I just got in from “ASAP Fables,” Moving Arts’ entry in the first annual Hollywood Fringe Festival. In our show, randomly assembled teams of Moving Artists created 8-minute fables built around a witches’ brew of  strange ingredients

• a randomly chosen animal
• a randomly assigned location within Hollywood United Methodist Church
• a moral to the story
• and an impossible assignment.

In our case, we were given:

•  a crow
• the chapel
• the moral “Nobody cares that you’re miserable, so you might as well be happy”
• and the assignment to “Fill the sky with your beauty.”

And, you had to work in the quote “Be who you are, and say what you feel” (from Doctor Seuss). And you couldn’t spend more than ten bucks on your show. How much did we spend on our particular impromptu play, “Reach for the Sky?” Ten bucks. Glad the budget wasn’t nine, because we would’ve had a problem.

More about how we accomplished this, and about the overall event, tomorrow. This morning I taught my workshop, ran an errand, then got over to the church to figure out some last-minute logistics on our show with my three scene partners, then performed the show seven times. As a miserable crow, this meant lots of running around and cawing on my part. After that, it’s now time for drinks. So tomorrow I’ll let you know what we did.

But here’s my favorite audience line of the evening. One of the people who came to see the show was an older gentleman who’s been following us around almost since our inception 18 years ago. I saw him in the first group that came in and later in the courtyard he was waiting to talk to me.

“Hi, Walter,” I said.

He looked at me and said, “Lee. I didn’t recognize you at first.”

“Yeah. It’s a lot of makeup.”

“No,” he replied. “I think since last time I saw you you’ve put on weight.”

My theatre company, Moving Arts, is playing along with the Hollywood Fringe Festival this week. Our offering is called “A.S.A.P. Fables,” in which randomly formed teams of performers and writers concoct new fables drawn from audience-suggested fables.

Here’s the Moving Arts website for more information. If you’d like to come out and play, we’d love to have you. (The team meeting is this Thursday night.) If you’d just like to come watch, please come do that on Saturday at 5. We’ll be performing five of these fun little plays at different locations all around the historic Hollywood United Methodist Church.

In the meantime, here’s a fable you think you know, but don’t.

A few days ago I set out to write a tribute to my friend and former student, playwright EM Lewis. Along the way, the piece also turned into a rumination about being a playwright, and being a playwright in Los Angeles. Here’s the piece.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’m in Omaha at the Great Plains Theatre Conference, where I’ve seen many old friends and made some new ones. I’ve also been making new Friends — Friends with a capital “F” being the designation one gives when it’s someone you know, or will know, primarily through Facebook.  Lately I’ve noticed a new dynamic:  Friending snobbery. I note it when two strong egos clash over who Friended whom (and, therefore, was seemingly the weaker person in the engagement). Several months ago my son claimed I had Friended him. I had not. I pointedly had not. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be reading his wall. But when I received a Friend request from him, I figured he was permitting that relationship, so I confirmed him. He still claims he didn’t do this. Twice since then I’ve come into contact with well-known people who had Friended me, and I’ve mentioned our Facebook Friendship and they’ve immediately clarified that they didn’t Friend me — I must have Friended them. And they didn’t. Really. Before they made an issue of it, it didn’t matter; now it seems to establish some sort of bragging rights. So I’m considering unFriending them. I also sense that this is going to turn into a short play of mine in the near future.

Final note on this topic:  If you’re on Facebook, please join this page:  Yes for State Parks.  This initiative will generate nearly $500 million to preserve California’s state parks. Full disclosure:  I am working on this initiative. And no, I don’t generally support initiatives, because I’m hoping for overall state constitutional reform. But as my family and I have seen first-hand, California’s historic state parks are in a desperate state of disrepair — last year nearly 150 of them were shut down part-time or suffered service reductions; for the two years prior, they all almost got shut down due to our ongoing budget crisis — and honestly, I’ve lost faith in elected officials to solve this any time soon. For an $18 registration fee on every California license plate, we can directly fund the parks, protecting and preserving trees and water and animals and keeping it all open and available to the public. So I hope you’ll join me in Friending the parks.

I’m wondering once again why I do things like what I’m about to confess in just a moment. But some backstory first.

I’m in Omaha, Nebraska for the Great Plains Theatre Conference. This is the third year that I’ve been booked in for this conference, where I lead a couple of workshops, and serve as a panelist giving feedback on new plays throughout the week. It’s a great gig, run by kind, talented, generous people, on an absolutely beautiful campus, where I spend lots of time smoking cigars and writing and drinking and where I get treated in a fashion I could easily grow accustomed to. Last year I left here with two plays. This year I would be happy to make major headway on my new full-length play.

So tomorrow is the first of the workshops I’m leading. It’s called “Starting at the Start” (or, as it’s listed in the program, “Starting with the Start,” which to me is a somewhat different thing. But anyway.). Usually I go over all my material in advance. Days, if not weeks, in advance. There are books I read from, and chapbooks, and writing exercises I like to employ, and visual aids — the whole works, in a very low-tech format. In the past two weeks I don’t think I had a minute anywhere to review any of that. Just before leaving town, I did lay hands on the pendaflex folder holding all the assorted precious paperwork from last year’s conference; a quick review satisfied me that some (if not most, or all) of the stuff I’d need was in there. So I put it into my suitcase.

I was supposed to arrive last night around 11 p.m. Instead, for no fair reason ever given, United canceled my connecting flight and I and many many other people were stranded in Denver half the night. I finally got here and into my room at 3 a.m. Then I stayed up ’til dawn playing Civilization 4 Warlords on my laptop because believe me, I was in the mood to plunder and sack someone else’s city. All day, since then, I’ve fretted about this workshop tomorrow. I’ve thought about it constantly, and meant to sit down and get ready for it, and tried to crack open the pendaflex folder and see what’s in there and get started… and I just haven’t. Instead, I read every single wall post ever made by anyone I know on Facebook. I walked to Popeye’s and bought myself a spicy wing sampler and biscuit. I went next door for a beer. I borrowed a car from the college to drive over to Target to buy myself new luggage. I came back and went back next door for another beer and had a great time swapping bad-production stories with Constance Congdon. Then I came back over here and read what had newly been posted on Facebook. Then I fired up Civilization 4 Warlords again and attacked the Mali empire, taking two cities away before they begged for peace. Then I went back on Facebook. Then, finally, with the clock past 10 p.m. and the constant awareness that this workshop is in the morning now thrumming and slamming in my head the way the deafening clanging machinery did in the engine room of my father’s automatic carwash, I cracked open the pendaflex file.

Whereupon I found, right on top, all my notes from precisely the same workshop last year.

Relieved, I grabbed a cigar and decided to head next door for a beer. But first, I thought I’d post this. Because I’m left to wonder just why I couldn’t bring myself to look in there at any time over the past 24 hours — or even sooner. I guess it was just the fear that it wasn’t in there. But even then, I figured I’d just wing it. I’ve been teaching playwriting in one form or another for 20 years; I like to think that in that time I’ve developed some ideas of how to make use of 90 minutes with a roomful of playwrights. Maybe my reptile brain figured that looking in the pendaflex folder equated somehow with “work” and I just wanted a day of no work. Who knows?

I just know it would’ve been a lot simpler to have looked in there earlier.

The other night I told a playwright friend over dinner that I felt “pregnant with play.” It’s a repulsive metaphor, but better than the alternatives that seem somehow equally right:  that a play is going to burst out of me like an alien through my chest; that a play is going to pop like a pus-filled blister; and so forth. Whatever the appropriateness of the image, she knew what I meant:  Sometimes you feel like you have a play coming on, and this was one of those times. I had thought I was going to puzzle out the missing section of act two of the play I’ve been writing, and which I told my wife I wanted to drive to Omaha and back (rather than fly) in order to be able to write.

Instead, it turns out it’s a new play. One that just came to me earlier today while driving with my college-student son back to Los Angeles from San Francisco. We were listening to an album by a band he likes. He said, “Do you like this?” “No,” I said. When it came to the end, though, I told him to leave it on so we could listen to it again. Because by then I was writing a play in my head, and this was the soundtrack. Eventually I pulled onto an embankment off the interstate, dug out my journal, and wrote down everything I knew about this play while my son looked around in the passenger’s seat, unsure what to do with himself. Later I had him fish me out a napkin from the glove box so I could scribble down two new notes:  the name of a made-up song in the play, and the last line of the play. This sort of thing kept happening. There was the realization that “Oh my God, I know the last line of this play….” And actually I could envision the last scene, completely staged. Then I could see the transitions between time periods — and this is not the sort of thing that I’m very good at. I quickly scrapped the first scene, set at the protagonist’s home, because I never wanted the action to go there, because I didn’t know how to go back there once the play moved on. Then I realized that I could have one actor play two roles in two time periods. Then I had the back story — of how the protagonist and the third main character came to meet again in the present.

This went on in my head for hours.

So now I have to write it, and I think that starts tonight. This is a good time to start it — a few days before I go off to a theatre conference, and then off to visit my mother on the East coast. In the next three weeks I’ll have more available time than I usually have, and as I told my friend the other night, “I’m a clumper.” I write plays in clumps.

After I put the pen back in the unashed ashtray of my car, I heard myself say this to my son:  “I don’t particularly want to be a playwright. I just am one.” Because plays have just come to me this way.

UCLA Live has dropped its theatre programming. Well, not willingly; UCLA administration has cut theatre from the series’ budget.

This is tragic, because for nearly a decade, UCLA Live has consistently programmed the best performance series in town — and many of the highlights have been theatre. It’s the only place that the Berliner Ensemble played in the U.S. (in a production of “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” that still haunts me); it’s where I discovered The Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and saw the astonishing “Genesi — From the Museum of Sleep,” which melded placid dream sequences with the twitching disturbances of a David Lynch or Nine Inch Nails; it’s where the Dubliners came over to play Beckett, where “Shockheaded Peter” had its American playdates, where Robert Wilson and Merce Cunningham and David Thomas did things that I’m not sure were theatre or dance or music or performance or what, but which were always mesmerizing. It’s where The National Theatre of Scotland performed their U.S. premiere of “The Black Watch.”

But no more. Dance, music and the lectures series remain intact. “What they’ve done is cut everything related to theater,” Sefton explained.

I don’t know where else in Los Angeles — in Los Angeles! — that one will be able to see this sort of work. No one else brings in shows like this, shows that require enormous theatrical training, often very specialized sets and pieces, and large budgets. At the point at which all the theatre becomes just two-character plays — or, God help us, nothing but solo shows — then there really will be no reason to leave your couch.

Here’s Charles Isherwood on the ups and downs of two-character plays.

New York has recently seen a spate of major two-hander productions, and given the economics of producing theatre, no doubt will see many more. I’d like to see “Red” — with Alfred Molina in it, which will require a trip to New York, unless the production gets remounted here. I saw “Collected Stories” in 1999 at the Geffen Playhouse; Linda Lavin was the star (as she is in New York), and she gave an inspired performance. And it’s a terrific play. If you’re in New York, I recommend it.

Last night I went with three other playwrights to see what I thought was a pretty dull play, David Hare’s “The Blue Room.” Whenever you find that you’re more involved with the lights and the sound and the music and watching the set changes (all of them admittedly pretty interesting in this production), then you know that the play isn’t working. I kept debating whether it was the script, the actors, or the direction, and landed finally on the script. Sex has never been so uninteresting, and every line sounded written, not spoken.

Afterward, the  four of us went out for a drink. I sat there, determined not to be the first to dig into the play. Maybe because I was so drained by seeing it. The experience was so enervating it had me wondering again whether the balance in quality between theatre and television had permanently shifted. When television is producing shows like “Breaking Bad” and “The Wire,” and you can carefully select what you want to see and when you want to see it with your DVR, and nine out of ten plays are a disappointment and every experience is a crapshoot and it all costs more, the argument for getting off your couch becomes harder. And no, you cannot imagine what it feels like to say this here.

One thing the theatre will always have over television is this:  drinks afterward. We had some fun at the expense of the show — I offered my usual analysis of why a play in question was 90 minutes with no intermission:  “So no one can leave early” — and somehow we got on the subject of drink and drugs. And then we got the quote of the night, something far better than anything in the play, something that I’ll be putting in a play of mine unless the playwright who said it beats me to it:

“I smoked weed. I didn’t like it. It made me feel like part of the wallpaper. Drinking is better. Alcohol is like me, plus.”

It’s so perfect a bit of dialogue that it sounds written. If only anything approaching that level had been in the actual play that night.

This is deliciously bad. As such, this scene from some long-lost movie may provide the finest entertainment of your day. I know it amused and entertained me.

By the way, despite claims to the contrary, this does not represent the worst acting ever. That distinction belongs to some odd-looking and unremarked character actor who auditioned for me 15 years ago and who at the end of his audition proudly punctuated the end of his standing monologue by planting one foot atop the seat of a nearby chair much in the way of an imagined Admiral Wellington or Napoleon Bonaparte. After he left, my producing partner said she didn’t believe any part of this man’s monologue. I replied, “I didn’t even believe the way he put his foot on the chair.”

This video therefore represents the second-worst acting ever. Although I’m open to other nominees, if you’d care to comment. And I suppose I’d nominate a third-worst: Nicolas Cage’s performance, such as it was, in last year’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans,” in which Cage’s lieutenant is best described as a cackling hunchback. Now that was pure enjoyment!

What’s the one jury you definitely don’t want to serve on?

It’s not a homicide prosecution, or a lengthy federal trial.

No, it’s the drama jury for the Pulitzer Prize. At least as a member of the jury on a homicide or any other trial, you’d get listened to in the end. As a member of the drama jury for the Pulitzer, you’re likely to do your service and then get utterly ignored. That’s the ignominious pattern of the drama jury. Here’s Charles McNulty on how that feels.