I was saddened but not surprised to learn of the death of playwright Lanford Wilson. I knew through Marshall Mason that Wilson had been failing. Wilson was a Pulitzer Prize-winner, a founder of one of our most important theatres (Circle Rep), and a writer noted around the world — but somehow, his death didn’t make the home page of the Los Angeles Times website. A sad statement indeed.

The first play ever that I bought a ticket for was Wilson’s “Fifth of July,” in 1980 (directed by Marshall). It continues to serve as an inspiration — I’ve bought hundreds and hundreds of theatre tickets since then. In an odd way, though, that wasn’t my introduction to Lanford Wilson’s work; in 1975, Norman Lear adapted a sitcom from Wilson’s play “Hot L Baltimore.” The show concerned prostitutes, a gay couple, an illegal immigrant, and every other sort of inner-city urban entanglement in a cheap hotel, a milieu utterly foreign to my backwoods semi-suburban middle-class youth. The show came with a mature-audiences warning at the beginning, which guaranteed that my 13-year-old self was going to watch it.

The playwright leaves us on the eve of opening night of two revivals of his work:  Steppenwolf is preparing to open “Hot L Baltimore” in Chicago, and “Burn This” is running right now at the Mark Taper Forum here in Los Angeles. A friend invited me for April 1st; I can’t make that date, but I’ll see it another night while it’s here. If you’re not in Chicago or LA, don’t fret; Lanford Wilson’s plays are always playing somewhere, and they always will.

Forget the Sinister Six. For Spider-Man, the real challenge is outliving the damage this musical is doing to his reputation. Courtesy of Ward Sutton and the Village Voice, here’s his cartoon perspective on how the show went wrong.

Last night, while I was out seeing something else (which I’ll be writing about later today), “Julie Taymor” was trying to salvage her reputation. This clip shows the predicament she’s in — for now.

Mike Daisey’s on-stage investigation of Apple and its impact on the world, which closes today at Berkeley Rep, continues to make waves in the tech sphere, as this piece in today’s New York Times shows. I didn’t get to see it while it was running in the Bay Area — as ideal a home for it, I think, as Hamlet found his uncle’s court to be when he wanted to see his little play staged — but I suspect I will in some place, at some time:  It now moves on to Woolly Mammoth in Washington, DC, and then Seattle Rep.

While I’m somewhat on the subject, I should note that I’m writing this from a MacBook Pro while snowbound in the mountains above Banning, California. I have a wifi signal — although it’s iffy — but my AT&T iPhone can’t connect to the cellular network. One of the regulars here asked a highly placed AT&T executive about getting cellphone coverage up here. His response, I was told:  “Get Verizon.”

Can’t swing the money to see that Broadway show featuring everybody’s favorite web-slinger? You’re in luck:  Here’s information about the five-buck Spider-Man alternative, which in addition to being super cheaper, includes beer.

I just came across this new video about Moving Arts, the theatre company I co-founded in 1992. You know you’ve built something successful when now you find out by accident about marketing initiatives like this, when you’re even name-checked in the video, and you had no idea about it previously. (In other words: They don’t need me any more. Sniff sniff.)

By the way, I saw the one-act festival mentioned herein last week and there’s some terrific work in it. I’m sure that at some point I’ll be stealing that set-design concept, which ingenuously unifies the five plays. Here’s where to get tickets.

We’re less than two weeks out from The One-Day New Play Playwriting Workshop I’m running with Trey Nichols. Click here for more info. To answer some anticipated questions: no, you don’t have to already be a playwright to enroll; yes, actors do well with this; and no, we don’t give feedback in this style:

A week and a half ago, I proposed that the Spider-Man musical might have been better if they’d had an actual Spider-Man writer involved.  Sounds like the producers have now gotten one of those involved — and, importantly, it’s one who is also a playwright.

The unanswered question is:  What could be changed in the script that could make the show better? In my experience, every production gets its own culture — its own informing ethos — that is distinct from what’s in the script; Apple and IBM may both make computers, but they do them rather differently, and what we see is a reflection not just of the different plans on paper, but of the different company cultures. A theatrical production is mounted by a production company, and that company culture is difficult to change. Once you get too far into the rehearsal process, it’s difficult to change directions, and “Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark” is a show that, more or less, for better or worse, seems to have opened, and long ago. (It has also been widely reviewed, and savagely panned.) Add to that that this is supposedly the most technically demanding show in Broadway history; what significant changes can be made when you’ve already got that much physical hardware in place? And finally:  With a show that is already legendary for the injuries incurred in some very dangerous stunts, how much will producers want to risk in changing how the rigging and pyrotechnics and whatnot work in relation to the script?

It’s a lot to overcome. I hope they can work it out.

Congrats to Mike Daisey on this terrific review of his show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which plays Berkeley Rep through the 27th. As a member of that Apple religion, and someone who has started to consider nailing some questions to the church door, I would very much like to see this show. A quick review of my schedule shows that a trip to the Bay Area isn’t possible between now and then, so I hope this is coming to LA.

To tackle one of the statements that Daisey seems to be making in this show — that we have already become “cyborgs” because of our constant attachment to the internet — I think that’s right. And I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. It gives more people more access to information than ever before, which is theoretically the goal of the enlightened intelligentsia. And given recent history, it seems effective in toppling dictators very quickly.

When you work in theatre in Los Angeles, you sometimes get to meet people you grew up watching on TV. Betty Garrett, who died yesterday at the age of 91, was someone I saw on “All in the Family” and “Laverne & Shirley” when I was a kid. Before that, she was better known as a leading lady starring alongside the likes of Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly. I didn’t know Betty well, but she was such a visible part of the Los Angeles theatre community for so long that I think some of us assumed she would always be here; at least, I made that assumption. I remember once going to some bizarre theatre thing outdoors at Griffith Park and sitting on the lawn — near Betty Garrett and near Marion Ross. She was one of the presenters and an awardee for an awards show I did (and now I find I’m sadly fuzzy on the details), and I saw her many times at Theatre West, where she was a founder and a performer, and elsewhere around town. What I remember most about her is her sense of fun and optimism. Ninety-one years is a good long time to live, and it seems she lived it well, but I’m sad that we won’t get to run into her any more in our theatres.

Here’s a montage that the fine people at Theatre West put together last year, in honor of Betty Garrett’s 90th birthday.