It’s not unusual for me to find myself entwined in discussions about “bad theatre” with fellow practitioners. Sometimes these discussions are in person, sometimes they’re virtual. Here’s a sample email, received this morning:

“Saw [the new show directed by a mutual friend/colleague] and cannot recommend it. It isn’t bad, and there are some laughs, but I also think there are some inconsistencies in the performances, and the script is obscure. … I keep saying this and then letting it go, but I really don’t know why I go to theater in L.A. anymore. In the past 12 months I’ve probably seen 25 to 30 shows, and I think I really liked two. Water and Power at the Taper or Dorothy Chandler or one of those, and Huck and Holden at Black Dahlia. I can’t think of anything else I’ve really been happy I saw, instead of saving my money and staying at home. Not that they’ve been bad, most of them, just that they didn’t give me any more than I’d have gotten staying at home surfing the net, or watching tv or reading. I know I’ve not mentioned the car plays, of which one was yours. I enjoyed that, and thought the concept was terrific, but it didn’t knock my socks off, sorry.”

All tastes are individual. I would disagree with him about The Car Plays (which Moving Arts is bringing back to the Steve Allen Theatre this summer) which was terrific precisely because of the concept and its execution, but because I was involved in that perhaps I’m biased. I can’t disagree with him about the show he describes because I haven’t seen it. I have to agree with him that in most cases my socks stay firmly on — just as they do through most movies and television. It’s hard to get these socks knocked off any more. Whether the play winds up being good or bad, I still get a visceral thrill from going to the theatre; its very nature (of having to drive there, and arrange for tickets in advance and so forth) makes it far more of an event than lying on the couch scanning channels, and given the backwoods environment I grew up in I still count myself lucky to have such opportunities.

With regard to my friend’s batting average, I would say that it sounds about right. I think he’s equating “knock your socks off” with excellence — and isn’t excellence at the furthest end of the continuum? Excellence is by its nature exceptional. If there were more of it, it wouldn’t be excellent.  I wrote about the batting average here, and here’s the relevant clipping:

Every once in a while you see a show that rewards your devotion to the theatre. Some months ago I asked a group of fellow playwrights how often they were glad they’d seen a show. How often had it been worth the effort involved? Responses ranged from 25% (the always upbeat and bright-eyed comedy writer Stephanie) to 10% (me) down to 5% (the would-be curmudgeon in the group who is a closet romantic — and isn’t that what every cynic is: a romantic who got burned?). The theatre is notoriously difficult to pull off. The writing has to be good, as well as the performing, it has to be pulled together and presented well by a director and designers, the theatre had better not be too hot or too cold, the right audience has to have found it because they are very definitely part of the experience, there had better not have been a bad parking or driving or box-office experience, and on and on and on.

So why do so many of us go so often? Just to get angry at ourselves for our blockheaded refusal to give up? No — because when it is superb, nothing surpasses the visceral thrill of performers and material connecting with an audience in a defined space. I love great performers of all stripes and honestly feel blessed to have worked with so many wonderful actors, and I love great provocative writing. Put the two together and you’ve got the theatre — when it works.

I stand by that. I have had some amazing experiences in the theatre. Are they frequent? No. Then they wouldn’t be amazing.

Three questions:

1. No matter whether they like it or not, why are people shocked about what the shock jock said?
2. With regard to the following interview, has Senator Obama (and others) ever tuned in to Fox News? Ann Coulter isn’t one iota more pleasant than Mr. Imus, but I don’t hear about any boycott over there.
3. Again with regard to the following interview — and not to pick on Senator Obama, whom I generally like and respect — given that he and his wife are very well-off, shouldn’t these scholarships he’s scoping out for his daughters be reserved for other kids who actually need them?

From MSNBC.com:

Before the announcement was made, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) had appeared on the MSNBC program “Hardball,” where host David Gregory asked the senator and presidential candidate if he thought Imus should be fired.

“I don’t think MSNBC should be carrying the kinds of hateful remarks that Imus uttered the other day,” Obama said.

He went on to note that he and his wife have “two daughters who are African-American, gorgeous, tall, and I hope, at some point, are interested enough in sports that they get athletic scholarships. … I don’t want them to be getting a bunch of information that, somehow, they’re less than anybody else. And I don’t think MSNBC should want to promote that kind of language.”

Obama went on to say that he would not be a guest on Imus’ show in the future.

I wrote my first play almost 30 years ago when I was 14. I was attending a high school I strongly disliked that provided early lessons in how to rebel; that’s how the play came to be called “Too Long.” The “teacher” — I use the word loosely; he was assigned to in some way oversee my play production at a student event while I did my best to subvert his authority without losing the production — said that the script was “too long.” So that’s what I named it.

How did I come to write this play? I was asked by some of the other kids if I would appear in their play — a jury-trial play of some sort — and I agreed; I was thrilled to be asked. But then I noticed that most of my close friends — the odd, the inept, the ungainly and ill-kempt, the losers and stragglers, the self-conscious and left-out, in other words, people like me — weren’t invited. I kept making pitches for them to be involved in the jury-trial play, but the kids putting that on just couldn’t find any way for them to be involved, even though, unsurprisingly, there was a role for everyone on the soccer team. I understood. Kids aren’t dumb about societies of people. So I decided I’d write my own play, a comedy, with only one parameter: If you wanted to be in my play, I would write you a role. It was an equal-opportunity production. I had a lot of fun with playing off the perceived notion of my friends’ identities — I made my best friend, a seemingly weak and withdrawn boy with glasses, into a serial killer who had strangled 29 people with one hand; I turned into a femme fatale the odd girl who never turned her head lest her perfectly straight hair wrinkle; I gave great gobs of dialogue to my stammering friend with full confidence that not only could he deliver those lines, he would. And of course, in keeping with the nature of such theatrical origin stories, it all came off as a huge success. The play got big laughs and for one night everyone involved was a star. And without knowing how to do anything, with no formal training except trial and error, I became a playwright and director without realizing it.

Not much has changed. Hundreds of productions and readings and workshops later, I still have no formal training in the theatre. Instead, like an apprentice or a magpie, I’ve just adopted what works for others when I find it also works for me. Moreover, I’m still working within mini societies much like the one in school: the society of actors and directors and playwrights at my theatre company Moving Arts, the extended society of such folk locally and across the nation, the society of students and colleagues at USC. I do have some formal training in playwriting, courtesy of David Scott Milton (who shaped my career and still teaches in the MPW program at USC) and the late and much-missed Jerome Lawrence. Dave and Jerry were part of theatrical communities as well and talked about them at length and did what they could to introduce their students to those societies; that’s an inspiration and an example that I work to pass on.

On Friday night I saw the world premiere of EM Lewis’ “Infinite Black Suitcase.” (Here’s a link to the theatre company, The SpyAnts, who are producing it.) Ellen Lewis was my student at USC, then my assistant director at Moving Arts, and a member of my playwriting workshop, and now she’s out and about and inspiring other people. Ellen is both strong and compassionate, qualities that don’t always intermingle and that one doesn’t always find in writers. On Saturday morning, after her opening night and its ongoing opening-night party and toasts from many well-wishers both blood-related and not, Ellen came to workshop (of course; she’s nothing if not dedicated). In talking about the pages of her new play, “Song of Extinction,” I said that the common thread in Ellen’s plays is “being strong, and going on.” She corrected me: while they may be about being strong and going on, she felt that “going on” is possible because other people help, both in the plays and in her life. And then she turned to the workshop and generously — probably too generously — thanked all of us for what is truly her success.

Every once in a while, I’m reminded of why I’m a playwright and not a novelist. This was another instance. I never wanted to be alone in a room writing for weeks and months at a time. I wanted to be working with a group, and that was one of my earliest writing experiences. No matter how much we might complain about it at times — about the directors who misinterpret the play, the actors who bungle the lines, the producer who didn’t market the play, and on and on — every working playwright I know is here because we need these other people and secretly hope they will be as committed and as talented, as inspirational, as other committed, talented, inspirational theatre people we’ve worked for. We love the actors and the audience members and the directors and producers and everyone else, sometimes in theory, but sometimes in practice.

Almost 10 years ago now I was fortunate to be in the audience one night for one of my comedies when a woman literally fell out of her seat laughing. The moment has passed, but it’s burned into my brain and I still love her wherever she is now. I’m still writing for that woman and other people like her, and still counting on theatre people to help me do it.

(Or if you’re even nearby.)

Remember Debra Ehrhardt’s play “Jamaica, Farewell” that I raved about? Now it’s opening in Atlanta. I think we’re going to be hearing a lot more about this.

Before you watch this brief video, in which a “theologian” uses peanut butter to “disprove” evolution, reflect a moment on which group more than any other comprises what remains of the support structure behind the current administration in Washington DC. Then shudder.

Remember Michael Dukakis in a tank? It was the quintessentially foolish moment of a very foolish campaign.

I think we’ve just seen John McCain’s tank moment.

As ThinkProgress has it, McCain

“recently claimed that there “are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today.” In a press conference after his Baghdad tour, McCain told a reporter that his visit to the market today was proof that you could indeed “walk freely” in some areas of Baghdad.

This picture clearly makes his case. The people alongside him (assistants, I guess) seem, um, heavily armed. And that’s a nice flak jacket he’s sporting himself. And I suppose it’s just lucky that Blackhawk helicopters and Apache gunships were patrolling overhead.

Yep, just a stroll in the neighborhood.

Karl Rove gets into the act.

While I appreciate the sentiment of the latest Jib-Jab video, below, railing against the news doesn’t seem particularly new. (This reminds me of Peter Gabriel attacking Jerry Springer on his last album, about six years too late for the zeitgeist.)

Captain America is dead, but his legacy lives on.

Yesterday, the Washington Post trained its laser vision on the zeitgeist of “dumbed-down” game shows — which had me wondering if the writer had ever seen any game shows previously. (I know that my generation took its cultural cues from “Match Game.” Oh, the good ol’ days.)

Today, I discover that the paper’s online version seems to be doing video interviews with, um, nobodies, talking about nothing in particular. Click here for a case in point. To my trained ear, Mr. New (great name) is a case study in “unreliable narration,” in which while he believes himself a knight errant, we can see what a neurotic loser he is.

If only there were some news to cover, or some interesting modern philosophers to interview, and if only we had a newspaper or a website that could disseminate this information.