A few quick questions about the closing of the Pasadena Playhouse:

1. Can we save it somehow?
2. Would Dustin Hoffman write a check? (Famous alum.)
3. Would Gene Hackman write a check?  (Famous alum.)
4. Would Carol Burnett write a check? (Famous alum.)
5. Might this qualify for a federal bailout?
6. If the answer to #5, above, is no — why the fuck not? Why is the Pasadena Playhouse — given its importance — not “too big to fail”?

I tweeted this yesterday. Now the LA Times has the story:  The Pasadena Playhouse, the state theatre of California, is closing its doors.

Steven Eich is quoted. I’ve known Steve for almost 10 years and have immense respect for his abilities. I also know his love for the artform. Closing the theatre couldn’t have been an easy decision for him or for anyone involved.

Is there hope for keeping it open? I hope so. Whether or not that happens, this is a further reflection on the mismanagement of California, a place where the state theatre is left to buckle and break — just like the schools, just like roads and bridges, just like emergency rescue, just like higher education, just like everything else.

I don’t know quite how to lead in on this without just saying it:  I found out today that someone I’ve known for years in the local theatre scene was stabbed to death over the weekend in his home.

What a horrible way to die, and for such a nice man.

I wish I could see this production in New York, which promises much sweet sorrow:  a production of “Romeo and Juliet” — cobbled together from people’s (false) recollections of how the play goes.

I took my daughter to see “Jay Johnson: The Two and Only” tonight at the Colony Theatre in Burbank. Whether or not you think you want to see “a ventriloquism act,” you should see this one if at all possible. Johnson is “a ventriloquist” the way Michelangelo was a painter. It’s an astonishing show. Johnson can make voices, noises, sound effects, singing, echoes, and every other sort of sound imaginable arrive seemingly anywhere on the stage. What Ricky Jay can do with cards, Jay Johnson can do with his voice.

But the show is more than that. Johnson gives us a history of ventriloquism that stretches back to the dawn of mankind, illuminating the connections between the Oracle at Delphi, seance mediums, village exorcists, and nightclub performers (all of whom practiced ventriloquism). The history that is even more revealing, though, is his own, as he takes us through a boyhood in Texas spent talking to himself in his room, to countless adolescent performances in his small hometown after getting hooked by the first laugh he got from an audience, to a chance telephone meeting with the much older man who will prove to be his mentor, to his eventual great success on television and the stage. It’s the story of someone who finds his own voice by throwing it into so many different objects. He’s a consummate writer and performer, and a very funny one.

Here’s where to get tickets. (It runs for just ten more performances.) And while, sadly, I can’t embed the trailer to the show, here’s the link so you can watch it.

There’s a joke that goes, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”

Which seems apropos, having just come from seeing “Better Angels,” a play about Mr. Lincoln, at the Colony Theatre in Burbank.

At this point, I think I’m pretty well-versed with Mr. Lincoln and his story. Above my desk at home I’ve got a miniature bust of that president, and throughout the house I’ve got countless biographies and studies of the man, and collections of his writing. I’ve been to his memorial several times, and I respectfully refrain from comparing other, lesser politicians to him, no matter how close they try to sidle during election campaigns, no matter which party they come from.

Still, this play tonight did just what you hope the theatre will do, every time you step inside one: it awoke me to the reality. There is Lincoln the monument, and there was Lincoln the man. In order to remove Lincoln from the reliquary, the playwright (Wayne Peter Liebman) arrives upon the device of a framing sequence concerning Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay, as played by David Dean Bottrell. At the play’s beginning,we encounter an older Hay, serving as secretary of state in the early 1900’s during the administrations of McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. This Hay now realizes that with Lincoln he was in the presence of greatness. The younger Hay, seen throughout most of the play, like so many other contemporaries mistakes Lincoln for a lucky and talentless buffoon. He, like the third character in the play, a female petitioner to the president, grow to understand his depth. And then, in the moment of his triumph, having won the Civil War and passage of the Thirteen Amendment, which abolished slavery, Lincoln suffers his tragic end. But this is offstage, and Hay, the older Hay, 40 years after the fact, one of the last few wh knew Lincoln personally, is the one to tell us, except he cannot fully tell us, his voice cracking as he says about that evening in the theatre, “You know the rest.” The moment was like a depth charge. Almost 150 years after the death of a man I never knew, I started to well up.

This was the second play I saw this week. The other, sadly, I didn’t like at all. I took a good friend with me and we spent the next day exchanging emails picking the play apart (and the direction). I could go on about why it didn’t work, but they’re the usual reasons:  no real conflict, no real investment in the characters or the milieu, long and self-important monologues, late-arriving themes and complications. Rather than go on about that, I’d just like to say this:  There’s a reason we’re drawn to art. Art is the expression of someone else who was here, someone who is connected to us, someone who left this trail. The cave paintings at Lascaux are the earliest and most vivid proof of this. In an age when we are bombarded by sensory overload and traffic jams of the freeway and of the mind, when a producer has to remind audience members before the performance that they can indeed forego Twitter and email for 90 minutes and to please do so, it’s art that has the power to reroot us in the ground we all stand on, the ground of our common humanity, and to remind us of its potential and its impossibility, its exultation and its awfulness. That’s what art is for.

Last night, this year’s Moving Arts one-act festival closed. Afterward I hung around ’til 1:30 in the morning with a few other people and dismantled the set flats for pickup and storage the next morning. I was sad to see the festival close, especially because I was proud of so much of the work, including the three plays I was most closely involved with: one that I wrote, and two that I directed. (I wrote a scene for the event at the Natural History Museum, too, but never got to see it. I hear it was good.) But while I was sad to see it close, another side of me wasn’t sorry at all. To give you an idea why, I share my Halloween costume this year:

This was our 15th annual one-act festival, so I think at this point we know how to do such events. But we had so many problems it’s like we were cursed:

• an actor in one of my plays was hospitalized with a heart infection
• another actor was hospitalized after passing out in a bus
• the understudy I cast to take over for actor #1, above, suddenly came down so ill he was laid up with an IV drip
• another actor almost broke her wrist because a flat was moved into a position it didn’t belong, blocking her entrance in the dark
• another actor slipped and fell outside on the cement — twice
• the lead in my play was in a car accident just prior to opening
• a supporting actor in one I directed was in a car crash and hospitalized with a concussion

You might (somehow!) chalk that up to actor problems, but we had major ongoing tech problems, too.

• At the end of an 8-hour cue-to-cue rehearsal in which all the light and sound cues were programmed, they mysteriously disappeared. All of them had to be reprogrammed, which added nine hours onto the day. (I said, “I won’t be here at 2 a.m.” And wound up leaving at 1:56 a.m.)
• Some nights the stage lights would seize, stranding the actors in the dim lights set for scene change. After this happened a second time, the tech crew spent an entire day checking every cord and cable and instrument and all the impressive buttons and levers on all the tech equipment, but couldn’t duplicate the problem.
• One night prior to opening when we’re getting our press photos taken, it starts to rain. Water starts to drip onto the stage floor. Our producer wisely puts down a bucket and a towel. Naturally, in all the press photos for my play, the bucket and towel are front and center. Later someone Photoshops them out (but not before we nickname them Mr. Bucket and his sidekick, Towelly). But more editing is necessary later, because the actor on the left is one of those who wind up hospitalized.
• Props and set pieces and costumes would mysteriously vanish. One night the bottle of Rolling Rock so emblematic of my lead character’s small-town truck-mechanic milieu was gone, substituted quickly with a PBS-subscriber Heineken someone helpfully located. Another night the prop baby openly referenced in one play couldn’t be located, so the woman playing its mother had to mime carrying a baby. When the mother shared her distress about the baby, her fellow actor helpfully chimed in, “But Mom — the baby isn’t even there!”
• Previously, I shared the story of  the incredible professionalism of an actor who went on for one of those hospitalized actors, off-book, with no rehearsal, and who was absolutely terrific in his performance.  What I didn’t share at that time was the rest of the story. The play starts and I’m sitting in the house and I’m just blown away by how great this actor is — in fact, by how great all three cast members are. I’m very proud of this play and them and my work directing it, and I’m enjoying the stark lighting that I wanted, and then… I start to hear something. It sounds like… music. In Spanish. Like a Mexican radio station, slightly not tuned in. I pull out my iPhone and text the board op in the booth:  “Why is there music on stage?” I get a text back:  “I don’t know. It’s not coming from the booth.” In other words, she doesn’t show it and she can’t hear it. My actors, including the understudy who has taken over, bravely soldier on, but everyone in the theatre is well aware of this music now, and of course, it’s the night that we’ve got a critic from one of the more important papers. I sit there and seethe.I don’t know who, but someone must die. And so I go down the mental list of suspects and as I pick through that list scratching off one name after another because really none of them is to blame, I start to realize that it’s even worse than I’d imagined:  There is no one to blame. No one.

No one is responsible for the out-of-tune Mexican radio station providing lively background for what should be the searing drama about a passenger getting beaten to death on a commercial airliner. No one is to blame for the vanishing props and the tumbling actors and the car crashes and the deadly airborne toxins and the wandering electrical shorts and on and on. We’ve done a festival for 15 years, and many of the people involved in this festival have been involved in many of those years. No, we’re just somehow… cursed.

My friend Trey blamed his play “Move”:  “This is the last time I write a play with a ghost in it.” My wife picks up this theme and says that a la “Macbeth,” which theatre people superstitiously call “The Scottish Play,” Trey’s play should now be referred to as “The Motion Play.” That was funny — but whatever ghost might have been the root cause plagued all the plays in all three evenings.

The night of the Mexican radio broadcast, I figured that somehow the equipment in the booth had become a receiver. This can happen. (It never happened again, and no, we never figured out how it happened that once.)  But once I realized there was no one to blame, I did the smart thing after that night’s show ended:  I gave up. Uncharacteristic, I know, but it’s one thing to struggle against oneself or others, it’s another to shake your fist at the sky. We had surmounted every possible torment and soldiered on, and no amount of testing and retesting and trial and error had been able to replicate any of the tech problems — they simply happened or didn’t. So I gave in and guzzled wine in the courtyard with about 20 other Moving Artists and we all laughed and laughed great rolling waves of laughter, the cascading eruptions of people who’ve been electrocuted but lived. The only thing left to befall us would be a meteorite crashing from the sky, and if that was going to happen, well, there was no stopping that either. So we all just gave in and gave up.

And after that we never had another tech problem.

Friday

Six of my family members go to see my play “He Said She Said” without me (more on that in a moment). My brother and sister and brother-in-law all seem impressed the next morning. (This is a 30-year first.) But my wife tells me, “It’s all just so sad and pointless.” (Yes, she’s talking about my play.)  “Weren’t people laughing?” I ask about the play, which is intended as a poignant comedy. “Yeah,” she says, “but that’s just because of the way he’s doing the lines. It’s not the writing.” Takeaway:  Now that blood relatives like one of my plays, my wife has left the reservation. A Taoist would say this is balance.

Meanwhile, my friend Trey and I are suffering in purgatory. Or more precisely, the play “Purgatorio” at UCLA Live! (Exclamation point theirs.) I will say what the LA Times’ Theatre Critic whinges on about without fully stating:  It’s tedious in extremis.  His reservation at calling out its dullness eradicates any former credentials. Within the first five minutes of the extremely slow initial scene, which concern a woman slicing a cucumber at glacial speed, I get it:  Oh, we’re in purgatory — just like them. Unfortunately, another 85 minutes follow. At play’s end I actually stand up in my second-row seat, turn around to an audience partially populated by theatre people I know, and demonstrably hold my nose before leaving. The highlight of the performance is when my iPhone starts vibrating on my leg. (I later find out that a friend’s pocketed cellphone has accidentally called me.)

Saturday

I bid farewell to the visiting relatives after we all spend 90 minutes debating whether or not to wake up my wife so they can bid her farewell. Finally, at 11:30 a.m., they relent and leave, with her still asleep. She awakens perhaps 18 seconds later and says, “They left? Why didn’t somebody wake me up?”

I spend far too much time making up party games for  our Halloween-party-slash-22nd-anniversary party. I also visit two Halloween stores and am astonished (and cheered!) at the long lines within. I purchase enough fake blood for a sequel to Carrie. I also purchase ping pong balls with eyes on them, for the punchbowl.

I take the kids trick-or-treating, Trey again in tow. He’s dressed as Nacho Libre, and I’ve thrown on a wizard’s gown because my “real” costume for later isn’t ready yet. Everywhere we go around the neighborhood excited folks of Latin American descent cry out, “Oh, loo! Loo! Nacho Libre!” Trey basks in the warm glow of appreciation and acceptance, a lifetime of Halloween costume misfires now behind him. Later at my party he somehow wins both “funniest costume” and “scariest costume”; presented with Trey in this costume, the guests at my party are as confused by their choices as the old people puzzled by the butterfly ballot. Trey also scores an indecent 19 correct out of 22 responses in my contest to match the horror film with the actor. (It makes a statement when you can correctly identify John Heard as the star of “C.H.U.D.” and Jennifer Aniston as the female lead in “Leprechaun 2.”) Oh, and my kids’ costumes:  my 11-year-old girl is a dark wood fairy, and my 7-year-old boy is a soldier (and very happy to have a fake knife in hand). But really, all the focus is on the half-naked middle-aged man.

One of the guests at the party, a longtime friend, tells me he is the last remaining employee in his department at the LA Times. When he started, there were 22; now there’s just him. He also says that effective January the paper will be shrinking — literally. They will shrink the page size. I guess that’s one way to make it even smaller while saying they held the page count firm. I resolve yet again to cancel the paper.

My wife and I exchange 22nd wedding anniversary gifts:  I give her the Rowan Atkinson comedy special where he plays the Doctor (Who); she gives me the boxed dvd set of “I, Claudius.” Each of us is thrilled. Nobody needed anything more. She and I go to bed and stay up for a good long time.

Sunday

I determine to do nothing. Nothing at all. Maybe read a little; maybe not. I read part of the LA Times. I read a magazine. My wife gets up finally at some point. I talk to her for a while. Fed up with nothingness, I say I’d like to go hiking; she agrees, but then says she’d rather go to the park. I wait hours for us all to go to the park, my dog’s warm but fierce brown eyes drilling holes into me for the duration. Finally I write a note — “Went to the park” — and go. Leaving behind the dog to drill holes into her. At the park, there are two fathers with their children and when they see me enter unaccompanied by children I can read their thoughts. This worsens when I go over to the jungle gym and hang upside-down by my calves, my shirt slipping off over my head. Small children’s eyes are averted; they are cautioned away by these fathers. I could explain that I’m trying to stretch out my neck, indeed my entire spinal column, but finally one of them gets it when he sees me dismount and wag my head around slowly. When I do it again, this time children approach and gape. A little boy of almost two is standing there, his milk bottle dangling from his mouth as he stares intently and I think, “It’s past time this kid was weaned.” My wife and kids and dog finally arrive and now I seem safer to all concerned. I do some more hanging from the bars so my own kids can watch. They’re amused too.

We return home and my wife decides to wash the dog outside. I decide to watch. I’ve been on permanent dog-washing duty for 20 years with two different dogs, so I’m well-prepared to sit back quietly with a magazine while she does it. She does it all wrong. The dog shakes water all over her, then gets in the house while soaking wet, then slips back outside before dried and runs like crazy around the entire back yard, rolling around in grass and mulch and digging through dirt, coming out of it all dirtier than before. But my wife laughs it off and washes the dog again. For that, I decide to take her out to dinner.

We go out for sushi and each of us orders new things. I order different sushi selections than usual and she orders clam miso soup and dragon roll (when it arrives, the dragon looks and tastes suspiciously like salmon). Kid 2 orders coffee mochi, which means that Kid 3 has to order coffee mochi too. (Kid 1 is off at college.) We all agree that the new decor of this, our favorite Japanese restaurant, is beautiful and seductive. I’m just glad that sports aren’t projected fuzzily on the wall behind us anymore.

We come home and she puts Kid 2 and Kid 3 to bed while I watch “Mad Men.” Just as everyone who watches it has predicted all season long, the episode  deals with the Kennedy presidential assassination. I’m somewhat unmoved. I don’t care about the Kennedy assassination as it pertains to “Mad Men.” I care about the characters in “Mad Men.” Instead, I get numerous scenes of characters in “Mad Men” sitting around shocked and sobbing watching TV. It feels like “Purgatorio” again, but with commercials. My wife says she’s going to bed — “I’m actually tired!” she says — and then sounds me out about my sleeping habits for the night. She’s asking me to please not turn on the light to read, and not to eat noisy beef sticks, and not to try to sneak reading in bed while she’s asleep, because all of that will wake her up. Unspoken:  Please don’t sleep walk or thrash around or have one-sided conversations in your sleep et cetera et cetera, as though these are intentional choices. I watch the movie “Milk” downstairs and think that although the movie is a little padded, Sean Penn is pretty exciting in the role, and then to make sure I’m really good and tired I watch “Into the Wild,” except what it does is make me really angry at this inconsiderate coddled little shit who goes on an ultimately fatal 18-month walkabout and can’t once be bothered to call his parents and reassure them that he’s alive. He dies after four months in the Alaskan wilderness after several bouts of severe stupidity and, much as with the Timothy Treadwell saga, I find myself rooting for the bear to reintroduce the human to the realities of the food chain.

I go upstairs and get undressed for bed and open the sliding door to the balcony as gently as I can to let in some cool night air so that I might possibly sleep a little better and then lie down as stilly and noiselessly as possible and note how full a largely unfilled weekend ultimately turned out to feel, and then I drift off to sleep and somehow somehow sleep the whole night through.

Why do I work in the theatre? Yes, I love the thrum of immediate, live, audience response. But tonight, again, I wondered if maybe it isn’t the actors who keep me coming back. The good, competent, skilled, professional, incredibly talented actors who are fun to work with because they have incredible passion for what they do and because they can channel up human expression and the depths of our experience and present it to us in ways that are eerily true and unexpected.

Case in point:  this guy, my friend Brian Newkirk.

A little background:

I have known and worked with Brian Newkirk for about 12 years. I don’t know how many plays we’ve done together now with me serving as director or producer, and he may have been in one or two of the plays I’ve written as well and I’ve honestly forgotten, and if so, I apologize, but it just seems that we’ve done countless projects together. For all 12 years, Brian has been the consummate pro. I know that people who don’t work with actors all the time have this stereotype that actors are flakes. Neurotic, drooling, pampered, skittish, impossible flakes. No — those are stars (and just some of them). Actors — real actors — do things like show up on time, and know their lines, and give their all, and will do anything for a good part, and ask for little in return except maybe that you respect their craft. Sometimes you get a person who is both actor and star; I did three gigs with Alfred Molina, and I can tell you, he is a star and an actor. There are plenty of other examples, too. But to do theatre, you’d better be an actor. There’s no one there to bail you out, and there’s nobody who’s going to yell, “Cut,” and there’s no fixing your performance in post.

Which brings me back to Brian Newkirk. During the rehearsal of “The Incident Report,” a world-premiere play by EM Lewis that I’m directing, one of my actors took ill. Throughout the weeks of rehearsal, he kept going to doctors and hospitals and labs and getting every test known to man — and still made it to rehearsals and even made it to opening night before, finally, two days ago, he was hospitalized with, wait for it, a heart infection. Yes, an infection in his heart. And he still came to opening night and blew me and everybody else away, before he finally got diagnosed with something so serious that there are miles of tubes and other artificial plumbing now running in and out of his chest in a hospital at UCLA. So, Monday, two nights before the next performance, enter Brian Newkirk, who nobly agreed to go on in this other actor’s stead. How many rehearsals did Brian get with me? None — unless you count the “rehearsal” we did today over the phone.  Yes, I have now done everything one can do as a stage director on behalf of “the show must go on,” because I have now rehearsed an understudy over the phone. And by “rehearsed,” I mean we discussed his character arc and his intentions and an approach to the character, in about 15 minutes. And tonight, two days after getting tapped to go on for the rest of this run, and with one linethrough with his fellow actors yesterday and 15 minutes on the phone with me today, Brian Newkirk went on tonight. No script in hand, all of his lines and his blocking committed to memory. And he was fantastic.

I love this story. Don’t  you love this story? Because don’t we all like to believe that if you just put your back into it and your heart and soul, you can do amazing things?

Remember Otto, the elderly accordionist from the old country who has been supplying me with spicy beer sausage for years? My kids and I were sad to learn yesterday that he died. Here’s a nice tribute in our local paper. And here’s hoping that his son, or someone else, carries on his fine tradition. (‘Cause I don’t know where else to get that spicy beer sausage.)

By the way, about 10 years ago I was directing a play called “Grandma’s Christmas Goulash,” by David Vegh. One of the actors, Richard Ruyle, wanted to know how to do a Hungarian accent. Of course, I sent him to do some shopping at Otto’s Deli. Next rehearsal, Rich showed up with that accent perfected. (But no spicy beer sausage.)