Two Weekends in September

Good kitty.

Outdoor Theater of a Different Kind

The remnants of this late season has included bouts of strong summer storms, bringing down trees and flooding cities. So is the harbinger of catastrophic climate change. And yet, we get out. To enjoy what the urban outdoors has to offer, because we know the days are drawing far too short and sometimes it snows in September.

Last weekend, I took a three hour stroll through the streets of Cleveland with two hundred of my closest friends, attending Micro Theater CLE: Tremont Reloaded. And what I witnessed was a cavalcade of performances:

A short play about a fork in the road set in a dead end street, a multimedia performance about childhood trauma executed in an attic, a laconic chain-smoking improviser, lazing on a chaise lounge in someone’s driveway, and so much more!

And as usual, I provided the cat poop in the sandbox.

To be sure, I received so many positive marks about my brief solilokitty ("Stray") which was a surprise to those who were prepared to enjoy a series of silly stories told by dopey dogs. Then this feline arrived (performed with cat-like reflexes by the always adorable Katelyn Cornelius) to unwind an inscrutable saga about their transition from feral stray to pampered rescue cat.

Folks were moved, it stuck with them, which is only natural. Cats have depth. Dogs are dumb.

Molded From the Clay

For three seasons now, Cleveland playwright and impresario Stuart Hoffman has produced a series of creepy plays in September (Advent for spooky season) at Wizbang! in Cleveland Heights. If you have never been, Wizbang is homebase for circus performers Pinch & Squeal (Jason and Danielle Tilk) offering offbeat entertainments and clever concoctions in intimate digs festooned with fabulous frippery.

This year, Hoffman opened his roster of supernatural stories to include those by other playwrights with Out of the Kiln: When Your Past Haunts You, and so on Friday evening our senses were cooled by unnatural infestations, comic tales of torture, playful poltergeists, and a literal throwing of hands.

The night concluded with a rendition of “The Hearse Song” delightfully choreographed by Millie Sherin which was unsettlingly sexy.

Mike Frye, Mindy Herman, Keith Kornajcik 

Back to the Shop

If last week’s trek through Tremont was summer’s curtain call, participating in Pandemonium last night was opening night for fall.

Cleveland Public Theatre’s annual gala is an enormous party, this year celebrating the extensive renovation of the (former) Russian Orthodox Church space which is now fully accessible.

We were on the other side of the campus, the folks from Micro Theater CLE provided a stage to present a cycle of 10 minute plays. The stage was located outside the scene shop; at the first Pandemonium, over twenty years ago, I had produced a series of Neo-Futurist plays inside the scene shop for audiences seated inside the freight elevator, arriving every fifteen minutes.

I done lots of Pandemonium.

My offering this evening was Lombardo (also directed by Millie Sherin!) in which a character-free young man from LIFE interviews Guy Lombardo about his switch from radio to TV for his New Year’s Eve broadcast. A short play meant to take the piss out of bad biographic plays, I made a point not to include any data I couldn’t find on Wikipedia.

The scene was stolen by Mindy Herman as Lombardo’s wasted wife Lillibell. One of my colleagues observed, “I always love your woman characters,” which is funny because Lillibell is a parody of all those poorly drawn female characters.

Speeches were made, performances were witnessed, the massive, tented dance floor opened just as the clouds did, and I was in bed by eleven.

Welcome, autumn!

Minnesota Fringe Festival: Twenty Years On

Next week, I will have my first script bow at the BorderLight Fringe Festival in Cleveland, Ohio. I spent the first decade of the 21st Century paying attention to the fringe movement that was taking fire across the country, never imagining we would eventually have our own right here at home.

And yet, next week my play Step Nine will go up four times in the Snug at Parnell’s Pub in Playhouse Square. Better yet, it’s free. Check it out.

Red Eye Theatre, August 2003

Twenty years ago this week, however, I was in the Twin Cities for the tenth annual Minnesota Fringe Festival. This was the first time I had personally produced a show at any festival, and my learning curve was steep. 

The show was I Hate This (a play without the baby) and the things I learned there would serve me extremely well over the next decade. At that time, I started my first blog (I Hate This Blog) to record the experience.

Some lessons were hard: primarily, to plan for success and also to set your expectations very low. The home team, wherever you are producing, will have the advantage of family, friends, colleagues and a pre-existing audience. I learned to be happy with the attention I could attract, the audience I could engage.

Our (opening night) house was very, very small. It was a difficult show for me - I have never performed it without at least a few audience members who know who I am. No one laughed much, The tiny house contributed to this, I am sure, but I just couldn't tell if it was flying.

Afterwards I just sat in the dressing room a few minutes, trying to pull it together. I mean, tonight's show was one of the hardest things I have ever done, ever. The lighting guy (for the venue) came in and told me how great the show was.

I told him how I felt about the audience not laughing ever and he said, "Oh, that's just a Minnesota thing, you don't laugh at someone else's problems.” — August 2, 2003

I also learned to see as many shows as I could. There are a number of reasons for this, not least of which to glom onto the zeitgeist, to know what’s going on, not just in the festival, but in the larger world. Getting out into the festival also gives you the opportunity to meet not only the artists but the support staff, for the venue, and the festival itself.

(My brother) had some friends over for dinner, and I found myself in the position of trying to describe the differences between the style of performance in my show and (Rik Reppe's) "Staggering Toward America." I play characters, but then so does Rik ... but he's not really acting, only, well, what are we doing when we impersonate someone else and tell something from their point of view, I mean, isn't that what acting is?

On the way home from seeing Amy Salloway in "Does This Monologue Make Me Look Fat?" I was struck by all of these deep thoughts about solo performance, and not just solo perf. but spoken word perf, and not just that, but the entire stripped-of-artifice thing — as can be illustrated by the work of the Neo-Futurists.

(We) saw three of them (Neo-Futurists) do a final dress of "Drinking & Writing" at the Bryant-Lake Bowl. They do the show in a bar, the three of them drink the entire time (well, the two guys do) and talk about drinking and its effect on writing and great American writers ... or (vice) versa.

I have been struck by a number of no-frills shows at this Fringe, shows that have a great deal of honesty and heart ... Shows that really communicate something, told by people who I am actually happy to listen to. I only hope I can count myself among those people. — August 6, 2003

Nick Koesters, Denny Hansen & Me
Volunteers for "Voice-In-Head"
Minneapolis Theater Garage, 2003

Self-promotion, while an end unto itself, is also helpful in teaching you how to think about your own work. This is from the first day:

I ran into some people outside (the venue). They asked what my show was, and I said, "I Hate This" and as they looked at my card one asked, "Oh? And what do you hate?" and I said, "oh ... uh, I, ah, my wife and I had a stillborn child, and, uh, this is about that." 

"Oh," he said, kindly.

I said, "Yeah, I really gotta work on the pitch." — August 1, 2003

Then, two days later:

I approached a number of people… One said, "I've heard good things about this," and another, "what is it about?" 

And I said, "Two years ago my wife and I had a child who was stillborn and this is about the year I spent coping with it. Now, whatever you think a show like that might be like, forget it." 

Then someone asked, "Is it a good show?" and I said, "It's a great show — your friend here already heard good things about it." — August 3, 2003

Looking forward, to the BorderLight Fringe, I hope to maintain some of the perspective that I gained from festivals I have attended in other cities. The Minnesota Fringe was, even twenty years ago, quite progressive in their implementation of social media. Facebook wouldn’t even exist for another year, Twitter even later, and yet in 2003 the MN Fringe had a message board ("Vox Fringe") for anyone to leave reviews and starred ratings.

The question then, as now, is what percentage of participants on their message boards were potential audiences, or other fringe artists.

Last night the Vox Fringe board greeted us with this cry in the wilderness: "Who Do I Have To Blow To Get A Mainstream Review?" 

Ah, yes. The question of the ages. This person went on to lament the fact that all the papers have covered the same dozen shows (this is not true) and goes along with the accusation of local critics ignoring the out-of-town acts (they haven't.) 

But there is something to be said for the media concentrating on established performers and writers and up-and-coming companies which have already made waves at previous Fringes. — August 7, 2003

Finally, during the frenzy of festival activity, it is good to reflect upon what it is you are offering, and how it fits into the larger picture of the event. The following year, when I brought my show to New York, I heard someone say, “I like my fringe funny.” Not surprisingly, they were not interested in seeing a show about stillbirth.

One of the two closing night parties was last night ... I only got to chat with a few people ... one conversation was with a Fringer artist … she was torn up about a review she received in the weekly paper, and I think I said all the right things for her to put it in perspective. I mean, the show isn't for the (local weekly paper’s) readership … 

"Your show isn't hip," I said. "My show isn't hip. You know people like your show, they've told you, and that's what matters, when you come down to it." — August 10, 2003

James Rankin & Nicholas Chokan
"Step Nine"
Give Me Your Keys, 2023

Very soon, artists will descend upon downtown Cleveland for the BorderLight Fringe. The festival is still in its infancy, and I am excited and apprehensive. Will people come? What will they say? Which shows will have what we called “buzz”, and which will not? 

You might think it would be very difficult, over the course of only three days, to generate buzz, so many of us are working ahead of time to get the word out there.

And who knows? Perhaps net weekend some young artist will be taking their first step on a lifelong journey.

I wonder how long I will be producing (“I Hate This.”) — August 8, 2003

Give Me Your Keys presents "Step Nine" by David Hansen, August 3 -5, 2023 at the Snug in Parnell's Pub in Playhouse Square as part of the BorderLight Fringe Festival. Admission is free. 

Notes on Camp: Day Eight

It is true, with the improv club on our penultimate day, we could spend the entire day rehearsing and preparing for our performance.

To think. We weren’t even sure if we could do this. Would anyone sign up? Would they agree to masks? And how would that go? I’ll tell you, it went fine. Only the photos will remind me that we were even wearing them. And no one got sick, not at this camp.

Family and friends of the campers arrived in time for a 2:30 PM performance. The Jesters & Fools (9-11 group) presented an original play about oracles before our teams presented their short plays and Shakespeare scenes, before the entire camp came together for our final song and dance number. It was a one-hour show! Created in eight days!

The short plays, by the way, were presented in a manner inspired by the Neo-Futurists. We called it “Ten Short Plays in Twenty Minutes” with the caveat that there were neither ten plays nor were we performing them in twenty minutes, though when all was done I believe we did execute all eleven plays in twenty minutes or less.

On the drive in this morning, I was already thinking about next year, when hopefully I will have a better opportunity to organize the improvisation workshops. The first week is for a close study of the mechanics or techniques, the second concentrating on a singular character for use in a (short) long form improv.

Now, if you will excuse me. I am going on vacation.

My First Fringe Festival

"Happy Happy Bunny Visits Sad Sad Owl"
(not actually) by Samuel Beckett, age 7
from "The Complete Lost Works of ..."

The last millennium, as any obnoxious numerology will tell you, ended at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 2000, because we count from one to ten, and not zero to nine.

Anyone with a social life or a personality or friends will tell you oh hell no, I was there and the new millennium began on January 1, 2000 baby, whoop whoop, that was awesome.

Which just goes to show that numbers are only symbols and the majority wins in the marketplace of popular imagination.

The year 2000 was, for me, an ending and not, as it seemed to me at the time, the continuation of a journey upon a determined path. I was newly wed, I had started a popular theater company, I was 32 years of age, and we had plans to start a family. And yet, there was a new me that was about to be born. My first life was about to end, for better or worse, and I was unaware.

Philip Bosco, Michael Cumpsty,
and Blair Brown
"Copenhagen" (Broadway, 2000)

The summer of 2000, my wife had left a job at a weekly newspaper to begin grad school, rehearsals were about to commence -- for both of us. Bad Epitaph was producing Cloud 9, and Dobama’s Night Kitchen her new play Angst:84. Late August, twenty years ago, and it was the perfect time to plan a weekend in New York City, to see old friends and even catch a show. We took the train. Time was expansive. We had no kids.

We had even gotten tickets to see Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen at the Royale. Science plays were all the rage, don’t you know. David Auburn’s Proof was transferring to Broadway that fall, Caryl Churchill's 2002 play A Number and Stoppard's Arcadia nine years earlier. Three actors walked in circles around a bare stage ("like particles in an experiment") talking about physics. It was a hit! We used to be smart.

It was a dare, taking a train and buying tickets for a show, and we just made it, too. Heading straight from the station to the theater, we shoved our backpacks under our seats, no time even to pee.

We were staying with her old boyfriend Harris in an apartment on the east side in the 60s. As the three of us made plans for the weekend, he suggested we see a show at the New York International Fringe Festival. I did not know what that was.

That night, my wife was having dinner with an old friend from Sarah Lawrence and so Harris and I had disco sushi at Avenue A and went to see a festival offering, FrankenClown, ostensibly an evil clown show, even promising “several slayings and raucous laughter” but turned out to be a pretty straightforward retelling of Shelley’s classic in clown make-up.

Home of disco sushi.

But. My God! Looking through the festival guide, there were over one hundred shows going on across the L.E.S. A happening was happening! I felt vengeful and jealous. Also old.

I thought of the past five years of my life, the several shows we had created in the Night Kitchen, original plays and ensemble-written pieces and long-form improvs, any one of them could have been submitted to this festival -- except it didn’t exist yet. The New York fringe began in 1997, and I left Dobama soon after. Alas.

After the show we caught up with the others and bar-hopped until about four a.m.

CJ does the thing.

The next morning my head and tummy were a little tender and so we lay low for the early afternoon. One of them said something about “CJ doing the thing” and I was the only one in the room who had not yet started watching The West Wing, they had to explain it to me. Harris downloaded “The Jackal” using LimeWire because we could not yet just dial up something from YouTube, so I could hear the song. It was peak Y2K.

That night we had more success with the fringe, joining a packed house at Surf Reality in the East Village to see The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett as Found in an Envelope (partially burned) in a Dustbin in Paris Labeled "Never to be performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I'll Sue! I'LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!!! It was created and performed by Theater Oobleck members Ben Schnieder and Danny Thompson, and Neo-Futurist founder Greg Allen and included elements of each companies’ work, particularly their high-brow loopiness.

By now I was in the zone and I desperately wanted to see one more show before we left. Sunday afternoon we packed our backpacks and headed back downtown for one more show. We saw the play Merrick's Gallery at the Present Company Theatorium on Stanton Street, headquarters for the entire festival. During intermission I nosed around, trying to gladhand one of the administrators.

I was bitten. This was the next step. Bringing a show to New York to participate in a festival like this was definitely on the agenda for the future. And the opportunity presented itself sooner than I imagined, though not with one of my shows. The Night Kitchen took my wife’s play, Angst:84, to the Fringe the next year, produced right there at the Present Company Theatorium. I ran sound for that production, and during my copious spare time took in sixteen other shows at FringeNYC 2001.

This experience did not start my new life, but in hindsight it was a piece of it. For the better part of ten years I had endeavored to create new works in northeast Ohio, to be a participant in making Cleveland into the theater city I knew it might be. And it's not like I hadn't attending storefront theater before in Chicago, the Twin Cities, New York, London, and elsewhere.

But to be confronted with the sheer massive scope of current theatrical productions, all in one place at one time, was to be more suddenly and deeply engaged in the national and global theater community. There was an element of FOMO to it, to be sure. I wanted in.

"Angst:84" company at the Present Company Theatorium (FringeNYC 2001)

I brought three of my own shows to fringe festivals, in New York and elsewhere. Did it make an impact on my career? Maybe. Was it fun? Sure. Did I learn anything? A lot. But it feels like a long time ago. And now I have, at last, started grad school.

Amy Salloway, who I met at the Minnesota Fringe in 2003, she said, "Fringe festivals are summer camp for theater people." For me, however, summer is over.

Sources:
Playbill, "Copenhagen" (Royale Theatre, 2000)
Dog Days Sizzle for Theater's Off-Offbeat Pups by Jesse McKinley The New York Times (8/18/2000)

The former Present Company Theatorium space was demolished to make way for luxury apartments in the late 00s.

UPDATE: BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025. Help support our production by dropping a donation on our GoFundMe campaign! 

Urinetown: The Musical @ Blank Canvas Theatre

Daryl Kelly as Bobby Strong (Blank Canvas, 2017)

It is a well-known fact that the ground-breaking musical Urinetown: The Musical was set to open on Thursday, September 13, 2001. As events played out that week, it is no small feat that they only need to postpone the opening for one week, and opened instead on September 20.

What is less-reported is that I already had a ticket to see it two weeks later, on Saturday, October 6. Not only a ticket to the show, but also a plane ticket for LaGuardia. The emotional trauma of witnessing the events of September 11, even just on television, endowed the idea of flying with a newly realized dread, one which continues to this day.

Earlier that summer my wife and I took a transatlantic flight, international terrorism was furthest from my mind.

I had several reasons I really wanted to attend this new production, however. I knew some people who were deeply invested in it, and I had long been a fan of Greg Kotis from when he was a member of the Neo-Futurists.

My first impression of his work was a Too Much Light play called “Documentation” from 1991. Kotis stepped out onto the empty stage with a Polaroid camera and asked, "Will all the Jews in the audience stand up, please?"

People stood, the guy I came with stood. I’m not Jewish, I didn’t stand. Kotis took a photo of the audience, looked at the photo until the image was clear. He said, "Thank you." Curtain.

Simply told, haunting and cautionary. Our imitative company in Cleveland were always trying to reach the elegant impact of plays like that one. The idea that someone whose experimental work I had seen in a rented theater in Chicago ten years earlier had written the book for a Broadway musical was inspiring and I just wanted to see it.

My wife had written a play which was produced at that year’s New York Fringe at the old resent Company space, a mere two years since Urinetown had made its mark in the same venue. The Broadway producers of that musical were about, drumming interest and selling copies of original cast album, which I purchased.

So, I knew what the show was about, and frankly I was a bit concerned how it would be received. We were still, supposedly in an era of “post-irony,” SNL producer Lorne Michaels had only the weekend before my arrival asked Mayor Giuliani on the show if it was okay to be funny again. (The mayor’s response; “Why start now?”)

John Cullum as Caldwell B. Cladwell (Broadway, 2001)

Even Urinetown’s most experienced and lauded performer, John Cullum, didn’t get the show or think it was funny. In Backstage earlier that year he said he thought the show was “strange and crude and by the end of the first act I was angry and offended.” Later, I heard Cullum in an interview admit that it was his wife who read the script, thought it was hilarious, and encouraged him to take the role.

My first night in Manhattan I met and drinks with some friends. We were well uptown, far from Ground Zero. I had already seen it, however, from the sky. We arrived at dusk, the sky was dark, but the site of the former World Trade Center was lit as bright as day, crews working around the clock, the pit still actively smoldering. Everyone in the plane was looking out the window. Many literally gasped. The guy sitting next to me had a tourist guide, he was visiting his son at college, and good for him.

I asked my friends, should I go? Should I go downtown and see it? Was that the right thing to do? The wrong thing to do? These were early days. I didn’t want to be a ghoul.

They said, yes! You must! And so I was absolved. And I went. And what I saw there is a story for another time. It is enough to say at this time that all of this was hanging in the air the night I first saw Urinetown: The Musical at the Henry Miller Theatre.

Was the audience apprehensive? Perhaps they were. Maybe it was just me. And maybe it was just me, but the company seemed apprehensive. They were totally on, the show was funny, and it music popped. And we were appreciative. But even from the beginning, I felt as though some previous audience had mistreated them, and that they weren’t sure we were going to like them. And I wasn’t sure if we were either.

It wasn’t until "Run, Freedom, Run!" -- in the middle of the second act -- that the audience was, at last, entirely on their side, and it brought down the house. We liked the show. We liked it a lot.

The following spring, I returned to NYC with my wife. It had been less than a year. Driving into the city we were struck by the absence of the Twin Towers. We met our friends, we had a beautiful weekend in New York. And I took her to see Urinetown.

By this point, it’s success was apparent. The theater was buzzing with excitement which hadn’t been present the previous fall. This guy sitting near us said this was his third time. It was a hit. And maybe it was just me, but I could see it in the cast. They were relaxed, confident, hilariously confident. John Cullum, who seemed a bit above it all my first time, was now rolling in the production. He got the joke.

Dayshawnda Ash as Little Sally (Blank Canvas, 2017)

I was thrilled when Kotis won a Tony Award for Best Book, and disappointed when the show lost out on Best Musical to the more traditional Thoroughly Modern Millie. But a play as acidic as this one had never been bestowed that honor before … though such arch material soon would be. This is what I meant by “ground-breaking.”

This weekend, the entire family went to see Urinetown at Blank Canvas Theatre. Other parents take their children to Wicked, we take them to Urinetown. They were not unfamiliar with the show, the by has heard the about the girl saw a production at Shaker Heights High last year.

And yet, even today, even following the success of arch-satiric musicals that actually won a Tony for Best Musical like Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon, watching it again I was struck by how “strange and crude” the play still is, to its credit. If anything, its themes of greed, want and unsustainability are far more relevant now than they were sixteen years ago.

My daughter goes to Heights High, and she already knows who Thomas Malthus is, which is more than I could say when I first saw the show. Watching the corporate masters of the show's “Urine Good Company” raise fees on public amenities the same day our Senate passed their version of Trump’s tax plan was entirely not lost on our audience.

Or maybe that was just me.

Blank Canvas Theatre presents "Urinetown: The Musical" through December 17, 2017.

Sources:
John Cullum: A Real Pisser in "Urinetown: The Musical" by Simi Horwitz, Backstage.com (5/9/2001)
Weekend Edition, NPR (12/1/2001)

"The Infinite Wrench" at The Neo-Futurarium

This week the family is enjoying a few days in Chicago, following a weekend wedding in Aurora, Illinois. The kids haven’t been here since before they can remember and we have a full slate of touristy things planned for them, city walks and museums and so on.

My son is already familiar with the Neo-Futurists. He has listened to the CD recording they produced in the late 1990s of sketches from Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind (an attempt to perform 30 plays in 60 minutes). He became a fan of the work and wistfully remarked he would like to see the show some day, but only if they sell out because he wanted the pizza.

When they sell out, they “order out.” Get it? One large pizza, divided more or less equally among two hundred audience members.

Following the election, I was surprised to read that Neo-Futurists founder Greg Allen had announced he was pulling the rights to Too Much Light (TML) with plans to create a new version designed specifically to "combat the tyranny of censorship and oppression." I posted something on Facebook about the announcement, ignorant of the larger story at play.


I assumed he was disbanding the current troupe of Neo-Futurists, unaware that he left the company several years ago. He doesn’t own the rights to the name Neo-Futurists, in fact there are permanent companies in New York and San Francisco, he only owns the rights to the name “Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind” and licenses the concept to these companies and any others who wish to create their own version of the show. He had pulled the rights to perform TML from the Chicago branch only.

Long story short and without getting into any more details, the NY and SF troupes dropped TML in solidarity with the Chicago troupe and worked to create a new framing concept which is called The Infinite Wrench. That is the name of the show we saw last night.

And it’s virtually the same as TML in all the ways that matter.

Twenty-five years ago my colleagues and I contacted the Neo-Futurists to speak with them about their work and to let them know we were hard at work on our own late night program of very short plays performed in a random order, inspired by TML. There were a few brief questions.

Q: Do you call the play Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind?
A: No.

Q: Do you call yourselves Neo-Futurists?
A: No.

Q: Are you performing any written work previously written by Neo-Futurists and performed in Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind?
A: No.

And that was about it. Our format was reverse engineered from theirs, presented in the style of a TV game show, but how can you copyright the idea of performing short plays, even when presented in a randomly decided order?

So it goes with The Infinite Wrench. They were stripped of the iconic title but otherwise the show functions much as it always has.

I cannot recall the last time I saw them perform, but it was certainly before the children were born. The baton has passed entirely from those members of Generation X who made the core company when I first saw them in 1991 – many who have made their mark far beyond the Neo-Futurists, like Ayun Halliday, Greg Kotis, Spencer Kayden, Lusia Strus – to these Millennials.

The differences are subtle, where they are even apparent. Most striking were the emotional, thematic, substantive similarities. There is a philosophy behind writing for this show, for being a member of this company.

Improv comedy troupes like to promote the idea that improvisation means every show is different, when the exact opposite is true. Just because you have no script does not mean every iteration of Party Quirks doesn’t feel like every other performance of Party Quirks.

Yet there is an inherent spontaneity to the writing of the Neo-Futurists, the fast-paced rolling out of the sketches throws an audience member's expectations off-kilter. Many works I experienced last night have the some loopy vibe as those I saw a quarter-century ago, though much of the issues and events addressed are intimately tied to those today.

And this filled me with an intense personal melancholy, as I realized something I thought I understood before but was finally brought into sharp relief. We tried to bring the spirit of TML into our work in Cleveland, but we had no philosophy. We had rules about content, which is not the same thing.

One of the main tenets of The Neo-Futurists is that they do not imitate life, they present it. They never do impressions, they always perform themselves. This is not strictly accurate, one performer last night was a dog, for example – but this was in the service of telling someone else’s story.

When I was twenty-four and twenty-five years old I wrote some great short plays for our show. Those two years spent writing and writing and writing, thinking about writing when I wasn’t actually writing, I learned and grew in my practice every day, laying the groundwork for my future work. But I was entirely immature and unprepared to tap into the kind of emotional honesty present in any single play I saw in just this one performance of The Infinite Wrench.

Last night’s show was a special show, however. Yesterday was the Chicago Pride Parade, and this was the annual "30 Queer Plays In 60 Straight Minutes" performance. The company does not necessarily discourage parents from bringing younger audience members but also could not promise the content to be “appropriate” for them. Our definition of appropriate is different from most people's and I am much more concerned with all the violence my son perpetrates through his video games than watching a series of silent, brief vignettes which describe one intimate evening in a lesbian relationship.

It might also be pointed out that my children are not unaware of LGBT issues. In fact, issues of inclusion and equality are very important to them. It was all cool.

The Neo-Futurists continue, as relevant and fascinating and fresh as when I first experienced their work. It was an inspiration and a reminder.

Best of all, my son got that pizza.

Play a Day: Zamboni Godot

Ayun Halliday

This morning's read was Zamboni Godot by Ayun Halliday, and available on New Play Exchange. Last night we saw Jonathan Richman at the Grog Shop, so between that, my lucid dreaming and this play, my brain is pleasantly baked with absurdities.

I am a great fan of Ayun and her work, her books, (Peanut, The Big Rumpus) her zine, (East Village Inky) and her writing and performance as one of the original members of the Chicago and New York Neo-Futurists.

Members of the Neo-Futurists have employed a technique of deconstructing classic play texts to comment upon modern issues and anxieties. In this work, Halliday's protagonists are waiting everywhere, in the emergency room, at the amusement park, at the BMV. Beckett's original is only a template for Halliday's spare and insightful examination of every contemporary indignity, or perceived indignity.

Zamboni Godot is hilarious and "100% Bechdel Test Approved!"

44 Plays For 44 Presidents

Photo: Steve Wagner

The Hall of Presidents

In 1995 my (then) girlfriend and I took a drive across the upper Midwest and we stopped in to the Neofuturarium to see Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, (TML) an attempt to perform 30 plays in 60 minutes. They had recently unveiled their Hall of Presidents, which was at that time forty-two large modernist paintings which present not just the man, but the idea of each man who was once President of the United States.

The Hall of Presidents exhibit was originally conceived by Greg Kotis (Urinetown) and Ayun Halliday (No Touch Monkey) with each portrait executed by a different artist in a variety of media. Witnessing the Cleveland Public Theater production of 44 Plays For 44 Presidents, I was reminded of these paintings, and the way in which each of us views the distant past, our personal past, and the very, very recent past.

The Neo-Futurists cleave to the premise if not the fascist politics of the Italian Futurists and the aesthetic of TML can be neatly summed up by F.T. Marinelli’s Futurist Synthetic Theatre manifesto of 1915, to wit; It's stupid to write one hundred pages where one would do. TML consists of extremely brief plays about absolutely anything, making their point quickly and elegantly, and then moving on to the next.

Taking inspiration from their Hall of Presidents, five members of the company, Andy Bayiates, Sean Benjamin, Genevra Gallo-Bayiates, Chloe Johnston and Karen Weinberg, set out to compose one brief play for each of the (at that time) forty-three men who had held that position.

Actually forty-two because we count Cleveland twice. It’s confusing.

Triple-A Plowed Under (1936)

Living Newspaper

I read the original script for 43 Plays For 43 Presidents over ten years ago, and there was an obvious resemblance to TML, very brief plays varying from the absurd to the sublime, only in this case not presented at random, and focused on a common theme.

In performance I felt the production less like TML, and more like a Living Newspaper, one of those offered by the Federal Theater Project in the 1930s. These plays, with titles like Power, Injunction Granted and Triple-A Plowed Under, relied heavily on research to present facts to an audience, often with a specific social agenda.

Like 44 Presidents, Living Newspaper plays were also meant to entertain, commenting - sometimes heavily - on the issues presented, and utilizing a wide and creative variety of performance styles, dance, music and technology to make their point.

Cleveland Public Theatre

Remember The Ladies

We brought the kids, age 11 and 13. I knew they would be entertained, but they were also educated and that’s nice, too. My kids do not normally have anything to say about a play immediately after a performance. We'll ask and they just kind of shrug.

We hadn’t even left the theater Monday night when my daughter said quite emphatically, “That was really good.” And I was hoping she’d say that, because there is one particular component of the Cleveland Public Theatre production which is unique among all those that have been produced in the past fourteen years.

In Cleveland all the performers are women.

I have commented recently about so-called “non-traditional” casting. Choosing actors of color for roles historically played by white actors, or even actual persons from history of European descent. It’s not actually new, Shakespeare’s women were played by boys, the Moor of Venice almost certainly by an English actor in blackface. Somehow going the other way has put people of privilege in a tizzy.

Watching a talented ensemble of seven women portray all of the American Presidents what impression did that leave on my teenage daughter? She hasn't expanded on that yet, only that it’s "really good."

1994 - President Clinton
by Jean Chernoff

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story

The two acts differ considerably, and much of this is due not only to the writing, and decisions made by this production team, but also the considerable revisions the script has received since it first premiered. The entire play wears its political views proudly on its sleeve, but the events of the nineteenth century are handled with less gravity than those of the twentieth.

For example, in As Karma Sees Fit, William Henry Harrison’s life prior to his inauguration is summed up by his personal responsibility for the wholesale slaughter of native peoples. It is implied that his death thirty-two days after his having been sworn into office is some kind of “indian” curse. We laugh at the irony.

However, in The Not-So-Fair-Deal, Truman describes “the moon, the stars, and the planets” having fallen upon him by FDR’s demise (his words) then drops a symbolic heavenly body onto a war flag of Japan, and there is nothing funny about it. Which president was responsible for more death? Why is one darkly amusing and the other simply awful? Will time + tragedy ever = comedy in this case?

In fact, it is around FDR’s play that the production, as written and performed, veers into the hagiographic. The original version of FDR (simply titled FDR parts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5) are much more poetic. The fourth part imagines a twelve-year old who had never known another President, and they ask, “what if the sun never shifted … and you could always find it just where you left it.” But then they ask;

When night fell
Would you know it was night?
Or would you think
The sun is gone?

The Honorable George Herbert Walker Bush, III
by Gregg Reynolds

In its present version (Character Above All) it is a candlelit vigil, and a straightforward recitation of his many actions, virtuous and those much less so. This is all well and good but the second half of the twentieth century goes on like that, the guilty condemned, the virtuous exalted. It does not always follow party lines.

George H.W. Bush has received the most significant reconsideration in the past fourteen years. In 2002 he was a moderate whose universally praised war victory couldn’t save him from the criticism he received domestically.

In this version, The Bargain: Prelude To The Great Divide, Bush père is pilloried as a decent man who sold his soul to the devil (personified in the character of Lee Atwater) to achieve high office and is here accused of single-handedly ushering in the modern era of conservative dog whistles, fear-mongering and race-baiting.

Surprisingly, the most recent play that did not receive reconsideration was that for Bill Clinton. He was the sitting President when the Hall of Presidents was created, and received a fine, attractive portrait, suitable perhaps for the White House itself, and in that way much unlike the others.

Consider, for example, his predecessor, whose own portrait is actually a large poster of Saddam Hussein, with a small, George H.W. Bush action figure in box sitting in his lap.

By 2002, however, the writers of this play were able to consider Clinton's entire administration, and found him wanting. In How The Left Was Lost, Bill Clinton is manipulatively charming and all too willing to sell out progressive ideals.

What's In The Box

The evening concludes appropriately enough with an election. The audience gets to choose which play they would like to see last, either the one for him or the one for her. The company makes it clear they do not judge; we were asked to select by a show of applause which play we want to see, not who we actually want for president.

Word has it they have, in fact, performed the Trump play twice already, but the evening we were there the vote was clear, we were with Hillary. And really, after watching a company of women lay bare the magnificent excesses of all our previous, exclusively male heads of state, it only seemed appropriate.

The rap, What's In The Box, describes the frustration you might imagine a woman might feel when everyone knows everything about them, and makes up even stories about them, and yet everyone says this is the most secretive and deceitful woman who ever lived.

The company received this script during the rehearsal period, before the debates began, before grab her by the pussy and such a nasty woman. 

My thirteen year-old girl has watched and listened while the first female candidate for President of a major political party has calmly endured the most hateful and anti-woman rhetoric. My daughter is paying attention.

She has also bought an HRC T-shirt with her own money.

In early September, Hillary's "box" of secrets may have been interpreted only tangentially by its sexual connotation. In late October, it is a metaphor for all of the private and public violations women have to endure every single day, and not only from the dumpster fire at the top of Republican ticket.

Closing argument; You get my public image, bitches / but this is mine.

44 Plays For 44 Presidents continues at Cleveland Public Theatre through Saturday, October 29, 2016.

Do Do That Voodoo

For those of you jonesing for a piece of this new play Centennial! ... the first public performance of one short scene from my unofficial history of Cleveland theater will be presented as part of Cleveland Public Theatre's annual benefit extravaganza -- PANDEMONIUM!
In 2003, then-Artistic Director Randy Rollison had the brilliant idea to kick out all the stops and create a mammoth benefit which would not only entertain and intoxicate (in all sense of the word) as many monied patrons as possible, but also to show off as many square inches of CPT's burgeoning campus as possible. At the same time, he solved the seemingly unending bane of the theaterworld -- mooching artists. Why yes you can have a free ticket! But you have to perform.

And we do. And we love it. Because no one wants to miss this party.

That first year Randy asked me to shepherd some actors together to present Neo-Futurist plays in the scene shop. And so for one night Magdalyn, Josh, Kelly and I were the New Guerrillas presenting Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind (by permission) an attempt to perform ten plays in ten minutes. A dozen audience members were seated in the freight elevator at the Levin lobby, were handed a menu of plays, dropped down to ground level, the doors swung open and the four of us started shouting at them for which play they wanted to see. After ten minutes a buzzer went off, the doors closed and the audience went away. It was such a hit we were asked to reprise it several additional times during the evening. Yes, I kissed Christine Howey on the mouth. Yes, I paid her two dollars.

What we were unaware of, sequestered in the bowels of the theater, was how expansive the rest of the party was. We simply hadn't seen it. After we were released, we went above and found a huge dance party going on in the Gordon Square and out into the then-unpaved parking lot. It was huge! Since then, we the acquisition of the Church and Fellowship Hall spaces, it has gotten even bigger.

In 2005 we were about to open the revival of The Vampyres and I provided a cutting from that play ... which was presented out of doors on a platform stage. It was just one of those cases of bad planning on my part, I was unable to participate in any of the technical preparations and just distanced myself from the entire event. It wasn't the year for it for me, with a two year-old and a new baby at home. When Beth asked if I was interested in providing something this year, I made sure the scene fit the venue.

Two years ago, my wife wrote a piece especially for the event, a tribute to the goddess Kali in the form of a Mary Kay party, a scene I was delighted to have participated in. Last year the theme for the night was Wild Thing and though I was unable to attend, I was very happy to send the actor-teachers from Great Lakes to teach happy, adult partygoers how we coach first graders to perform Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are. Apparently, it was quite a hit.
This year, my scene Do Do That Voodoo takes place in the Intimate Bar at the Alcazar Hotel following a performance of the Federal Theatre's Negro Unit touring production of Macbeth, directed by Orson Welles.

The scene will feature Toni K. Thayer as the Voice of the Living Newspaper, Emily Pucell as Dare Wright, Geoff Hoffman as Bernard Schrader, Joshua D. Brown as Orson Welles, Eric Perusek as the bartender ... and your truly as William F. McDermott.

Saturday, September 10. Pandemonium. Be there.


Evan Palazzo
"You Do Something To Me"

I Dreamed of Rats (play)

Terrence Cranendonk
"I Dreamed of Rats"

For the past several years, artists have been leaning on the boundaries of live performance by creating interactive or intimate theatrical events, plays where the audience either has a (sometimes very limited) choice in the manner in which they observe or engage with the performance, or are made part of the performance itself in some creative fashion.

One of the most recent, much-ballyhooed productions in 2011 has been the arrival in New York City of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, in which an entire hotel is the setting for a remake of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Emphasis is placed little on the text, and more on the mood and atmosphere. Audience members wear masks, watching as actors murder, party and have sex right in front of them -- and the audience is permitted to get as close to the action as they like (so long as they don’t touch anyone.) One review noted how audience members would pick up things to look at them, like discarded letters, or rummage through cabinets or cases, and discover something relevant everywhere they did.

Over ten years ago I heard of the Neo-Futurists staging their version of Crime and Punishment, where every participant (audience member?) was handed a portable cassette tape player -- like I said, over ten years ago -- and had to follow whatever instructions were given them through their headphones. Which room to walk to next, whether to act as accused or judge. Each audience member went in on their own, though they may find themselves in a room with another audience member, whom they most likely did not know, playing their part in that moment’s scenario.

Nick Denny & I
"Voice In Head"

Nick, my brother Denny and I joined the audience of Voice-In-Head at the Theatre Garage during the 2003 Minnesota Fringe which followed the same model only with absurdist results. We had minidisc players (things change) and were given instructions to carry out throughout the proceedings. My brother told a surprisingly funny joke, considering he is very bad at telling stories, and Nick apparently had two minutes to tell the audience anything he wanted, and chose to praise me and my overwhelming talent and general goodness, and that if everyone that night saw just one more show the the Minnesota Fringe, it had better be I Hate This, which was opening the next evening.

 
I didn’t hear any of this, my brother asked me later if that embarrassed me or if I was moved or anything because I had this frozen mask on my face the entire time Nick was lauding my glory. I had to admit that for the entire two minutes this was going on I was receiving complicated instructions about how it was soon necessary for me to leap up, swirl around the room and deliver the worst fake-Shakespearean monologue I could muster.

Even more recently, the concept of salon performances have swept the theater world. Not simply the type of play where actors perform for an audience of one (although that is also a big deal deal right now) but situations where an actor or small company holds a performance in their own home.

The first I became aware of such an idea was in the early 90s when I first learned of Wallace Shawn’s The Fever which he introduced to select audiences in an apartment near Seventh Avenue. Wow. That’s exclusive, I thought. I wonder who was there. Given the opportunity to experience such a thing, I would not pass it up. Strange that I never had the nerve to do it myself.

Because really, I feel there is an emotional leap required to attempt such a thing, even now that it has become en vogue. And it has to be artistically requisite. A solo performance, sure, but that seems arrogant in the extreme. I have thrown a party where you have to sit quietly while I talk about me for an hour. A narcissist’s wet dream.

Last year I attended a performance of Kirk Wood Bromley’s It Was a Setup … performed for an audience of 20 in his living room in Gowanus, Brooklyn. It was an open, advertised performance, but only if you had a reservation would you receive the address. A play for three, a domestic drama, it was perfectly suited to the realist, well, real space and the confined proximity to the performers.

Yes, it took me twenty years to find and attend a salon performance.

A few weeks back my wife and received a Facebook invitation to Terence Cranendonk’s I Dreamed of Rats. Terry has been working on this piece for over fifteen years, a one-hour, solo adaptation of Gogol's The Inspector General. We attended last night, arriving just in time, at his lovely home in Akron, and joined an audience of eight for a startlingly good event. Terry has always been a member of the physical theater, and he is a joy to watch in performance. Surprise is humor, and his work consistently leaves me surprised and delighted.

And, as most nourishing artistic experiences do, last night’s event left me hungry, wondering what I will do next to fill it.

UPDATE: BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025. Help support our production by dropping a donation on our GoFundMe campaign! 

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind

And now a word about the creative process ...

The Neo-Futurists (1988)
Photo: J. Alexander Newberry

There's a piece on the Neo-Futurists in American Theatre this month. For over twenty years they have presented a show which is maddening in its simplicity. Returning from an aborted attempt to live in Los Angeles in 1991, my best friend and I spent one night in Chicago, caught their Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (TML) and my life was changed forever.

That is not hyperbole. I knew little of experimental theater, next to nothing actually. The Neos inspired me to learn more. But first they inspired my friend and I to rip off their act.


This was in the early 90s. Few, if any, knew of the Neo-Futurists in Cleveland. We protested we were creating a new form of theater for Cleveland audiences - and it wasn't as though we were calling ourselves "neo" anything, or that we were stealing the title of their show. No name tags, headphones, dark room timer, no pizza. We made up our own gimmicks as set-dressing for short, original plays we wrote ourselves in our own style.

However, the structure for TML was and is so basic, that trying to retro fit an original-appearing framework to it is much like the Windows operating system. As much as it wants to be MacOS, it is still just a clunky program running on top of MS-DOS.


Having said that, two years (more or less) producing short plays for Not-Too Much Light productions with names like You Have the Right to Remain Silent! and Mind Your Own Business did teach me the art of writing short plays that abandoned the idea of character or setting, and cut directly to the point of whatever it was I wanted to say. As the original Futurists said, why spend two hours trying to make your point when two minutes will accomplish the job just as effectively?

There was a premium on originality among the intelligentsia who were the clowns my older brothers used to pal around with. As a high school freshman I was particularly impressed with a series of satirical articles one of my brother's friends had written for the school paper. I had an idea for an updated sequel and went to him for permission to begin work in one and was roundly humiliated for the very idea. "Sequels," he snorted.

Believe me, I have been conditioned to feel that kind of contempt any time the word "sequel" is used in any circumstance. And you know, I am not sure that is an entirely bad thing.


However, I did spend the next several years wandering in my own neurotic wilderness, afraid to attempt anything. It is stunning to think now that I was involved in a comedy program on our local access channel for three years and never wrote anything for it. Strange to think I was surrounded by such a creative atmosphere, and yet did not feel confident enough to really engage it.

By the time Guerrilla Theater Company (for so we were called) was through, I was a writer, and a director, and not so crazy about acting any more. There was a time when it would have been ideal to contact Greg Allen about a legitimate franchise of the Neo-Futurists in Cleveland, and maybe someone should. But not me. I'd just be happy to attend, and hopefully have some pizza.

See also:

44 Plays for 44 Presidents (10/27/2016)

"The Infinite Wrench" at the Neo-Futurarium (6/26/2017)