Today I politely told four more people that my eight-week playwriting workshop, Words That Speak, is sold out. I take only 10 playwrights at a time, and then only five times a year (for a total of 40 weeks); the only time someone new gets in is when someone doesn’t renew. In the course of a year, five slots might open up.

I don’t enjoy turning people down. I really don’t. But I haven’t had extra room in this workshop for quite some time now, and I’m not going to add another workshop because that will cut into my own writing time. If someone doesn’t get in, I offer to put him or her onto the wait list; after which, if there is an opening at some point, I read sample pages and do a phone interview.

But in all the years (21 of them) that I’ve been leading this workshop, I’ve never gotten an entreaty like this one, which I got tonight in an email from someone I don’t know:

Dear Lee,
I want to get information on your play writing workshops. I am working on my first play and it means a lot to me since it has to do with my daughter’s suicide. I really have to make it happen.
Thank You so much.

My heart sank when I saw this; I can’t imagine the despair behind it. As politely as possible, I emailed back, and offered a slot on the wait list.

This.

Who said what, writer James Joyce or rapper Kool Keith? Take the test here.

At some point or other, almost every playwright finds himself in a development process. His (or her) play is being workshopped for a short run, possibly for consideration of future production; or he’s at a retreat working with actors and directors that will result in a reading of sorts; or he’s at a new play development conference for a public reading with feedback; or he’s working out some areas by having some actor friends get together and read scenes now and then.

I’ve been involved in many of these experiences myself, as a playwright or director or producer or respondent.

So, occasionally, I’m asked by a playwright for my advice on whether or not to bring an unfinished play into such a situation. Not a play that has a first draft and needs a rewrite, and not a play that is stuck and that the playwright needs to hear — a play that is being written but which is currently unfinished.

Here’s what I say:

I can’t say what you should do, but  I can tell you what I would not do:  I would not take an uncompleted play into a development situation, especially not a play-in-process that is working well.

1. Well, nobody said writing a play should be easy. But I’m still working on it.

(Leaving out, for obvious reasons, anything I worked on or that are still in development, including several honestly terrific plays I saw at The Great Plains Theatre Conference.)

Some years, I’ll see three or four plays a month — or more. In 2013, I saw only 15 (not counting the plays that Moving Arts was involved with, or, again, that I saw at GPTC, or that were workshops or staged readings.) What do I look for in a play? I don’t care about subject matter (although I’m adverse to plays that confuse neurotic couples arguing on their couch with drama, and one-person shows about how darn difficult it was growing up with parents who just didn’t understand), or form, or tone. I want to see things on stage that stick will stick with me because they’ve brought a new level of insight or inquiry; in other words, I want to be surprised and provoked. And entertained.

Putting it that way, two plays stood out above all others:

1. The Nether by Jennifer Haley, a Center Theatre Group production at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. In this dystopian not-so-distant future, people who can afford it escape their bleak day-to-day by living their meaningful lives in an area of the Internet called The Nether. In the Nether, people with horrifying thoughts and impulses are free to live out their fantasies — until the authorities deem even those fantasies illegal. The ramifications are far-reaching of investigating and prosecuting would-be pedophiles for their inclinations even while they are only virtually living out their fantasies. As all truly great drama does, The Nether pits strong arguments against each other — there are no straw men here — in a way that leaves one arguing about what is true and good and right. Starting from a powerhouse script, the production was flawlessly mounted and staged. I’m very glad that I read none of the reviews in advance (even the set held surprises) and instead just heeded trusted friends who implored me to see it. It’s a play that I won’t ever forget.
2. And now, a runner-up:  The Whale by Samuel D. Hunter. Although Hunter’s script piles up metaphors that aren’t fully explored or dramatically grounded, when the action centers around the enormously overweight central character, the play sings. Matthew Arkin’s devastating performance of a 600-pound man whose lungs and joints and legs and entire body are failing him will always weigh on me. Watching this obsessively unhappy man dig ferociously into a bucket of fried chicken was a sad spectacle — half the audience groaned audibly — but his determination to do right by his estranged daughter before he died elevated the character to a rare humanity.

I have a short play that’s being performed during Moving Arts’ holiday party this Saturday evening. It’s one of six plays that will be staged at various locations around a large house in the Hollywood Hills.

I invited a relative to join us for this on Saturday night. Every industry has its jargon; when you’re a practitioner in that industry, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s jargon and therefore what people won’t automatically understand. So when I invited her to join me for a holiday cocktail party “in a large house, with six brief environmentally staged plays,” she asked me, “What is an environmentally staged play?”

I explained that an “environmentally staged play” means it happens in different locations and is specific to those locations. (Mine is set in a bedroom, and is performed in a bedroom.)

She responded, “The plays sound interesting. We were thinking it meant the props were all from recycled materials.”

Which, of course, makes sense on the face of it. Especially given that I once produced a play called “Cockroach Nation” with set dressing largely drawn from trash….

I was sorry to learn just now of the death of Syd Field, a colleague of mine when I was teaching in the graduate writing program at the University of Southern California. Syd was a nice guy and a good teacher. And a bit influence:  just about everyone in Hollywood has read his book. Here’s the obit.

Also, I seem to have missed the passing of Marcia Wallace. Just over five years ago, Marcia was in a special performance of one of my plays — a one-night-only fundraising thing — and I have to say, she killed it. I knew the thing was funny (it had been done before), but she found all sorts of new things that made me seem like a comedy genius. She was very sweet to work with. I grew up watching her on The Bob Newhart Show, so getting to work with her, however briefly, felt like one of those situations where you ask yourself how you wound up this lucky in life. I’m sorry we’ll never get another chance. I hope that, somewhere in my “records” such as they are, I can find that photo we took together.

Effective today, I’m no longer artistic director of Moving Arts, the theatre I founded in 1992. And it’s a good thing.

I love my theatre company, and all of our history, and I enjoyed being artistic director from 1992 to 2002, and then again for about the past five years. But here’s what I really want to do now with Moving Arts: be the best supporter of our new artistic director and our company as possible — and be a playwright. I loved running a theatre, but it’s time (again) for new people, and I have another company I’m leading right now (this one, with my business partner, which provides another place to work with smart, talented people every day).

Here’s the announcement re our new artistic director, Darin Anthony. We picked Darin over a surprising number of other well-qualified people who applied. We did that because in addition to being awfully talented, and smart, and dedicated to new-play development, he’s the right fit for us. As he said on Sunday night when he addressed the theatre company on the eve of the announcement, he didn’t just want to be an artistic director, he wanted to be artistic director of Moving Arts (and had been quietly campaigning for the post for two years). Moreover, he has an attractive
vision for where we can go.

This is an exciting moment, for Moving Arts and for me. I’m looking forward to lots of productions and workshops and readings and developmental labs of new plays, including, I hope, my own.

In my adolescence, I was fortunate to meet the right person at the right time. I’m speaking of my mentor, Rich Roesberg.

There’s no one who has made a greater influence on my cultural life.

Growing up in the Pine Barrens and surrounding environs of southern New Jersey made artistic and intellectual engagement hard to come by. People who, last decade, abhorred the encroachment of big-box chain bookstores, to the supposed detriment of small independent bookshops, had no idea what it was like growing up in a place with no bookstore nearby. If there had been a Borders bookstore anywhere near me when I was growing up, it would have been a godsend.

As it was, though, I had my own godsend. One day my mother went into a Hallmark greeting-card store in a strip mall to buy some cards. The store also carried books — in fact, it was called Blatt’s Books — and I found in the back some secondhand comic-books. What I discovered when I took them to the front counter was the assistant manager, an elder in his late 20’s named Rich Roesberg, and a conversation about comic books that over the 35+ years since then has broadened into art, music, politics, and much, much more. “Uncle Rich,” as my gang and I started calling him, became my oasis.

Here’s an abbreviated list of what I found through him during my impressionable adolescent years:

1. A deep admiration for Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and the Beach Boys
2. An appreciation for dada and surrealism
3. R. Crumb
4. John Cage
5. Cut-up (Brion Gysin’s technique)
6. Soupy Sales
7. The Bonzo Dog Doodah Band
8. Jean Shepherd
9. Bob & Ray
10. Steve Ditko (it was Roesberg who made me see how wonderful his work is)
11. Bill Irwin
12. Ernie Kovacs
13. Steve Allen
14. Uncle Floyd
15. Charles Bukowski
16. John Fante
17. Alfred Jarry
18. William S. Burroughs