For many years I would include a post this time of year in which I would look forward to the year to come. This started in late 2012, because I was excited about all the new work I was developing at that time. I had three workshops or productions scheduled for calendar 2013, and that was the first time that had happened.
Often, I have new work scheduled but am not yet at liberty to announce them yet, so this post has to be a coy “wait and see” message, and this one is going to be like that. Last year, I didn’t even bother to write a “Twenty Twenty-Five” post because post-election, things were all so bleak, I didn’t feel that I had much to look forward to. It was also unknown as to whether I would have anything new to share, though it turned out to be a production year, regardless.
The world remains bleak. Next year is the American Semiquincentennial. Fucking yay. We thought things were bad in 1976. Elderly Gen Xers can remember celebrating our nation’s birth by learning how to make soap and dip candles, and by painting our fire hydrants to resemble colonial patriots. I’m no prognosticator, but I believe celebrations on July 4, 2026 will feature tear gas.
Closer to home, I have several projects in the works, and yes, I am not at liberty to announce them yet. But at least the work continues. Received a commission for a non-fiction piece, and workshop productions that will provide new and expanded audiences to some recent plays that have so far had limited exposure. And as usual, that doesn’t include all the business that is currently in their proposal stages.
So, resuming this tradition of looking ahead; it’s not so much about promoting upcoming projects, that will come soon enough. It's about reminding myself of something that is in short supply these days: hope.
"Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare Guerrilla Theater Company, 1994
"Let's talk." - Romeo and Juliet, III.v
The last time I yelled at an actor was in 1994.
We were close to opening Romeo and Juliet at the Actors’ Gym (current site of the Bourbon Street Barrel Room) for Guerrilla Theater Company. It was one of those moments when the entire company crosses the stage, a pantomime, as music and recorded narration plays.
I was seated in the house. I could hear chatter throughout the space, especially out in the lobby, and it was those folks who needed to center first, setting off the action. I was pretty sure they weren’t paying attention, and I called the cue anyway.
The music started, and … nothing. No one entered, as I had assumed. I hollered for the music to stop, and from my seat I cried for everyone to stop fucking around and pay attention – to act like professionals.
There were murmurs of assent and understanding from the far corners of the space and we continued without further incident.
I was twenty-six. I have lived well more than another lifetime since then, and I cannot recall shouting in anger in a theatrical setting ever since. Not at Night Kitchen, not at Bad Epitaph, not in my current position. I have taught myself not to lose control; yelling is never helpful, and it may very well be harmful. Better not to.
"You Can't Take It With You" by Kaufman & Hart Bay High School, 1982
Our drama teacher in high school yelled at me exactly once (well, twice – the other time was in a class, that is story for another time) and it was for the exact same reason. I was a freshman, it was tech week for the recently mentioned production of You Can’t Take It With You, and I was goofing off in the house when I heard my cue.
Panicked, I bolted through the auditorium and leapt onto the stage, ducking around the curtain in a desperate attempt to make my entrance late when our director held the action and dressed my down good. It was probably that moment I had in mind when I scolded the Guerrilla company. Perhaps that’s why I did it.
Are there those who enjoy anger? Who luxuriates in it? That anger is the way they get things done and that is a necessary avenue to success? Because I don’t see it. I have never been so alienated from a cast as I was from the Romeo and Juliet company, for a variety of reasons. It was quite the education. But shouting in anger is the end of open communication. Let’s figure things out together. Let’s talk.
A couple weeks ago, we attended a dance concert, the Cleveland Dance Festival in the Westfield Insurance Studio Theatre in the Idea Center. Looking about, I saw a couple hundred people I had never seen before, which was fascinating. I always recognize at least a few folks in any theater audience.
But those would be theater people. These were dance people. A completely different population. It was fascinating.
Dance is weird. Non-verbal performance – abstract, movement based performance – it can be alien, and that by itself is disquieting to me. We use words to describe our world with specificity. But dance is an entirely new language, a visual, physical language.
Freshman year, one of the very first exercises we were asked to prepare for Acting 101 (I don’t think it was called Acting 101 but you get me) was to lip-synch a song from a musical. I chose "Heaven on Their Minds" from Jesus Christ Superstar. Our instructor, a grad student, then picked apart our choices.
Why that song? Why hide your eyes with sunglasses? Why spend so much time standing still in a pose, wagging just one finger?
That last one stuck with me. We can be myopic about our bodies, we think we are making a “Grand Gesture” when we point with our finger. We feel our entire self projecting through what is, in visual reality, a very tiny part of your body, the tip of your index finger.
Use the whole self! Do not neglect one single part of yourself! Be aware of your entire person, and use your entire person! Know how you appear to others.
At the same time, I was also taking a modern dance class. It’s the only time I have taken a course in dance, and as with so many other courses, I was exposed to a whole history of artists of whom I had been entirely ignorant; in this case, it was those who had broken with classical, traditional, acceptable forms of movement for something entirely new and different, to discover another way to communicate, to express through movement.
And I was learning it all for the first time, and it was awkward. Lanky, six foot teenager, flailing about, sometimes literally flailing, attempting grace. Not aspiring to it, merely attempting.
You can’t fake it. I would soon become aware of just how many of my achievements to date had been accomplished by faking it, by not doing the work, instead relying upon my experiences to simulate knowledge, wisdom, or understanding.
Acting is pretending, but you can imitate what you don’t know. And you can’t pretend to dance.
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 Knocksby 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.
I applied to two schools. One accepted me. And so I matriculated into the Ohio University School of Theatre. I had no idea the school was in flux at that time. A sudden transition of leadership. I wasn’t even asked to audition.
Why did I want to study theater? Why wasn’t I an English major? Because acting was play and writing was work. There was an instant gratification in doing a play, and none for writing – I did not see how writing could get me attention, at least not positive attention (that is a story for another day) and attention had always been what I craved.
I am a 57 year-old man who keeps a blog. Of course I crave attention.
Erin Cameron, Steven Pack "Living Together" by Alan Ayckbourn Bay High School, 1986
I tried my hand at directing a two-act play (Living Together by Alan Ayckbourn) my senior year in high school. I had no idea what I was doing. Tell a bunch of my friends to move about on stage and there would be a play. No thought about costumes, or a set – I knew there were odd furniture pieces stored backstage, we’d use those – and light? To me, light was the invisible art. Surely, you just turn them on at the beginning and fade them out at the end.
I wasn’t just inexperienced with design, I was ignorant of design. I had never noticed it. It did not exist.
And that was who I was and how I started my undergraduate theater experience. I knew nothing. I would soon be trying everything.
My brother tells a story; fifty years ago, on November 9 (also a Sunday) it was unseasonably warm, so warm that he recalls that mother took me to the beach. I was seven, this was an unremarkable occasion for me, but he was fourteen and would remember how the temperature plummeted the next day, and how soon he and the nation would be rapt by the haunting mystery of the disappearance of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald.
Last night, we invited a small ensemble of friends to have an informal, private reading of the play Ten November by Steven Dietz, with song lyrics by Eric Peltoniemi. Commissioned by the Actors Theatre of St. Paul, the play premiered at Wisdom Bridge Theatre in Chicago in 1987. It is a fast-paced, harrowing tale of the disaster and its aftermath, and also an examination of how, as Blue Öyster Cult put it, “History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men.”
My desire was to invite a number of friends to gather around a fire in the backyard, to spin this yarn on a cool, fall evening, but the weather turned, as weather will, and we seventeen crammed into our beloved, tiny house. An unrehearsed ensemble, reading for ourselves, to mark this historic occasion. Five of us were alive when the Fitzgerald went down. It was an education for most. Folks familiar with the Lightfoot song – and this is a common refrain, which I have heard many times before – often don’t even know it’s a true story, or even that it happened during the twentieth century – let alone the late twentieth century.
Fifty years is a long time for a human. It’s not a long time for history.
Sarah Blubaugh and Scott Hanna interpreted the lyrics, which really elevated the experience, the assembled rewarded them with snaps after each melody as I pressed forward with the stage directions. Everyone who attended was provided a speaking role, it was a marvelous and varied chorus of voices.
It is a script that weaves together a variety of tales to provide context to the mystery. The fact that it was written before we had even visited the ship at the bottom of Lake Superior, before the bell was recovered in 1995, the site designated a grave site, not to be disturbed, actually serves the work. It illustrates the confusion and the frustrating search for solutions in the aftermath of tragedy which are often not to be found.
My grandfather was a merchant marine, and before he settled down to raise children, he piloted freighters like the Fitzgerald, though none as large. One of my recent discoveries in the effects I kept from my parent’s home was the old man’s personal logbook. An illustration he drew of the Steamship Robert Fulton was on display during the reading. Twenty-nine men died in a sudden storm on the Great Lakes on an evening fifty years ago, any man of them like my grandfather.
As the assembled departed last evening, the rain had turned to snow. Not exactly the blizzard we were promised. Sometimes, nature is kind, or so we perceive her to be.
Last week I was running the track at the Rec Center, and a song came on that I knew but I could not place from where. A bombastic anthem of nostalgia and regret with an all-encompassing theme of acceptance.
A quick search reminded me that this song, It’s Not Over (‘Til It’s Over and Done) by Bleu McAuley was the song that played over the closing credits of the Netflix series Sandman, based on the comics series of the same name.
When I was a teenager, I yearned for something which was not yet possible; that a TV show or movie might be successfully adapted from the genre materials that I loved so dear. Not just comics, but also books like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. When such attempts were made they suffered from a lack of technology and funding (see the BBC’s TV series for HHGTTG) or the inability to transfer what was essential about the material to the project (see Howard the Duck).
As I was never a DC fan, I had no strong emotional ties to either Superman or Batman, so while those movies (1978 and 1989, respectively) were important, to me they were only weigh stations to something that mattered. When X-Men (2000) was released I was a giddy 32 year old and mostly satisfied.
Sandman was an epic, 75-issue fantasy series which focused on the personification of dreams, sometimes called the Sandman – but not really, he was more often called Morpheus or often just Dream, and his primary function was managing that place we all go when we fall asleep.
I loved this comic because it was literate, transgressive, and Goth – Goth in that it was dark and moody and brooding and romantic. It also owes a lot of its imagery to familiar musical acts; Dream appears like Peter Murphy or Trent Reznor, Lucifer like Bowie. Word has it Delirium was modeled after Tori Amos, and Desire, of course, looks like the cover of Duran Duran’s album Rio(Patrick Nagel, RIP). My ex-wife Diana introduced me to the book, which started publication in 1988, and we read them issue by issue. Later, I bought the bound reprint books.
The other night I asked my wife Toni why Sandman has been so important to her (yes, I married two women who love Sandman, quelle surprise) and she reflected to me how expansive it is, and immersive. When she thinks of it, she doesn’t see the panels, the specific artwork, she sees worlds.
When it was announced in 2019 that Sandman would be a series on Netflix, I was excited about that. In the past, such announcements came with a certain amount of dread, like the feel you get every time they announce a new Fantastic Four movie. I love the IP, they are going to fuck it up. The thing about comics, for example, is that they are episodic, and most superhero movies prior to The Avengers (2012) would spend half the movie on the origin story. Even when there was a reboot, they would tell the origin story again.
Then there is the idea of cramming years of potential narrative into one two hour feature. It loses nuance, even when it looks spectacular. There will be nothing unique or interesting. And then there is casting. There were plans for a potential Sandman film in the early 90s that was to star Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But mostly, it is the adaptation of one thing into another thing. Comics are one particular thing, and movies a total other. Comics are cheap and movies are expensive, so comics can do so much more because it is only ink on paper and relatively few are reading them, whereas movies are practical and have to make money.
Martin Freeman (Arthur), Sam Rockwell (Zaphod) "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)
This is where Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005) failed. The source material is a science fiction satire, with the emphasis on satire, not science fiction. To wit; it is veddy British. In the original, a bunch of weird things would happen in the service of a dry, witty punchline, and the film kept the set-up but cut the punchline. The film gives us spectacular visuals and gags presented by writers and directors who did not understand or care why it was popular in the first place.
But now it is the 2020s and not only can you make almost anything look real, popular culture is so fragmented that the idea of a comic book with an enormous – and intergenerational – cult following being turned into not a single feature film but an anthology series makes total sense.
I will not describe the allegations here, except in how they relate to the subject at hand. Let us state what was and what is. Neil Gaiman was once a model figure for those who feel outside of the mainstream; he not merely wrote the works that made them feel seen – adult fantasy fiction like Sandman, and also children’s books like Coraline – but was a constant presence in public and on social media who defended the right for people to be different. His tweets were a protection against the trolling of J.K. Rowling.
At the same time, in his personal life, he was a serial abuser, a monster and a creep.
The second season of Sandman dropped this past July, with little notice or fanfare. I didn’t even discover that it had for a month after. The first season encompassed (more or less) the first twenty issues of a seventy-five issue series. They could have easily made three or even four seasons from the remaining fifty-five books, but chose to cram them all into this final, second series. Even the most lauded issue of Sandman, the World Fantasy Award winning story about Morpheus commissioning Shakespeare to write A Midsummer Night’s Dream is briefly shoehorned into a different episode. It is as though the folks at Netflix said, all right, let’s get this shitshow over with.
I chose to watch, even though I was conflicted about doing so. I mean, so many artists contributed to making this show a reality, that’s the thing about artistic collaboration. So I wanted to see it, I wanted to see them. But I was wondering how it would feel, knowing what we know. As it happened, I had my second bout of Covid in late summer, which was an opportune moment to binge the second season while in my own private delirium.
"It had been her own fault." Sandman #17: Calliope (1990) Pencils: Kelley Jones Inker: Malcolm Jones III
Knowing what we know, certain storylines pop with dread. To quote a meme, “Mister Police. You could have saved her. I gave you all the clues.” One, Calliope, is about Richard Madoc, a famous author with writer’s block who takes action to harbor the actual muse of epic poetry – essentially, he has trafficked her – to spur his creative output.
Dream arrives to free her from the author, something he does not actually have the power to do. The author must freely release her. But Morpheus can torture Madoc, and does so by flooding his mind with so many original ideas he goes nearly insane. When the writer announces Calliope is free, his torment ends, but he can no longer think of anything new or original.
Not arrested, not pursued by other supernatural entities, Madoc simply remains creatively empty, which we are free to assume is something Gaiman believes to be the worst punishment imaginable. (It isn’t.)
Witnessing the second season, released post-allegation, themes of remorse, regret, and atonement are pushed to the forefront. To be honest, they were always there in the text, but are so much more apparent now. Dream had committed an unforgivable act, and in the process of making it right was compelled to do something which (literally) brought the Furies down upon him.
In the end, all the chaos, pain, and anguish, the sum of a lifetime of poor decisions, are wiped away as the entity that was Dream is eliminated and replaced by someone new. End of story.
But reality is much more complicated. Morpheus apologized, repented, and took responsibility for his actions. To date, his creator has not.
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