Gr33n Hamzies & Eggoes | BorderLight 2026

Dan Zanes was lead singer of the Del Fuegos and a wild garage rocker and swiller of Miller High Life until he started having kids and that's when he started recording children's music. I, too, had not considered the child audience until I started fathering them.

Fathering. What a terrible verb. I digress.

Faye Hargate and Renee Schilling collaborated on the Visual Theatre Award winning Her Mark for BorderLight 2023 and they (with Joan Hargate and Jeremy Paul) have devised a new exploration of motherhood with the creation of Gr33n Hamzies & Eggoes, an original and exploratory art installation for the very, very young.

I felt a bit odd, I knew I would, appearing as an adult without a child escort, but they don't judge. The space had just opened and there were already five kids with their two adults, and Hargate and Schilling, costumed as what appeared to me to be DIY store associates were making suggestions and accommodating needs as the child audience explored and commented and created.

Dan Zanes with my family (2005)

I was provided with stickers I was told I could put anywhere I liked (I put hem up high, there seemed to be no stickers up there for some reason) and was offered a basket of "dream boxes" the team had created previously in collaboration with a CHUH school.

In fact, dreams were a theme, the walls featured trees that asked "Where do you go when you dream?" with answers like, "I hear music in my dreams," and "I see my dog, he is no longer with us."

The night before I had dreamed that we lived in a society where cannibalism was permissible, but it was unseemly to discuss it. You had to be very discreet when disposing of long bones. I didn't write any of this on the trees.

Before I left there was a group activity where our hosts read the Dr. Seuss book which inspired the title of the installation. There were many questions from the children. How did you set this all up? What is that? Are you a rapper?

It's a calming, welcoming room, and the kids I saw appeared very happy to be there. This is an non-ticketed event. I recommend bringing a young person. 

BorderLight Theatre Festival at Playhouse Square, July 8-11, 2026

Scenes From a Night's Dream (inspiration)

We were in a hotel room and she was in a box and she would not come out.

"He is Bob, eager for fun.
He wears a smile, everybody run."
(Twin Peaks)

Had the opportunity to attend a run-through of Scenes From a Night's Dream on Thursday night. The first act is a dream, and by that I mean it takes place inside a dream. There are so many entrances and exits, it's dizzying. But it's delightful. It's also horrifying.

My wife sent me to the basement to rub toothpaste on a couple of fuses. I went to the basement, the light was out, but I knew there was a fluorescent light on a cord down there, so I hurried down the stairs and found the light. I could just see the old fuse box, way across the room. I could see other things, too, and that scared me so I fled back up the stairs as fast as I could go.

The subject of my dreams has been a major part of my waking life, especially in the past couple of years. Is that true for others? Or is that incredibly self-indulgent? Musing on random imaginings which make sense only to me.

It was so big inside my parents’ house. Their bedroom was massive, with flocked wallpaper and Trompe-l'œil ceiling. But there was terrible mold and water damage. I offered that anyone who needed a place to stay the night might live there.

"Mama! Papa!"
(In the Night Kitchen)

In the past several years, between the death of my mother and the pandemic, these amorphous journeys have loomed large, featuring undocumentable trends which are difficult to trace.

With my brother and his wife in a crumbling old house. I was lecturing them about not setting the spider webs on fire.

During the lockdown, my subconscious was out there, in the world that I was visiting with much less frequency. For the past year or so, interiors have played a strong role in my dream space. And while they can be grandly spacious they are also worn and aged.

There was this rap act. They had a demo that they tried to re-record but it wasn’t as good so they made a video from the demo. For some reason, I held this particular act in contempt and used an app on my phone to change the lettering on the marquee to read “Comedians Rap Now.”

My parents stately home is often a location I return to. They may or may not be there, and the rooms are not actually the rooms as they were, but physical manifestations of the emotions those rooms represented. 

A large school many kids, flooding. High water. Lots of snacks. A beautiful schoolroom. So many kids.

Source: Cleveland Clinic Foundation

Returning to these neglected rooms, I lamented not having sold my parents' house when it was still in good order. I woke relieved because I had actually sold it. I once held a great sense of responsibility to keep the place, but that would not have made me happy. And so my dream actually reminded me that I had made a good decision, which is a useful thing for a dream to do.

Tooling down a street in my old neighborhood, noting homes that had been torn down we missed the turning and drove into the cemetery, which appeared from the opposite end to be a packed theater house.

The first act of Scenes From a Night's Dream tells a story where nothing is real but everything is true. James plays a menacing character (actually, he does that in both acts) and the other night he told me he'd unlocked the entire play in one line. I was shocked because he was absolutely correct, but I was unaware of it. You'll have to come see the show to figure out what that line is. 

Different rooms, different spaces. A big event. I was dressed as a mime, but I had to go around. Part of the performance included a shadow play in which a ballerina got stuck but was rescued by a fox with the voice of Prince.

"Scenes From a Night's Dream" by David Hansen and directed by Cory Molner, closes out the NEOMFA Playwrights Festival at Convergence-Continuum, February 16, 17 & 18, 2023

Process LXIII

Mary Todd Lincoln
(William H. Mumler, c. 1870)

As the semester winds to a close, I am confident in how well things have proceeded. I lost an entire week due to illness, and yet I am ahead of the homework game. I needed to complete at least 120 hours for my teaching internship, and I think I passed that finish line sometime, I don’t know. Today.

That was a difficult new work to bring to the finish line. I had a big, long cry in the shower after it was completed. That was a surprise. I haven’t cried like that in years. Not for two years. I was alone then, too.

As the semester winds down, I become wistful about online education. I have really enjoyed my illness narrative class; we have been covering a wide variety of often very affecting material. And in spite of our Zoom assemblage, I have become attached to this collection of students. They are all unique, compassionate, quirky, shepherded by our wonderful professor. I’ve loved this class, even though we have been attending from our personal spaces.

Then again, my personal space is a couch in front of a fire during the chilly Ohio months. Would I prefer traveling a half hour to get to a cinder block room downtown. I imagine not.

I will graduate in a year, and yet we are almost through. No classes this summer, fall quarter, next spring is all about the thesis. What will be my motivation to create, when there are no assignments with deadlines? Two plays a year, for two years. It’s a big deal.

And my brain, the reading, how will I keep up? When someone chucks a book at you and says read it, then write about it, then we’re gonna talk about it, that’s amazing. You make associations across narratives, connections between classes, and over the years.

Yesterday, reading Out of Nowhere Into Nothing by Caryl Pagel, I learned about William Mumler, so-called spirit photographer. He let people believe that his double exposed images revealed the ghosts who accompany us, watch over us, and comfort us. It’s bogus, of course, but it feeds the imagination. Tuesday night I had a dream that I was visited by the ghosts of my parents; they were dead, in my dream, I knew that. These were their spirits. It was a revelation. It was sad, it was also an adventure.

(Later she quotes Roy Scranton’s book Learning To Die in the Anthropocene, which was assigned to me in a different class this semester, another example of my current educational experience answering back to itself. Are there really so few books? Is the world smaller than we believe it is?)

I need to write about ghosts. Like, literally, that’s the next thing I need to do, write a few scenes with ghosts in them.

See also: Lincoln In the Bardo (book)

We Play Ourselves (book)

Pengo's 2021 Summer Book Club

There are far too many plays about plays, and I should know. I have written a few. Plays about plays satisfy playmakers and play-attenders. Movies about plays are usually weird. See Birdman or Cradle Will Rock.

There are also TV shows about plays. Okay, there's only one TV show about plays.

But then there are novels about plays. And those, as long as they do not include William Shakespeare as a character, can be transcendent. I believe it is because while theater is about showing, and not telling, just showing stories about plays in plays or other visual mediums doesn't succeed at taking theater further than it already goes.

Writing about, telling it, telling how it happens, how it feels, is the only true way to describe it to someone who doesn't know. When it's put on the page, the totally bizarre art form that is live theater performance becomes explicable, if no less odd.

I'm thinking of Station Eleven or The Cabinet of Edgar Allen Poe or even Interview With the Vampire. Earlier this year playwright Jen Silverman published the novel We Play Ourselves, about the after-shock of a certain Off-Broadway opening night. I tore through it in less than a week.

What Silverman describes so perfectly is all the ugly parts about being an artist. The creative process can be messy, especially in theater which is by necessity collaborative. You have a drive to create, but also need to compromise, and then there is the deep, dark part of you that wants your work to be accepted.

I have never read a better description of receiving a devastating review for your new play than when the author writes, “You keep thinking you should be fine, because there was a moment very recently in which you had been fine, so why aren’t you still?“

This is also how you could describe a broken heart.

Last night, having finished the novel just before bed, I dreamed I was running a marathon. This is not in and of itself unusual, because that is a thing I do. But this was no ordinary race. The route led me up mountains and across giant misshapen stone sculptures. It should have been a difficult trek, but I was doing very well, fleet of foot and remarkably agile.

I was also, I was informed, in the lead! In a marathon? Amazing! There was, however, a blonde man following close behind me, and so it was no longer enough to run. I had to maintain my lead.

Then there was a place where the stone beneath my feet broke through and I fell, maybe fifteen or twenty feet, straight down. I feared I might break a leg, or damage the bones in my feet. But I landed soft, cushioned by the springy bending of my amazing knees. I was okay! But I had been overtaken by the blonde runner.

When I got out from under this giant stone mountain, I found myself in a middle school library, one that was very crowded. I didn’t know which was to turn or how to get out. It was clear the blonde man had made it through, but I could not. There was a conveyor belt for books, but I could not fit onto them. I could not make my way through the library. I was increasingly distressed as I ran through stacks and time passed and I was stuck in this labyrinthine building.

Eventually, a fun size candy bar appeared in my pocket and it read “Congratulations!” on the label but it wasn’t for me. Rather, it was an announcement that the blonde man had crossed the finish line, and I felt defeated.

At first, I had just been running. And I loved the race, the hills, the obstacles. I was unafraid and feeling good, just running. But once I heard I was in the lead, winning became important. I lost the joy of doing what I loved, and so I lost everything. 

“Choose your art,” a director warns the playwright protagonist of We Play Ourselves. “Practice your art, always, always choose your art over and above anything else.” Approval, acceptance, acclaim, success, riches, love. These can be happy side-effects of doing the work, whatever work that is. But they can never take the place in your heart for the work itelf. 

Play a Day: Aliquippa

Lydia Valentine

For Thursday, I read Aliquippa by Lydia Valentine and available at New Play Exchange.

Lately I have been made aware of the use of board games to illustrate to young people (and not young people) the concept of instutitional racism.

One example, in brief: Four people play Monolpoly. Actually, two play, and two watch. The two people playing move around the board, accumulting property and wealth.

After maybe a half hour to forty-five minutes, the other two are invited to join the game. Two people have all of the wealth and property, and the other two have nothing but are free to move about the board, scraping together cash and paying rent for everything. Got it? That's America.

With her play Aliquippa, Valentine has composed a painful and joyful family drama of tragedy and hope. Four generations of Lockwoods aspire to difficult dreams in a nation where the rules remain set against African Americans. The playwright neatly weaves issues of economics, chemical dependence, and raising non-heteronormative children, providing each of her characters the opportunity to have a voice, doing so with a great deal of warmth and familial humor.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Sources: 
Using Monopoly to Introduce Concepts of Race and Ethnic Relations by Warren Warren, The Journal of Effective Teaching (2011)
The Disturbing History of the Suburbs, Adam Ruins Everything (2017)

What I dream of.

I do not dream about my wife. I have never, in the past, dreamed about whoever it was I were dating, or married to. I do not dream about my children. I do not dream about my family members. I do not dream about my co-workers, nor my fellow artists I see on a regular basis. If you are present, I do not dream of you.

It is not because I do not care about you. It is because you fill my conscious mind. I do not need to worry about you. You are right here (points at own forehead.)

I dream about lovers I never had, and didn't know I wanted. I dream about those important to me, but so far away they are out of reach. Maybe in reality, in space. Maybe in time. I dream about the famous.

I dream about the dead, the unexpected dead. Not grandparents, not historic figures. Those who should be here, but are not. I dream of Peter. He always surprises me. And I dream of those who are dead to me, because they went away. And I don't know which is worse.