How I Spent My Summer (2021)

Progressive Field

How is the summer over? I mean, I know how. I was aware its speed while it was happening. And I wasn’t even doing much … only I was doing a lot, as compared to last year.

The summer began, for me, with an outdoor orchestra performance in front of the high school. The only live musical performance of the school year, and the last for our eldest. It was a perfect evening, and the conclusion to a terrible year, as we sat out on blankets and chairs and enjoyed their work. After there was a lot of cautious meeting and greeting between friends and family who hadn’t spent any time in each other’s company for over a year.

The boy had a gig at the Beachland Ballroom with the School of Rock, the “Relativity” show featuring acts that included siblings and other family members. All were asked to arrive masked, and we were escorted to tables and asked not to mingle. Plexiglass separated the tables. But it was a live, indoor performance and I was reminded of the Mike Doughty gig my son and I had attended in late 2019. That was the last time I had been in that room.

He was the drummer as they played Champagne Supernova by Oasis and if I say I hated myself for crying, it’s only because Noel Gallagher is such a dick. 

The kids have been very busy all summer, our eldest, they, have a job serving at a local restaurant, while our youngest, he, has been assisting a landscaper. Speaking of landscaping, we finally had the patio put in in the backyard, something we had hoped to do last summer. There have been a few gatherings and firebowls and it’s so nice to have people over.

"In the Heights"

While live, outdoor theater has resumed I haven’t been able to attend too much of it. I took the boy to see Panther Women under a huge tent at Cleveland Public Theatre. Every seat was taken. Our first live theatrical performance, for so many of us, it was a powerful evening in more ways than one. 

But David, what about your professional life? How is the writing going? Good questions, all, and not much to report. Sherlock Holmes Meets the Bully of Baker Street has been published by Pioneer Drama, and I have already started to hear from interested schools! Vivid Stage in Summit, NJ (formerly Dreamcatcher Rep) presented an outdoor, staged reading of I Hate This, interpreted by Jason Szamreta. And the writing ... happened. It's cool. We'll get there.

A friend wanted to unload some of the Cleveland baseball tickets, so we bought them. Four dates at Progressive Field. They hadn’t announced the new name when we attended in July, at our first game everyone was handed a free, commemorative Bob Feller jersey. It doesn’t say Feller, but it has a number “19” on the back and CLEVELAND on the front. And I like it that way. 

I love this woman.

There were also summer movies -- at a movie theater! I took one of the kids to see In the Heights, then a few days later I took the other one. And the wife and I saw Summer of Soul, which you can see on Hulu but it's so much better on the big screen.

July was very busy with work, for everyone, concluding with our annual journey to Flood’s Cove, Maine. The four of us made the journey, in one car. The first night of our drive there we stayed in a hotel and took advantage of the pool. The only people in there that night, the family played Marco Polo. It was like they were small again.

As our eldest makes their way to college this coming weekend, I wonder how many more journeys we all have together. As the Delta variant does its damage, I also wonder whether this summer has only been a brief reprieve and if the worst is yet to come.

To Maine By Canada (1996)

Emily Grotz & Kiernan Danaan
"Aquitania"
Camden Shakespeare Festival (2021)

Last week, we did something we have never done before, in a lifetime of vacations in Coastal Maine.

Went to see a play.

The Camden Shakespeare Company in cooperation with Ziggurat Theatre Ensemble is producing Aquitania, written and directed by Stephen Legawiec, and one of the featured singers is going to be a new actor-teacher with Great Lakes this fall. It was an opportunity I did not want to miss, having long considered checking out the company’s work, which is presented on a beautiful lawn behind the charming Camden Public Library and a short walk to the harbor.

We generally prefer to stick close to the cove. That is, after all, why we go there. To hide from everything for a little while, and theater is my job. But I was delighted by the performance, my son was too. A witty, punny, fanciful production with some lovely music and good laughs.

There’s a couple ways to get to Maine from Ohio. You could take the Massachusetts Turnpike, as we did this year, though it does have its problems because it is in Massachusetts. One option that was not open to us this year was to travel through Canada.

My parents took us that way in 1976, though I barely remember it as Dad liked to drive through without stopping very much. We took the scenic route by Niagara Falls, without getting out of the car.

Six years ago, we took the kids and made a time of it, overnighting at Niagara and spending several days in Montreal. That was a magical week.

Twenty-five years ago this week, my wife and I returned from our second road trip together, through Niagara, Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City, on our way to Friendship. There was an Olympics going on that summer, too. Our first day on the road in late July, the papers were reporting on the pipe bombing in Centennial Park, and the TWA 800 crash. 

This trip was my first real break from work in a year. And it had been quite a year, concluding my first season with Dobama's Night Kitchen. A third iteration of The Realistic World was have an extended summer run as we traveled, and while I looked forward to sightseeing and relaxation, just as I had during our drive through the midwest in 1995, I was also keeping my eyes open for new ideas.

“Clouds” in Toronto

You may find this hard to believe, but this member of Generation X did not own a pair of Doc Martens until he was twenty-eight. True story.

In Toronto we bought several pairs of shoes, and also took in a show. The Ancient Comic Opera Company was presenting an original adaptation of Aristophanes' Clouds at the 106-seat Poor Alex Theatre. From my travel journal:

Tuesday, July 30, 1996 - Toronto
“I want a theatre that size. I also want to dedicate more of my time to writing plays … I think I’d rather leave directing to others.”

Huh. Wish I'd kept that thought.

Enjoying a fifteen month run, the text for Clouds was freely translated by Greg Robic, ACOC Artistic Director and it was drop-dead hilarious. Faithful to the plot of the ancient Greek original, it had elements of Forbidden Broadway and also Tom Lehrer, incorporating familiar music by Gilbert and Sullivan, Wagner, Rachmaninov, Mozart, and several others.

This take on the corrupt influences of that scoundrel Socrates (they mistrusted teachers even 2,400 years ago) included songs with titles like “Strepsiades In the Night” and “No Cockfights Today” and a rousing direct address to the audience to support independent theater, eschewing those Broadway shows that had been running in the city for years. They closed the first act waving a flag with a picture of a French orphan on it.

After the performance I met the playwright — Robic, not Aristophanes. He said he also had a one act version of Lysistrata that used to run as a midnight show which he was planning to expand into a full-length. Instead, he pursued an education in Japanese theater and is currently a Rakugo storytelling in New York City, working under the name Katsura Sunshine.

A week or so later I would pick up a copy of Lysistrata in a used book store in Camden, Maine. This experience and that book would lead to my directing Lysistrata at Bad Epitaph (featuring original songs by Dennis Yurich) in the year 2000.

Tu voulais le meilleur, tu as le meilleur.

Montreal: KISS and make-up

Montreal was a revelation, like a dream where you discover there is an entire carnival lurking in a room in your house you didn’t even know you had — it’s right there, waiting for Americans to discover. We loved our brief moment here so much we got an AirBnB with the kids in 2015 and stayed several days.

Strolling past an HMV (that’s what we used to call a record store) we noticed some kind of concert going on, and ducked in. KISS was going to perform in the city in a couple days, and the place was hosting a lip-sync contest. One band was particularly excellent and when I asked if I could take a photo they insisted it include “my woman.”

Listening to these guys in KISS make-up switching between perfect English with us and French among themselves was a bit of a mindfuck. So, too, was something we spotted across the street from a cafe where we were dining al fresco.

Thursday, August 1, 1996 - Montreal
“Toni noticed a crowd gathered around a life-size statue of a clown holding a book. It was a bronze statue and Toni wondered what little purveyor of Montreal children’s mirth it was dedicated to. When we got closer, we saw it move!”

As you can tell, we had never seen a “living statue” busker before. Having seen dozens since, I sincerely believe this guy was the best. Not only did his make-up and costume and prop have the patina of aged and weather-worn bronze, he had these little bells which emphasized his movement — when you put something in his hat he would do a brief routine — which lent to the illusion that he was a truly mechanical automaton.

We watched him for an hour as we ate and relaxed. Crowds would build and with all the coins being tossed into his hat he might be moving non-stop for a short while. As fewer people were contributing he would come to a stand-still and folks would drift away and he would be still for several minutes with folks coming and going. Pedestrians would walk past, not even noticing him, until a curious soul would put a coin in the hat full of money and the cycle would start all over again. One old man even exclaimed, “Oh, my GOD!”

Yes, I know. It’s just a living statue, or as they referred to it in Hot Fuzz, the “extremely irritating living statue.” Having noticed this one, I saw several more before we left the country. But you never forget your first, you know?

Don't blink.

Friendship: Hamlets

Arriving in Flood’s Cove, I shared with the woman whom I would later marry this important corner of my family history. We joined my brother and his girlfriend, my parents and my grandfather for some long, leisure hours on the coast.

The day before my father’s birthday I had something of a belated birthday party with cake and gifts. Dad presented me with Mary Maher’s book, Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies, in which she describes several important 20th century productions concentrating on how each performer tackled one of the pivotal speeches. The book includes interviews with such Hamlets as Derek Jacobi, David Warner, Kevin Kline, and Ben Kingsley.

I had enjoyed Hamlet in the past, we had even seen Ralph Fiennes play him on Broadway the year before. But it was this book that set me down a path I would travel for some time.

Sunday, August 4, 1996 - Friendship
“Reading this, reading how the great acting men of this century tackled what some feel is theater’s greatest role (if not play) makes me long for directing Shakespeare. R&J was difficult. Hamlet would be more so, but I would like to try.”

By the next day I was already making notes.

• Re-read this book.
• Re-read Gielgud’s book.
• The David Warner chapter.
• The bit in the Kinsley chapter, about the director throwing the characters a party, a real party, with drinks and cake and paper hats.
• Been toying with the idea of “to be or not to be” sitting next to an audience member, asking them to speak right to them, or getting them to say it, getting everyone to say it.
• Modern dress can be so much fun.
• Check all extant records for the other (“bad”) lines. They exist because someone, somewhere, remembered them that way.

Within three years, I would direct Hamlet. Seven years after that, I directed it again. Thanks for the book, Dad.

Source:
Canadian rakugo storyteller keeps dream alive in NYC by Matthew Carland, Kyodo News (10/5/2019) 

Music Television: Forty Years On

"Are we living in a land
Where sex and horror are the new gods?"
- Frankie Goes to Hollywood, “Two Tribes”

Forty years ago today, at 12:01 AM on August 1, 1981, MTV went on the air. We didn’t get our MTV until early 1983, but its influence was already being felt as HBO (Video Jukebox), NBC (Friday Night Videos) and other networks sought to capitalize on all the new material that was suddenly being generated to feed this new medium.

A short list of songs that were featured during the first twenty-four hours of MTV might seem confusing as it’s not very “80s” but then, what would you expect. They could only play what was available, and the 1980s hadn’t really started, anyway.

 

Why so many Rod Stewart videos? It’s weird.

The major impact of MTV, as I saw it, was the mainstreaming of non-traditional culture. Even as America was course-correcting from decades of increasing liberalism into a decades-long slide back into Puritanical conservative authoritarianism, young citizens dwelling away from the coasts were suddenly exposed to a non-stop Weimar Republic cabaret of sex, androgyny and synth.

Even those elements of pop culture that eventually made their way to the Midwest, used to take months or years to reach us. Commercial television was never very good at pushing trends, only reflecting them, and the internet was a long way off. Suddenly, we were receiving the avant-garde in real-time.

"Girls On Film" (1981)
Duran Duran

There are those who argue that music videos promoted vapid music in favor of attractive imagery. But how any artists who flourished in those first years were inarguable music geniuses whose identity were as visual as musical? David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Talking Heads, Prince – you can listen to their music on its own, it’s brilliant. But it would be a different world without their videos.

Even MTV had to cleave to arbitrary social mores. They censored several videos due to nipples. Blurring the double bass drums in the Tubes clip for She’s a Beauty or zooming to focus on faces, creating fuzzy moments in the Golden Earring video Twilight Zone. No tits, please, we’re American.

Three music videos stand out to me as iconic, specifically because they were edited for broadcast or just not scheduled for broadcast. I hesitate to use the word “censored” because only a government can do that. But the short film which accompanied each songs – songs I would have been listening to regardless – were inspirational to me, for better or worse.

The first, the clip for Girls On Film by Duran Duran and directed by Godley and Creme, a racy piece of work in which the band is depicted playing in the background as staged performances of scantily clad women sumo wrestling men, massaging men, and playing wading pool drowning for a lifeguard.

While this is all presented to satisfy the male gaze, in each case she entirely dominates he, in the last instance leaving the lifeguard unconscious one-inch underwater.

This piece was edited, shadowing, obscuring, or editing skin. The original version had been shown in clubs and on the BBC, but as I learned reading Annie Zaleski’s book on Duran Duran, when it came to releasing it for home video, they actually added additional, provocative material. I thought I was purchasing something I hadn’t been allowed to see on MTV, while what I was really getting was something that had never been broadcast anywhere.

"Relax" (1984)
Frankie Goes to Hollywood 

The video for Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood wasn’t just edited, MTV insisted upon a completely different video or they wouldn’t play it. We got what must have been an intentionally boring video of singer Holly Johnson toying about with the “laser beams” from the lyrics in order to shield the American public from the original clip, directed by Bernard Rose, which featured an orgiastic brawl in a gay bar.

The thing about FGTH was this … for a few years we had all been playing the androgyny thing. Many gay anthems of the early 1980s are couched in vagueness. We could pretend George Michael was into those girls, and that Boy George was just an act. Because they didn’t come right out and say it, in their lyrics or during interviews.

But Frankie was up front about it, and that meant we had to choose. Not whether we were straight or gay, you can’t choose that, but were we going to open ourselves to the difference?

You could rent the Duran Duran video from the local store and I did, several times. I had to order and purchase the Frankie Goes to Hollywood VHS. Almost ten years later you couldn’t even buy the Nine Inch Nails video “album” Broken, it was a widely-distributed bootleg recording of a simulated snuff film that Trent Reznor commissioned but never released.

Included on the many-times dubbed-over copy I picked up at Record Rev was the video for Happiness in Slavery, directed by Jon Reiss. The supposed “single” from the new EP (no commercial station in Cleveland would play that song nor any other from the record) the clip presupposed censorship and Reznor didn’t provide any alternative for the song until the Woodstock ’94 live performance version.

"Happiness In Slavery" (1992)
Nine Inch Nails

Performance artist Bob Flanagan stars in this darkly hilarious scene, filmed in black and white. A mockery of faith and trust, Flanagan enters a room, lights a candle, strips naked and voluntarily sets himself into a machine that tortures, rapes and disembowels him before grinding up and shitting out his corpse.

Why is that funny? No idea. I can’t remember, it sounds horrible. But there was something deeply troubled in my soul in my mid-20s and I had to see it. By the 1990s music videos were beside the point and MTV was already in the process of transitioning from those to original, episodic reality-based programming.

Which means of course, the only people who bemoan the fact that MTV no longer plays videos must be well over forty themselves. They don’t actually wish MTV was still playing music videos 24 hours day – they wouldn’t like what they’d be seeing.

To put it another way: No one misses music videos on MTV, they miss the person they were way back when they watched music videos on MTV. 

 

The Electric Hotel (book)

Pengo’s 2021 Summer Book Club

Last Christmas, my wife presented me with a copy of Dominic Smith’s historical fiction about the origins of the motion picture, The Electric Hotel. The New York Times calls this novel a “highly entertaining work about the act of creation” though by the time the word reached me, she, my wife, claimed it had been called the greatest book on the act of creation, which is to say ever, and that I found hard to believe.

As I have opined previously this summer, I do like works about the art of creation, but only when they are about other media; I like movies about painting, painting about dancing, dance about television, TV about theater, plays about writing, books about movies. But plays about theater are usually self-congratulatory and rife with inside jokes. Movies about movie-making can be awfully sentimental and hagiographic. Television programs about TV, don’t get me started.

There are exceptions, of course, and we all know what those are. But for every Sports Night there is a Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. For every The Player there is Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (don’t get me started on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.)

The greatest film about the art of creation is, of course, Big Night. This small, period film by Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott film is a beautiful tribute to the immigrant American experience and all the dreams and disappointments that it engenders. But it is first and foremost an epic tale about the creation of food, what it signifies, why what we cook and how we cook it is important, never more poignantly exhibited than the single, five-minute closing shot, virtually wordless, which involves the preparation of a simple breakfast of eggs.

Stanley Tucci, Tony Shaloub
"Big Night" (1996)

The Electric Hotel is like two books. One chronicles the very, very early days of cinema, when folks were happy to just watch short clips of cats doing tricks (yes, yes) and how in very short order unconscionable amounts of money were being spent to cobble together fantastic sights to tell stories of beautiful, horrible people. The other book is about the origins of the uses of film as documentary fact and also political propaganda.

The fact that we have not found any new uses for motion pictures in the hundred years since is actually quite demoralizing.

Each tale is presented as prelude to the narrative thread, the rediscovery of these ancient works by a young film historian in the early 1960s. This man is a cipher, it’s not his story and just as well little time is given to him. His presence is a constant reassurance that the films so elegantly described in Smith’s text will not actually be lost to fire, flood, or the natural decomposition of plastic nitrate.

But is it the greatest rumination on the act of creation ever set to paper? Actually, it may be. At least, it excellently represents the chaos of creation. So many biopics or “great man” histories create a familiar origin tale of those who were destined by the universe to become what they eventually, inevitably became. Against all odds! They rise and fall and rise again!

These fictional film makers, impresarios, side show and classical stage performers; they added their piece to the puzzle of how motion pictures work and what they could do with them. But there was no plan, no grand vision for what it would be. Lives are messy, and art is messy, it is only in hindsight that someone else decides whether any of it was worth doing.

On Virtual Performance

Last Spring, KrisP. Production, a professional company and actors studio based in Hong Kong, put out a call for original plays written specifically for digital performance, never intended to be produced on a stage, for a short series they call LIMITATIONS.

As it happened, I had just completed a short work as a class assignment that had the same stipulation, and so I submitted that. And it has been selected for production!

The Runner was written to be performed as a continuous live stream; cinéma vérité executed on a platform like Facebook Live. Inspired by the John Cheever short story The Swimmer it is about ageing, regret, masculine toxicity and includes certain supernatural elements.

I am very excited and intrigued to discover how they realize the material. I had played with the idea of producing the script myself this summer, but we have all, fortunately, been very busy. Will they produce it live? The call for submissions encouraged some kind of audience participation, which it has. And a “sensory” experience, which it does.

Hong Kong is a twelve hours difference from Cleveland. I’d love to watch some live, experimental short play performed over breakfast!

Timing "The Runner"

In spite of the Delta variant making its way across the U.S., many here (including, it must be said, me and my family, who are all vaccinated) have been behaving as though the pandemic is over. This is never so apparent as in the theater community, as Broadway has plans to open shows in a little over a month, and all our local theaters are now announcing their 2021-22 seasons.

With the great reopening of American theater has also come the great dismissal of so-called “virtual” theater. Some speak as though they would be happy never to see a play on a screen again. Or more to the point, that unless it is performed live in front of you, it is not even theater.

I find this distressing. Not only because I wrote and produced live performances during the recent shutdown. Not only because this thing really isn’t over yet, and anyone who thinks they may never again have to spend a year (or more) indoors again may be in for a world of disappointment. But also because as an audience member, the performances I saw, live and recorded, as well as though I participated in, gave me life and brought me hope. 

And as much as I have enjoyed the live, in-person performances I have already taken in during the past month, I am not so ready to dismiss the virtual performances that carried me through.

On Clichés

Writers use words to challenge or shape ideas and thoughts. If you can distill a big idea into a short story, or an original turn of phrase, you can move untold numbers of people. You can also make bumper stickers.

Jesus told stories to get his point across. Ancient tales provide useful or hackneyed metaphors, to poignantly comment upon or dumb-down contemporary issues.

I remember the first time I heard the fable of the scorpion and the frog, it was nearly thirty years ago, in the movie The Crying Game (1992). I can also remember the last time I heard it, which was during the second season of The Umbrella Academy (2020). I have heard it too many times in between.

The first time someone told me that the clinical definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result (not the actual definition of insanity, clinical or otherwise) was almost twenty years ago, in 2002. I remember who said it, too, because I was impressed by the expression. Almost immediately, though, everyone was saying it and it has become cliché. 

cliché n. 1. a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought.

The most quoted line from I Hate This (a play without the baby) is one that I did not write. During our experiences recovering from the loss of our first child someone told me, “A person who loses their parents in an orphan, someone who loses their spouse in a widow or a widower. There is no word for the parent of a dead child.” They went on to say that this is because in our society, the thought of losing a child is too horrible to bear. So we dare not name it.

That is certainly one way to look at it. In my script I do not pretend to have made that line up, and add my own personal conclusion:

I read somewhere that we use language to understand our world. Someone who loses a spouse is a widow or widower. Someone who loses their parents is an orphan. There is no word for parents of a dead child, so we do not understand who we are.

That’s the line everyone quotes from the play, “There is no word for a dead child.” It seems to neatly sum something up for people.

As a writer this fact is, of course, irksome. If the line that truly stands out is one that is not mine, did I say anything else that was memorable? Does the entire play revolve around that one line?

When I was trying to come up with an alternate title for the play for the performance in Chennai, people suggested variants on this one phrase. It gets quoted in the reviews. I don’t remember where I first heard this phrase. I have heard it used in many contexts since, most recently on an episode of Falcon & The Winter Soldier which was released on March 19, 2021, the twentieth anniversary of learning our first child was dead. We actually laughed, it was so absurd.

For those in the know, there is an entire series of “canonical” Doctor Who stories produced by the BBC for audio. Paul McGann, the so-called “Eighth Doctor” was only featured in one made-for-TV movie in the mid-90s but his regeneration (and his voice) has been part of many stories recorded for CD and digital download.

In an episode titled Jonah (July 2018) the Doctor is visiting an ocean planet, one which has been ravaged by the “Time War” and Bliss, one of his companions, has the following exchange with a native person named Murti:

Bliss: Is it steam powered or what?
Murti: Sorry?
Bliss: Ah, nope, nope, it's fine. I'll be fine. This is fine.
Murti: Sorry, was that a joke?
Bliss: I don't know. Do you have jokes on this planet?
Murti: Not really. Not anymore.
Bliss: Ah, of course. Um, have you, uh ... it must be... Have you lost any --
Murti: Everyone on this ship is an orphan or a widow or a widower or a sakshi.
Bliss: A ... what?
Murti: A parent who's lost a child.
Bliss: Ah, and what are you?
Murti: A little bit of everything right now.

Get it? This is a private joke for or on everyone who has ever heard or used this phrase before. Only it goes one better, because it is told from the point of view of someone whose language does have a word for a dead child, substituting the sentiment of the original cliché with its own poignancy. Count yourself fortunate you do not live in a society that has a need for such a word. 

The next script I write will include the following exchange:

One: I mean, it's like ... have you ever heard the story of the scorpion and the frog?

Two: Of course, everyone has.

One: Oh? Well. It's like that.

Playhouse Square will premiere "I Hate This (a play without the baby)" in Summer 2021. Details to come. 

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.