My new one-act play, “He Said She Said,” goes up next month here in Los Angeles. (Details to follow.) Today was our first table reading. Between that, and a drinks meeting I had with my director just over a week ago, I’m reminded again why it’s better if playwrights don’t direct their own plays. At least, this playwright.

I am a director, and depending upon the rightness of the material for me and whether or not I screw it up, I think I’m a pretty good one. But I don’t think I have the sort of insights into my own plays that good directors have. That’s because, having written the play, I can’t discover it.  In this case, I thought I had written a simple short play in the style of story theatre. Listening to my director talk about it, I realized that what I’d written was closer to a short story narrated in first-person. This may seem like a fine distinction, but it’s not:  Short stories plant images in your mind for you to conjure, while stage plays put them on stage for you to see. This was going to require more directing that I had realized, and probably some changes in the text to eliminate redundancies. (The narrator telling us something, and the actors then doing it. Which unless done for comic effect would be like hearing a skip in a record. It should be one or the other.) I wonder, had I been directing this, how far into the rehearsal process we would have gotten before I discovered this. With good actors (which I’m lucky to have), pretty quickly, I think, because they would have told me. But I hadn’t discovered it already, and my director had. So he definitely earned my attention early on. When someone is being smarter than you, you should listen.

While this play is in rehearsal, I’m also directing a new one-act in an evening of plays by my good friend and former student EM Lewis. We had our first script meeting last week and I think it was like the meeting above, but now I was in the other chair. The current draft of the play is 18 pages, and the discussion took 2 hours, 17 minutes. She is a fine writer. The play has strong characters and good conflict and wonderful dialogue; all those things I like. But there were things I didn’t understand about the play, and to be able to present a vision of it, I needed to understand it. The fault may have been mine, or the playwright’s, or more likely there may have been no fault but rather a case of things that work and things that don’t work, depending upon your line of attack on the play. With “Hamlet,” is Hamlet deranged, or is he crafty, or both? Making that initial decision determines the playing of everything that follows. It’s always that way with all plays — at least the good ones. Bad plays have no creative ambiguity; they are resolutely what they are.

Next week I start on the other two of the four theatre projects I’m doing this and next month. My friend Trey Nichols has been commissioned to write a one-act play for the same festival; I’ll be helping him shape the material with a small cast (three or four actors) and co-directing with him. And I’m also involved in a project at the Natural History Museum where, if I’m understanding this correctly, six or so of us are writing short environmental scenes that interconnect into a larger play about their new spider exhibit. I know which character I’m writing, and that character’s basic storyline (which I pitched), and the actress playing that role (Liz Harris, a good actor I’ve worked with many times).

In “My Dinner With Andre,” Andre Gregory relates to Wallace Shawn that daily life dulls us to our own existence, and that we need to break our patterns to re-engage. I think that with four theatre projects all at the same time and all with different frameworks, I’ll be very conscious for the next two months.

Occasionally you come across something so wonderful on the internet that you must immediately worship it.

In most cases, it involves William Shatner.

This is only the latest example.

(By the way, I’ve worked with many many wonderful actors, and not one of them has had insights anything like those in this video. Now I think they need to get with the program.)

The LA Times’ theatre critic, Charles McNulty, reviews the new book of essays from my favorite working playwright, Wallace Shawn.

My favorite line:

Shawn’s signature tone, familiar to those who know his one-of-a-kind dramatic works, such as “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” “The Fever” and “The Designated Mourner,” or his movie colloquy with Andre Gregory, “My Dinner With Andre,” is a kind of canny naïveté, in which complicated questions are approached with a simplicity that strips the conventional barnacles from the search for truth.

Yes! That is true. Mix that with free-floating entitled guilt, and you’ve got much of the tone and approach.

What McNulty’s review doesn’t get at, and where Shawn excels in both his plays and his essays, is the net result of this approach:  a fresh way of seeing. “Clearing the barnacles” allows one to see the hull, and to sail more speedily. Clearing the detritus, or “camouflage of details” (another sharp observation from McNulty), allows one to see the truth and to act. The Bush Administration was all about obfuscation, with heavy layers of incompetence.  Whether or not, from the comfort and safety of his couch, Shawn is taking action, in all his work he nevertheless calls into question basic assumptions about safety and privilege and morality and humanity in ways that are thrilling and not a little jarring.

By the way, here’s an air quality map of my air-ea. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) It’s 11 PM as I post this (your results will vary, depending upon when you check it), and it may show “moderate” air quality now, but I am damn sure that all day long it would have read “unhealthy for sensitive groups.” So that’s the real reason I thought it best to get that air conditioning fixed and hang around inside with a cold beer.

Here’s one of those Car Plays I’m always talking about here. This is the animated version of my friend Terence Anthony’s play, “Choke,” featuring three terrific actors I’ve been lucky to work with a little bit myself (Sara Wagner, Rodney Hobbs, and Bostin Christopher). If you’ve seen Terence’s other cartoon, “Orlando’s Joint,” you know what you’re about to get: really funny, really dark. (Which is why I love his work.) Enjoy!

Choke

The forthcoming triumphant return to the stage of… wait for it… Pee-wee Herman.

Miss it and be sorry.

Wonder if he knows about the My Gay Agenda iPhone app.

Every year for 16 years now, my theatre company has held a one-act competition. We get hundreds of submissions from around the country, and some more from various other countries (in the past, England, Iceland, Ireland, and probably other countries ending with “land”). Each submission gets read by at least three different volunteer readers who are playwrights, actors, directors, and producers in the company, with plays that survive that process then getting a live cold reading during an evening of closed company readings. Which is what we did earlier tonight. Winning nets the lucky playwright a small cash prize, plus production. We then build the rest of the one-act festival around that winning play, accompanying it with plays written by resident playwrights, or some of the other submissions, or one-acts by playwrights we’ve previously produced.

Some years we get so many great plays via blind submission that it’s hard to winnow down the list. Other years we have lengthy discussions about how to somehow change the submission guidelines so that plays like these never, ever, ever show up again — at our place or any place else on planet Earth. More than once, someone has suggested for some reason that we should have one person who has to read all the submissions, and more than once my rejoinder has been, “Who do we hate the most?” Because while there might — might — be 5 or 10 terrific plays in there, and maybe a handful more good ones, there are still the other 200 or 300. If we forced someone to read all of those personally, I’m sure that  human rights groups would intercede. Even if that someone were Dick Cheney.

Fresh as I am from an evening of these readings, I thought I’d share a few thoughts about what separates the good short plays from the bad ones. Here goes:

1. Comedies should be funny. (If you think otherwise, don’t.) That means they have to be clever. Unexpected. That most certainly does not mean that the comedy should hinge on puns. In fact, it means the precise opposite. Comedy does not hinge on puns. Repeat after me: Comedy does not hinge on puns. Unless you’re Groucho Marx and you’re going to be in the play. Then we’ll make an exception.
2. If your play isn’t dramatic, it’s because you don’t have enough conflict. If it’s intended as a comedy but isn’t funny, it’s because you don’t have enough conflict. Comedy relies upon conflict taken to a high level, in an unexpected way.
3. In all cases, it’s stronger to have conflict than to have two characters sit down and share their feelings. I don’t care about their feelings, and 30 years into this, I can say with authority I think just about everybody who ever sits in a theatre agrees with me, whether they can articulate it or not.
4. Plays about sex should be sexy. At least once. Call me old-fashioned. People talking about the sex they are or aren’t going to have isn’t sexy. It’s annoying. Too many people already get too much of that in their marriage. Why would they want to pay twenty bucks for more of that? Especially when twenty bucks will get them more than that on Hollywood Boulevard.
5. “Subtext” means that there’s something going on subtextually. You need this. No, no, no, don’t have your characters say it, have them not say it.
6. If we all know what the next line is going to be, you shouldn’t write it. It’s even worse when we know what every next line is going to be.
7. If people are getting ready to do something in your play — if all the action of the moment is moving toward that — then for God’s sake, please have them do that. No matter how wrong or disturbing or repulsive or upsetting it may seem. Because that’s what we go to the theatre for — an interesting and unique experience — and if you don’t give it to us, you’re just a tease.
8. Please do not — and I’ve said this many times — please do not write sequels to famous plays in which, for example, Godot shows up. The guy who got there first made a pretty good showing with it, and you’re not going to. Also, do not take a famous play and change the title so  you can write your own version. If the play has been running in New York for more than three decades, at least two of us will know of it. The world does not await plays entitled “The Park Story” or “Burn That” or  “Indian Head Nickel.”

That’s just off the top of my head.

So:  the one we picked. Here’s why we picked it:  It’s really funny. It’s inventive. Every character, including the small one-scene characters, is well-written. We enjoyed hearing this play, and now we really want to see this play.  For several weeks. And because we picked it, now we’re going to get to. I’ll let you know when.

The classic musical, updated for now.

(Thanks to Mark Chaet for making me aware of this.)

One night last week I took my wife to see my play “All Dressed Up But Going Nowhere,” which was presented as part of The Car Plays. The play concerned a husband and wife broken down in their car, awaiting AAA and reliving arguments past and present. This was probably the first time in 10 years or more that Valorie didn’t like one of my plays. “It wasn’t funny,” she said. On the way home, she added that it wasn’t funny because “I say those things!” Which elicited in my memory the response my writing professor gave me in college when I asked how his wife felt about his nakedly confessional poems:  “She knows how much I fictionalize.” (Later, they divorced.)

Last night we had my son’s (second) 18th birthday party. The time came for cake, and Valorie asked me what kind I wanted. I saw two kinds laid out:  chocolate and carrot. Here was our exchange:

Lee: I’d like chocolate.

Valorie: You’re kidding me.

Lee: What? No. Chocolate.

Valorie: I made this carrot cake from scratch.

Lee: I don’t care for carrot cake.

Valorie: I made it from scratch.

Lee: Sorry, I just don’t like carrot cake.

Valorie: I even made the icing from scratch. I can’t believe you.

Lee: Okay, I’ll have the carrot cake.

Valorie: You can have the chocolate, you know.

Lee: Uh… now I don’t know what to do. What’s the right answer?

I looked down on the plate she handed me and there was her solution:  two slivers of cake, one carrot and one chocolate. Diplomatically, I ate them both. Then she asked me, “How was the carrot cake?”

Lee: Amazing. Incredible. Never have I had cake like that!

Valorie:  I know this is going to wind up in a play some day.

She may be right. Luckily, she knows how much I fictionalize.

OK, those tickets are now on sale for this Sunday’s added playdate of “The Car Plays.” If past performance is any indication, you’ve got about 9 minutes to get to the Moving Arts website.