"Stereophonic" at the Connor Palace Theatre

The 77th Tony Awards, June 16, 2024

The KeyBank Broadway Series at Playhouse Square has something between forty- and forty-four thousand subscribers, which is the largest season ticket base in the country. If an average season is like this one, subscribers will have the opportunity to witness six new Broadway musical productions and one play.

For a short moment, when the kids were in their adolescence, we had a subscription. During the 2017-2018 season we had the chance to see the musicals Waitress and Hamilton and also Stephen Karam’s Tony-award winning play The Humans. And it was weird. On Broadway, the show, which takes place in a realistically rendered Lower East Side duplex apartment, played to an audience of one thousand. The Connor Palace seats nearly three times that, and seated as we were in the balcony and off to the side it was like watching someone’s Thanksgiving dinner from the far end of a football field.

Sometimes, subscribers get confused by these theatrical offerings, the ones without songs. Even I was surprised, though not unpleasantly, to learn that The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was not a musical. That one, at least, was so full of visual stimuli that our seating was actually a blessing.

Andrew Gombas as Peter

This year, we were treated to Stereophonic, David Adjmi’s roman à clef about the turbulent creation of Fleetwood Mac’s classic 1977 album Rumours. Two years ago the show was nominated for a record number of Tony Awards, and won the Tony for Best Play. Best Play, not Best Musical. It’s not a musical, a fact which apparently left a great many subscribers, especially Baby Boomers and aging Gen Xers confused, and in some cases, outraged.

One old dude went on social media to decry his experience as “HORRIBLE” (yes, all caps) going on to report that “AT INTERMISSION THE AUDIENCE LEFT IN DROVES!! THIS IS NOT AN EXAGGERATION.” He concluded his rant with, “I am sorry to be so negative,” which I do not actually believe.

Before I go any further, I would like to report that not only is Stereophonic a good play, I think it is excellent. I saw it twice, the first week of the run, and then again last Saturday night. More on my experiences in a moment. Suffice to say, when thousands of folks buy into a series of productions, the vast majority of which are musicals, and you are presented with a show about a rock band, you might expect a rock musical. I wouldn’t have been surprised if some folks thought they were going to see a Fleetwood Mac cover band or something.

"Hedwig & The Angry Inch"
Cleveland Public Theatre, 2001

When I was public relations director at a certain local theater company in the late 1990s, they produced the intimate, three-person opera Bed & Sofa by Polly Pen & Laurence Klavan, inspired by the 1927 Soviet silent film of the same name. It was a beautiful production from top to bottom, the score, the singers, the set design (by the late Ron Newell) however, we were dinged by audiences and critics for advertising the show as a musical, and not as an opera. My boss thought the word opera would drive people away.

Stereophonic was advertised as a play, and it is a play with music, which is not the same thing as a musical. What else can one say? How else can one advertise? Except to emphasize that Stereophonic received the most Tony nominations in history, and even won the Tony for Best Play. Were they also supposed to tell stupid people not to come?

I was excited to see this show for several reasons which I will (eventually) enumerate. A couple years ago the podcast Decoder Ring with Willa Paskin produced “Making Real Music for a Fake Band,” an episode centering on the development of Adjmi’s new play. The conundrum; playwright wants to produce a work about the creation of an album which will eventually be regarded as one of the greatest of all time. If we are to hear that music, it better sound pretty good, right? And Adjmi is not a songwriter. But he found one in Will Butler, late of Arcade Fire, and together they wrote songs like Drive and Masquerade for the show which do amazingly capture that mid-70s Malibu sound.

Jack Barrett & Steven Lee Johnson
"Stereophonic" National Tour, 2026

Paskin’s episode also included references to other works that feature hits that never existed, like the film That Thing You Do and TV shows like Daisy Jones & The Six. What was not included in that list was another stage play, one which deftly blurs the line between play, musical and rock show, Hedwig & The Angry Inch. 

We saw the legendary 2001 Cleveland Public Theatre production of Hedwig, starring Dan Folino and Alison Garrigan, and soon after the film starring creator John Cameron Mitchell. The songs, co-written by Mitchell and Steven Trask, are entirely original, they do not sound like other songs, but they owe so much to the style, the substance – the vibe, if you will – of David Bowie, Elton John, Marc Bolan and so many others, that they trick you into thinking you already know them, and even love them, the very first time you hear them. And that’s what Adjmi and Butler were going for.

Matt Zitelli & Tim Keo
"The Vampyres"
Cleveland Public Theatre, 2005

I have also written a couple songs for my plays (plays that are not musicals) including the lyrics for “Come” and “Doctor” (music by Dennis Yurich) for the play The Vampyres, and both lyrics and music for “If You Were a Train” which was written for The Right Room. For that last I set myself a simple task, to create what David Byrne might call a “naive melody” or somewhat repetitious. I even included a fake biography in the program in an attempt to lead people to believe it was a real song by a real artist.

I always planned to see Stereophonic, the podcast was very persuasive, and anyway, I like plays. When I then found out my friend Andrew Gombas is an understudy on the tour, and that he was scheduled to play the role of Peter (do I get sued now if I call Peter the Lindsey Buckingham role) the last weekend of the Cleveland stand, I got a ticket to see it then.

Then I lucked into a pair of tickets for the first week of performances. Seeking someone to join me, I asked my friend Sarah, who is a singer and interpreter of late 20th century rock songs. She accepted the invitation gleefully, and over dinner I asked what she knew about the show and she told me she’d already seen it three times, including on Broadway. She loves this show!

During intermission David, one of my new work colleagues, joined us for a short chat, and I was intrigued. Sarah knew the show well, it was new to me but I was familiar with the source material (i.e. Rumours) and for David, who is in his mid-20s, it was all something new. I was very curious about his opinion and while he was engaged he wasn’t sure where it all was going. 

After, we three had drinks at Parnell’s where Sarah said something which stuck with me: Think of it like Chekhov. And that made great sense, because, like Chekhov, Stereophonic isn’t about plot, but about interesting characters and how they bounce off each other, in search of an elusive happiness. Chekhov is a vibe. And if you can’t dig that, well. You aren’t going to like it.

And by the way, happy birthday, Anton Chekhov.

I was very much looking forward to sharing the piece with Toni at the end of the run (and to see Andrew in it) but first we had the chance to see a special event, hosted by Playhouse Square, featuring the entire company, playing classic tunes from the 1970s like "Rebel Rebel," "Ventura Highway" and a breathtaking reinterpretation of "Being Alive" from Company. The absence of songs by a certain bi-national quintet was not a surprise.

Gombas was Emcee for the event, recalling how he had gotten his professional start as an actor-teacher with the school residency program, even calling out to me in the house to ask if it was in fact that very building we were in in which we rehearsed, and indeed it was.

Eli Bridges, Christopher Mowood & Andrew Gombas
January 12, 2026

Toni held off on listening to the songs that were to be created during the telling of the story of Stereophonic, but hearing each of these artists sharing their talents that evening meant she was even more excited for the actual production.

So what, after all, is Stereophonic about? This is what it is not about; it is not an episode of Behind The Music, a lascivious kiss-and-tell in which we are witness to orgiastic binges of passion and drugs and the total destruction of human souls and minds. No one throws a keyboard through the great glass window in that beautiful set. To the contrary, there’s even a character arc in which one goes from booze swilling degenerate into insufferable (not quite) ascetic.

No, it is – and if you have been paying attention, you know why I am attracted to this piece – about craft, about the act of creation, and how interesting characters bounce off of each other in the pursuit of that craft. Everyone is serious about the work, and they all have different ideas about how to make it happen.

The creation of Rumours is legendary, due in large part to the disintegration of the romantic relationships between the two couples in the group. But the group didn’t disintegrate, at least not right away. They even leaned into the controversy, agreeing to that Rolling Stone cover that shows them all in the same bed together. But this play doesn’t take place in bed, it takes place in the recording studio, and in that way it is a “locked door” play in which the players cannot depart until they are through completing their task, namely recording the album.

This is a story of a very specific time, when record labels would throw absurd amounts of cash at a band of young artists, giving them all the time they need with access to the best equipment available (as well as access to gallons of alcohol and mounds of blow) in the hopes of creating solid gold. For better or for worse, this particular time will not come again.

And time is a character in this piece. This is perhaps why a lot of subscribers “LEFT IN DROVES!!” at intermission, because the first act by itself is ninety minutes. Because that’s the time it takes. And when the music plays, it sounds really good.

The U.S. Tour of "Stereophonic" by David Adjmi at the Connor Palace Theatre, Playhouse Square, Jan 6 - 25, 2026.

My Life in the Theater (Part II)

Preparing for "Death Knocks"
Bay High School, 1984

The first time I ever stepped onto a stage was my freshman year in high school (You Can't Take It With You by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart). My character appeared at the very end of the first scene. I remember the moment. We’d rehearsed, I had my lines cold, very prepared, familiar with the entire ensemble – making a mistake was not a concern, I hadn’t even thought of saying or doing anything wrong, that’s how well-rehearsed we were.

And yet, just before I moved from backstage, unseen, hidden behind a fake door, to onstage, into the action, under the light, entirely visible to the audience, I was struck with one thought, shockingly vivid to me, even to this day:

“Who said you had the right to do this?”

Who said that? What voice was it? Was that my mother’s voice, she who I had embarrassed so many times with my pranks and shenanigans? Why do you have to attract attention to yourself in this way?

Maurice Adams, Brian Pedaci
"The Vampyres"
Dobama's Night Kitchen, 1997

Two years later, when I directed a short scene for an evening of one acts (Death Knocks by Woody Allen) I heard the same voice, right before I entered through an open window that was part of the set, only the voice in my head was a little louder. Because this time I was not merely a participant, I choice this piece. I was responsible for it happening.

When I drew a somewhat controversial comic strip for the university newspaper (if you believe being inscrutable as controversial) my college roommate asked the same question, suggesting as my mother would have; you could just draw these things and put them on the wall of our dorm, why do you have to put them out into the world?

Once more, when I was twenty-eight, this time sitting in the audience, as the lights came down and the music came up on opening night of my first full-length play (The Vampyres). I’d been working on the script for over two years, all my friends were involved in the production; directing, acting, designing the set, the mural, the costume, the lights, the sound – Oh! The sound!

We had a full house, everyone was very excited, and in the darkness, before the protagonist spoke his first word, I heard a voice say, “Who said you had the right to do this?”

"I Hate This (a play without the baby)"
Staged Reading
Dobama Theatre, 2002

Well, obviously, I did. I told myself that.

My wife thinks it is strange that I would even think this; after all, who has the "right" to do anything? And what entity provides that right? God? Society? My mother?

I do not always feel this way. Call it Imposter Syndrome if you like. But usually I rise above it. What is the difference, though? Confidence, I imagine. In myself, in the work. When I performed my first monodrama (I Hate This) I didn’t think, “Who said I had the right to do this?” No, I thought, I have a story to tell, and these folks came here to hear me tell it.

And it’s that last part, that people came here to see this, and that they are counting on me, and on you, baby, to do our best. 

To be continued.

Hamlet & Me (Part VII)

Thomas W. Cullinan
Promotional photo for "Hamlet"
Bad Epitaph Theater Company, 1999
Photo: Anthony Gray

Tom Cullinan and I met when he auditioned for a show at Dobama’s Night Kitchen. Having spent some time living in Chicago, he was returning home, so he told me, to look after his mother following the death of his father.

I sat in the house, he sat on a singular chair on the stage, wearing a long coat and, in my mind’s eye, smoking a cigarette. Was he? It is hard for me to imagine that he was not.

The audition in question was for a long-form improvisation inspired by MTV’s The Real World. As I had scant experience in improv, and that his resume said that he had, and in Chicago of all places, I was intimidated. But I have also always scorned men in dusters who smoke during auditions, and so we sized each other up and decided to become friends.

Besides, the fact that I was seated in the position of authority, evaluating him in a theater space he had practically grown up in, I had to respect his équanimité. He became an invaluable player in our late night adventure.

Over the next couple years we would grow close, but not too close. It was good to have a new partner in theater, someone I hadn’t gone to school with, someone with a broader experience than I had, an entirely different creative toolbox. Someone to push me out of my carefully guarded comfort zones.

I asked him to direct my first play, The Vampyres, about a goth coffee house. He suggested we visit New Orleans at New Year’s Eve. You know, as “research.” Goodness, I never would have dared.

Yes, we spent many evenings drinking and smoking, primarily at La Cave du Vin, and elsewhere. Tommy was the toastmaster, the speechmaker. I was always uncomfortable before crowds, he lived to be there. I asked him to be Best Man at our wedding.

Brian Pedaci, Tom Cullinan
Promotional photo for "Hamlet"
Bad Epitaph Theater Company, 1999
Photo: Anthony Gray

However, it was he who made getting too close impossible. I would invite him out for a private evening, just the two of us, and he would bring along one or two. There was a crisis in my relationship with Toni and he simply did not let me talk to him about it. He spoke too quietly in bars. He was pretentious – and not in the same way I am pretentious.

He was complicated. We’re all complicated, but Tommy was really complicated.

My time as Public Relations Director at Dobama Theatre was coming to a close. I’d never worked anywhere for three whole years and I was anxious to move on. I loved my time there, but I was turning thirty and feeling constrained, I guess. I had no idea what was happening next, what I did know was that I had a burning desire to create an epic, independent production of Hamlet, and I knew who I needed to build the company around.

My man is Tom Cullinan. The reasons for him are plentiful. I love him. I can work with him. He is an experienced actor with just the right everyman quality to his personality, but also the right amount of class, charisma and charm. And guile. And romance. And because he’s not perfect.
- December 23, 1997

To be continued. 

The Wild Party (book)

Queenie in "The Wild Party" 
(Art Spiegelman)

In February 1995, I traveled to New York City by train to visit my girlfriend.

My wife and I had separated, half of the furniture in the house we had purchased a little over year before was gone with her, and I had recently been diagnosed with a hernia for which I would receive surgery the following month. I was serving pizzas in an Uno’s in Lyndhurst, I had no theatrical prospects at all. I was twenty-six.

The train was comfortable, and warm, unless I leaned close to the window, which was frosted. The northeast was in a cold snap, NYC that week would be the coldest I have ever experienced. Still on the train, I opened my new laptop (with the last of the black and white screens) and began to write a play about vampires.

My girlfriend worked at the Shakespeare & Company at 81st and Broadway, the one featured in When Harry Met Sally (“Someone is staring at you in Personal Growth”) and while she was on I browsed and read and even bought, or walked around the corner to Café Lalo to sit and sip and write.

One book I picked up at that time was a recently released hardcover edition of the poem The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March, and illustrated by Art Spiegelman (Maus). I’m not sure what caught my eye about it. Maybe it was Spiegelman. Maybe it was the claim that the poem was “lost”. Maybe it was the 20s. Maybe it was my 20s.

At that time I had only a passing interest in the 1920s, though it was piqued that week as we saw the Alan Rudolph film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle at some little theater in the East Fifties which surely doesn’t exist any more. At that time I was into generational theory and turned onto the idea that the Lost Generation and that generation we call “X” had much in common. Aimless, rootless, artistic, unbound, nihilistic, you know … “whatever.”

Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle

As Spiegelman points out in his introduction, the Lost Generation “swilled gin” while ours “gulps Prozac.” Of course, the Lost Generation also experienced the horrors of World War One while ours had to, what? Make our own dinner? Learn about adult relationships from The Piña Colada Song?

Mrs. Parker is a biopic, starring the incomparable Jennifer Jason Leigh, and it was easy to overlook her personal disappointments and misery when she and Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott) were writing away at facing typewriters, creating threadbare stage performances, or trading witticisms in the Algonquin. 

We could do all of this, though standing in the smoldering remains of Guerrilla Theater Co. I no longer knew who “we” were. 

The Wild Party is told in rhyming, irregular couplets, March’s meter is what makes the piece sing, the timing of the rhymes is irreverent, in places obscene, always funny, and very funny. And the subject is so sordid! A showgirl named Queenie and a clown with a violent temper named Burrs decide to throw a wild party, and that’s really it.

There is drink, there is dance. There is an orgy. A teenager is assaulted, and the fighting begins. Burrs discovers Queenie having sex with another man, things go tragic. Then the cops arrive, the end.

Spiegelman doesn’t get in the way of the narrative, just promotes it with his graphic imagery. It has a hard-boiled quality, like Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. Handsome guys have square jaws, Burrs is long and narrow like a villain. I do question why there is so much female nudity, but only female nudity.

The Secret Adversary
(A Tommy & Tuppence Adventure)

The 1920s were transgressive, folks were pushing back against their hopelessness with wildness and pleasure. The 90s were hardly hard times for us, but I certainly felt a little lost. 

I began casting about everywhere for inspiration, though it wasn’t until my two Agatha Christie adaptations, nearly twenty years later, that I took the opportunity to focus on the 20s. Tommy and Tuppence, however, are far too sweet and hopeful, especially as compared to the jaded Queenie and Burrs. 

In 1995, I channeled my nihilistic tendencies into the contemporary milieu of a vampire-themed coffee bar.

The Witches (inspiration)

Adrionna Powell Lawrence
Rehearsal for "The Witches"

Titles can be challenging. Usually I turn to song lyrics. Is that a bad thing? Not that I care.

Recently, I wrote a script titled No One Wants To Work Anymore. A meme from 2021, that phrase was the inspiration for the entire piece, so it makes sense.

The working title for The Witches was The Witches, inspired by Stacy Schiff’s epic history of the Salem Witch Panic of 1692. As I was considering a proper title, I remembered that I have already written one play titled The Vampyres and thought it would be symbolic to have another play named after a monster.

I know. Witches aren’t monsters. You take my meaning.

The Vampyres is an immature work. My first full-length play, it was meant to be a metaphor for the creative arena. It now feels to me like a study in toxic masculinity – it’s not about toxic masculinity, any more than the works of David Mamet are "about" toxic masculinity. They are the thing itself.

The Vampyres took place in a goth-themed coffee house (very 90s), The Witches in a witch-themed roadside attraction. Who knows, in a quarter century I may write a work about death and dying called The Ghosts or The Zombies.

My original intention was to write a piece about tourist traps (my wife and I love tourist traps) and also about my life in non-profit theater and education. The attraction in question, the fictional Bradbury Witch Dungeon (and Museum) aspires to a status of respectability as an historic, educational institution.

Bryce Evan Lewis
Rehearsal for "The Witches"

The family had a brief stay in Salem a few years ago, and I revisited a certain witch-themed attraction with our eldest, finding it to have changed somewhat since I visited with my wife a quarter century ago. I mean, it was mostly the same, except the docent, our guide, provided a great deal more context, which made the entire experience much less cheesy. Also, no one jumped out and said “boo” at us as they had in 1996. The place felt downright respectable.

Upon returning home, I wanted to call them, to see what I could learn about a place like that, how does it operate, how big is the staff, what are their hiring practices, were the changes I saw standard, or does it depend on who is conducting the tour?

The person I spoke to on the phone was not interested in speaking to me. I left a message, no one returned my call. I sent an email, and again received no response. So in writing my play, I just made stuff up. Sometimes you have to make stuff up.

To be continued.

Cleveland Public Theatre presents THE WITCHES as part of Test Flight, a showcase of new works, March 3, 4 & 5, 2022.

The Witches: First Reading

Upstairs at Parnell's

What’s next? As I described previously in my post on procrastination, I have been managing my deadlines not by thinking of them all at once, but only by what is next. I would not recommend this as a way to live your life in general, but I found it was the only way I could manage for the present. Only what is right in front of me. I have the skill to manage. And the meds.

And so it was, I completed the first draft of The Witches. Which is to say, I reached the end. The play is not complete, but then why should it be? The Test Flight series “offers artists the opportunity to self-produce works-in-progress.” (CPT website.) It will remain in progress until these performances close on April 11, and beyond.

Director Chennelle, most of the acting company and a few friends met at Parnell’s last week to hear it all out loud, from beginning to end. It read at an hour ten, there’s bits still missing, I will have a longer draft available when rehearsals begin next week.

So, the witches. This is a kitchen sink play, sister to The Vampyres (no, that wasn’t intentional) in that I saw a scene, I felt a mood, and I thought I had something to say. But I didn’t know what was going to happen. Unlike, for example, The Bully of Baker Street, where I had a clear agenda, and plotted a mystery with a beginning middle and end before I started to write, here I had a place, I had characters, and they told me where to go.

And yet, there’s an awful lot going on here, as the readers and listeners made evident. Because it’s not just about witches, it’s about ghosts. It’s not just about women, it’s about generations of women.

Women who should respect each other, but don’t. Those who believe "the young and brash are destroying the work." (Craig's words.) Those who see themselves as functionaries in the grand schemes of their elders. And those who keep their heads down and just keep working.

Then there’s New England, and Salem, and the old beliefs. Chennelle observed something I have always noticed about places like Salem, or New Orleans. They are like Europe, in that they are loud. Heather called it an energy. They have a loud energy. Perhaps that is only to the descendants of those who came or were brought across the ocean to be here. The weight, the loud energy of our history, which is not evident in the newer buildings and pavement of a Cleveland, but in the wood, the soil, the trees of the colonial, coastal towns and cities.

Our company wants rules. What calls the spirits, what makes them go away? Old Hamlet wandered the ramparts seeking attention, but he was also easily insulted. On the Dark Side of Twilight was all about how the rules for vampires have shifted over time. We also need to understand what those are.

Finally, the characters themselves. The four from 2020, the four (five, actually) from 1692. They each have their own history, biographies which I have created but not yet shared. Because I want to know it makes sense before I tell them why I think it makes sense. We will work together to create a common understanding of their past.

There's more, a lot more. And it's a comedy, that's also important. I want it to be stirring and chilling and funny. During our discussion someone mentioned a line from Poltergeist and I thought, well, I know exactly where that goes.

Right now I am feeling excited and grateful, grateful to work day after day with so many talented, loving people. A long, long time ago, when we were youngish, I was sitting with a playwright friend in the Arabica on Coventry, musing pretentiously about the Algonquin Round Table, and how I wished that one day we would be famous and spend our days just writing and our nights sitting around a pub or restaurant getting tight and tossing off bon mots, night after night after night.

Yes, well. I'm not famous and I neither write for a living nor do I spend every evening drinking and posing about. But there are these moments, and there quite a few of them, when we share in semi-public spaces, chatting and drinking, and reading and doing the work, and I think I got what I always wanted after all.

Parnell's Irish Pub Playhouse Square is located at 1415 Euclid Avenue in Cleveland.

On Revision

VICKY: I think “bully” is a thing that you do. It’s not a thing that you are.

Joshua McElroy as Sherlock Holmes
(Great Lakes Theater)

The first play I wrote for production was Breaking Point, a one-act adaptation of my daily comic strip for the college newspaper. The fact that I was also directing the script was an early lesson and made me hesitant to ever direct my own work ever again.

The problem is, I don’t know whether I should be a playwright who should have an eye to revising the as-yet un-produced work, or a director whose responsibility is to the text as it exists.

Breaking Point was problematic, and thank goodness it was and that I saw that. I recall that the ending was entirely unsatisfying, especially to the women in the company. I can’t even remember what happened, but I do know the argument was quite simply, “this doesn’t make sense, no one behaves like that.”

I knew in my heart of hearts that people do behave like that, because the moment in question was something that actually happened to me. Did it, though? And does it matter? We were producing a play, not a documentary, and if everyone says it doesn’t make sense, you have to at least entertain the idea that it really doesn’t make sense.

Breaking Point (1989)

I revised. My first revision. The ending was much more satisfying (especially to the women in the company) and in fact got the biggest reaction from the audience. Lesson learned. Revision is good.

But it’s hard. You have established a reality for yourself, it was hard fought, and now you have to change your reality. The Vampyres featured two major monologues by the protagonist, John Polidori, at the beginning and the end. The first monologue was not working, not at all. The director asked me question after question after question about it, trying to make it work. I changed a word here or there, but I was deeply unhappy with the criticism.

Over Christmas 1996, I just rewrote the entire thing. It was better. Our actor could make it work.

When we revived the show in 2005, I cut both monologues. They were both tedious, maudlin, unsympathetic, and unnecessary. Why did I ever think we needed them?

(Side note: I believe it is a testament to my fascination with Brian Pedaci, who originated the role of Polidori in 1997, that I believed they were worth including. I could listen to him recite a dictionary. Looking back, I would rather listen to him recite a dictionary.)

We held a reading of the second draft of Sherlock Holmes Meets the Bully of Baker Street on Monday, September 30, for the Great Lakes Theater Education Committee. Obvious plotting errors from the first reading had been cleared up. Comments about character had been taken to heart, and I had found ways to make Vicky was a stronger protagonist. She wanted specific things and stood up for herself in a manner which was appropriate -- learning to stand up for herself is, of course, an important theme of the story.

The Vampyres (1997)

One major point of contention, however, was the character of Barney and her relationship with Vicky. Barney is headmistress of the orphanage, and the titular bully of the play, or so it is assumed. It is this relationship, in which the abuse runs from adult to child which made people justifiably concerned. We are creating a play about bullying, not domestic abuse. Yes, the two are associated, but you can understand how that might take the conversation where we do not want it to go.

When it was recommended that the bullying be peer-to-peer I was a bit distressed. I had already plotted the mystery, created the characters, and written the play. To suddenly introduce other characters, other girls in the neighborhood, perhaps, to antagonize our narrator … it would be like starting all over again. Comments were offered in good faith, and I spent the past few months going over it in my head. I didn’t know what to do, and I was running out of time.

Then, over Christmas, because Christmas is when I have all of my best ideas, I had an idea. What if Barney isn’t middle-aged? What if she’s the same age as Vicky? What if they were once like sisters, but now Barney has been appointed to manage the asylum while the headmaster is away on a holiday? It’s the Victorian Era, such things could certainly happen.

Chennelle Bryant- Harris as Vicky
(Great Lakes Theater)

Making Barney an aggressive boastful nineteen year-old was easier than I first thought it might be. But questions remain and they should be answered to provide more context to the mission of the production. We have incorporated tactics for coping with bullying behavior, with some of them even put into practice. Can we also address possible causes for this behavior?

Potential causes include:

• Problems at home 
• Bullied themselves 
• Struggle with personal issues

Perhaps Barney doesn’t even like the name Barney. Her last name is Barnaby, Barney is a nickname. Calling someone a name, if they don’t like it, is a form of abuse. Sherlock himself is guilty of it as he insists on calling Vicky “Watson” even when she asks him not to.

Rehearsals begin in one week!

To be continued.

UPDATE: "Sherlock Holmes Meets the Bully of Baker Street" is now available from Pioneer Drama Service

On the Dark Side of Twilight

Self as John W. Polidori
Ohio University, 1988

Thirty years ago this fall, I played John Polidori in the Ohio University School of Theatre production of Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry, directed by Alana Byington

The plot centers on the whirling personal and professional relationships of George Gordon Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, with particular focus on that unusually cold summer of 1816 they spent together at the Villa Diodati. It was there, one evening, after reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem "Cristabel" that this trio, Byron’s personal physician -- Polidori -- and Byron’s lover Claire Clairmont, challenged each other to write a ghost story.

Brenton’s work goes on to describe the crippling effects these artists’ attempts to love freely and fight against contemporary social norms of propriety and restraint had on their lives and work. The play also has a lot to say about men who dare to live life on the edge and the women who must deal with the consequences.

John William Polidori
F.G. Gainsford, circa 1816

What is only obliquely referred to in this work are the stories created the evening of that fateful writing exercise. Most famously, this was the night Mary Shelley would later claim she arrived at the idea for her novel Frankenstein. Like Bloody Poetry, her classic tale investigates themes of great risk and fantastic achievement, but also issues of abandonment and personal responsibility.

Less well-known is the ingenious idea Byron had arrived at that night; a modern re-imagining of the “vampyre.” Folk tales describe this monster as an outsider, living on the outskirts of society, feeding off blood and human flesh like a ghoul. Byron wondered what it might be like if such a demon could pass as human, even enter society? But he grew tired with his own fragment of a story and set the work aside before it was brought to any conclusion.

His doctor, who fancied himself a writer, had arrived at a story about a skull-headed lady “peeping through a keyhole” (we have Mary Shelley’s word for this) which everyone agreed was dreadful. A few short years later, Polidori chose to appropriate Byron’s idea of a gentleman vampire, producing The Vampyre: A Tale in 1819. The good doctor attempted to exact some artistic revenge on the lord who famously made a habit of crushing him with withering verbal abuse, by creating the rakish Lord Ruthven, a thinly-disguised parody of Byron himself.

The Vampyres: A Play
Dobama's Night Kitchen, 1997
Brian Pedaci (right) as  John Polidori

The joke was on Polidori, however, as when The Vampyre was first published, it was mistakenly attributed to Byron, a fact which each man found galling.

Then a twenty-year-old student, I researched the person of John Polidori for the performance, surprised to learn I was playing a man my own age. I was taken by not only his own brief unhappy life (he died by suicide at the age of 25) but also the legend of the vampire. Many abortive works I created that school year -- comics, short stories, scripts -- included immature and unfortunate ruminations on suicide. One idea was for a daily comic strip about a modern Polidori who, following a romantic humiliation and contemplating his own demise, is seduced by vampire.

If the idea of a vampire preying upon the despair and near-suicide of a young man sounds familiar, it is because I had started reading Anne Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles.” The comparison to Louis and Lestat was purely intentional. In the following years I would read a few more vampire novels, but not an overwhelming number of them. I was more interested in the vampire as a metaphor than as a romance. More After Dark than Lost Boys. I prefer Throat Sprockets to anything by Poppy Z. Brite.

With director Andrew May
On the Dark Side of Twilight, 2010

My infatuation came to a head a few years later after the disillusion of both my first theater company and my first marriage, resulting in the script The Vampyres: A Play. Borrowing directly from Polidori’s tale, and using the name’s of all those at the Villa Diodati, a young doctor (John) enters a goth-themed coffee house, meeting an old crush (Mary) and two preening rockers (George and Percy) who may or may not be actual vampires. There is also a teenage barista named Claire, who is actually my favorite character in the play.

My first full-length work, I threw everything into it and it is one big angry mess. The original songs by Queue Up, however, are killer.

Anyway, ten or so years later, then-Director of Education Daniel Hahn was looking for a touring script to compliment Great Lakes Theater’s mainstage production of Bat Boy: The Musical. I made a mad proposal. The character of Bat Boy is some kind of mutant creature half-boy, half-bat. Its origins may be from the Weekly World News, but the story has much in common with B-level monster movies from the mid-20th century.

What if we created a brief history of the vampire in Western literature in four short plays, each describing a pivotal moment in vampire history? The greatest challenge, as I saw it, was how we could successfully incorporate that most recent trend in vampirism; sparkling. Yes, we would have to acknowledge the most controversial of vampire sagas, Twilight.

My working title was Evolution of the Vampire. Daniel suggested something more evocative. In the first chapter of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jonathan Harker begins his diary entry, "It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz ..." It is a much, much better title.

The four scenes or “arcs” of On the Dark Side of Twilight play out like this:

Arc One represents Polidori’s The Vampyre. Set in 1810, we meet Lord Darvell (Byron’s vampire) and the callow Aubrey Porlock; his Christian name taken straight from the good doctor’s short story, his last a combination of Polidori and Orlock, the main character in F.W. Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu.

(It's is also a nod to the author of "Christabel," who ostensibly made all of this possible. A “person from Porlock” interrupted Coleridge as he was feverishly writing "Kubla Khan.")

Aubrey Porlock and Lord Darvell
(Dusten Welch & self)

As they travel the Continent together, Aubrey is set upon by a monster while trying to complete an assignation in the woods with a local girl named Xanthe, and neither he nor Darvell are ever heard from again.

Arc Two is an homage to Dracula, the text which set so many rules of vampirism (death by sunlight, aversion to garlic and mirrors, etc.) Here, at the turn of the twentieth century, a young society couple entertains a strange eastern lord who turns out to be Porlock, now a vampire himself, returning to London after nearly a century.

This scene includes a silent coda, a tribute to Murnau’s film, in which the “count” is tricked by his prey into feeding until sunrise.

Arc Three, set in the mid-1980s, is inspired by the work of Anne Rice. With her works, a vampire is now someone to be understood, one to be sympathized with. He is our hero. A fledgling vampire named Edwin is interviewed in New Orleans and we learn that his master is none other than Porlock, who has survived and immigrated to the Americas.

Arc Four, present day. Edwin passes as a teenager in an Alaskan high school. A romance develops between he and a fellow student named Lucy. Their time together is cut short by the arrival of Porlock, who receives his final rest at the hands of an old (very old) companion.

Edwin and Lucy
(Dusten Welch & Emily Czarnota)

The entire package includes a narrator who guides the audience through this two-hundred year journey by sharing found materials in the manner that Dracula is composed entirely of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and other contemporary accounts.

Written to be performed by a company of three (though it could also accommodate a company of up to twelve or more) the premiere production was directed by Andrew May. I performed the older male roles, Dusten Welch the younger, and all of the female roles by Emily Pucell Czarnota.

Working with Emily for the first time with this production was a life-changing experience, and over the next several years she originated performances in several of my works, including The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and the short play The Schoolboy (part of the Seven Ages anthology.) Most meaningful to me, I wrote for her the part of Beatrice in Double Heart, her wit and delivery foremost in my mind when composing verse lines for this younger iteration of Shakespeare’s great romantic heroine.

Emily as Xanthe
On the Dark Side of Twilight, 2010

In performance, On the Dark Side of Twilight is chilling, creepy, knowing, and also very funny. Plain Dealer theater critic Tony Brown found it "hysterical, campy fun." But is has a deeper relevance, as vampire tales have always been allegories, reflections of the fears and taboos of the time.

Polidori's short story portrays the struggle between propriety and the evils of Byronism. Stoker's is a thinly-veiled examination and reflection of sexual repression and xenophobia. Anne Rice created a homoerotic romance at the dawning of the AIDS crisis. And Stephenie Meyer brought the story full-circle, creating a novel aimed directly at teenage girls to promote and champion morality, chastity, self-delusion, and male dominance through emotional and sexual abuse.

On the Dark Side of Twilight tackles all of these issues, while remaining brisk and compelling, a compact and humorous horror story that would make an excellent high school, college or community theater production.

Read the play script for "On the Dark Side of Twilight" at New Play Exchange.


Reference:
"Vampire play 'On the Dark Side of Twilight,' performed by Great Lakes Theater Festival, is campy fun" by Tony Brown, The Plain Dealer 2/19/2010

The Bechdel-Wallace Test

Alison Bechdel (b. 1960) is a MacArthur Grant Awarded cartoonist, creator of the long-running strip Dykes To Watch For and the graphic novels Fun Home and Are You My Mother? As a young theater artist in the 1990s reading Dykes in the Gay People’s Chronicle was a primer helping me to see beyond coarse stereotypes about lesbians when my circle of friends were either largely straight or closeted.

Click on to enlarge.

An edition of Dykes titled "The Rule" featured two friends discussing what movie to see. One explains she has three rules which dictate whether or not she’s interested in seeing a movie:

1. One, it has to have at least two women in it,
2. Who, two, talk to each other,
3. about , three, something besides a man

Now generally referred the Bechdel Test, the cartoonist prefers joint attribution with the person who originally thought up the criteria, an old friend names Liz Wallace -- whose contribution, you will notice, was noted on the original strip. Though "The Rule" is thirty years old, the term has become a meme in the past decade and a starting point for discussion about gender parity across all spectrum of media.

Breaking Point (1989)

What do the results signify? You could deduce from the dearth of roles for women in film that the point is representation. You can also consider what those roles consist of; do the female characters exist merely as romantic foils or objects of sexual desire - do these female characters even have names?

The bigger question, and the question I have been asking myself of late, is what stories are we telling? It’s not about cramming more women into your movie, and it’s not even about employing more women writers - although that would go a very long way to ameliorating the discrepancy. We should be asking ourselves what stories we writers choose to present to the world.

Scripts written for the theater (call them plays) have a handicap when it comes to passing the test, if only because most plays by design will have fewer total characters. But the challenge remains the same, what story do we choose to tell?

The first play I tried writing was the one-act Breaking Point, based on my own college comic strip. One night, as I was conversing with my stage manager and fretting about the one female housemate in an apartment of four. She was as smart and smart-alecky as the rest of them in the strip, but distilling several months of story line into a thirty-minute play, I realized how all the male characters treated her like shit.

“I write terrible female characters,” I sighed.

“Yeah," she said, shaking her head somewhat sympathetically. "You do.”

The Vampyres (1997)

I didn’t have another play produced for the better part of ten years. When I finally started composing The Vampyres in the mid-90s (finally, as in, why wasn’t I writing plays before this?) I had a story I was burning to tell, about a cynical med-student and a couple of poseur vampires which also included a former crush of the protagonists and a teenage barista onto whom he transfers his affection.

No, the two women do not talk to each other. If they did, it would certainly have been about the men. However, by that time I was aware of sexism in my writing, even if I didn’t know exactly what to do about it. I strove to retrofit the character of Mary so that she was a strong women who had her own agenda as an artist, but really, in brief she fell in love with a male vampire because he was irresistible in the way we are all told we just have to accept.

The story belonged to the male characters. It was a struggle between he and the other two hes. And it was represented in a battle over possession of the two shes. Giving the female characters their own personal agendas does not change what was the central conflict of the plot.

More recently, I have been working on a two-hander, the as-yet unproduced The Way I Danced With You. There’s two people in this play, one man and one woman, so the Bechdel Test does not really apply. But is the story equally theirs? Is the pursuit of her goals on an equal footing with her pursuit of her own goals? I believe that it is, and it is important to me that it is -- and not merely to satisfy an agenda. As I reported previously, the reception of this play changed from the Valdez reading in June and the Cleveland reading in November.

My breakthrough in creating feminist plays, however, comes largely thanks to my work in children’s theater. Who knows why this is, perhaps because at a distance I can tell stories to children in which gender has the fluidity that children themselves possess.

White Garlic and Red Onion

Adventures in Slumberland featured a protagonist in the form of a five year-old boy, who could be a girl, and was, in fact, played by a woman, and probably usually should be. His hero’s quest ostensibly is to find the princess (this is eighty years before Donkey Kong) but that’s a McGuffin, it’s really about a child growing to appreciate their own personhood.

Rosalynde & The Falcon turns the princess story on its head, as a young woman is persecuted by her wicked stepfather the king, and escapes to the wood where -- instead of looking after a band of thieves (or dwarfs, what have you) she becomes the leader of the thieves, and eventually the ruler of her nation. There are two named female characters … I guess it’s funny that one of them doesn’t even speak until the very end, but they certainly do not talk about the men, they talk about governance.

My latest work, Red Onion, White Garlic, opens early next month. I hate to describe a play by what it is not, but I did not set out to create a feminist children’s play. It was not my intention to create a play which passes the Bechdel Test entirely and without qualification.

What I did do was investigate Indonesian folktales, arrive at one which centers upon the relationship of two sisters, and every moment I found myself searching for a new character to add to the narrative, she was always female. I even considered male characters, but they never made sense as part of the story. It is not that men are absent. The tale belongs to women.

Red Onion, White Garlic opens April 8, 2017 at Talespinner Children's Theatre.

In The Night Kitchen (book)

When Dobama Theater Artistic Director Joyce Casey asked me to curate a late-night series of performances for teenage and young adult audiences, it didn't take me very long to choose a name for the project.  

The play I was currently writing, The Vampyres, was set in a goth-themed coffee house called The Night Kitchen. There a couple allusions to children's books in the play, in particular books that went to dark but dreamlike places.

When Dobama's Night Kitchen started I was twenty-seven. I had already put on the trappings of adulthood -- marriage, home-ownership, divorce -- finding each an ill fit. I was in a new relationship with a woman who encouraged me to re-discover the childhood I had always been determined to scorn, deny and suppress. My mission was to create works which respected and celebrated young people, from their point of view.

Joyce kept trying to thrust This Is Our Youth upon me to direct for DNK. I have a lot of respect for Kenneth Lonergan. I really like his movie. But stories about wasted people acting wasted are really boring ... I couldn't get past the stage direction describing as one of the kids "expertly rolls a perfect joint." Really? That must have been an amazing joint. I think it was eventually produced at Beck Center, but anyway.

We had a basement after dark, when the adults had checked out, to be creative. That was dreamlike in itself. And for this guy in his late-twenties it was a race against the clock, I started getting delirious around 12:30.

In The Night Kitchen was published by Maurice Sendak in 1970. Since publication it has remained controversial, and for all the wrong reasons. Well, there's one reason, and it's between Mickey's legs. There's a boy running around naked in it!

Yes, well. There's a boy running around in my house, naked, pretty much every day, but I wouldn't call that pornographic, and I would have some pointed questions for anyone who does. The child doesn't read In The Night Kitchen and think it is sexual, only a sad and ashamed adult does that.

And there was never any nudity in Dobama's Night Kitchen either, unless you count that time Peer's junk fell out of his pee jays during The Realistic World 3, but I wouldn't call that sexual, either.

In The Night Kitchen was inspired by, practically stolen from the classic, early 20th century comic strip Winsor McCay's Little Nemo In Slumberland. That comic featured a boy's dreams where anything could happen, and did, on his fruitless quest to reach Slumberland to take his place as rightful playmate to the Princess. More on that later. 

Remarkably, I received the second volume in a large-format, collectible edition of the strip which includes at least one strip in which Nemo appears naked. Because in dreams, this happens all the time.

The being naked part. Not being eaten by a polar bear. At least, not to me.

Sendak's In The Night Kitchen also does not include any polar bears. But it does include three, gigantic chefs who may look like Oliver Hardy, but that only softens the fact that each sports a "Hitler" mustache and attempt to bake the obviously circumcised Mickey in an oven. Yes, there are far more disturbing things to trouble a person's sleep than a small child's genitalia.

So this theater project was named for an often-timed banned children's book, and for three years it felt like a cozy playhouse, a respite from the adulthood I thought I'd wanted. Leah, who was in her teenage years back then -- in fact didn't even start attending DNK shows until after I'd stepped down as director of the project -- once recounted to me the feeling of excitement she always had walking down those steps into the basement, it was like a vibration, maybe because the music was always played a little too darn loud, not knowing what was going to happen that night.

A surprise farewell to the Night Kitchen, June 1998.

The Vampyres (1997)

Seventeen years ago the world ended. And another began. The summer of 1994 stretched on until deep into November. I was playing games I would never play again, making foolish decisions which would define the rest of my life. I have few friends that pre-date that time.

One day in January, 1995 I came home from my shift at the pizza restaurant to find half of the house was empty. There was no longer a piano, a dresser, a bed. It was time to rebuild.

The music was dark, the house was cold. I boarded a train to New York on most frigid weekend of the year, to visit my new girlfriend. I had a PowerBook. I had destroyed my theater company, I had destroyed my marriage. I was full of hope, and I feared there would be no future. I started to write a play.


By late 1996, life was rich and decadent. Long nights of drink and smoke, producing crazy theater on Coventry, live music shows, late hours at new friends’ apartments. I got the green light fo The Vampyres in Dobama’s Night Kitchen. We had tapped professional musicians to write rock songs for the show. The production was the greatest attempt to incorporate a DNK show into the mainstage, our set melded perfectly with theirs, transforming the humble, mid-century home of Beast on the Moon into the dark and stylish coffee shop called The Night Kitchen.

Critics hate this play. The protagonist is a former actor who cowardly abandons his career in the arts to pursue on in medicine, but he can’t help but comment on everything, judging the girl he hasn’t seen since high school for wanting to be an artist (even though he still wants to bang her,) transparently hits on the teenage barista, and displays naked jealousy of the two musicians that frequent the place who may, or may not, be real vampires.

Maurice Adams, Brian Pedaci

In the end, this pathetic wanna-be gets literally and figuratively fucked up the ass.
Christine Howey called it a "misbegotten effort."

The Free Times called it, "more hollow than haunting."

Tony Brown said it was "juvenile" and "infantile blathering."

The original production in 1997 was too long by half. Cleveland Public Theatre produced an edited version in 2005, and I was very happy to have the chance to present it with the most of the flab cut from it, but it was still such a nasty piece of work and I was no longer in that place. I find it difficult to reconcile my disconnect with this work that I spent so much energy living in. It’s obvious who wrote it. But I cannot believe there was ever so much anger and hurt in me.


In spite of critical derision, or perhaps because of it, it was a very successful run. One of the best attended Night Kitchen shows I produced. Houses were full, there were small tables on the stage for audience members to sit at to give the impression that The Night Kitchen (the coffee house) actually had customers in it. Elizabeth (as Claire the barista) was onstage during preshow serving coffee and pocketed the tips.

Cool Cleveland called The Vampyres, "Sinister, sexy, perverse and hilarious."

Anastasia Pantsios said it had “an intensity that makes the waters in which it wades feel very deep and dangerous indeed.”

Dobama Artistic Director Joyce Casey didn't actually want me to produce the piece. She was concerned that it glorified cutting and drug-use. When I moved on from Night Kitchen, DNK Artistic Director Dan Kilbane produced Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking.

Cutting bad. Screwdriver-sodomy good. Got it.

Happy Halloween

Cleveland Public Theatre presents THE WITCHES as part of Test Flight, a showcase of new works, March 3, 4 & 5, 2022.