Unsurprisingly, Moving Art’s The Car Plays is a huge hit in its current run at La Jolla Playhouse down in San Diego County, California. I say unsurprisingly because the show is a unique theatrical experience, and because each time one of the plays is performed, it’s performed for an audience of two. So, yes, it sells out. Quickly.

Which makes it all the better news that the show has been extended for  one more weekend, which means it runs this weekend, and next, closing March 11. Here’s where you can get tickets (if you can).

In the publicity shot at top provided by the La Jolla Playhouse, you see Sara Wagner as Esme Coughlin in my play Dead Battery, plaintively making calls from within her teenage son’s car to learn more about his life, his death, and her own culpability. You also see a couple of audience members. (Look:  Another sold-out performance.) I have to say, it’s an amazing voyeuristic experience living out these little playlets from inside the cars they take place in, and it’s a testament to the phenomenal work of some very very talented actors. My wife (admittedly perhaps biased) cried just reading the script; imagine how it feels being in that car while this grief-demolished woman struggles to maintain her self-control; now imagine what it takes for an actor to do that performance 15 times a night. I am enormously grateful to Sara and to my director, Paul Stein, who is also the progenitor of the entire Car Plays concept. I’m grateful to them both, as I hope you can see in this shot below, taken over celebratory beers at the local bar on opening night last Thursday.

Nice to see that this review on LATimes.com “as been corrected.” Phew!

That’s how long my friend Doug drove today just so we could have dinner together.

He was in southern California from Texas, just overnight. He had a meeting in Carlsbad (that’s just above San Diego), while I had a series of meetings up here in Burbank. The only time slot we had in common was dinner — so Doug drove two hours up and two hours back just so we could meet for dinner. After we ate, as he was walking back to his rental car and I was getting ready to head off to City Hall, he said, “Well worth it!”

This is not the sort of commitment made by passing acquaintances. To drive for four hours to spend 90 minutes together, you’ve really got to be a friend.

For rent:

Beautiful open-plan loft space situated in bucolic surroundings. This freshly built one-room hideaway, nestled in the bosom of fruit trees providing natural shade, works with its natural environment and is open to both wind and solar. Its compact design ensures efficiency, while allowing affordability and comfort exceeding tenement spaces in lower Manhattan. A simple rope system dumbwaiter ushers goods from ground level. Photos below only hint at the possibilities.

Note: Please do not disturb current occupants. These members of the construction crew are now squatting, but will be removed.

I’m pleased to report that “The Cowboys” still works as it did 40 years ago, for boys at least.

I was thrilled beyond measure when, after John Wayne’s character Wil Andersen is shot five times by Bruce Dern’s evil cattle rustler,  my son Dietrich said, “He’s not dead.”

I hit pause on the DVR and asked him, “Why do you say that?”

“He can’t be. He’s just faking it so the boys don’t get hurt.”

This was exactly my reading of the movie 40 years ago when I was his age. Somehow, this restored my hope that somehow today’s kids are not utterly jaded. When it was over and I asked Dietrich what he thought of the movie, he told me how much he’d enjoyed it, and that his favorite part was when the boys all had their revenge on the bad guys who killed Mr. Andersen. Of course — as intended.

The movie is compelling filmmaking for 9-year-olds; for the rest of us, from the beginning scene showing what’s clearly a stunt double for a fat old John Wayne taming a breaking a wild horse, to the triumphant scene where 10 kids, mostly preteen, outwit and outshoot a gang of 11 grown men, it’s science fiction. I’m sure I never noticed any of that when I was a kid. Here’s something else that’s changed in my perception:  Now it’s a movie populated by people I’ve known, which makes it harder to focus on purely as a work of fiction. I hadn’t realized that Mark Rydell was the director and producer; some years ago, I co-taught a class with Mark Rydell (although we met in person only once). Now I wish I’d told him what an impact this movie made on me as a child. Lonny Chapman, whom I knew a bit through the Group Repertory Theatre (which is now named the Lonny Chapman Group Repertory Theatre), has a small role as the father of one of the boys. And now whenever I see Bruce Dern in something, where I used to think fondly of the early environmentalist science fiction movie “Silent Running,” now I think of speaking with him a couple of times in recent years, including at his wife’s art opening. (Along similar lines:  I was telling a friend last week that whenever I think of Scott Bakula, all I remember is being surprised seeing him in the audience at my tiny little theatre once when he was in the prime of his career. Whenever something like that happens, it’s like:  “Audience, audience, audience, major TV star, audience, audience….”)

The other thing that I now notice about “The Cowboys,” something that is so transparent to an adult, is that it’s a movie about fathers and sons. Both of Wil Andersen’s boys died before reaching their prime; now he has a chance to serve as a father figure in what will be a life-transforming experience for these boys. There’s a scene where two of them are tempted by prostitutes — my son had no idea what this was about, and I’m sure I didn’t either at his age — and in another scene, Roscoe Lee Browne’s character tells Wes that with these boys he has another chance at fatherhood. I can see why the film resonated then, and now, with boys of a certain age.

Who was the first superhero? Maybe it was Abraham Lincoln.

And here’s another moment of pop-culture history that shook my childhood:  The episode of “Star Trek” where Kirk teams up with Lincoln, and Lincoln gets killed. Again. (And Kirk has to carry on the mandate of fighting for “the good.”) As a kid, it made me sad to see that. As an adult, I have to observe that some people just seem fated to die for a cause.

1. Watch “The Cowboys” with my 9-year-old son. I was that age when my father (and mother) took me to see it. In the movie, John Wayne plays a rancher who is forced to hire a bunch of kids who work for him as real cowboys. Near the end of the movie, John Wayne’s character is killed off and the boys have to complete the cattle drive without him. This was astonishing to me, and I kept waiting for the trick ending, showing that he was actually alive and had been secretly watching over the boys the entire time like a guardian angel. But nope, he was actually dead, and I couldn’t get over it. I’m curious to see what this generation will make of that. Prediction:  nothing. They’re inured to everything now.
2. Stay up really late (or, well, early) writing.
3. Interrupt extended bout of writing with blog posts.We’ll see.

Last night, my friend Jonathan Josephson’s theatre troupe descended unannounced on Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood to perform several poems by Charles Bukowski. You can watch the performance below — and be sure to note the reactions of diners seated in and around the playing area. I understand their constrained response:  I’m not sure I’d want to be eating Barney’s signature chili dog while being accosted by an actor reciting “My Underwear Has Shit Stains Too.”

Last year, I bought my wife a gift and a card on Valentine’s Day. When I brought them home, she said, “Oh. I thought we weren’t celebrating it.”

I spent days pondering what that meant. Especially since I thought everything was fine.

Today was Valentine’s Day again. As we know, I was busy out of town for four days, then utterly jammed the past two. And I had to pick up not just my son, but also two of his friends after school for a sleepover so their mother could have her first date in three years (on Valentine’s Day, no less). So even though on the way home, I thought about it being Valentine’s Day, if I stopped to get something for my wife, it would be not only last-minute and inconvenient — but also unnecessary, because it seemed to have been established last year that we weren’t celebrating it.  I didn’t know why we weren’t celebrating it, or when we had evidently agreed not to, but somehow, the story went, we had. So I drove home with said kids in tow and ordered a pizza and a salad and that was it.

Then my wife came home with a gift and a card for me. “Happy Valentine’s Day!” she said. Then she grew slightly impatient when I didn’t open either item right away.

So I have several theories about this. (As I told someone today, 35 years of writing plays have left me focused on motivation.)

1. She’s toying with me. Then and now.
2. She isn’t toying with me, and this year she’s in a better mood than last year.
3. Last year, I did agree not to celebrate it but then forgot, and this year I was too preoccupied and used last year as an excuse. (If those things are true, I’m the unwitting villain in this piece.)
4. Neither one of us knows what the fuck we’re doing.

By the way, the year before, we celebrated perhaps the best Valentine’s Day ever for us, with a wonderful time before, during and after a fine meal at a fantastic restaurant with romantic live guitar accompaniment. So one thing you can say for us:  After 28 Valentine’s Days together, we’re still not stuck in a rut.