I’m sorry to learn of the closing of Hunger Artists Theatre in Fullerton, California, after 16 years of producing new work and brave revivals. They produced my play “Next Time” a few years ago, and many  plays by local playwrights, including scripts that came out of my workshop. I haven’t been down to Fullerton in a while (it’s 38 miles in distance from Burbank — but sometimes that translates into two hours of driving), but I liked knowing the theatre was there.

Here’s news of the announcement, and here’s a further analysis.

My 10-year-old has refused to appear in this year’s elementary school production of the holiday show.

The teacher has tried everything to get him to change his mind.

She’s asked him if he’s sure. (He’s sure.)

She’s reminded him that he knows all the words to the songs, and seems to like music, and so perhaps he’d like to be on stage singing along. (He wouldn’t.)

She pointed out to him that this was his last year of elementary school, and therefore his last year to be in this school production. (He doesn’t care.)

Last week at our parent-teacher conference, she brought it up to me and wanted to know what I thought about it.

“How many don’t want to participate?” I asked.

“Just him,” she said.

“I thought there was another boy.”

“No, he joined in,” she said.

So this other kid had caved. “Well, I’m glad to know he doesn’t give in to peer pressure.”

She looked at me. “There’s no peer pressure,” she said. I think she assumed I meant from the other kids.

“I’m not going to force him,” I said, “but I’ll ask him about it again. I know he likes to sing.”

Later, in the car, I asked him about it. Yes, he likes to sing along, but no, he wasn’t doing the show. So that was that. Part of me was proud of him, even though I knew his grandparents would be disappointed. As for my wife and me, we both thought it presented a fine excuse for missing the elementary school holiday show.

Today I came home and Dietrich proudly announced that he was involved with the holiday show.

“WHAT? I thought you didn’t want to be in it!”

“I’m not,” he said, beaming. “I’m the assistant director.”

It sounded like it had been his plan all along.

This Saturday night is Moving Arts’ 20th anniversary party. When are we going to have another 20th anniversary party? Never. It’s a one-time event.

That’s just one reason I’m hoping that if you’re in Los Angeles tomorrow night, you’ll join us. (Click here to get tickets, or more information.)

Here are some other reasons:

• There’s great food and drink and entertainment
• It’s going to be a lot of fun
• It’s incredibly reasonable! (Just 25 bucks.)
• I would love to see you there
• What Moving Arts does is really important

Since our founding in 1992, we’ve produced hundreds of new plays. We’ve launched a lot of new plays (and a lot of new playwrights) in that time, racking up awards and a significant body of work. We were the first to produce many of these playwrights, many of whom have gone on to illustrious careers. And we started doing that at a time when practically no one was doing strictly new plays.

Moving Arts is more than a theatre, or a theatre company: It’s a mission. It’s a mission that says that stories from our times must be supported and produced. Not just workshopped, or read, or developed. Produced.

As founding artistic director, I’m incredibly proud of our work, and of the talented people running the theatre and the talented people doing good work that moves audiences to laugh and to cry. Please come out and join me in hoisting a glass to all of that – and to what promises to be our best season ever.

I hope to see you on Saturday night.

p.s. Can’t be there in person? Join us in spirit! Click here to make a donation. Thank you.

It was 20 years ago tonight that we opened Moving Arts. Not all of those 20 years have been easy — it’s never easy keeping any theatre open, let alone one devoted entirely to new plays — and in fact, some of them have been pretty hard. But still, I’m not surprised we’ve hit 20. We’ve got good people running the place; in fact, we’ve always had good people running the place.

Moving Arts began in 1990, on paper, as Acme Performance Group, Inc. Originally, it was going to be a production company called Acme Arts Co., under a different artistic director than me. The concept of the proto artistic director had been that with the name Acme Arts Co., we could do “anything” — we wouldn’t be limited to theatre. Now I know better: that in most cases, it’s better precisely to be limited to just one or two things. Unless your corporate name is Virgin. But it turned out that Acme Arts Co. was a name already registered in the state of California, so the name became Acme Performance Group, Inc. In other words, the name went from bad to worse. But after waiting a seeming eternity for that artistic director to do something, I decided to drive around, find a space we could afford, and call him up and tell him about it, and as politely as I could, to also tell him that I thought I should take the title of artistic director. “I think you should,” he said.

The space I found, 1822 Hyperion Avenue in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, had been a police substation. It was about large enough for two police and maybe their donuts. When the landlord, Bud Plochere, showed it to me and asked me what I wanted to do with it, I said, “I want to turn it into a theatre.” He stood inside and looked around and said, “You can’t open a theatre in here.” But we did. And we’ve been doing theatre there — and elsewhere — for 20 years now.

Over those 20 years, many hundreds of people have contributed their time and energy to Moving Arts and its productions. I do want to name just a relative fraction of them.

The founding board of Acme Performance Group, Inc. was: Eve Kathleen Baker, Julie Briggs, Gary Guidinger, Joe Stafford and myself. We never would’ve started the non-profit without Eve, who much like Johnny Appleseed sowed seeds wherever she went, but her seeds were non-profits; she started a lot of them, including ours. Eve died about five years ago (more, now?) and I still think about her frequently. And a special two-decade tip of the hat to my good friend Joe Stafford, who wrangled all the paperwork down at City Hall in 1992 while I was on the East Coast dealing with the death of my father; Joe made a friend in the bureaucratic maze and somehow navigated us through the other side.

The theatre was opened with $7,500. (!) Those founding funders were: Julie Briggs, her parents, Paul Crist, Joe Stafford, my mother, my wife and I, my brother Michael, and my wife’s grandfather, Frank Senn. Seven of them gave $1,000 each (that was the ask), and one gave $500. I remain grateful to them all.

There were many people who built the theatre, but the primary work crew was Marcy Ross, Tom Boyle, Rodger Gibson, David Krebs (now deceased), Julie, and myself. Rodger was an electrician and wired us throughout; Marcy was an ace carpenter; and Tom, as always, seemed to know how to do everything. I spent a lot of time scraping fake popcorn off the ceiling and inhaling lots of lung sealant in the process.

When it came time for a name for the place (I was damned if it was going to be Acme something), we compiled a sheet with three dozen or more alternatives. I no longer know where that sheet is (and I wish I did), but I do remember two names off it: Theatre X (which I came up with, and liked, but which got vetoed), and Moving Arts, courtesy of Steve Freedman. Nobody vetoed Moving Arts, and the more it stayed on the list, the more it grew on people. Thanks, Steve.

We’ve always had many talented, resourceful people in charge, but here are the true forces to be reckoned with, as I recall them.

Managing Directors: Julie Briggs, Rebecca Rasmussen, Lisa Payne Marschall, Michael Shutt, and especially, especially, our current hard-working (and long-suffering?) managing director Steve Lozier.

Artistic Directors: Julie Briggs again (about five years in, we adjusted titles and made her an equal artistic director with me; essentially, we’d already been producing partners since the founding), Kim Glann, and Paul Stein. (I was the founding artistic director, and I’m currently serving as artistic director again, on an interim basis, but really it’s in title only.)

Our Literary Director of many, many years, Trey Nichols.

Our incredible producer-director people, including Cece Tio, Sara Wagner, Terence Anthony, Mary McGuire, and Jane Sunderland.

And the many board members who’ve truly made a difference: Dan Beck, Jeannine Fairchild, Michael Curry, Mark Kinsey Stephenson, Kevin Scott, J. Hobart, Joe Stafford, Brian Newkirk, Marlene Coleman and Cris D’Annunzio among them.

And, finally, all the talented (and sometimes semi-talented) actors and designers and board ops and directors and playwrights who gave of their time and their energy. Thank you. Enormously.

Originally, my co-founder, Julie Briggs, just wanted to direct a play, one of mine. But I needed a place to work, and I hadn’t had a great time at the other place I’d tried to work. (The now long-closed Burbage Theatre.) And I didn’t like what I was seeing of other small theatres were run at the time. So I drove around and found the place we could afford to open. It was too small, and we had no money, and it was just the two of us. I figured you could do theatre anywhere, so the size wouldn’t stop us, and I knew even then that you can always get more money. But Julie wanted to know how just the two of us were going to do this. “We’ll get other people,” I told her, and that’s precisely what happened. One of the quips I share all the time is attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre: “Hell is other people.” But from day one, Moving Arts was built by other people. We thought we were building a theatre, but really we built a community.

I get asked this sometimes. Here’s the answer:

Sometimes 46 minutes.

Sometimes a couple of weeks.

Sometimes a few months.

Sometimes four and a half years — as in the case of the play I just finished. Started it in 2008, and then oddly today I had the feeling that I could finish it. No, I don’t know why. Hadn’t even looked at it in years. But I cracked it open and looked at it and, yes, finished it.

(Which means there’s still hope for the play I started in 1990….)

When Ron Palillo died two weeks ago, it immediately brought to mind a one-act play festival we were both involved in back in 1989. Now I finally have time to tell you about it, and about the ironies of celebrity that I learned from the experience.

I was in grad school at USC, with a focus on playwriting. My play “Guest for Dinner” had been selected, along with three plays by three other writers, for the annual one-act play festival on campus. (A festival that, oddly enough, I became the producer of for two years about 20 years later.) This was a festival with fully staged productions — actors off-book, and with set pieces and costumes, with a three-night run, and this festival was a competition, meaning that one of us was going to be selected as a winner of something or other. As you can expect, each of us wanted to win, and at least two of us had all the arrogance and competitiveness rightly associated with male playwrights in their 20’s. (And, probably, most artists of any age.) One thing that the two of us agreed on was that the other two plays were terrible, and that we’d be happy to lose if we had to, so long as the other guy won. This is similar to the Oscar nominees who say “It’s an honor just to be nominated.” In other words, it’s bullshit. We both wanted to win. That said, I did think this other guy’s play was good, and perhaps better than mine, and that certainly ours were light years ahead of the other two.

But then Peter, the other guy, came up with an ace in the hole. He was able to cast a celebrity in his play. He announced excitedly one day that he had Ron Palillo (“Y’know, Horshack!”) in his play. I knew exactly who Ron Palillo was — I had grown up jeering at “Welcome Back, Kotter,” mostly, I think, because I knew kids like that at school and couldn’t stand them. At least, I now like to think that that’s why, because I’m friendly now with Mark Evanier, and “Kotter” was Mark’s first TV writing job. And Mark’s a good, clever, funny writer. Even though now, in 1989, “Horshack” was past his prime, 10 years earlier he had been a pretty big sitcom star, a guy whose face was on lunchboxes and board games and toys and on television screens around the world. Starring in my play I had a very good actor named Charlie Hayden who had once had a scene with Charles Bronson. (Quoth Charlie about working with Bronson: “Like acting with cement.”) Charlie was great, but he wasn’t on any lunchboxes.

During rehearsals, I would catch little breezes of trouble from Peter about working with Ron Palillo. I had no idea what any of this was about, but the general gist seemed to be that he was difficult and demanding. On the first two nights of performance, the plays came off without a hitch. Mine ran about the way it should, with laughs in the right places and the intentional anxiety of being made to wait in others, and Peter’s, about a troubled friend (or brother?) who had to be left behind, worked fine too, and the other two were still miserable to sit through. Occasionally, we would all comment on how lucky Peter was to have a celebrity in his, and Peter would accept that he was lucky indeed, at one point saying with consideration toward the inevitable judging night, “Well, yeah, and I’ve got ‘Horshack,’ too, so there’s that.”

On that judging night, a funny thing happened. For some reason, the sort of reason impossible to suss out in the theatre, that particular night’s audience really connected with my play. The laughs were bigger and the connection with the plight of our antihero was deeper. And, in Peter’s play, Ron Palillo came in on the wrong note, seemed angry and intense for no discernible reason as he tried his hand at “Acting!” with a big capital “a” and an exclamation mark, ran around the stage, and, when he jumped up on the bed on stage to make a point, he very loudly broke the frame of the bed, the bed cracking to the floor, Palillo tumbling off it, and the other two actors left first stunned then scrambling to regain some composure and continue. Later, much of the discussion was on Palillo’s antics and his on-stage calamity, and when the judges came back… I won.

Peter had thought he might win partly thanks to Ron Palillo. Now he was certain he’d lost entirely thanks to Ron Palillo.

After the performance and the announcement of the winner, one of my professors, Bill Idelson, who had written about a million hours of television and who I really liked and admired, told me what he thought of my play when I asked: He ripped it to shreds. And so, 23 years later, I still wonder if I did win because of Ron Palillo.

By the way, here’s what I won: a plaque. That’s it. A plaque that had my name and the title of my play engraved on it as winner. I’m looking at it right now on my wall as I write this. The following year, I was in this festival again, and this time I know I had the best play — and I lost. As they say, “You win some, you lose some.” The impact in this case was nil either way. Later that same year, I had a play in a festival run by Jerome Lawrence, the revered co-author of “Inherit the Wind,” “Mame,” “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail” and many other plays. One evening in the restroom, Jerry asked me what I thought of playwriting contests. Before I could respond he said, “I’m agin’ ’em.” He said we shouldn’t make playwrights compete against each other. He felt it was already too hard to be a playwright; why extend the suffering?

All this came back to me when I heard of Ron Palillo’s death — and then saw this piece on Mark Evanier’s blog. Mark doesn’t have very nice things to say about working with Ron Palillo either, and in my experience (and from reading his blog), Mark is generous with credit and good to work with. But I also wonder what it felt like to have been an enormous television star in 1979, and 10 years later to be performing for free in a one-act play festival at USC in the hopes that someone, anyone, from the film school, or perhaps one of the professional judges, or the next Spielberg in the audience, might spot you and give you again even the smallest taste of what you’d had so recently. And so that was the lesson of celebrity that I learned: that fame cuts both ways, for those who are famous, and also for those who expect things from association with it.

Mark Chaet, my friend of 20 years, is a terrific guy, and a terrific actor. He’s also very smart — smart enough to take a look at how the odds have changed for screen actors. Mark knows a lot about these things — here’s his IMDB page, with more than 75 credits; and that doesn’t include any of his stage credits. If you’re trying to make a living as an actor, or considering it, this post on his blog is well worth reading.

In no particular order, drawn from research performed over lunch with theatre people, and including solo shows:

1. Four neurotic New Yorkers complain about their lives.
2. I’m emotionally wounded and you should be fascinated / amused.
3. College professor gets divorced!
4. Three women complain about men.*
5. My life story — it’s so wacky!
6. Dad abused me and I can’t get over it.
7. (Family member) is dying and I feel sad.
8. Ugh, the relatives are coming over and dinner is ruined and we suck.
9. Clever college grads hang out and talk!
10. You don’t understand this, and that means it’s good.

*submitted by a female friend (thank you)

Yes, I did go see Waiting for Godot at the Taper on Friday night, and it was marvelous. It was surprising how fresh and entertaining the play was, and how moving in its conclusion, especially given how many times I’ve seen productions of it. Big congrats to the cast, director Michael Arabian, all the designers, and everyone else involved, on a flawless production.

But there’s another production that I’d like to talk about at greater length.

On Tuesday night I was able to see another play, this one the world premiere reading of a new play that marked the literary debut of a promising new playwright: my daughter Emma. Emma is an 8th grader who participated in a program at her school by Center Theatre Group — the folks who put on that Waiting for Godot production you should see — wherein students work for many weeks with a playwright who is a teaching artist to learn how plays work, and how to write one. Over the course of the school year, they do improv games, write scenes and lines of dialogue, and get to work with professional actors, culminating in an evening of readings by those professional actors. (One of whom, it turns out, was Rob Nagle, whom I’ve worked with at Moving Arts.) Eight of these brief plays, each of them co-authored by small groups of the students, were performed on Tuesday night by the actors.

Here’s the plot of the play by my 13-year-old daughter and her co-authors:

A father asks his (13-year-old?) daughter if she’s done her homework. She says she wants to watch TV first. (As I was watching this unfold, I was immediately hooked by the theatricality of this setup. I closely related to it, and its inherently theatrical complications.) He gets angry and loses his cool — so the daughter and her mother leave. They just get on a bus and leave town. For good. And then the father is angry with himself (for enforcing homework, I guess).

Clearly, there’s a lesson here for all of us, and that lesson was not lost on me: Be careful about how you insist on homework getting done, lest your wife and daughter get on a bus and leave town for good.

Over the years, I have made appearances in the writing of other people I’ve known, sometimes in poems, sometimes in plays or stories or essays, sometimes thinly disguised and sometimes not. One time I went to the reading of a play at the Pasadena Playhouse by someone I know and the characters were discussing another character, unseen in the play, who seemed rather much like me, and whose character name was “Mr. Wochner.” That seemed eerily similar to my own name, which is “Mr. Wochner.” So I have had previous experience of seeing a character that might or might not be based upon me shown in another light. But to be the abject villain of a piece — a piece written in part by my daughter, in which our heroine simply wants to watch TV unfettered by the necessities of homework — was new. And to witness the wretched state that the encounter with a demanding father left the mother and daughter in as they rode the bus to a faraway town was to leave me questioning my approach to homework. (Mother: “Do you think we’ll be okay?” Daughter: “I don’t know.”)

I was impressed with all eight of the students’ plays. They were funny, they were dark, they were brave, and they were untrammeled by the proclivities of professional playwriting that insists upon such things as subtext. In these plays, what is said is what is meant, and that made me hunger for such a world, where if we don’t want to go somewhere we say it, where if we want something from each other we just demand it immediately with the expectation that it will be given. The evening was a window into the mind of 13-year-olds, and that made for an experience I’ll long remember. And I offer this as proof: Tonight I took my family out to dinner, and then when we got home, we watched some TV. And when it was over, and only when it was over, did I tell my daughter to go do her homework. I don’t want to find her with a one-way bus ticket to elsewhere.

I’m seeing Waiting for Godot tonight at the Mark Taper Forum.

Just recently, I was telling the playwrights in my workshop that I would not being seeing this, given how many productions I’ve seen of this play. Just off the top of my head, here are some of them:

• a college production in 198x starring my friend Joe Stafford. (Still probably the best Pozzo I’ve seen. Joe had a commanding and imperious presence, leavened by an impish humor.)
• the filmed version with Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel
• as much of the staged version with Robin Williams and Steve Martin as I was able to stand
• a production in… was it 1989? At the Taper, Too. (Now known as [Inside] the Ford.)
• a production at the Matrix starring Robin Gammell and David Dukes. They were superb. Dukes may have been the best Vladimir I’ve seen — you really felt his pain when Godot didn’t show up, and his desperate desire for the man to make an appearance, for God’s sake
• a production by the Dublin Gate Theatre in 2006 at UCLA Live that, despite its acclaim, I didn’t like at all because it was so meaningful.  “Godot” is much better when played as vaudeville; Robin Gammell (above) was an excellent clown. The play is intended to be played that way — one stage direction has a character “scratching his head like Stan Laurel.” When it’s filled with portent, it’s a drag. And that’s what this production was like.

I’m sure I’m leaving out four other productions. Minimum.

And yet, I’m going again. Why? Top-notch cast, including Alan Mandell (who is now 84 and unlikely to be doing this sort of thing much longer; sorry, Alan), and featuring two actors who knew and worked with Beckett himself (Alan, and Barry McGovern); a video clip (above) from the production that, just in this excerpt, shows that the approach is right; it’s one of the most important plays of the 20th century and one I find deeply effecting; and, well, my friend Dorinne had an extra ticket and invited me.

Wish me luck.