In this post, I was poking fun at bad publicity shots for bad theatre. I ended that post by writing,  “I’m also struck by the hunchback on the left.” Note the relevant photo, which I’ve helpfully replicated above.

Yesterday morning I got a sincere email from a faithful reader of this blog. In a very kind way, he took me to task for calling the person on the left a “hunchback,” because he believes she has untreated scoliosis. And, I gather, whether or not she does, it’s wrong to call a person with a hump a “hunchback.”

I have to say, I’m not big on calling people out by being types. So if I’m guilty of that, I apologize. It wasn’t my intent.

The point I was trying to make was this:  Given the awful acting and over-the-top costuming and cartoonish nature of the photo, right up to that woman’s image, I had assumed she was acting impaired. Hence the offhand nature of my comment — I was criticizing the production and the photo, not her physical nature, and using a derogatory term to indict the intent. Looking at the photo again, I have to admit, I can’t say definitively what’s going on. (Though my suspicion remains that we’re look at bad character acting.)

In any event, I apologize for any unintended slight. And for the bad pun in the title. (Just couldn’t help myself.)

Surely, after 30 years of being involved in PR shoots for plays, I must have been involved in at least one of the terrible PR pictures from the theatre of the United States.

The guy in the photo above, by the way, strongly reminds me of my first boss, when I was 14 and he was theoretically running the nighttime classified ad department. He later got fired for sleeping on the job. Next time I ran into him? Nine years later, in college — turns out he was, you guessed it, one our flamboyant community theatre actors. I’m sure that in someone’s files there are photos of him in “acting mode” all too similar to what is seen above.

I’m also struck by the hunchback on the left.

At some point or other, almost every playwright finds himself in a development process. His (or her) play is being workshopped for a short run, possibly for consideration of future production; or he’s at a retreat working with actors and directors that will result in a reading of sorts; or he’s at a new play development conference for a public reading with feedback; or he’s working out some areas by having some actor friends get together and read scenes now and then.

I’ve been involved in many of these experiences myself, as a playwright or director or producer or respondent.

So, occasionally, I’m asked by a playwright for my advice on whether or not to bring an unfinished play into such a situation. Not a play that has a first draft and needs a rewrite, and not a play that is stuck and that the playwright needs to hear — a play that is being written but which is currently unfinished.

Here’s what I say:

I can’t say what you should do, but  I can tell you what I would not do:  I would not take an uncompleted play into a development situation, especially not a play-in-process that is working well.

My friend the actress Cathy Carlton (here called “Cathy Hews” — so I guess I’ve just discovered that Cathy Carlton is her stage name) has moved back to her hometown of Belchertown, MA to care for her aging father. Prior to that, she was an actress here in Los Angeles, and later in New York City (where, it turns out, she did some shows with my friends Barry and Catherine at Peculiar Works Project).

Here’s her local paper’s story about the return home of a “big city actress.”

1. Well, nobody said writing a play should be easy. But I’m still working on it.

(Leaving out, for obvious reasons, anything I worked on or that are still in development, including several honestly terrific plays I saw at The Great Plains Theatre Conference.)

Some years, I’ll see three or four plays a month — or more. In 2013, I saw only 15 (not counting the plays that Moving Arts was involved with, or, again, that I saw at GPTC, or that were workshops or staged readings.) What do I look for in a play? I don’t care about subject matter (although I’m adverse to plays that confuse neurotic couples arguing on their couch with drama, and one-person shows about how darn difficult it was growing up with parents who just didn’t understand), or form, or tone. I want to see things on stage that stick will stick with me because they’ve brought a new level of insight or inquiry; in other words, I want to be surprised and provoked. And entertained.

Putting it that way, two plays stood out above all others:

1. The Nether by Jennifer Haley, a Center Theatre Group production at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. In this dystopian not-so-distant future, people who can afford it escape their bleak day-to-day by living their meaningful lives in an area of the Internet called The Nether. In the Nether, people with horrifying thoughts and impulses are free to live out their fantasies — until the authorities deem even those fantasies illegal. The ramifications are far-reaching of investigating and prosecuting would-be pedophiles for their inclinations even while they are only virtually living out their fantasies. As all truly great drama does, The Nether pits strong arguments against each other — there are no straw men here — in a way that leaves one arguing about what is true and good and right. Starting from a powerhouse script, the production was flawlessly mounted and staged. I’m very glad that I read none of the reviews in advance (even the set held surprises) and instead just heeded trusted friends who implored me to see it. It’s a play that I won’t ever forget.
2. And now, a runner-up:  The Whale by Samuel D. Hunter. Although Hunter’s script piles up metaphors that aren’t fully explored or dramatically grounded, when the action centers around the enormously overweight central character, the play sings. Matthew Arkin’s devastating performance of a 600-pound man whose lungs and joints and legs and entire body are failing him will always weigh on me. Watching this obsessively unhappy man dig ferociously into a bucket of fried chicken was a sad spectacle — half the audience groaned audibly — but his determination to do right by his estranged daughter before he died elevated the character to a rare humanity.

I have a short play that’s being performed during Moving Arts’ holiday party this Saturday evening. It’s one of six plays that will be staged at various locations around a large house in the Hollywood Hills.

I invited a relative to join us for this on Saturday night. Every industry has its jargon; when you’re a practitioner in that industry, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s jargon and therefore what people won’t automatically understand. So when I invited her to join me for a holiday cocktail party “in a large house, with six brief environmentally staged plays,” she asked me, “What is an environmentally staged play?”

I explained that an “environmentally staged play” means it happens in different locations and is specific to those locations. (Mine is set in a bedroom, and is performed in a bedroom.)

She responded, “The plays sound interesting. We were thinking it meant the props were all from recycled materials.”

Which, of course, makes sense on the face of it. Especially given that I once produced a play called “Cockroach Nation” with set dressing largely drawn from trash….

I was sorry to learn just now of the death of Syd Field, a colleague of mine when I was teaching in the graduate writing program at the University of Southern California. Syd was a nice guy and a good teacher. And a bit influence:  just about everyone in Hollywood has read his book. Here’s the obit.

Also, I seem to have missed the passing of Marcia Wallace. Just over five years ago, Marcia was in a special performance of one of my plays — a one-night-only fundraising thing — and I have to say, she killed it. I knew the thing was funny (it had been done before), but she found all sorts of new things that made me seem like a comedy genius. She was very sweet to work with. I grew up watching her on The Bob Newhart Show, so getting to work with her, however briefly, felt like one of those situations where you ask yourself how you wound up this lucky in life. I’m sorry we’ll never get another chance. I hope that, somewhere in my “records” such as they are, I can find that photo we took together.

In the past 10 days I’ve seen three performances that were simultaneously spectacular and enervating — Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach at LA Opera; Robert Wilson delivering John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing at UCLA; and Brian Wilson in concert last night with some of the Beach Boys and with Jeff Beck.

All three of these are going to inform my thinking for a while, in a number of ways. Because all three of them balanced performance elements of the highest level with stretches of tedium that leave me asking, “Is that intentional?”

I haven’t fully synthesized my thoughts about this yet, but here’s the condensed version:

Einstein on the Beach is a masterpiece. The stage images, often featuring performers moving ever so slightly, when matched with the repetitive, minimalist music of Philip Glass, frequently left me in a trance. I was enveloped with this music and with the visuals. When I wasn’t in a euphoric or trance state, i.e., when I was able to reassert my intellect, I started thinking about things, such as:  “What does this mean? When will something happen? And is this why Rich Roesberg once told me the only music he can’t listen to is Philip Glass?” I was so expectant of something happening — and lots did, in sometimes astonishingly small ways — that the intermissionless 4.5-hour opera went by without my ever thinking I needed to run to the bathroom.

Lecture on Nothing includes the infamous section where a piece of spoken word is repeated 13 times. The piece is a “lecture” composed on a complex time signature — words “performed” as music — but I have to admit feeling like the woman at the first reading of it who said she couldn’t stand it any more and ran out. At the same time, the silences and pauses were somehow breathtaking — because our lives are so often filled with clutter (of noise, of sound, of music, of language, of advertising) that its absence is startling. Wilson also brought a level of staging to it, in his trademark minutely observed motions, that increased my hyperawareness.

The show last night at the Greek Theatre left me wondering again if Brian Wilson isn’t a counterprogramming genius. The last time I saw him (sans the Beach Boys name) was at the Hollywood Bowl in 2007. For that show, he had a laughably bad  would-be symphonic-choir band open for him; honest to God, our entire section was beside ourselves with laughter and mocking. After that, Wilson seemed like a genius, even though he had all the affect of that guy we’ve all seen at one point or another, on a subway or a bus or a street corner, whose mouth moves wrong and whose body isn’t in sync with whatever his mind thinks is going on. Last night, he put in an exceptional first set, performing much of Pet Sounds, and with Al Jardine in tow, to the incredible delight of everyone in the venue. Astounding doesn’t begin to convey the feeling of hearing that music performed so well by two of the guys who produced it almost 50 years ago. After a few more Beach Boys songs, including a wonderful rendition of Sail On Sailor, Jeff Beck and his band were given the stage for a 45-minute set. In my analysis of these three events, the set by Beck and company would be the purposely tedious section that renders a specific counter-response (in this case, further enhancing Brian Wilson’s reputation and the impact of his performance). Forty-five minutes of noodling around on a guitar, no matter how self-indulgently, doesn’t constitute a concert or, at least, not one I want to see. I now understand how my wife felt the last time she gamely accompanied me to a concert by King Crimson — except they actually have songs. As I said to my companion last night, the only thing Jeff Beck needs is a singer, and some songs.

I’ve got two more concerts this year — Thomas Dolby, and Police, both in November — and I’m hoping to get to that Magritte show this week in New York.  The “mystery of the ordinary,” indeed.

Effective today, I’m no longer artistic director of Moving Arts, the theatre I founded in 1992. And it’s a good thing.

I love my theatre company, and all of our history, and I enjoyed being artistic director from 1992 to 2002, and then again for about the past five years. But here’s what I really want to do now with Moving Arts: be the best supporter of our new artistic director and our company as possible — and be a playwright. I loved running a theatre, but it’s time (again) for new people, and I have another company I’m leading right now (this one, with my business partner, which provides another place to work with smart, talented people every day).

Here’s the announcement re our new artistic director, Darin Anthony. We picked Darin over a surprising number of other well-qualified people who applied. We did that because in addition to being awfully talented, and smart, and dedicated to new-play development, he’s the right fit for us. As he said on Sunday night when he addressed the theatre company on the eve of the announcement, he didn’t just want to be an artistic director, he wanted to be artistic director of Moving Arts (and had been quietly campaigning for the post for two years). Moreover, he has an attractive
vision for where we can go.

This is an exciting moment, for Moving Arts and for me. I’m looking forward to lots of productions and workshops and readings and developmental labs of new plays, including, I hope, my own.