight, either. A self-identified witch claimed she could never get pregnant because she could menstruate at will, a twenty-one year-old hipster had no issues getting my fifteen year-old girlfriend to tongue kiss him, sitting right there in front of me. The rules were not familiar, I did not know what was all right and what was not.

What does “all right” mean, anyway?

As found families go, this one was somewhat toxic and my takeaway included some bad wisdom. Around the same time I was introduced to NORTH STARR COMICS, which was first operated out of this guy’s basement, and later in the storefront of a motel. It was the kind of place dudes (pretty much entirely dudes) might hang out all day. It was a place of safety for nerds where we could eat crap and talk shit and read all the comics and crack jokes and watch movies and just be ourselves.

Pengo & Serena

Up to a point. Our sexuality, ourselves, this remained an awkward subject. This “Bronze Age” of comics, where even the mainstream producers like Marvel and DC were exploring issues of race and class through titles like Cloak & Dagger and the New Teen Titans and the explosively popular X-MEN (and its countless spin-offs) they still served a dominantly heteronormative, binary gender paradigm.

Alternative comics were actually worse. Unburdened by the COMICS CODE AUTHORITY these books could freely offer images of sex and sexual violence with impunity, and of course, even in such high-brow and critically acclaimed titles as V for Vendetta and Sandman, women were the subject of degrading abuse in a manner the men characters never were.

And so many of us (I include myself in this number) were homophobic and sexist by upbringing, if not by nature. A comic shop was a much an example of Foucault’s beloved PANOPTICON as anywhere else in the larger society where, by awareness of constant observation by others, we were still self-governing our behaviors and statements, for fear of judgement or punishment by the larger group -- even if the standards of that behavior in a comic shop was alternate to that which was found in school or on the streets.

Pengo, age 52

THE NEGATIVE ZONE is a fictional space, inspired by the comic stores I frequented: Kovacs, North Starr, Cosmic Comics, Mr. Fantasy’s. A place where teenagers mingled with adults who shared a common interest, and in many cases had a greater opportunity to be their true selves, even when they weren’t sure who that was yet, even as they were in the process of becoming. To quote my man Jean Paul SARTRE, “A person who claims that they fundamentally have a certain identity is in bad faith.”

Many genres and subcultures came together under such roofs, the superhero FANGIRLS AND BOYS and the science fiction geeks, the fantasy seekers and their Wiccan counterparts. And yes, there were online systems back then where computer aficionados from different communities could chat with complete anonymity and pretend to be whoever they wanted to be.

If this all sounds perhaps a little risky, the underage and the aged interacting so far from the watchful eyes of parents and guardians, it was that, too. As it is in our schools and churches, and halls of government. But for those who sought the freedom to explore and to discover brave new identities, it was a haven, a sanctuary, a laboratory. We were IN THE ZONE.

"The Negative Zone" is now available as an e-comic for Kindle!

The Frantic Four (comic strip)

Artwork: Tom Packis

When I was a kid, I would get on a city bus, by myself, and take it to Lakewood. This was when I was ten or eleven. I’d get off on Clifton, and walk a half-mile south to get to Kovacs Comics at 16108 Detroit Ave.

I have this strange memory of a man with these bizarre growths, hanging from his face. They were like spheres of flesh, hanging from stretched tethers of skin. I found it horrifying, and only glanced at him and looked away. His face was unreal, grotesque.

Years later, in a novelty shop, I saw a rubber mask featuring the exact same, bizarre deformity, and I wonder, was that man real? Did I conflate some memories? Or was the guy on the bus wearing that mask and I couldn’t tell?

Anyway there I was, a child, on the RTA, on my own. Freedom! I can’t imagine my kids wanting to do that. 

I had a flyer from Mister Fantasy’s (15015 Detroit) and it was just an ad for the store. All the comics shops did that, printed up flyers to put into each bag of comics you bought. 

Artwork: Philip L. Fried

This flyer featured an original comic. “Mr. Fantasy” was direct addressing the reader, talking about how the store was closing, and that this was the last comic. Mr. Fantasy was a big bearded guy, the stereotypical image of a guy who owned a comic book store.

Thing was, though the comic was cheeky and cheery, in the last panel the character had shot himself. It was just a blood-spattered wall.

In 1981 or 1982, I was introduced to North Starr Comics. Originally it was a mail order concern, operated out of this guy’s basement in Fairview Park. But he had fixed up his basement the way you would a store, and my friend Tom brought me there. It was so cool, like a comic book speakeasy. If you knew the password, you could browse and buy and hang out and shoot the shit.

By 1983 he’d rented a storefront on Lorain Avenue. A proper store, open for business. And there was a regular cast of characters who would hang out there and antagonize each other. Some of us would spend hours there, reading books, watching comings and goings. If you have been paying attention, North Starr Comics was the inspiration for The Negative Zone, my recent comic book project.

"Ghoul" reference

Dave, the proprietor, also had fliers. They were usually cheesecake pin-ups drawn by this guy named Phil. And I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if we made a superhero parody featuring characters based on all the guys who hung out at the store?

Looking back, this turned out to be my first public foray into script writing. I wasn’t much of an artist then (am I now?) but Tom was, and so we created The Frantic Four which was full of inside jokes and references. 

It’s not for the ages, suffice to say I didn’t know what to write about, things just happened. Mostly it was a goof, inspired by Marvel Comics’ own self-parodies like Not Brand Echh, or the kind of riffing humor you would find in Cracked. 

One lesson I am glad I learned early was about unappreciated mockery. We were all in on the joke, but there was one guy who had been the butt of our jokes for some time, and I made him the villain of the story. In his first appearance he was an overweight, diet pop swilling creep who had a cadre of robot servants dressed like high school cheerleaders. We used his actual first name, and the drawing did look like him.

After that "issue" of the comic was produced and distributed, I received a very terse but measured phone call from him (he was in his mid-20s at the time, I was fourteen) explaining to me exactly what the meaning of the legal term "libel" was and recommending I put more thought into my work.

He wasn't wrong. He wasn't wrong at all. It freaked me out. So I had his character unceremoniously murdered by Dr. Doom and never mentioned him by name again.

It is remarkable to me, however, that for a couple years I was producing scripts, that another artist was turning them into pages, and that people actually received them to read (or throw away) in their monthly bag of comics.

My interest in the project waned at the same time my interest in superhero “floppy” comics did. By the time I was a junior in high school I was so engaged in other things, and that was around the time they ret-conned the Jean Grey/Phoenix Saga (if you know, you know) and I was moving on. North Starr closed shop while I was at college, which is as good a metaphor as anything else.

Creating The Negative Zone comic, taking the class, was  quite restorative. I felt like I had the opportunity to rewrite some history I had closed off in my memory, and to remember how enjoyable that period of my life was. It was so easy to dismiss the writing I did for this project as childish and silly. But that's what it was meant to be. And the really important thing to keep in mind is that we did it. 

Many thanks to "Frantic Four" co-creator Tom Packis for his amazing artwork!

North Starr Comics

Process XXVIII

Printed copies of The Negative Zone arrived in the mail the other day. I believed the most hassle-free and inexpensive way to complete the project would be to order them online, twenty copies, enough for the professor and any member of the class who wanted one.

Alas, there was a voice balloon missing from one of the panels. No need to explain how this happened, it was a technical error, and entirely my fault. Worse yet, the voice balloon in question was on the first page, even worse, it was the set-up to a rather crass joke, even worse yet, a joke that receives several callbacks throughout the comic.

What to do? Dump the entire run, of course, and have it printed for pick-up at the print shop up the street. Editing it, reprinting the one page, adding a sticker or something, these would cost as much, take too much time, and look sloppy.

I am relieved I did not (as I had considered) print one hundred of them, for sale. As it is, I will number these few revised copies, sign them, and that will be that.

I hope it's good enough. The memory of my embarrassing failure as an undergrad fueled my desire to create something truly special. Is it? Who knows. It’s a thing. It’s just another thing.

The audio drama I penned for craft and theory was a trip. I found a template for radio drama for Final Draft on Reddit, of all places, and that was very helpful.

The script, I Think We’re All Weirdos On the Web, is more me than Firesign Theatre, though I did name the protagonist Georgia Mordedor (Spanish for “teether”) after David Ossman’s omnipresent George Tirebiter. But she’s neither a spy nor a girl delighter, just a woman trying to get a chair she found on Craig’s List.

Process XXVI

"The Children Who Played at Slaughtering"
Directed by Dan Riordan
Animation by Chris Gleason

My Saturday routine has been to draw all day, and especially in the evening. I have been slavishly dedicated to the all-request show Radio Free Current, where Sean McPherson refers to me as “David from Cleveland.” He’d call me that anyway, but it provides me a distinction from “David from Las Vegas.” We are both dedicated listeners. 

Perhaps it would have been worth it to bring the drawing table out of storage, but there is literally nowhere we could have put it without it being in the way for the entire semester.

This week, as I was drafting the text for the final page, I began to get depressed. Already! Completion depression, and I am not even close to finished! It needs to be turned in by May 11. I am in the zone, though. Last week I was behind, and I spent the entire weekend catching up.

But last night I was not drawing. Because I was done! I did the whole page on Friday. I mean, I’m not done-done, I need to go back and clean things up, add some backgrounds. However, the big work is complete.

Click on for detail.

I also need to write a radio drama. This is also a thing I have done. I have been repurposing a lot of my work this semester, which I am entirely justified in doing (he said somewhat defensively) because it’s about form, not originality. I adapted a comic book from a short play, there are other unproduced works that might make for good radio drama.

Speaking of which, tonight is the 2021 NEOMFA Playwriting Festival. Five short films will be presented at the Tremont Taphouse, including an adaptation of The Children Who Played at Slaughtering. It’s an eight minute film, directed by Dan Riordan, animated by Chris Gleason, with all the voices performed by Jo Roueiheb.

I’ve seen a preview. The team improved on the text, by which I mean, they changed text and for the better. It has a better ending line than the one I wrote. Also, because it is animation, they were able to add a lot of business that isn't in the text, but comments on the text, on the horrible world the kids see around them, and I love that. It’s a real collaborative effort.

Process XXIV

I have always been bad at composition. I like drawing people, but not things. But things provide a sense of place. My first year as an editorial cartoonist for our weekly high school paper, my editor told me I needed to add background. If only a single line, so that y characters weren’t floating in space.

After I had created three comic strips for the daily paper at school, I self-published a collection (God, that was expensive and what no one was shopping for) and the cover is terrible. Just the main characters from each strip, floating in space.

Looking at that cover, I wouldn’t have bought it. Too much white space, as they say.

Creating a cover for The Negative Zone, I am creating a 1980s inspired superhero comic cover, with a bunch of inside references mostly from the class, and even from the class I took in 1988, if you can catch it.

And we are now fully vaccinated. And we have returned to the deck. The furniture is there. The lights are hung. It is time, once again, to work outdoors.

Meanwhile, on Thursday evening I attended the first in-person rehearsal in thirteen months. Same director, though Chennelle. From The Witches to I Hate This. A solo performance, one actor. But also director, playwright -- and cinematographer-collaborator, and a stage manager. A creative team, still distanced, still masked, but all in one room.

Is there a light? Can you see the light?

Process XXIII

Next Wednesday, I will receive the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. I will endeavor to pound water and orange juice all day prior to the shot, as is recommended by people I don’t know on the internet in an attempt to prevent serious feelings of illness the next day. And yet, I have a lot of stuff scheduled for the coming week.

There will be rehearsals in the evening - live, in-person rehearsals downtown - as well as an online reading for a writers group on Thursday. The cartooning must continue, and I have fiction to write, as well as, you know, the jobs.

Why am I sharing what is coming, instead of reporting on what the past week was like? Maybe because I am full of anxiety and the past week didn’t really feel like much. We are nesting in Athens for an extended holiday weekend, which should be relaxing but I mean come on. It’s just a more relaxing place to do the work.

Meanwhile, the short animated film adapted from my play script The Children Who Played at Slaughtering is in development. And that’s all I need to say about that! Entirely out of my hands. One voice artist is playing all of the kids, I’m just excited to know it’s happening.

Now that it's April, I have also started reading a play a day. That is a thing I have done for a few years. People suggest plays for me to read, I can’t possibly read them all before the end of the month but I do log them in my NPX “library” to read soon. Just today someone read one of my plays and posted a recommendation, for The Negative Zone, the script I am adapting, one page at a time, for my comics studies class. 

"Everyone needs a safe space. It can be your room, your study, the garage, the kitchen, or even an erstwhile comic book store in someone's basement." - Philip Middleton Williams

That’s a piece I would like to see on stage some day.

Process XVIII

Click to enlarge.

One of the things I failed to mention at the beginning of this semester was that I was afraid of failure. That I would fall short this second time out, that I had taken on too much. At the same time, I felt more alive than I have in years. 

I am no longer afraid. And I still feel alive. This, in spite of being largely sedentary. The snow, cold temperatures and sheer busyness have kept me from running, at all, for over a month. And I don’t care. And that’s not good.

Regardless, Taṇhā has opened, and I am very happy with that. I have settled into my assistantship, and I am very happy about that. Teaching classes remotely can be exhausting, but this past week was light and I was so very happy about that.

My “mini” comic, as you can see, was not so very mini. I deluded myself into thinking it might take a couple hours. It only took two hours to draft and complete a comic strip when I was in college … well, this one took the better part of three days. And I’m still not happy with it. I just got a new appt redo the voice balloons

Because I’m not done. I’m going to keep working at The Negative Zone.

For craft and theory I need to develop a twenty minute “quarantine” play, and I have an idea which I have gotten really excited about. It involves running, so? Now that the temps are above freezing, maybe I need to get off my butt.

Seriously, though. This new one-act script idea is driving me to distraction, and I am so jazzed about that.

"Savory Taṇhā (sixteen short plays performed by a rotating ensemble)" continues this Sunday at 6:00 PM

Process XVII

"Hello, Cleveland."
Alters #4
(Aftershock Comics, 2017)

We’re reading the Paul Jenkins/Leila Leiz comic Alters for class this week, the third notable comic to take place in Cleveland, Ohio, after American Splendor and Howard the Duck. It is also notable in that the protagonist is a trans woman superhero, named Chalice.

Last week we took in the Iceman comics which delved into his life as a gay man, which was queer as in strange (as they say.) It is often an odd fit when an long-established character is rewritten to have a sexual orientation contrary to previous expectations.

So, yeah. We’ve moved onto queer superheroes. When I was a teenager, reading X-Men was in its full flower, working as an aggressively overwrought metaphor for any marginalized group. This came to its obvious conclusion in the X2 when (coincidentally) Bobby “Iceman” Drake reveals to his parents as being a mutant. The metaphor is played for comedy.

His mother asks, “Have you tried ... not being a mutant?”

In the Iceman comics he has to come out to them a second time, this time as gay. No more symbolism, this is attempting to reflect the real life experience.

Alters had the advantage of starting fresh, a new “universe” with a different power dynamic between superpowered humans, which I enjoyed more. In spite of its unique and sympathetic protagonist, and leans harder into the lives of marginalized people - not only trans, but disabled, homeless, people of color - it still falls into a several traps, including a queer-coded arch villain and the cringey depiction of a single black mother anmed Sharise.

Is she realistic, are there people like Sharise? I guess. But knowing it comes from the mind of a white, male writer, the situation and vernacular were a little difficult to take.

And then there’s the Cleveland thing. Just as Steve Gerber, who never visited Cleveland, chose our hometown as the setting for the adventures of Howard the Duck, the British-born Jenkins made this Chalice’s home without really knowing anything about it. Where the hell is “the city center”? The least bit of research could have made it more believable. As it is, Cleveland is simply a stand-in for “Not New York.”

As for me, I am spending this weekend creating a twelve-panel comic adapted from my short play The Negative Zone, which takes place in a comic book shop in the mid 1980s.