I was going to post all sorts of things on this blog tonight, but wound up writing 10 pages of my new play tonight instead.

Late last year, I started going to the gym regularly. Mostly to deal with chronic pain I’ve been experiencing since a car accident (not my fault) two-and-a-half years ago. It’s not something I talk about too much, and it’s not something I believe I’ve written about here before. At first, I started going to the gym just to loosen up, and to sit in the jacuzzi as often and for as long as I could. But then, sometime in February, something started to happen: I started to feel like I needed to go to the gym. Like I had things to work out. And now I’ve further turned that corner: Now I’m someone who looks forward to going to the gym.

For years, I posted on this blog every day. Every single day. Lately, it’s been more sporadic. I’ve wondered why that is, especially since I write every day. It’s not always playwriting (or, clearly, blog writing), but every single day I’m writing something, some of it for a fair amount of pay, some of it for some small amount of pay at some point (those tend to be plays), and some of it, I’m sure, for no pay whatsoever (those would be poems and short stories, which I haven’t even bothered to send out for years now). The itch I now get when I don’t go to the gym or get some other physical activity — the sense of feeling “rammy,” as the adults used to say about the overly rambunctious son of my father’s friend — is akin to the itch I get when I’m not writing.

But here’s what I think spurred an unexpected 10-page writing session on my play tonight: the miracle of seeing four compelling, enjoyable, thought-provoking plays recently, which were like finding water after being in the Mojave of bad theatre for the past two years, and the resumption of my playwriting workshop today. My workshop is stuffed with good writers writing good plays. When you’re in the room with that, you’d have to work not to be inspired by it.

The play I’m writing is a memory play. That’s not what I normally do, or, more appropriately, it isn’t what I’ve mostly done. (Or done at all?) But that’s what this play is. Tomorrow, we’re removing the seats from Moving Arts, the seats that we installed in 1993 or 1994, the seats donated to us that came from a silent movie house in the Bay Area where they were installed in 1916. We’re doing that because we’re putting in new seats. Parting ways with these seats that we’ve had for 20 years, and which have seen almost 100 years of audience derriere, will certainly spark more feelings fit for a memory play. But I’m excited to be part of taking them out for two reasons: because a number of them are going to a good new home where they’ll be cherished; and because while it’s good to appreciate the past, the future always beckons. And we’re already there, all the time.

My play “The Size of Pike” opens here in Los Angeles in April. We just finished two days of auditions, with callbacks tomorrow night. More news to follow about this when I have more news.

This is a new production of the play, by Moving Arts, which premiered it in… 1995, I think. (I could check on that, and will at some point.)

A lot has happened since 1995, and even 1994, when I wrote it. (I think. Again, I could check on that.)

One of those things is called the World Wide Web.

Another of those things is called the smartphone.

I could go on in this way.

This came to my attention, as it has in recent years with so many of my plays from the 1990’s or, gasp, the 1980’s, when someone has asked to read one or perform one or something: I look it over and suddenly see that elements of the play are now dated thanks (or “no thanks,” actually) to technology.

Witness “Happy Fun Family,” wherein editions of a newspaper are thrown in through the window at key moments. Here’s something that’s not too far off in the future: “Hey, Grampa, what’s a newspaper?” My kids don’t know what a cassette tape is. Not one of them has a wristwatch. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

While listening to actors audition to sides from “The Size of Pike,” I came to realize that an argument in the play — a central argument, one that winds through about, oh, 20 pages of the script — would be easily settled in 2013 by pulling out a smartphone. So I’m presented with two options:

Option A: Update the script, bring in the smartphone (or the threat of using it), and develop a new comic riff involving that;

Option B: Talk to the director about staging this as a period piece, i.e., set the play prior to that pesky World Wide Web / smartphone era.

Further complicating this matter: This play was selected as one of 20 plays drawn from its 20-year history that Moving Arts is revisiting. In other words, it’s a revival. Is it right to contemporize a revival? That seems somehow… wrong. Except I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen with at least one of the other 19 productions. Also, if I’m going to bring this play up to date, I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me with at least 10, maybe 15 other plays too — and I have new plays I’d rather write. I don’t know which path to take, yet, with this particular situation. I do know that I’m not the person who wrote it in 1994 — how could I be? — and tampering with it will not necessarily improve it. I’m well-versed in the bad tradition of writers seeking to improve or update their past successes and making them worse. No, I didn’t want or need the prequel to “The Zoo Story,” and I didn’t want most of the 388 poems Whitman added to the original 12-poem “Leaves of Grass” over four decades. On a lower plane of art, I also don’t want all the various versions of “Star Wars” — I liked that first one, complete with crummy models and bad prosthetics. The more it got “fixed,” the further removed it was from my appreciation of it. I’d rather I didn’t wind up accidentally contributing to the weakening of my own play.

Here’s what hyperbole looks like: Mary McNamara’s over-the-top encomium to Maggie Smith, in today’s Los Angeles Times.

Choice bits:

“…a performer of such consistent, elastic and unique fabulousness that, well into her eighth decade, she’s practically become her own genre.” (Given that elsewhere in the same piece, the writer extolls Ms. Smith’s virtuosity of range, I can’t imagine what the genre would be. Except, perhaps, “classy old British actors in movies and television.” Is that a genre?)

“…the lift of an eyebrow, the tilt of her chin, and the world cracks open in her hand.”

“Smith is one of those women who has looked essentially the same since she was 20…”

Here is Maggie Smith in 1969:

Here is Maggie Smith in 2012:

Now, I too like Maggie Smith. A lot. But I don’t believe she is a genre unto herself, I doubt that she can sunder the forces holding together the globe, nor do I think she can arrest the progress of time. I just think she’s a really, really good actor.

A few years ago, I dubbed our local elementary school’s annual offering “The Talentless Show,” because clearly you didn’t need any in order to get up on stage. Now I see I have company.

I’m sorry to learn of the closing of Hunger Artists Theatre in Fullerton, California, after 16 years of producing new work and brave revivals. They produced my play “Next Time” a few years ago, and many  plays by local playwrights, including scripts that came out of my workshop. I haven’t been down to Fullerton in a while (it’s 38 miles in distance from Burbank — but sometimes that translates into two hours of driving), but I liked knowing the theatre was there.

Here’s news of the announcement, and here’s a further analysis.

I get asked this sometimes. Here’s the answer:

Sometimes 46 minutes.

Sometimes a couple of weeks.

Sometimes a few months.

Sometimes four and a half years — as in the case of the play I just finished. Started it in 2008, and then oddly today I had the feeling that I could finish it. No, I don’t know why. Hadn’t even looked at it in years. But I cracked it open and looked at it and, yes, finished it.

(Which means there’s still hope for the play I started in 1990….)

When Ron Palillo died two weeks ago, it immediately brought to mind a one-act play festival we were both involved in back in 1989. Now I finally have time to tell you about it, and about the ironies of celebrity that I learned from the experience.

I was in grad school at USC, with a focus on playwriting. My play “Guest for Dinner” had been selected, along with three plays by three other writers, for the annual one-act play festival on campus. (A festival that, oddly enough, I became the producer of for two years about 20 years later.) This was a festival with fully staged productions — actors off-book, and with set pieces and costumes, with a three-night run, and this festival was a competition, meaning that one of us was going to be selected as a winner of something or other. As you can expect, each of us wanted to win, and at least two of us had all the arrogance and competitiveness rightly associated with male playwrights in their 20’s. (And, probably, most artists of any age.) One thing that the two of us agreed on was that the other two plays were terrible, and that we’d be happy to lose if we had to, so long as the other guy won. This is similar to the Oscar nominees who say “It’s an honor just to be nominated.” In other words, it’s bullshit. We both wanted to win. That said, I did think this other guy’s play was good, and perhaps better than mine, and that certainly ours were light years ahead of the other two.

But then Peter, the other guy, came up with an ace in the hole. He was able to cast a celebrity in his play. He announced excitedly one day that he had Ron Palillo (“Y’know, Horshack!”) in his play. I knew exactly who Ron Palillo was — I had grown up jeering at “Welcome Back, Kotter,” mostly, I think, because I knew kids like that at school and couldn’t stand them. At least, I now like to think that that’s why, because I’m friendly now with Mark Evanier, and “Kotter” was Mark’s first TV writing job. And Mark’s a good, clever, funny writer. Even though now, in 1989, “Horshack” was past his prime, 10 years earlier he had been a pretty big sitcom star, a guy whose face was on lunchboxes and board games and toys and on television screens around the world. Starring in my play I had a very good actor named Charlie Hayden who had once had a scene with Charles Bronson. (Quoth Charlie about working with Bronson: “Like acting with cement.”) Charlie was great, but he wasn’t on any lunchboxes.

During rehearsals, I would catch little breezes of trouble from Peter about working with Ron Palillo. I had no idea what any of this was about, but the general gist seemed to be that he was difficult and demanding. On the first two nights of performance, the plays came off without a hitch. Mine ran about the way it should, with laughs in the right places and the intentional anxiety of being made to wait in others, and Peter’s, about a troubled friend (or brother?) who had to be left behind, worked fine too, and the other two were still miserable to sit through. Occasionally, we would all comment on how lucky Peter was to have a celebrity in his, and Peter would accept that he was lucky indeed, at one point saying with consideration toward the inevitable judging night, “Well, yeah, and I’ve got ‘Horshack,’ too, so there’s that.”

On that judging night, a funny thing happened. For some reason, the sort of reason impossible to suss out in the theatre, that particular night’s audience really connected with my play. The laughs were bigger and the connection with the plight of our antihero was deeper. And, in Peter’s play, Ron Palillo came in on the wrong note, seemed angry and intense for no discernible reason as he tried his hand at “Acting!” with a big capital “a” and an exclamation mark, ran around the stage, and, when he jumped up on the bed on stage to make a point, he very loudly broke the frame of the bed, the bed cracking to the floor, Palillo tumbling off it, and the other two actors left first stunned then scrambling to regain some composure and continue. Later, much of the discussion was on Palillo’s antics and his on-stage calamity, and when the judges came back… I won.

Peter had thought he might win partly thanks to Ron Palillo. Now he was certain he’d lost entirely thanks to Ron Palillo.

After the performance and the announcement of the winner, one of my professors, Bill Idelson, who had written about a million hours of television and who I really liked and admired, told me what he thought of my play when I asked: He ripped it to shreds. And so, 23 years later, I still wonder if I did win because of Ron Palillo.

By the way, here’s what I won: a plaque. That’s it. A plaque that had my name and the title of my play engraved on it as winner. I’m looking at it right now on my wall as I write this. The following year, I was in this festival again, and this time I know I had the best play — and I lost. As they say, “You win some, you lose some.” The impact in this case was nil either way. Later that same year, I had a play in a festival run by Jerome Lawrence, the revered co-author of “Inherit the Wind,” “Mame,” “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail” and many other plays. One evening in the restroom, Jerry asked me what I thought of playwriting contests. Before I could respond he said, “I’m agin’ ’em.” He said we shouldn’t make playwrights compete against each other. He felt it was already too hard to be a playwright; why extend the suffering?

All this came back to me when I heard of Ron Palillo’s death — and then saw this piece on Mark Evanier’s blog. Mark doesn’t have very nice things to say about working with Ron Palillo either, and in my experience (and from reading his blog), Mark is generous with credit and good to work with. But I also wonder what it felt like to have been an enormous television star in 1979, and 10 years later to be performing for free in a one-act play festival at USC in the hopes that someone, anyone, from the film school, or perhaps one of the professional judges, or the next Spielberg in the audience, might spot you and give you again even the smallest taste of what you’d had so recently. And so that was the lesson of celebrity that I learned: that fame cuts both ways, for those who are famous, and also for those who expect things from association with it.

Various news sources have reported that Gore Vidal died today at age 86. He had been in declining health for some while. Over the years, I’ve seen him numerous times around town at various events such as the LA Times Festival of Books, and I recall seeing him somewhere a year or two ago where he mostly sat planted in a chair, slightly confused. In his final television appearance (at least, the final one I saw), on Bill Maher’s show on HBO, Mr. Maher was uncharacteristically gracious in trying to overlook Mr. Vidal’s slippage. I say all this by way of noting that I doubt anyone is surprised that he’s now died, and to recall the comment a friend made after we’d both seen that HBO show: “He needs to die now.” I like to think that Gore Vidal would have appreciated the candor.

A quick scan of my bookshelves reveals 13 volumes of his works, plus others that I’ve read that I know are misshelved: I read “Creation” and his omnibus of essays, and “Kalki” and “Myra Breckinridge” and I don’t see any of them there. All tolled, I’ve read many thousands of pages of his work, some of them twice, and have earned the right to say that he was not a prose stylist. (And so, don’t believe any obits that would have you think so.) What he was was a popularizer — someone who knew history, both ancient and modern, better than you did, and could spin an entertaining yarn about it that conveyed his firmly held opinions. That’s what he did in print, and that’s what he did on television, frequently with Johnny Carson but often with others: make a middlebrow audience feel smarter. To read Gore Vidal was to make connections between past and present, and between people here and people there, that you otherwise would have missed, and to think afresh about things that everyone else had considered settled.

This middlebrow reader will miss him. Not because I agreed with him (sometimes yes, sometimes no), but because his writing was informative, his opinions were usually countervailing, and his style was always entertaining. And also because he’s our last great literary celebrity, someone who was widely read and widely bed.

It begins with setting up a paper tiger you can knock down easily. Then it goes from there. Here’s how.