NYC EOY 2025 (part two)

My experience with LES theaters is limited to my several summers either witnessing or participating in the (former) New York International Fringe Festival. The last time I set foot in Under St. Marks Theater was in August 2001, to witness a solo performance, the coming out story for a queer individual of native ancestry. There was no air conditioning, it was a forty seat hotbox.

Nearly a quarter century later and in deepest December, it was a bit chilly in that space, which was only appropriate as we were attending a 5:00 pm performance of the RadioTheatreNYC production of The 15th Annual Edgar Allen Poe Festival, under the banner of Frigid NY. Directed by Dan Bianchi, the event was a live radio drama (with prerecorded music and sound effects) performed with creepy gusto by Frank Zilinyi and R. Patrick Alberty.

The selections performed included The Tell-Tale Heart, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Masque of the Red Death, Berenice, and The Cask of Amontillado. Given the format, the words took center stage and while the performers did not disappoint, listening to the stories spoken aloud in this way allowed both of us to become more critical of Mr. Poe than reading him off of the page.

The Masque of the Red Death was the weakest of the set, as it describes a selfish millionaire who shuts himself away from a world ravaged by plague. When he throws a lavish party for his monied friends, the personification of pestilence arrives and murders everyone. Even in its telling, it’s not particularly suspenseful or scary, you know exactly what’s going to happen from practically the first word.

No, it was the one with which I was least familiar, The Case of M. Valdemar, that had me on the edge of my seat. A first person account (it was first printed without any indication the tale was fiction, creating something of a stir) the narrator claims that he mesmerized a man at the moment of death, essentially trapping the man’s consciousness inside a dead body.

What we fear is what touches us closest, and for me that is not dying, nor illness, nor ageing, not for me personally. No, it is the fear of caring for someone else who is dying, and doing it wrong. That we – I – cannot accept the death of someone we love when that death is inevitable, and necessary. And we prolong their suffering as a result.

After we had dinner and cocktails at Schmuck (yes) which was stylish yet unpretentious (yes) the kind of place where they pour your half-finished martini into a newly frosted glass. Without even asking. I’ve never experienced such a thing before.

We walked briskly back to our hotel – we’d spent an entire day without need for a cab or bus or train – exhausted and happy and feeling like it must be nearly midnight. Checking my phone I laughed out loud that it was only eight. All’s well, we had an early night.

To be continued.

Here (film)

I'm staring at the asphalt wondering

What's buried underneath (where I am)

- Death Cab for Cutie, "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight"

Here (2024)

On a recent transatlantic journey, I had the opportunity to watch a couple films including The Northman, a re-watch of Spielberg’s West Side Story and also Bob Zemeckis’s adaptation of the graphic novel Here.

The film Here came and went last fall, cost $50 million to make and made $15 million at the box office. That it was based on a short comic from 1989 that I had found very inspiring at the time had piqued my interest, but the negative reviews kept me from seeing it. Recently, however, in describing my new play The Right Room to a number of people, one said the concept reminded them of this movie (which they had liked) and of course, that filled me with great concern. I will go into the comparison in a moment.

Like the 1989 comic and the 2014 graphic novel, both by Richard McGuire, the film depicts the corner of an American living room from one fixed vantage point. The camera never moves (until the very end) but the narrative moves back and forth in time, from the 1940s to the 1970s, back to the 1910s, forward to the 2020s, even further back to before the house was even built and even into prehistory.

The major failing of the film is that an in-depth narrative is laid upon it, and that this narrative is not terribly compelling. A young man (played by a CGI de-aged Tom Hanks) grows up in this house, and just as our vantage point is stuck in one place, so is he, confined by the expectations of his father, his inability to succeed in business, that in spite of having a loving wife (Robin Wright) and family, he is unhappy and cannot move on from "here."

The movie’s fatal flaw, however, is its score by Alan Silvestri, an award-winning composer, responsible for iconic themes found in wildly successful movies like Back to the Future and Avengers. You can hear them, right? Of course you can.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

The Here score put me in mind of Elmer Bernstein’s legendary score for the 1962 film adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The main theme to that film is like liquid nostalgia, at once sweeping and sweet, grand yet intimate.

The first time I read Mockingbird, I found the first half to be interesting but disjointed – a selection of unassociated small town tales. When the trial happens, however, all the elements of the first part come together to define what happens next. And Bernstein's music serves to underscore lost innocence that comes with seeing the world as it really is, while remembering what it used to mean to you.

The thing about the graphic novel Here is that it has no narrative, it is an abstracted rumination on the meaning (if there is one) of time and space, and our brief place in it. These moments sometimes turn back on themselves, as when a 20th century child plays with a plastic dinosaur in the same frame as an actual dinosaur from millions of years ago that once occupied the same space, or a young woman is offering a cocktail in the same panel as she, as a baby years earlier, is being nursed with a bottle.

The Here screenplay by Zemeckis and Eric Roth includes a few brief, abstracted moments like these within the larger narrative (the one defined by the the Tom Hanks character) but they clash with the movie's serious, dramatic tone, and come off not as humorous but obvious and heavy-handed, especially as they allude to recent events, like COVID or the BLM uprising.

Meanwhile, Silvestri's score keeps reminding us that this is meaningful, this is important. But all we are seeing is a number of (mostly white) people living, growing old, and dying. And while there is a common philosophical argument that death gives life meaning, death does not in and of itself give life meaning.

Here (1989)

A professor of playwriting once described to me what he called the “dead baby” plays. He had had a number of students – people in their late teens and early twenties – drop a dead baby into the narrative of their scripts, which he saw as cheap, unearned poignance, and he absolutely has a point. When I was a young man, I dropped suicide into the narrative of more than one project, and that was also sloppy writing, and thoughtless.

Death does not provide meaning, but it can inspire meaning.

My new play, The Right Room, takes place in four different time periods, and in four different rooms, but they are all hotel rooms (or three hotel rooms and one room in a boarding house) in four different cities. And it follows the story of one family, in these elements I can see how I was inspired by McGuire’s original 1989 comic Here.

In my first draft, there were four distinct scenes, which I have since braided into one continuous scene, and so four couples share the same room, all at once. And I like to think that meaning is revealed by the actions that take place in those rooms, by those characters. Not time, nor place, nor even death. That it is life that gives life meaning.

"Here," a student film by Tim Masick and Bill Trainor (1991)

Process LVIII

Art: Winsor McCay

Folks like to get a lot of responses on social media by throwing out questions. What was the last movie that made you cry? Who was the most important teacher you ever had? Sometimes I respond to them if I have something worth reporting.

What I never answer is “What is your greatest fear?” That’s straight up 1984 shit. You can just imagine some government apparatchik taking notes and using your own fears against you in a torture room somewhere after the revolution comes.

My fears, my pre-adolescent fears, are the subject of a new script I am working on. It’s inspired by Little Nemo in Slumberland, only he never leaves his room. And there’s nothing particularly fantastical, no giant nymphs nor goblins playing only sexual anxiety, and the idea that someone will abduct you and you will never been seen again.

So, I was nervous about this. Or, if not nervous, then at least curious as to whether or not it would hold interest. Having it read aloud by the entire class, I was reminded of how upsetting it is. I have been amusing myself, writing about these terrible thoughts from my past. Because it is absurd. But it doesn’t play as absurd. It’s sinister. That’s a word that was used, it was called sinister.

I mean, duh. Of course it is. How could I trick myself out of knowing that?

Anyway, that’s one piece I’m writing for class. Before spring break I will turn in a proposal for Illness Narratives, for that I am investigating the writing notebooks I kept every single day throughout my mother’s decline. No idea what I’ll find there but I plan to start by writing a short piece about Thanksgiving 2019.

Yes. These are notebooks I have not yet burned. See you in two weeks!

On Death

This post includes spoilers for William Shakespeare's four hundred and thirteen year-old play KING LEAR.

“Thou wilt come no more.
Never, never, never, never, never.”
- LEAR V.iii

Gloucester (Anne McEvoy) and Lear (Robert Hawkes)

My phone has this odd bug … I’ll be listening to a podcast and the Music app will suddenly start up, playing some song I purchased from iTunes at some point in the past fifteen years.

Today, before rehearsal, that song was "You’ll Be Back" from Hamilton. What an exciting time that was, three years ago, discovering this new musical, this national craze, at the same time as my seventh grade daughter.

I haven’t listened to this score for, what? Half a year? Since summer vacation last? So I had to ask myself, why this feeling of sadness, of melancholy, especially in reaction this, one of the lightest, most frothy tracks on the album?

Ah yes, always. Hamilton is steeped in melancholy for me. We purchased it shortly before my father died one February Friday morning. The year 2016 was dizzying, thrilling, full of anticipation, promise, and fear. And all year I was keeping my chin up, deep in mourning.

All the celebrity deaths that year. “Let’s all make a protective circle around Betty White!” I didn’t find it amusing. You know what I found amusing? That moment in Oh, Hello On Broadway when George St. Geegland (John Mulaney) says, “Ladies and gentlemen, it behooves you when a famous person dies, blame it on the year and make it about you.”

Just as we were adjusting to the new normal, death of a father, death of democratic norms, came the call. My father-in-law had cancer, the kind you don’t get better from. We were still in it, only my father dropped dead one day. They were all correct, those who said that was better. Yes, Chris hung on, danced at his daughter’s wedding. But his care took such a toll on my wife, on my mother-in-law.

My wife gently reminds me she wouldn't have traded those seven months with him for anything.

When he passed that December, my son was ashamed that he didn’t grieve in the same manner he had for my father. He didn’t openly weep, he was numb. We tried to reassure him. My father was a shock, a surprise. You knew this was coming.

But my son lost both grandfathers in as many years. I am glad he was close to my dad. But Chris was supposed to teach him so much more.

Kent in the stocks.

I am in therapy. I am having difficulty moving on, of making sense of all of this. Turning fifty, watching my children move into the last stage of childhood. I realize I may not have much longer, I didn’t used to be able to see the end, and now I can.

What have I accomplished? What have I yet to do? Will I do it?

And what will oblivion be like? I will miss this world, I want to see so much more. That is why I have been investigating Buddhism, to make peace with the void.

Performing in King Lear exacerbates this anxiety, especially in the role of Kent, working to help and protect those he loves from harm and then watching helpless as, in spite of his best efforts, they are all dragged down to their doom.

Kent survives, but Albany’s appeals for the nation to move forward do not compel him. He will die soon, too, of a broken heart.

“I have a journey, sir, shortly to go.
My master calls me, I must not say no.”
- LEAR V.iii

Have a beautiful Memorial Day.

Beck Center for the Arts presents "King Lear" directed by Eric Schmiedl, May 31 - June 30, 2019

Play a Day: Death and The Tramp (El Muerto Vagabundo)

Georgina Escobar

Fourteen plays in fourteen days!

For Sunday I read Death and The Tramp (El Muerto Vagabundo) by Georgina Escobar and available at New Play Exchange.

"The day you understand the meaning of death is the day you start living."

This lovely Día de Muertos play for children and families is presented in English and Spanish, and also through shadow puppetry, projections and several other magical stage elements to weave a tale of memory, loss and despair, as well as remembrance, determination, and hope, told with delight and clarity.

This uniquely original story did put me in mind of other tales of the Underworld and of the Dreamworld. The fear that those who have no living persons to remember them will be olividado, or forgotten, was the theme of the Pixar movie Coco (this play was produced a year before that film was released) though in Vagabundo, souls who are forgotten do not cease to exist, they wander the earth without a home.

That's where this piece takes on real world significance, as I wondered if the land of the dead truly exists, or if the earth is a place we never leave. Loss comes in many forms, death being only one of them. To be dispossessed, homeless, without a nation, unwelcome anywhere. There are greater fears than the end of all.

The setting is beneath a bridge. And don't we need more bridges.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Lincoln In the Bardo (book)

“We’re only tourists in this life / Only tourists but the view is nice.”
- Everybody’s Coming To My House, David Byrne

“And life is finite
But shit, it feels like forever.”
- tonite, LCD Soundsystem

“And when my time is up, have I done enough?”
- Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story, Lin-Manuel Miranda

“We are blessed with love and activity, but not enough time.”
- Me, July 27, 2018

“We had again been granted the great mother-gift:
“Time.
“More time.”
- Lincoln In The Bardo, George Saunders

In fiction, ghosts are a manifestation of regret. Can a ghost exist without a belief in the need for its own existence? And that need is to complete something that had not been accomplished in life, as though life itself is defined by accomplishment.

Because it is, really. That is how we as humans define it.

In his riveting, ruminative novel, Lincoln In The Bardo, author George Saunders argues that life is what it is. What we do or what happens to us cannot be judged, it was what it was. No need to glorify not denigrate. Do what you can. Succeed or survive. Strive to do your best, surely. But let no one describe to you what that may be. Then, let go.

I find myself lamenting the scarcity of time. But time is not a thing. Life is a thing, the world is a thing. These can be valued, in the moment or not at all.

Three days ago I was sitting on the porch of a rustic cabin in Maine, listening to the sounds. My son’s peculiar and delightful laugh, the unfamiliar voices across the cove. I recalled that breakfast diner in Charlottesville, last month. (I remember -- the Nook!) The brick wall, the delicious odors; the coffee, the hash browns.

Today I sit at my desk to make a note of the memory. I hear the ticket printing machine, the brief, almost imperceptible whine of the copier. All of these things are special. They are not special because of what they are, they are special because they are what is.

I think I may be Buddhist.

Top Ten Life Lessons Pengo Learned From Fred

Me and Fred, from a lost "silent" film. (1986)

This was not the post I intended to write on my fiftieth birthday. But life rarely goes as planned, and birthdays are as arbitrary as any other holiday.

Fred Steiner died this morning from a massive coronary. Apparently he was looking out his window contemplating mowing the grass, which is as fine a way to go as any I can think of.

Fred graduated from Bay High in 1980, a contemporary of my eldest bother, Denny. But we spent a lot of time together, watching movies, engaged in RPG, and producing comedy television for the public access channel.

We haven't spent a lot of time together recently, the last time I saw him was at his mother's funeral, before that at my father's. But unlike some from those old days we never had a falling out, never really lost touch.

I was unable to attend his 50th birthday party, six years ago, but I did pass along a number of things I had learned from him, sincerely offered, to be read at the event. It was only appropriate to be produced as a Letterman-esque "Top Ten" list.

TOP TEN LIFE LESSONS PENGO LEARNED FROM FRED

10. Do the best work you can. Don’t get uppity. Create low expectations.

9. Christian Bale was a grown man before he learned what I learned at age fifteen: Do not have a tantrum when the camera is rolling.

8. The cool person stays in his chair, and makes people come to him.

7. Turn TV-viewing into a contest. It's more fun that way.

6. Fred’s defense of The Creature from Alsace Lorraine sketch; “Nobody told me no.”

5. Be original. Avoid high-concept. Edit.

4. Make the Dungeon Master laugh, and you can get away with anything.

3. "I’m SO fucked in the HEAD!"

2. Women are people, not aliens. They are easy to talk to and if you want something from them, just ask.

1. [This one is private.]

When I was a teenager Fred treated me with respect and dignity, long before Denny did. He was one who taught me decency and humility, and humor. I am very sorry he is gone.

This American Life (radio)

Radio: An Illustrated Guide
(I own this comic book.)

Recently we had occasion to dig out our old copy of Trivial Pursuit: 90s Time Capsule Edition. The tagline is, “from the most trivial of decades.” Even today, that seems a most accurate description. You can get in trouble painting an entire decade (or an entire generation) with so broad a brush. But historically speaking, we were complacent.

In 1995, when I was creating theater pieces about Gen X nostalgia and long-form improv-inspired by nascent reality TV, NPR reporter and producer Ira Glass introduced This American Life.

Its mission, ostensibly, was to report on life in these United States. Not the famous, or the necessarily newsworthy, but life as it is lived in the corners and in the fringes. I loved it almost immediately, if only because these brief radio diaries were about things I was interested in. Conventions, summer camp, 24-hour diners, Canadians, and terrible sex.

Glass quickly developed a stable of reliable writers he would turn to with some regularity, whose work I greatly enjoyed; David Rakoff, Scott Carrier, Tobias Wolff, Dan Savage, Sarah Vowell, and David Sedaris. You notice that even in this sampling, which I thought up off the top of my head, almost all are men. All were white.

By the late 1990s I was consuming episodes voraciously, even using primitive methods of “downloading.” Due to issues of copyright, TAL came to the podcast game rather late, but early on you could stream the program with players like RealAudio, and I hooked a cassette machine to my computer to record episodes in real time for playback anywhere in house or car at my convenience.

The most compelling to me were the truly moving ones, most notably Last Words, an extended rumination on death. This episode sends chills down my spine through the music alone, prompting me to buy CDs from Bill Frisell, Philip Glass, and to put Brian Eno’s Music For Airports back into personal rotation. It was here I first heard the quote attributed to Yahuda HaLevi, “It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.”

A moving sentiment, it has what the kids today refer to as “all the feels.” I did not yet comprehend what that phrase means, though. These weekly journeys into dark corners America were, shall we say, an in vitro experience. I was thirty. I was a slacker. I didn't know much.

On one episode in the mid-2000s, Ira related the moment he was watching The O.C. when two of the characters name-check his show. They’re on the phone and one says he’s listening to This American Life, and the other says, “Is that that show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are? Ecch. God.”

However, by that point, things had already begun to evolve for the program. The events of 9/11 was a challenge the team met with surprising speed, depth, and clarity. The last program in August, 2001 was about basketball tricks and professional gambling. By September 14, they had assembled a collection of stories they already had in the can on personal loss; co-writing your father’s obituary with your not-yet-deceased father, and David Sedaris writing about his mother’s death.

By the following week they were able to break open tales of how communities experience and cope with (or do not) monumental tragedy and grief with the brilliant episode Before and After. David Rakoff recounts the historic destruction of the steamship General Slocum, which devastated nearly every family in an entire New York neighborhood, and Haruki Murakami reporting first-person accounts of the 1995 poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway.

In telling smaller stories around a subject, and not necessarily about the big story at hand, the producers of This American Life have been able to effectively, and in recent years with more urgency, comment upon recent events. The war years (which have not actually ended) pushed the program out of its comfort zone, and TAL’s definition of what constituted a story about “American life” broadened considerably. We were taken to Afghanistan and Iraq and Kuwait and Guantanamo Bay.

Your host.

I mentioned the prominence of male writers and voices on the program, though even from the beginning there were women producers, writers and reporters like Nancy Updike, Alix Spiegel, Julie Snyder, and later Sarah Koenig (of Serial fame, a TAL spin-off) have played a prominent role. But if you tried to articulate any bias, or particular point of view for the program, it would be that squishy, liberal, can’t-we-all-get-along vibe. Homosexuality was always presented as matter-of-fact (though predominantly male-centric homosexuality) and racism, for example, is presumed to be a bad thing.

For example, in Be Careful Who You Pretend To Be we hear the story of Ron Copeland, who plays a “slave owner” as part of an interactive, historical reenactment. He thinks of himself as a good person, certainly not racist, and it begins to tear at his soul when he has to behave as one for the purposes of education and entertainment. It is an affecting piece. You feel bad for him, the white guy.

In light of recent national events, however, the show has started to lean with greater strength into uncomfortable modern issues … and Ira Glass, the omnipotent, white, cis-male narrator has noticeably begun to lean back. Two remarkable episodes from the past twelve months illustrate issues in American society which have deep roots, but have been brought into sharp relief during the time of the Trump Administration. And in each case, Glass has taken the once rare and now more frequent opportunity to hand over responsibility to another, one more familiar with and a true representative of the subject matter.

Last summer We Are in the Future, hosted by TAL producer Neil Drumming, who is African-American, delved into the subject of Afrofuturism. For the uninitiated, one of the most powerful recent examples of Afrofuturism is the movie Black Panther, and particularly the fictional nation of Wakanda. What would the present be like if white colonials had not ravaged the continent of Africa in the past? But that is merely one way to describe the aesthetic.

FTL, Y'all!:
Tales From the Age of the $200 Warp Drive
Cover art by Paul Davey

One of the stories reflects that episode from almost twenty years ago, about the white historical reenactor who played a slave-owner. In this case, however, it is comedian and actor Azie Dungey recounting her time playing the part of an enslaved person at Mount Vernon. Playing the part of one of those whom our first President claimed to own as property, she was exposed to the mental and emotional abuse of white visitors and co-workers who unintentionally or not saw her as what she was performing -- a servant, an object, an other -- which begs the question; is that not already what happens every day in America?

This past spring, the episode Five Women, hosted by producer Chana Joffe-Walt (a female-American) told a story about one empowered man -- a so-called progressive, liberal man, by the way -- and the manipulative effect he had on five women he worked with, was romantically involved with, or in several of these cases, both. The President of the United States is an unapologetic serial harasser, who only this week mocked the #MeToo movement, but the outrageousness of his sins have served to created not merely a conversation, but a revolution is the way we consider inappropriate and/or inexcusable behavior across the society.

The past year and a half we have seen historically marginalized people’s rights and liberties threatened, at the same time witnessed as they have used their voices in new, exciting, insightful, and powerful ways. And while This American Life was never meant to be at the forefront of fierce social debate, I am glad that this program, which originally focused on stories most trivial, has evolved to reflect the current moment in a manner most relevant.

Play a Day: Living Creatures

Ashley Rose Wellman

For Saturday I read Living Creatures by Ashley Rose Wellman, and available at New Play Exchange.

Having a relationship means risking part of yourself. Having a child means risking all of yourself.

My daughter has a severe peanut allergy. She is smart and diligent, she's fifteen and can care for herself. Always very careful about checking packaging, she doesn't fool around with that. She won't eat any baked good if she doesn't know where it came from.

And yet, things happen.

When my son was less than one year old her had a fall and fractured his skull. I was on watch. It required surgery. He's fine. Scar on the back of his head, when his hair is long you can't even see it.

It didn't have to happen that way. It could have been worse. A fraction of an inch. It could have been debilitating. It could have been fatal.

And before that, we were expecting a baby. Just the two of us, our first child, and he died before he was born. Like that. Things happen.

Having a child means that every day, every moment, is an opportunity to die. The fact that it becomes less fraught as they grow doesn't mean the terror goes away. You just get used to it. It's right there to destroy you if something goes wrong.

Wellman has composed a chilling fable about the helplessness of parenthood. Part ghost story, part aching lament, she taps into the primal fear of child loss, creating a contemporary mythology, not to explain the afterlife, but rather what happens to the living when someone they have put their heart into is gone.

The anxiety, the misery, the bargaining, and the utter impossibility of acceptance, of "closure." We want to believe that one day everything will be okay, that everything will go back to the way it was. But the only way through is forward.

Play a Day: Glass

Azure Osborne-Lee

Fourteen plays in fourteen days! Two weeks of new work.

For Friday I read Glass by Azure Osborne-Lee and available from New Play Exchange, which put me in mind of Yoruba folk tales and the works of Sam Shepard, filled with animal characters in human form slouching in an existential, American tableau.

Ancient magic abounds as Life and Death engage in a barroom brawl with Anansi playing bartender.

So what have we accomplished, reading new, unpublished plays for two weeks? Has this been motivational, you might ask. I have written bits and pieces here and there, and thought that emerging myself into the works of others might be an inspiration, and I am glad to say that it has.

It also takes up a great deal of time, that time I normally reserve for the writing itself. But as long as I am not writing, why not engage in something different?

Having said that, last night I was sitting in XYZ, waiting to see The Tongue That Tells Me So next door, and I started sketching a game plan for a story I'd like to tell, and how I might like to tell it. Not much, a few notes, but there were more ideas there than before. Reading diverse work from others reminds me of how much freedom I have, to do anything, but also to be myself.

I am discovering, though, that what is in myself is more expansive and interesting than I previously allowed myself to imagine.

Play a Day: Death and Cockroaches

Eric Reyes Loo

For Monday morning I read Death and Cockroaches by Eric Reyes Loo, available for download from New Play Exchange.

Eric tells a semi-fictionalized version of the death of his father with humor, honesty, and a surprising number of dicks.

I have a homoerotic dream last night and wake up to read a play that includes a wall of dicks. That part was odd, but not unsatisfying.

People keep telling me how lucky I was my father suddenly dropped dead one morning. It's not actually the kind of thing I like to hear, because I am still in the I'd rather he were not dead at all yet stage.

However, these sentiments are offered up from those whose own fathers lingered in dementia, Alzheimer's, or in the case of Loo's father, a poor heart that took its time to stop.

In the immediate aftermath of my own father's death, my mother second guessed her own decisions in the minutes, the days, the months before he died. Part of my job was in telling her there was no right decision, what has happened, happened.

I felt a great deal of sympathy for the Eric in this play, it's his story and he presents himself as a deeply flawed person. But he's the one who is there, in the same city as his parents, who are presented here as having very challenging personalities, and he has to cope with them, and the hospital, the health care providers, the hospice staff, his brother - the responsible one who lives in another city.

I can sympathize. I can also breathe a shameful sigh of relief that I didn't have to deal with any of that.