A week and a half ago, I proposed that the Spider-Man musical might have been better if they’d had an actual Spider-Man writer involved.  Sounds like the producers have now gotten one of those involved — and, importantly, it’s one who is also a playwright.

The unanswered question is:  What could be changed in the script that could make the show better? In my experience, every production gets its own culture — its own informing ethos — that is distinct from what’s in the script; Apple and IBM may both make computers, but they do them rather differently, and what we see is a reflection not just of the different plans on paper, but of the different company cultures. A theatrical production is mounted by a production company, and that company culture is difficult to change. Once you get too far into the rehearsal process, it’s difficult to change directions, and “Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark” is a show that, more or less, for better or worse, seems to have opened, and long ago. (It has also been widely reviewed, and savagely panned.) Add to that that this is supposedly the most technically demanding show in Broadway history; what significant changes can be made when you’ve already got that much physical hardware in place? And finally:  With a show that is already legendary for the injuries incurred in some very dangerous stunts, how much will producers want to risk in changing how the rigging and pyrotechnics and whatnot work in relation to the script?

It’s a lot to overcome. I hope they can work it out.

For one day only, Saturday March 5th, my esteemed playwright pal Trey Nichols and I are offering “The One-Day New Play Playwriting Workshop” at a theatre in Hollywood. It’s a fundraiser for Moving Arts, the theatre we’ve been associated with since… well, almost since before the dawn of the modern age of drama. (Which in our case would be the early 1990’s.) Here’s more info.

In just one day, we’ll cover a lot of ground about writing plays that scintillate, you’ll get to do plenty of loose and fun playwriting on the spot, and you’ll leave with the makings of a short play — which will be read by really good actors we’re going to personally shanghai into doing this.

Should you sign up to come do this? Hell yes. We’re serving breakfast and lunch, you’ll hear your pages read by professional actors,  we’ve got 20 years’ experience teaching playwriting, and we’ll do our best not to be boring. (And it’s for a good cause:  the event benefits a theatre donated 100% to doing new plays by emerging playwrights.) Never written a play before? Give us the day, and we’ll change that for you. Written plenty of plays, but ready for something different? We can handle that too. Just bring your laptop. And yes, Angelenos:  There is plenty of free parking. Here’s everything you need to know.

We’d love to have you, and we’ve got only 20 slots.  Here’s where to sign up.

It looks like the major critics have abandoned waiting for “opening night” — whenever that will be — of  the musical “Spider-man:  Turn Off the Dark,” and are now running reviews. Their calculation, no doubt, is this:  The show is doing major box-office business, it’s big talk in theatre circles, and it’s essentially being reviewed daily on the internet by people who’ve seen it. So yet again, old media and its old way of doing business is responding too slowly to new dynamics.

So the “professional” reviews are in, and they are punishing.  The LA Times’ Charles McNulty calls it “a teetering colossus,”  a “frenetic Broadway jumble,”and “an artistic form of megalomania.” In his review for the New York Times, Ben Brantley shares his paper’s decision making process in going ahead with a review, before swooping in for the first strike:

But since this show was looking as if it might settle into being an unending work in progress — with Ms. Taymor playing Michelangelo to her notion of a Sistine Chapel on Broadway — my editors and I decided I might as well check out “Spider-Man” around Monday, the night it was supposed to have opened before its latest postponement. You are of course entitled to disagree with our decision. But from what I saw on Saturday night, “Spider-Man” is so grievously broken in every respect that it is beyond repair.

Of the many effects in the show, he adds:  “But they never connect into a comprehensible story with any momentum. Often you feel as if you were watching the installation of Christmas windows at a fancy department store.”

To me, two things are worth noting from these reviews:

1. What he and McNulty are describing is spectacle. Whether or not one subscribes to Aristotle, it’s good to bear in mind that he ranked spectacle low on the level of artistic achievement. Story is important for a reason. Even the elementally simple “Waiting for Godot” has  a story — and a good one. And I can personally testify that Spider-Man has featured prominently in any number of good stories for the past 50 years.
2. The character on the right in the photo above is Hammerhead. Hammerhead is bar none the lamest Spider-Man villain, even lamer than Stiltman (who, really, is a Daredevil villain). Stiltman is just a guy on, well, stilts. Hammerhead is just a guy with a steel plate in his head. I once met a guy with a steel plate in his head; it didn’t give him superhuman abilities, it just protected what was left of his brain. He was almost as dumb as Hammerhead. I didn’t realize that Hammerhead was in the Spider-Man musical; seeing him there alerts me to just how misbegotten this show must be, and makes me wonder how much better the show might have been had they hired any one of the writers who’ve written all those solid comic-book stories to at least consult on this.

Bristol Palin’s forthcoming “memoir.”

Theoretically, the memoir form calls for self-reflection. I hope someone tells her that this doesn’t just mean looking in the mirror.

I was just asked to serve as a judge again this year for the PEN USA literary awards. This is my second time, and it’s again an honor. I’ll be toting around new plays through the summer and reading them and scribbling feedback. Last time I did this, I got to hang out with Larry Gelbart for a little while at the awards ceremony; that in itself made it worthwhile.

And I was just booked again into the Great Plains Theatre Conference this May-June in Omaha. This will be my fourth year serving as a judge or feedbackmeister or whatever they call it, as well as a workshop leader. GPTC is one of the very best playwriting retreats in the nation, one I’m proud to be associated with. I’ve made many good friends there, seen many good plays, and have even written a couple of them on the spot while I’ve been there. (One of which was produced last year.) Talk about environments — it’s a terrific environment to go to with a play.

I just came across this interview with my friend and former student, playwright Stephanie Alison Walker. (I knew her when she was just plain Stephanie Walker. In fact, I knew her before that, when she was Stephanie Weinert. But now she’s Stephanie Alison Walker. Such are the ways of writers.)

The focus of this interview is on Stephanie’s writing environment — her desk, her setup, the inspirational collage nearby, etc. I found this very interesting. For many years, my writing was done in a separate home office. But for probably the past five years or more, my preferred writing environment has been outside.  Outside with my laptop, a glass of wine or something stronger, and a cigar. It was said that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote anywhere, even on the platforms of train stations with his wife and kids in tow as they awaited the train. I’ve done that too, writing anywhere, but whether or not I can write anywhere, editing is done best without disturbance.

The notable thing lacking, for me, in this discussion of Stephanie’s writing environment is sound. I write to music, usually the more raucous or dissonant or bizarrely twisted the better, but it depends upon the mood of the play. (And yes, the mood of the music informs the mood of the play.) You know that really harsh Nirvana album that most people didn’t like? That’s the one I wrote a play to. But I’ve also written to Glenn Gould (a favorite) and Erik Satie.

And where am I writing this now? From the desk in my office, before delving into a fully scheduled day. I’m looking forward to working on my new play the next couple of days while I’m out of town. And, maybe, outside.

There are many who deserve that title, but according to Michael Feingold in the Village Voice, perhaps none moreso than Romulus Linney, who died on Saturday. Don’t know anything about Mr. Linney? Perform a Google search and you’ll find that his daughter was the actress Laura Linney, but you’ll find comparatively far less about the playwright himself, and his work.

In his piece for the Voice, Feingold notes that Linney was a practical stranger to Broadway (only one production, largely unremarked), that he didn’t write for television or film, and that his interests were catholic. The latter in particular may have been difficult to overcome — we expect our writers to represent something, in the way that the plays of David Mamet and Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco represent singular points of view and recurring themes and situations.  It sounds as though Linney’s range of interests and lines of attack were broad, making him difficult to categorize, and therefore rendering him less immediately memorable.

Why do I say “it sounds as though”? Because as relatively well-versed as I am in contemporary American playwriting, and with all the theatre I’ve attended in 30 years of playgoing, I’ve never read or seen a single play by Romulus Linney.

This is Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs,” adapted (?) to video by Spike Jonze. It mines the same territory as the Wallace Shawn play “The Designated Mourner” — that our obliviousness to the freedoms we take so casually endangers them — but more believably. That’s saying something for a music video, over the work of perhaps our greatest living playwright.

A friend emailed me tonight to let me know that the television show “Rubicon” had been canceled. He said he knew it seemed silly, but he was a little down about it, as though he’d lost a friend. Why did he email me? Because he knew I’d feel the same way. We were the only two people we knew who were watching it.

“Rubicon” dealt with a group of government analysts tasked with sifting through reams of data, usually in the form of stacks of reports, to find clues about terrorist strikes. Ultimately, the team finds the source of terrorism against the U.S. — and it turns out to be their own organization. The first (and now last) season ended with the group having perpetrated a terrorist attack of enormous proportions, scuttling U.S. access to oil from the Gulf of Mexico and deeply wounding the U.S. economy. What would have happened next, we’ll never know.

What drew me to the show was its deliberate pacing, and its layers of meaning and characterization. In an age where it’s expected that everyone will be distracted at all times, “Rubicon” insisted that you pay attention. Midway through the season it occurred to me that some of the characters’ odd names must have been anagrams, or clues — and, indeed, I unscrambled “Kale Ingram” into Leak Margin — because he was a leak, and he played the margins. That sort of exploration provided superficial fun; what was more exciting was deciding that Mr. Ingram, who by all evidence could not be trusted, needed to be trusted by the main character, Will Travers, because Travers had nowhere else to turn. And so we were vicariously put into the position of all the characters — making alliances with unfit allies, just as players on the world stage do every day.

I did my bit advocating for the show, and I did manage to get one new person to watch it. “Rubicon”‘s finale claimed just over one million viewers. “Mad Men,” a show that has descended into ludicrousness, netted two-and-a-half million people for its own season finale. In a nation of 300 million people, that’s not that great a difference. While “Mad Men,” somehow, is in the zeitgeist, it didn’t start there; most people climbed onto the show via DVD prior to the second season. I think something similar would have, or could have, happened with “Rubicon.” At the least, I wish AMC had invested in one more season to find out.

I’m not the only one who will miss the show. (Here is Vanity Fair’s Mike Ryan bemoaning the show’s demise.) “Rubicon” was the only show I ever wanted to have a water-cooler conversation about. The problem was that no one else was at the water cooler yet.

Here’s something some of us never thought we’d see:  a major exhibition of Charles Bukowski’s work at a major, respected institution here in the U.S. I wonder if  the Times’ Carolyn Kellogg is trying to make something of the Bukowski exhibit’s proximity to a rare edition of Chaucer, as if to say, “Here is the work of a bum beside the work of an acclaimed artist.” I don’t think that’s her point — she seems too smart for that — and I certainly hope it isn’t. If anything, Bukowski owes a clear debt to Chaucer, as do Mark Twain and Hemingway and Carver and indeed every other writer in English who wrote in the vernacular. Chaucer invented that style. No Chaucer, probably no Bukowski.

I’m always glad to see it when academia and the forces of order working from their fortresses of solitude pry open their doors and let in someone new or underground, so it’s a delight to see Bukowski honored in this way. I’m not sure how he would have felt about it (half-embarrassed and half-exalted, probably), but I intend to ask our mutual friend Gerald Locklin. And I intend to go see the exhibit.