Here’s the LA Times obit for my friend Lars Hansen (showing him in a way I’d never seen him — with a beard and some hair).

I’m still working on my own remembrance for this site. Part of me just doesn’t want to write it because that means he’s truly gone. I just assumed we’d reconnect.

I just learned that my friend and mentor Lars Hansen died yesterday. Which was precisely the day I found him on Facebook and sent him a Friend request. It had been almost six years since I’d seen Lars — I wish I’d sent that Friend request (or an email, or made a phone call), far sooner.

Here’s the obit. I’m going to put more up here today or tomorrow. Lars is someone who was very kind and generous to me, and who really shaped my life and career.

Tonight we’re holding readings from my playwrights’ workshop. Please join us for the readings and a small catered reception afterward. The event is free — and so is the parking, making this a truly special occasion in Los Angeles.

Where: [Inside] the Ford. (That would be inside the Ford Amphitheatre.) The address is 2580 Cahuenga East, Los Angeles, 90068.

When: Tonight at 8 p.m.

What: Readings of

Tattoos (Act 1) by William Young, directed by Joe Gill

Old Dog Blue by Bill Berry, directed by Libby Letlow

Singular of Dice by Ross Tedford Kendall, directed by Vesna Hocevar

Hope you can join us.

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.