Even with this latest disaster, I’m rooting for that Spider-Man musical.

#1 in the list:  A Klingon Christmas Carol.

(Although I have friends I suspect will be there.)

This is Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs,” adapted (?) to video by Spike Jonze. It mines the same territory as the Wallace Shawn play “The Designated Mourner” — that our obliviousness to the freedoms we take so casually endangers them — but more believably. That’s saying something for a music video, over the work of perhaps our greatest living playwright.

On Monday night starting at 8 p.m. at the Hudson Backstage Theatre in Hollywood, we’re hearing two plays that have come out of my workshop recently, “Awake” by Michael David, and “Successor,” by Ross Tedford Kendall.

These are good plays. Trust me. Directed by talented directors with a history of getting good actors into the roles.

Afterward, there’s wine and cheese and, doubtlessly, cigars outside.  Admission is free.

Please join us.

The Hudson Backstage Theater (on Santa Monica just east of Highland).

Hudson Backstage Theater
6539 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90038

And here’s the Facebook event page.

My good friend Rich Roesberg turned me onto this story in May and I’m only now getting around to posting it. It’s still a good story. It seems that during a recent rehearsal for Waiting for Godot in Melbourne, one of the stars, Sir Ian McKellen, took a break outside on a bench. Whereupon one of the passersby, thinking him homeless, tossed him a dollar coin.

McKellen is holding onto the coin as a good luck charm but offers his benefactor something for his money, “If that man would like to identify himself, we would like to invite him to come and see Waiting For Godot. And if he insists on paying, we’ll knock a dollar off the ticket price.”

I have three further thoughts about this:

1. I have no doubt that this theatre’s publicist leapt on the opportunity to put this story out. A tip of the hat to that theatre professional for a job well-done. The story got reported widely — even down to southern New Jersey, where said good friend Roesberg lives. A good theatre publicist is always worth his keep.
2. My favorite comment to the story on this newspaper’s site:  “Round in Yarraville and Seddon we have got heaps of these types. I never give them money, just a kick in the pants and yell get a job you bum.” So the confusion that Sir Ian was a bum continues even onto the news coverage.
3. In theatre circles, Sir Ian is known as a real gentleman and a bit of a cut-up. When he did his show “A Knight out” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1997, he was prone to taking over the box office and answering the phone himself in ways such as this:  “Oh, so you’d like to come see my show would you? And where would you like to sit? Are you sure you wouldn’t like to sit further down where you can see me better? Now, it will cost you a little more, but I’m sure you’ll agree it will be worth it.” And so forth. He charmed everyone who called and everyone who worked there.

Last week, I was mentioned (briefly) in the Burbank Leader’s coverage of a forum that I agreed to moderate about developments within our fair city’s police department. Click here if you’d like to read it. Public response so far, on some blogs, is that no doubt I was paid to intentionally get some people’s names wrong. Good theory — and I wish I’d thought of that.

Also in the Burbank Leader comes news that Gun World is closing.  For those of you who’ve seen my play “About the Deep Woods Killer,” this may strike a chord. Here’s Scene Three, in which Jack, the son of the Deep Woods Killer, struggles to stay on a good path:

 

 

                                                (Scene Three: Testimony.)

           

(Spotlight on Jack. He stands alone, addressing us as though we were a group. He holds his baseball cap in his hands and fidgets with it, at times twisting and turning it.)

 

                        JACK

My name is Jack. I’m an alcoholic. But you know that. I had a tough week. Well, a tough day. The same thing happened at work, again, the thing that happens every time I think it’s okay. They hired this new girl, woman, Alice, and somebody told her. About me. Well, about my father. I know you all already know, so what’s the point. It’s about honesty in here. So at work, nobody said anything to me but I could tell. Monday morning Alice was filling out paperwork while I was in the breakroom and she smiled and said hello. I didn’t want to talk to her, I wasn’t trying to talk to her, I wasn’t even trying to look at her, but I did like her hair, it was red, pulled up behind. She talked to me and I looked up and looked up at her hair, that was when I saw it, and she smiled again. And after lunch she wouldn’t look at me. She came into the breakroom and I was there again and she acted like she didn’t mean to come in there and turned and left, and I knew what that was. I was… I was really down after that. The whole day that feeling was back, it felt like there was something on me, something heavy I couldn’t get off and the drive home took me past the Dew Drop Inn, and the Rustic Inn, and the Pitney Tavern, and the Stop and Go Liquor – I don’t know why we have so many of these places, it’s like they build ‘em right where I’m going to drive by, that’s what I was thinking – then I stopped at the light at Leeds Road and there was Gun World. And I looked at myself in the rearview and I just looked tired, real tired. The light changed… and after a bit I drove home and I got inside and I –

(He starts to choke up.)

–  I called Tony. I got through it all, I got home, but I might not’ve gotten further ‘cept for Tony. He saved me. So I thank him and I praise God for him. I am a strong person, a strong man, but sometimes everybody needs a little help, and I had Tony. Thank you.

 

This play was performed in the Moving Arts one-act festival two years ago here in Los Angeles. One of the actors was walking down Magnolia Boulevard and did a double-take. He called our producer, Steve, to say, “You’re not going to believe this… but I’m standing in front of Gun World.” He later told me how very strange it felt to one moment be leading his normal life, and the next moment to feel that he’d entered the world of the play. For this reason alone, I’m sad that Gun World is closing.

Finally,  the current issue of Inc. magazine has a profile of my company, Counterintuity. Counterintuity is the place where I write those other things that blur the lines between reality and fantasy (we call that marketing copy). Click here if you’d like to read it and use my image for target practice.

Twenty years ago, few would have predicted that Disney would become a major force in American theatre, especially in employing the avant garde. In retrospect, it’s not as strange a development as it may seem; after all, Walt & Co. did found California Institute of the Arts expressly to turn out avant garde animation (and, later, performance) as a research-and-development lab for the Mouse. (And where have so many of those Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network shows come from? You guessed correctly.)

This piece examines the secret behind Disney’s success on stage:  hiring the most creative people. (Something the company has always done.)

Harvey Pekar died a few days ago. I started reading his comic book, “American Splendor,” when he started publishing it in the late 1970’s. Why did I buy those early issues? Two words:  R. Crumb. It was an interesting time for comics — undergrounds had already died, but now we had graphic realism, in the form of Pekar’s work, and what Crumb’s comics were evolving into, and what is generally recognized as the graphic novel, Will Eisner’s “A Contract with God.” I bought and appreciated all these things.

I also met Mr. Pekar a few times. While I admired his work, I  never enjoyed meeting him. His curmudgeonly appearances on David Letterman’s show weren’t an act; if anything, speaking with him in person was worse. Whenever I told him that I bought his comics and books and enjoyed his work, his response was a glare and a snarl. I’ve hung out with movie stars and sideshow freaks who treated their fans better. The last time I saw Pekar, a couple of years ago at the legendarily jam-packed Comic-Con in San Diego, he was the only person anywhere near his table. In the middle of 135,000 bodies in motion, his table was the doughnut hole of activity. Everyone gave him a wide berth, and I understood why.

Although I faithfully bought all his comics and books, I found much of the writing slack. It isn’t compelling to observe the dailiness of life if you have no observations to make, and in general, Pekar didn’t. His novelty was that he was among the first to put this sort of unwashed realism into comics form. Absent the work of some of his artists — Crumb, but also Frank Stack, and especially Budgett and Dumm — many of the stories wouldn’t hold any interest.  I’m not alone in this opinion.

What was the best of Harvey Pekar’s work? Moreso than the comics, or his books, or his newspaper and magazine writing, or the movie adaptation, the best Harvey Pekar work I ever came across was the stage adaptation I saw around 1990 at Theatre/Theater in Los Angeles. The show was deceptively simple — Dan Castellaneta (of “The Simpsons”) and an ensemble of supporting actors, and some theatre cubes. The cubes got restacked at times to form filing cabinets (Pekar was a file clerk) or to serve as a table and chairs, or to stand in for the front seats in a car. The writing was fast and funny and loose. The actors did a great job of fleshing out the characters from the comics; even the man who played Mr. Boats, who was clearly not an actor per se, but someone they found because of his physical similarity to the actual person, did fine. I went to see the play three times, then saw it again when the producers took it to the Comic-Con and did it again. Twenty years later, I’m still lifting ideas from that show. I was  glad to be in LA and able to see such things (and it felt lousy when the movie mocked what had been a terrific, sold-out, award-winning show).

I’ve always wished I could see that show again. I can’t — but tonight, in tribute to Harvey Pekar, we can listen to a shortened radio version of it once last time, at 7:30, Pacific Time, on Santa Monica’s KCRW. It won’t be available on demand or podcast. So if you’d like to hear it, here’s your one (and only?) chance. 

The Hollywood Fringe Festival is producing correspondents’ videos of various shows around town. The second interview in this particular roundup — about one minute in — features me talking about Moving Arts’ show, “ASAP Fables,” along with some of our Asaps (or guides; a further play on “Aesop”). (It also features two of my children in the background: the big one with the black armless t-shirt, and the small one with the close-cropped hair.) Unfortunately, in a turn of events I didn’t notice during the interview, the correspondent seems to think that the name of our theatre company is “ASAP Fables.” It’s not — it’s Moving Arts. I was sure I mentioned Moving Arts in here somewhere, but it’s not in the edit. Drat. I should also note that although I’m not the best judge of what my voice sounds like, it’s been pretty blown out the past week, what with a cough I haven’t been able to shake for three weeks. Add onto that a couple of hours of running around shrieking and cawing and this is what you get.)

By the way, we do fun stuff like this show all the time. Just in the past year, we did “The Car Plays,” a really fine one-act festival, an interactive family-friendly show called “Arachnatopia” at the Natural History Museum (another in a series of plays I’ve written but never seen), the world premiere of “Song of Extinction” at [Inside] the Ford Amphitheatre, the world premiere of “Blood & Thunder” at our original space, and now this show. We’re already talking about doing a haunted house this October. Here’s the link to sign up and keep abreast of these and other fun developments.