Thanks to good friend Doug Hackney of letting me know about this:  Jason Freedman’s post “Become a morning person. How to end insomnia for $520.99.” Here it is.

My response is twofold:

1. Hypnosis worked better than anything else ever has.
2. My hypnotist told me that my problem is that I don’t really want to go to sleep. “You’re right,” I said. “It seems like a waste of time.” I related this to my brother recently and he agreed and in precisely the same words:  “It seems like a waste of time.” Which makes me think that the Wochner family condition certainly runs in the family, and therefore may be genetic (as has always been my assumption), or may be cultural. Maybe we’re just not a bunch of time wasters.

There are other reasons I don’t really want to go to sleep. I’m a playwright, not a novelist. Novelists work in seclusion — they write their novel (inevitably in the mornings), and then they do whatever else it is they do the rest of the day. (Almost all of them:  work a day job or teach.) Playwrights write at night because the theatre takes place at night — that’s our natural timeframe. In fact, we often write after the theatre. So here’s the schedule:

• 8 PM the show starts
• 10-11 PM the show ends
• 11 PM – 1 a.m. drinks ensue, whether it’s your show or not
• 1 a.m. to ??? you’re writing your play

This applies not just to me. It’s the same story I’ve been hearing in my workshop for 17 years now, and one I heard again just last Saturday:  “I didn’t write these pages until 2 a.m. this morning….” We know, honey. That’s when all of us were writing our pages. You’re one of us.

That said, I did download the free program that the gentleman above recommended. It’s called f.lux (and no, I don’t think the wordplay is cute enough). It controls the relative light of your computer (in my case, a 17″ MacBook Pro). It lowered the glow from my screen to a shade of what I’ll call Santa Monica Pier at dusk. We’ll see if I sleep any better. And maybe this vodka-and-cranberry I’m having will help.

At some point in the immediate years hence — i.e., within the next three years — I intend to arrive upon the truly perfect solution for me:  Going to bed at 5 a.m. and awakening at 11 a.m. I did that for years and it worked flawlessly. I don’t need a lot of sleep — I just need it to be in the right timezone for me. In three years, my 8-year-old will be 11 and he can get his own damn self off to school just like his older sister and brother did. I’m counting the hours.

My theatre company, Moving Arts, is playing along with the Hollywood Fringe Festival this week. Our offering is called “A.S.A.P. Fables,” in which randomly formed teams of performers and writers concoct new fables drawn from audience-suggested fables.

Here’s the Moving Arts website for more information. If you’d like to come out and play, we’d love to have you. (The team meeting is this Thursday night.) If you’d just like to come watch, please come do that on Saturday at 5. We’ll be performing five of these fun little plays at different locations all around the historic Hollywood United Methodist Church.

In the meantime, here’s a fable you think you know, but don’t.

A few days ago I set out to write a tribute to my friend and former student, playwright EM Lewis. Along the way, the piece also turned into a rumination about being a playwright, and being a playwright in Los Angeles. Here’s the piece.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’m in Omaha at the Great Plains Theatre Conference, where I’ve seen many old friends and made some new ones. I’ve also been making new Friends — Friends with a capital “F” being the designation one gives when it’s someone you know, or will know, primarily through Facebook.  Lately I’ve noticed a new dynamic:  Friending snobbery. I note it when two strong egos clash over who Friended whom (and, therefore, was seemingly the weaker person in the engagement). Several months ago my son claimed I had Friended him. I had not. I pointedly had not. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be reading his wall. But when I received a Friend request from him, I figured he was permitting that relationship, so I confirmed him. He still claims he didn’t do this. Twice since then I’ve come into contact with well-known people who had Friended me, and I’ve mentioned our Facebook Friendship and they’ve immediately clarified that they didn’t Friend me — I must have Friended them. And they didn’t. Really. Before they made an issue of it, it didn’t matter; now it seems to establish some sort of bragging rights. So I’m considering unFriending them. I also sense that this is going to turn into a short play of mine in the near future.

Final note on this topic:  If you’re on Facebook, please join this page:  Yes for State Parks.  This initiative will generate nearly $500 million to preserve California’s state parks. Full disclosure:  I am working on this initiative. And no, I don’t generally support initiatives, because I’m hoping for overall state constitutional reform. But as my family and I have seen first-hand, California’s historic state parks are in a desperate state of disrepair — last year nearly 150 of them were shut down part-time or suffered service reductions; for the two years prior, they all almost got shut down due to our ongoing budget crisis — and honestly, I’ve lost faith in elected officials to solve this any time soon. For an $18 registration fee on every California license plate, we can directly fund the parks, protecting and preserving trees and water and animals and keeping it all open and available to the public. So I hope you’ll join me in Friending the parks.

I’m wondering once again why I do things like what I’m about to confess in just a moment. But some backstory first.

I’m in Omaha, Nebraska for the Great Plains Theatre Conference. This is the third year that I’ve been booked in for this conference, where I lead a couple of workshops, and serve as a panelist giving feedback on new plays throughout the week. It’s a great gig, run by kind, talented, generous people, on an absolutely beautiful campus, where I spend lots of time smoking cigars and writing and drinking and where I get treated in a fashion I could easily grow accustomed to. Last year I left here with two plays. This year I would be happy to make major headway on my new full-length play.

So tomorrow is the first of the workshops I’m leading. It’s called “Starting at the Start” (or, as it’s listed in the program, “Starting with the Start,” which to me is a somewhat different thing. But anyway.). Usually I go over all my material in advance. Days, if not weeks, in advance. There are books I read from, and chapbooks, and writing exercises I like to employ, and visual aids — the whole works, in a very low-tech format. In the past two weeks I don’t think I had a minute anywhere to review any of that. Just before leaving town, I did lay hands on the pendaflex folder holding all the assorted precious paperwork from last year’s conference; a quick review satisfied me that some (if not most, or all) of the stuff I’d need was in there. So I put it into my suitcase.

I was supposed to arrive last night around 11 p.m. Instead, for no fair reason ever given, United canceled my connecting flight and I and many many other people were stranded in Denver half the night. I finally got here and into my room at 3 a.m. Then I stayed up ’til dawn playing Civilization 4 Warlords on my laptop because believe me, I was in the mood to plunder and sack someone else’s city. All day, since then, I’ve fretted about this workshop tomorrow. I’ve thought about it constantly, and meant to sit down and get ready for it, and tried to crack open the pendaflex folder and see what’s in there and get started… and I just haven’t. Instead, I read every single wall post ever made by anyone I know on Facebook. I walked to Popeye’s and bought myself a spicy wing sampler and biscuit. I went next door for a beer. I borrowed a car from the college to drive over to Target to buy myself new luggage. I came back and went back next door for another beer and had a great time swapping bad-production stories with Constance Congdon. Then I came back over here and read what had newly been posted on Facebook. Then I fired up Civilization 4 Warlords again and attacked the Mali empire, taking two cities away before they begged for peace. Then I went back on Facebook. Then, finally, with the clock past 10 p.m. and the constant awareness that this workshop is in the morning now thrumming and slamming in my head the way the deafening clanging machinery did in the engine room of my father’s automatic carwash, I cracked open the pendaflex file.

Whereupon I found, right on top, all my notes from precisely the same workshop last year.

Relieved, I grabbed a cigar and decided to head next door for a beer. But first, I thought I’d post this. Because I’m left to wonder just why I couldn’t bring myself to look in there at any time over the past 24 hours — or even sooner. I guess it was just the fear that it wasn’t in there. But even then, I figured I’d just wing it. I’ve been teaching playwriting in one form or another for 20 years; I like to think that in that time I’ve developed some ideas of how to make use of 90 minutes with a roomful of playwrights. Maybe my reptile brain figured that looking in the pendaflex folder equated somehow with “work” and I just wanted a day of no work. Who knows?

I just know it would’ve been a lot simpler to have looked in there earlier.

As I said the other day, they just come to me.

But if you’re really really really stuck for a script idea, this little tool will take care of it for you for free. Here’s what it suggested that I write next:

• A bug-eyed monster and a couple of child-like steelworkers find themselves trapped in a shopping mall.

Except I think I’ve already seen that one. Instead I guess I’ll be writing this one:

• Six bounty hunters form a rock band in a corn field.

But wasn’t that a John Cougar Mellencamp video?

The other night I told a playwright friend over dinner that I felt “pregnant with play.” It’s a repulsive metaphor, but better than the alternatives that seem somehow equally right:  that a play is going to burst out of me like an alien through my chest; that a play is going to pop like a pus-filled blister; and so forth. Whatever the appropriateness of the image, she knew what I meant:  Sometimes you feel like you have a play coming on, and this was one of those times. I had thought I was going to puzzle out the missing section of act two of the play I’ve been writing, and which I told my wife I wanted to drive to Omaha and back (rather than fly) in order to be able to write.

Instead, it turns out it’s a new play. One that just came to me earlier today while driving with my college-student son back to Los Angeles from San Francisco. We were listening to an album by a band he likes. He said, “Do you like this?” “No,” I said. When it came to the end, though, I told him to leave it on so we could listen to it again. Because by then I was writing a play in my head, and this was the soundtrack. Eventually I pulled onto an embankment off the interstate, dug out my journal, and wrote down everything I knew about this play while my son looked around in the passenger’s seat, unsure what to do with himself. Later I had him fish me out a napkin from the glove box so I could scribble down two new notes:  the name of a made-up song in the play, and the last line of the play. This sort of thing kept happening. There was the realization that “Oh my God, I know the last line of this play….” And actually I could envision the last scene, completely staged. Then I could see the transitions between time periods — and this is not the sort of thing that I’m very good at. I quickly scrapped the first scene, set at the protagonist’s home, because I never wanted the action to go there, because I didn’t know how to go back there once the play moved on. Then I realized that I could have one actor play two roles in two time periods. Then I had the back story — of how the protagonist and the third main character came to meet again in the present.

This went on in my head for hours.

So now I have to write it, and I think that starts tonight. This is a good time to start it — a few days before I go off to a theatre conference, and then off to visit my mother on the East coast. In the next three weeks I’ll have more available time than I usually have, and as I told my friend the other night, “I’m a clumper.” I write plays in clumps.

After I put the pen back in the unashed ashtray of my car, I heard myself say this to my son:  “I don’t particularly want to be a playwright. I just am one.” Because plays have just come to me this way.

I just came across this news feature on my friend Trey’s Facebook page. It seems that as a third-grade teacher in 1961, his mother gave some memorable encouragement to a student writer. That writer has now written more than 100 children’s books and, now, a book of poems. Here’s the story.

Last night was the latest night of readings from my playwriting workshop. One of the three playwrights has become an accomplished award-winning, produced, published playwright. (I think she and I will always remember the moment we jointly realized in my class that yes, she was a playwright. I could suddenly see it, and so could she.) One of the other playwrights last night has been in my workshop for a while. She joined the workshop to start writing plays — to learn how to write plays — and now here she was, the first act of her first play finally completed, playing out for a full house at the Inside the Ford space at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre. She had one of those rare debut achievements:  the audience laughed in all the right places, and at least two of them cried in the right places. The joy written on this new playwright’s face afterward will stay with me for a long time.

I salute my friend’s mother. And I salute all the people who continue on with whatever sort of endeavor despite all the setbacks and discouragements  the world can sling at them.

What’s the one jury you definitely don’t want to serve on?

It’s not a homicide prosecution, or a lengthy federal trial.

No, it’s the drama jury for the Pulitzer Prize. At least as a member of the jury on a homicide or any other trial, you’d get listened to in the end. As a member of the drama jury for the Pulitzer, you’re likely to do your service and then get utterly ignored. That’s the ignominious pattern of the drama jury. Here’s Charles McNulty on how that feels.

Now that I’ve ended my day of internet silence — and thank you again to everyone here who joined me in helping to make the internet more available to everyone, especially those struggling with slow connections — I thought I’d share this great news. The previously lost Beckett play, “Attack the Day Gently,” has been found! Here are the details.

Thanks to Mark Chaet for alerting me to this!

My friend Terence Anthony’s terrific environmental piece “Blood and Thunder,” about two lowlife criminals caught in rising waters during Hurricane Katrina, closes this weekend after a smash six-month run. If you’re in LA and you haven’t seen it, I strongly recommend you do. Here’s where to get tickets.

In the meantime, here’s a nice interview with the cast, courtesy of my friend and fellow playwright Ross Tedford Kendall.