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.)

My play “He Said She Said” opened tonight and now it’s 1 a.m. and I’m back at my office to catch up on some writing work. But before I get to that, I just have to take time to note the moment. The response to the play was tumultuous:  big laughs right where they should be, matched by a keening audience-wide sense of the lead character’s plight. Thirty years of doing theatre, and that was one of my best opening nights ever. It’s true what they say:  you can get pretty far with great actors and a great director.

Here’s where you can go for ticket info. There are only 4 or 5 more performances.

Here’s actor Bostin Christopher’s take on how he got cast in my play “He Said She Said,” which opens next Saturday here in Los Angeles. My quick response:  Yes, I wrote it with him in mind — and yes, he still had to audition for the role.

Why?

Because the director, in this case Ross Kramer, had never seen him. Never even met him. So while I had the benefit of seeing Bostin’s work in a variety of venues the past two years, it would have been a lot to ask someone else to cast him sight unseen. That was my thinking anyway. And how much do I trust this director? I didn’t even go to the auditions.  I’ve worked with lots of different directors, and I can’t think of another time in 30 years of getting produced that a play of mine was auditioning in town and I didn’t go.

So here’s the thing:  Bostin is terrific in my play. Unsurprisingly, he’s doing a good  job of playing a role that I wrote with him in mind. As for the female role, I saw that one very differently than how Rebecca Davis is playing it (and how Ross is directing it), but now that I’ve seen this take it’ll be extremely hard to see it any other way. Until, that is, I do. Nobody wants his play to be done just once.

What playwrights do want, though, is for their plays to be done well, with a director and actors bringing things to the production that add to the experience.  Playwrights who get productions in which people detract from the experience know exactly what I’m talking about. My first production was in high school and went fine; for my first production in college I was saddled with a female lead whose habit it was to deliver every line like a crazed magpie: “Got any MAG-a-ziiiiinnnnnes?” Some years ago in New York a director decided that my play about artists in hiding from the government actually was about a lesbian subtext that he freely invented — and directed for accordingly. (On opening night, the cast and I, by now thoroughly creeped out by this guy, ditched him for our own party elsewhere.)

I’ve got more such stories — you do this long enough and you collect them. But I’ve also had many productions that left me awash with gratitude. To fly in somewhere, especially a small town, and see how hard and how well they’ve worked on your play, how much they’ve committed and achieved, leaves you humbled.  Whatever alchemy produced the run-through I saw of this new play of mine the other night, I’m grateful for it.

Tickets are now available for that extra-long, extra-wide one-act festival that opens (or, begins opening) next week here in Los Angeles. (The one that has me out at rehearsals and tech rehearsals and dress rehearsals and so forth at all hours.)

My play “He Said She Said” is part of “Passions,” which is a “Keystone” event; I’m directing “Move” by Trey Nichols on the same night; I’m directing “The Incident Report” by EM Lewis as part of the “Special Presentation” called “Flight”; and word has it I’m writing one of the segments of the “Spotlight” event “Arachnatopia” at the Natural History Museum. (Which means I’d better start writing it.) Can’t follow all that? Go to this link and… just buy all of it.

Hope to see you there.

Yesterday a friend and I went to Long Beach to see the Brian Eno installation, “77 Million Paintings,”  at the University Art Museum of California State University Long Beach. The genesis of the 77 million paintings enumerated in the title — which, Eno later said during his lecture, would actually be 77 million cubed —  is described well in this piece by the LA Times’ Reed Johnson. In short, a video mosaic of 12 individual screens pulls images randomly from grouped sets contained in databases held by three different computers, generating an ongoing series of freshly executed video “paintings,” which are sonically supported by a soundtrack of  sound loops on six separate tape decks, resulting in randomized musical accompaniment. The intention is to remove deliberation and intention from the artistic process; the result is mesmerizing. As my friend and I found, it was quite easy to get lost in the neverending self-generating inventions of the computers and the tape decks. For one brief period, I felt detached from space and time. I’ve had this feeling before with some art, in various disciplines, but only rarely.

Later, we attended Eno’s lecture at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center (also part of Cal State Long Beach). After 30 years of following the man’s career in all its phases — rock star, record producer, artist, writer, thinker — this was our first chance to see him in the flesh. Eno proved to be thoughtful, puckish, droll, and concerned, in equal measures. I would characterize the first third of his lecture as an admonishment to let go. (This should be expected from an artist whose visual work is created largely from computer generation.) He started by reminding us of something we’ve known for 566 years, since Copernicus:  that not only we are not at the center of the universe, we are off in a small corner, in one of a billion billion solar systems, and we exist as only one of innumerable species just on this one planet, where only an estimated 10% of species have been cataloged. In other words,  Get over yourself. Again, this viewpoint should be expected from someone extolling the virtues of random, unemotionally generated, art.

On the way home I wondered aloud how well these theories that can work so well  in visual art and music would work in long-form narrative. Having read (or tried to read) Samuel Beckett’s novels and some of William S. Burroughs’ longer pieces, I unfortunately believe I know too well. In such cases, even a little plot can go a long way. Organic writing — which I practice and preach — benefits from pruning and shaping. Effects can engage an audience, but only for so long; the best effect is an emotional verisimilitude, however achieved, that transports people into a deep level of caring about what happens. That occurs in better productions of “Waiting for Godot” because Didi and Gogo are present and we can relate; it never happens with “The Unnameable,” which is a true chore to read. When he’s collaborating with, say, Robert Fripp, Eno is free to produce an album of electronic feedback loops, but when he’s producing records for U2 or Coldplay, he must serve the song. To his immense credit, he never claimed in this talk that he was abandoning all oversight; rather, he talked about intentional balance, moderating oneself along the continuum between surrendering all control, or controling all elements, depending upon the desired outcome. I think that’s about right.

If you’re interested in “77 Million Paintings” and cannot make it to Long Beach, where it runs through December, here’s some good news:  a beautiful software-and-DVD version exists. Here it is on Amazon.com.  I bought a copy at the museum, and at about 35 bucks, it’s a steal. The package includes the software to run these self-generating images on  your computer, with accompanying soundtrack. In addition, there’s a beautiful booklet with notes from the artist, plus an interview DVD. Get it and surrender all control to it.

I don’t have a lot of interest in pleasant music. Yes, I can hear that it’s soothing, but I can’t figure out why you’d want music to soothe you. I want music to snap me out of it, to communicate something new in an interesting, dynamic way that’s impossible to refute.

So, it’s easy to see why I like a lot of what I like:  Roxy Music, Talking Heads, David Bowie, the ubiquitously written-about (here, anyway) Pere Ubu, TV on the Radio, Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth, Van Dyke Parks-era Beach Boys, King Crimson, and the like. What are the common elements? Intellectualism, contrapuntalism, dissonance, and surprise. What else do many of them have in common? Brian Eno.

It’s impossible to track the music I like without repeatedly stumbling across the name Brian Eno. The best Bowie albums? (Lodger, Low, “Heroes,” Outside.) They all featured Eno writing,  producing, providing “atmospherics,” or a combination of all three. Same with the three Talking Heads albums truly worth owning, including the astonishing Remain in Light. Eno has had the immense good taste or good fortune to work repeatedly with the likes of Robert Fripp, Harold Budd, John Cale, Philip Glass, David Byrne, and many others, and I’ve gotten this far without mentioning another act he’s produced by the name of U2 because their music does nothing for me. Along the way, he invented ambient music and made a lot of money doing so.

Eno can’t “really” play music, although his ability to twiddle knobs on early synthesizer systems and tapeloop machines he stapled together in the early 1970s enabled him to play live with Roxy Music. As someone with lots of ideas and very little skill, Eno is the prototypical modern artist. The abstract expressionists couldn’t paint, Martha Graham’s dances don’t look like dance, there is some doubt that most of the current academically hailed playwrights can write a play, and Brian Eno can’t play an instrument or read music. When asked by one interviewer if he would have been a music had he been born at an earlier time, the 61-year-old Eno said no, because his instrument would’t have been invented yet. What instrument is that? “The recording studio.” There is obvious enormous benefit to the presence of a naif. Why does Eno’s 1974 album Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy still sound so fresh, and so wrong? Because it wasn’t  hampered by someone who knew how to do it “right.”

The past few years, Eno, who is also a painter, and is a painter in a similar way that he is a musician albeit with more training, has been doing installations of changeable art created by a random shifting interplay of abstract images, shown against a backdrop of ambient music. He’s now brought that show, “77 Million Paintings,”  to Long Beach, where I’ll be seeing it on Sunday with a friend similarly well-versed in all things Eno before, miracle of miracles, we’ll also catch a lecture by Eno at the Carpenter Center that evening. Yes, I got those tickets almost as soon as the event was announced; good thing, too, because the lecture sold out almost immediately. I’ve been following Eno and his work with great interest for 30 years, and this is the first time he’s made an appearance anywhere near me, so I wasn’t going to miss out. Expect more here after the event.

• President Obama’s health-care speech last night (great job!) and his killer tactic of inducing that thick-necked GOP jerk to yell out “You lie!” That alone will have swung enough support. Once again, other people have misunderestimated you, sir president. We watch and learn.
• The Gallup-originated “Strengths-Based Leadership” test I took today, which sized me up as having strengths in Strategic, Activator, Individualization, Responsibility, and Input, resulting from oddly dichotomous choices like “You believe in ghosts” vs. “You like chocolate.” More on this tomorrow, I think, when my neck isn’t killing me. I also would have preferred that the test conclude in words of the same form — all adjectives or all nouns or all gerunds or all something the same. These qualities — Strategic Activator, etc. — sound like mistranslations from the Chinese, like Glorious Serving Sword of Destiny.
• My second night of rehearsals with my cast, and hearing my rewrites for the first time. Short version:  New opening line sucked (and my actor rightly asked for the old one back); new purposely bad poem is deliciously bad and probably earns a laugh right where I planned because, as I suspected, the actor has the chops to get that laugh and got it right away; still very glad to have the director and actors I have. The director has better ideas than I do, so again, I’m glad he’s directing and I’m not.
• How “lack mentality” drives me crazy. Brief definition:  “I lack [fill in the blank], so I can’t do [fill in the blank].” It’s just reflexive with people. (Most people?) Once you’ve trained your ear to hear it,  you hear it all the time. Why not instead:  “I want to [fill in the blank], so I have to [fill in the blank].” That’s more actionable; you can actually do something about it. I think today I heard the lack mentality about six times. In one case, I’m concerned that an important arts institution is going to go under — or at least suffer greatly — because of all the lacking going on.
• My thrill at getting a new script by one of my favorite playwrights. In fact, right now I’m going to go read it in the jacuzzi because, for some reason, my neck is killing me.

Yes, today is 9/9/09, the day that a bunch of 40-year-old albums by a certain band got re-released in various CD re-packagings, to the delight of millions around the world.

For others among us, it was another day in the countdown toward the new Pere Ubu album, “Long Live Pere Ubu!” Even if it turns out I hate it, I guarantee it’ll be far more artistically provocative than any other new music coming out this month. Yes, the Beatles were provocative. Forty years ago.

The new Ubu album brings together two things I’ve been interested in for a long time:  the band Pere Ubu, and the inspiration for their name, Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi.” “Ubu Roi” was an adolescent prank — a play written by a high-school kid to mock his teacher. I wrote a novel in a similar tone when I was the same age, but my novel’s still in a box somewhere while Jarry’s play radically changed its artform. (Do we get to have Ionesco, or Theatre of the Absurd as a whole, without Jarry? Probably not.)

Fittingly, Pere Ubu the band has been every  bit as influential as “Ubu Roi,” and even more doggedly uncommercial. One of the bonus features on an Ubu CD is a series of documents, including one that references an album’s sales as numbering about 6,000. This for a band with a three-decade history and a sound that influenced Nine Inch Nails, the Pixies (and, therefore, Nirvana), Joy Division, REM, Thomas Dolby, Hüsker Dü, Henry Rollins, Bauhaus, and innumerable others including the entire industrial-rock movement, a band rightfully recognized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (albeit in an undeservedly small corner), where one of singer David Thomas’ instruments is proudly displayed:  a railroad spike with accompanying ball peen hammer. And if you listen closely enough, you can hear that very instrument on some early tracks where it is played to perfection.

This FAQ about the rationale behind the concept and recording of “Long Live Pere Ubu!” speaks to some of the many reasons I love this band. Imagine this sentiment, by David Thomas about the resurgent appearance of the monstrous Pere Ubu wherever you look, being uttered by any other recording artist this long in the game:  “Regardless of whoever or whatever it is that you personally choose to lionize, it’s more than likely that such a person or organization is Père Ubu. Every talking head that you see and admire on the tv is Père Ubu.” Thirty-four years on, 20 years past the last gasping relevance of the Rolling Stones, Pere Ubu retains the industrial crackle of original thought. That makes every new CD by them a release worthy of anticipation.