After more than 30 hours straight of writing, punctuated only by a few hours of passing out here in my office, I think I need to walk around the block or something.

The good news is, I’ve made strong progress on my book (about playwriting).

The other good news is that I finished a new one-act play in time for submission to a festival I was contacted about.

The not-so-good news is that I just caught myself sending emails like this one, to a friend of long standing (and sometimes sitting, and other times lying down):

Appropos of nothing, I thought I’d send you my new play, “Next Time,” written in time for submission to a one-act festival this September. (No idea if I’ll get in, but it’s run by a former grad student of mine — not sure if that helps or hurts.)

One brief moment in this play may seem familiar. About 15 years ago you wrote — and I mean HANDWROTE — a brief play in which versions upon versions of people stepped away from each other to show the layers and depths of a person. I swiped that, but because I’m lazy and it’s a short play, I’m showing only one layer, and they’re playing Monopoly. And the entire play is about layers of meaning and identity and reality, it’s completely removed from your own notion, as you see, but I wanted to acknowledge even the hint of a swipe where there might be one. So thanks for that, kind of, if, sorta.

Yes, I think it’s time for a break.

I’m not a believer in “rules” for writers. Where rules exist, good playwrights know them – and break them.

We break the rules of grammar to create dialogue that sounds like normal speech.

We break the rules of spelling to hint at character and dialect. Having a character say “tuff” instead of “tough” provides an indicator for the actor.

We break the rules of punctuation by placing commas not necessarily where they go but where we need them: to serve as brief musical rests for actors speaking our lines aloud.

And most importantly, we break the unwritten and unspoken but all too obvious rules of conformity and convention when we have our characters say, do, and be things that aren’t popular or nice. Society is that construct that ostensibly helps people get along by burying what’s uncomfortable; playwriting is a mechanism by which writers unearth the unpleasant for art and entertainment.

As opposed to rules, I believe in what I call “craft techniques” – theatrical givens passed down to us about how to help dramatic writing play better. Actors, directors, writers, all have these techniques, and they’ve kept them because they work. A few examples:

• Put the punchline at the end of a joke because otherwise other words step on the joke and kill the laugh.
• Don’t have an actor cross upstage on someone else’s important line because it steals focus.
• If you have an actor play against the expressed intention of the line, you can often get a stronger reading by revealing subtext.

These aren’t “rules,” which inhibit us; these are techniques that help us succeed, and they’re generally related to the production.

When it comes to the writing, rather than keeping in mind rules, there are three notions that I hang onto, all of them starting with “F.”

Playwriting should be – needs to be – freeing. The act of writing a play frees playwrights, through their characters, to explore issues and ideas however they see fit: to see where they take us, to look at things in a new light, to find out what we think and to learn what we don’t know. This is a gift we pass on to the audience. Being free in your writing is a prerequisite to writing.

At the same it, playwriting should be frightening. If you never ever stop and wonder if you’re going too far, then you assuredly aren’t. You need to go further. If you want an audience to worry about your characters, you’d better put them in situations that make you uncomfortable while you’re writing it. This doesn’t mean putting them in oncoming traffic; it usually means they’ve said too much, too unkindly, behaved too rashly and too wrongly, been too good and are now paying for it, or are just flat-out unlucky in a truly catastrophic fashion. If everyone is safe, the play is safe – and no one wants to see a play that plays it safe. Playing within the rules of good behavior is safe.

And playwriting should be fun. This is the other reason that rules are to be understood but rejected: They usually stand in the way of the creative impulse, of the fun. If you’re having no fun writing your play, imagine how little fun actors are going to have acting in it and audiences are going to have seeing it. By “fun,” I don’t mean comic (although if you’re writing a comedy, it’s generally a good thing if at least you think it’s funny). I mean: exciting. You get up in the morning eager to work on it and go to bed feeling the same way. You think about it in odd moments. It colors your perceptions, as when you see someone in a supermarket berating a child and you realize that’s the way your protagonist would act. You feel truly alive when you’re writing the play and somewhat asleep when you aren’t. Fun is motivational. If everyone had more fun – if everyone were able to have more fun – the world would be a funner place.

Rules constrict people. In larger society, that’s often a good thing. In playwriting, not. To write plays, you don’t need rules. You need freedom, fright, and fun.

Don’t ever believe that Western governments are “free” societies — someone must always pay.

In this case, it’s brothers Vincent and Michael Hickey, at left, of Birmingham, England, who spent 18 years in jail after being wrongly convicted — but will still have to pay for their prison room and board.

Further evidence that Franz Kafka secretly runs everything.

Think you can’t predict the future?

Ray Kurzweil says you’re wrong, in this think piece in Inc.
What I love about this:

1. his optimism
2. that his optimism is built on fact, not belief
3. that it rings true, given the exponential growth in technological efficiency

To that point: I’m writing this on a MacBook Pro. Ten years ago I would have been writing this on a PowerMac 6300, which had one of those cool new 3.5″ disk drives. I would be writing it, but I wouldn’t be posting it — blogs didn’t exist yet, and neither did the internet in the way we know it. Ten years before that, I would have been writing this on an Apple IIGS with a dial-up modem. Ten years before that, I would have been working on paper with an IBM Selectric II, and other paper conveyances (called “a stamp and envelope”) for distribution.

Kurzweil thinks this exponential growth in power is going to hit the energy industry. I agree. And then at some point, if indeed the war in Iraq was about oil, there won’t be a need for such interventions.

Speaking of newspapers, here’s a community service from the New York Times.

If you are either a college student or faculty member, the Times’ premium service is free to you.

Here’s the link.

Yesterday, the Washington Post trained its laser vision on the zeitgeist of “dumbed-down” game shows — which had me wondering if the writer had ever seen any game shows previously. (I know that my generation took its cultural cues from “Match Game.” Oh, the good ol’ days.)

Today, I discover that the paper’s online version seems to be doing video interviews with, um, nobodies, talking about nothing in particular. Click here for a case in point. To my trained ear, Mr. New (great name) is a case study in “unreliable narration,” in which while he believes himself a knight errant, we can see what a neurotic loser he is.

If only there were some news to cover, or some interesting modern philosophers to interview, and if only we had a newspaper or a website that could disseminate this information.

He wasn’t “down,” he was ill.

One evening about 10 years ago I was walking outdoors down 3rd Street in Santa Monica with my two brothers, who were in town. We had just had dinner and were going to go see a movie called “Big Night,” which stars Tony Shalhoub, Stanley Tucci, and Minnie Driver and which concerns two brothers trying to save their Italian restaurant. All around, it was a warm, mildly festive night.

As we walked down the street, which had almost a carnival atmosphere with sidewalk vendors and various little things going on, we came across a man doing some sort of on-camera interview. He was doing what looked like a small on-location hosting segment.

“That’s Richard Jeni,” I said.

My brother Ray said, “Who?”

“Richard Jeni,” I repeated. “Stand-up comic. You know. He’s on TV a lot. You’ve seen him.”

Ray didn’t believe he had. I remain convinced to this day that indeed he had, but despite the numerous credits I rattled off, Ray just couldn’t picture him. Neither could my brother Michael. Even while they were both looking at him.

And that was kind of Richard Jeni’s career problem. Was he funny? Hell, yes. Was he memorable? Somehow… no. Although I’m not an expert on his act, I still can’t tell you what his “act” was: What was his character?

Now he’s killed himself. No one knows why for sure, and I’m not convinced that even the suicides themselves ultimately know why. But Elayne Boosler hints in this remembrance on the Huffington Post that it was frustration that other, lesser-gifted, comedians rose to prominence that Richard Jeni never quite achieved. To me, it sounds like a good theory. Because no matter how I tried, I couldn’t convince my own brothers that they recognized him.

Marvel Editor-in-Chief, Joe Quesada, is interviewed here along with Stan Lee about the death of Captain America.

Cap’s co-creator, Joe Simon, is still among us. He’s been quoted as saying that the death is a shame, because “we need him now more than ever.” Given that Mr. Simon lived through World War I, World II, the Cold War, McCarthyism, the Depression, and so many other assorted horrors and atrocities of the 20th century, this is indeed a troubling statement.

Someone close to me died and only now has it started to sink in.

That’s right, I’m talking about Captain America.

Cap and I go way back. We first met in the late 60’s, when, according to my father, hippies were attacking the country. That didn’t sound like a good thing, but it didn’t seem to affect Cap too much — he was always fighting Hydra or the Red Skull, and when he did interact with hippies or “minorities” it seemed like he was able to bridge the gaps in culture and generation. (And remember, Cap was an enlisted man in during World War II, so the gaps were huge.) He teamed up with the Falcon and learned some things about an outsider’s view of the system and what it felt like to be non-white and suspicious of the Man. And then, famously, Cap had a falling out with the Nixon administration, discovered that it was the president who was behind the vast conspiracy attacking the country from within, and quit being Captain America.

I was 12. It seemed impossible that Captain America — who set such a personal example of tolerance, yet, like Churchill, was able to spot evil early when he saw it — wasn’t going to represent us any more.

He came back later, after a number of other people tried to be Captain America. They knew the value of the symbol, and if he wasn’t going to wear it, others would. And that was the point when I realized that Captain America had never symbolized the United States of America — that he symbolized an ideal that we hoped to get to.

Now he’s dead. Will he be back? According to my subscription form — sorry to blow the surprise — after five months or so of downtime, someone named “Captain America” will be back with a new title. But if it is not this character, Private Steve Rogers, who surrendered to the government recently after waging an all-out war against what sounds to me suspiciously like The “Patriot” Act (quote marks courtesy of me), it won’t be the same. Steve Rogers turned himself in when he found that he’d lost the support of the people in the streets; evidently they liked the idea of registration for people with powers. To me, this is suspiciously close to “registering” the artists, the writers, the musicians, the philosophers, the scientists — anyone who thinks differently — and the relative quiescence of the majority of us speaks volumes.

Yesterday this nation’s Inspector General released a report documenting the extent to which the FBI has misued the “Patriot” Act in securing private information about individuals, all with no warrant. Today we have a minor hoohah over this; tomorrow, the “Patriot” Act will continue.

I’m sorry Captain America died, especially now. It seems like one more indication that we’ve lost the ideal, and that we aren’t deserving of the symbol.