I have to do some rewrites on my new play tonight so that I can hear them at tomorrow night’s rehearsal, but I thought I’d procrastinate first. (I am a writer, after all.) So I turned on the television.

First, I saw an episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!, which dealt partly with all the millions of people in Africa suffering from HIV and AIDS because they can’t get access to condoms.

When that was over, I caught the tail end of a documentary on another channel concerning the closing of a GM factory in Ohio. The crew followed about a dozen different long-term assembly plant workers around the shop floor on their last weeks, right up to closing day. You have never seen so many grown men cry.

Then on a third channel I caught the last 20 minutes of a documentary about a son who just couldn’t take his mother any more and killed her. The documentary is from the point of view of his older sister. I caught the scene where she asks their father why he never intervened in what I take to be his now-slain wife’s endless criticism and abuse. He says that if he’d suggested therapy, the mother would have divorced him, and so he didn’t know what to do, the daughter says that doesn’t absolve him, so the father bolts up from the interview and storms out of the house. The next scene is the sister visiting her brother in prison.

After this, I was afraid to see what I’d find elsewhere on TV. So now I’m writing the play. Who says theatre isn’t escapism?

My new one-act play, “He Said She Said,” goes up next month here in Los Angeles. (Details to follow.) Today was our first table reading. Between that, and a drinks meeting I had with my director just over a week ago, I’m reminded again why it’s better if playwrights don’t direct their own plays. At least, this playwright.

I am a director, and depending upon the rightness of the material for me and whether or not I screw it up, I think I’m a pretty good one. But I don’t think I have the sort of insights into my own plays that good directors have. That’s because, having written the play, I can’t discover it.  In this case, I thought I had written a simple short play in the style of story theatre. Listening to my director talk about it, I realized that what I’d written was closer to a short story narrated in first-person. This may seem like a fine distinction, but it’s not:  Short stories plant images in your mind for you to conjure, while stage plays put them on stage for you to see. This was going to require more directing that I had realized, and probably some changes in the text to eliminate redundancies. (The narrator telling us something, and the actors then doing it. Which unless done for comic effect would be like hearing a skip in a record. It should be one or the other.) I wonder, had I been directing this, how far into the rehearsal process we would have gotten before I discovered this. With good actors (which I’m lucky to have), pretty quickly, I think, because they would have told me. But I hadn’t discovered it already, and my director had. So he definitely earned my attention early on. When someone is being smarter than you, you should listen.

While this play is in rehearsal, I’m also directing a new one-act in an evening of plays by my good friend and former student EM Lewis. We had our first script meeting last week and I think it was like the meeting above, but now I was in the other chair. The current draft of the play is 18 pages, and the discussion took 2 hours, 17 minutes. She is a fine writer. The play has strong characters and good conflict and wonderful dialogue; all those things I like. But there were things I didn’t understand about the play, and to be able to present a vision of it, I needed to understand it. The fault may have been mine, or the playwright’s, or more likely there may have been no fault but rather a case of things that work and things that don’t work, depending upon your line of attack on the play. With “Hamlet,” is Hamlet deranged, or is he crafty, or both? Making that initial decision determines the playing of everything that follows. It’s always that way with all plays — at least the good ones. Bad plays have no creative ambiguity; they are resolutely what they are.

Next week I start on the other two of the four theatre projects I’m doing this and next month. My friend Trey Nichols has been commissioned to write a one-act play for the same festival; I’ll be helping him shape the material with a small cast (three or four actors) and co-directing with him. And I’m also involved in a project at the Natural History Museum where, if I’m understanding this correctly, six or so of us are writing short environmental scenes that interconnect into a larger play about their new spider exhibit. I know which character I’m writing, and that character’s basic storyline (which I pitched), and the actress playing that role (Liz Harris, a good actor I’ve worked with many times).

In “My Dinner With Andre,” Andre Gregory relates to Wallace Shawn that daily life dulls us to our own existence, and that we need to break our patterns to re-engage. I think that with four theatre projects all at the same time and all with different frameworks, I’ll be very conscious for the next two months.

In which the film version of The Road gets an early review every bit as devastating as the apocalypse that catalyzes the novel.

Between 1907 and 1915, the photographer of Czar Nicholas II traveled his nation taking photographs of pre-Revolutionary Russia. In color. Here are 28 of them — including one of Leo Tolstoy — and they are stunning.

The LA Times’ theatre critic, Charles McNulty, reviews the new book of essays from my favorite working playwright, Wallace Shawn.

My favorite line:

Shawn’s signature tone, familiar to those who know his one-of-a-kind dramatic works, such as “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” “The Fever” and “The Designated Mourner,” or his movie colloquy with Andre Gregory, “My Dinner With Andre,” is a kind of canny naïveté, in which complicated questions are approached with a simplicity that strips the conventional barnacles from the search for truth.

Yes! That is true. Mix that with free-floating entitled guilt, and you’ve got much of the tone and approach.

What McNulty’s review doesn’t get at, and where Shawn excels in both his plays and his essays, is the net result of this approach:  a fresh way of seeing. “Clearing the barnacles” allows one to see the hull, and to sail more speedily. Clearing the detritus, or “camouflage of details” (another sharp observation from McNulty), allows one to see the truth and to act. The Bush Administration was all about obfuscation, with heavy layers of incompetence.  Whether or not, from the comfort and safety of his couch, Shawn is taking action, in all his work he nevertheless calls into question basic assumptions about safety and privilege and morality and humanity in ways that are thrilling and not a little jarring.

Here’s one of those Car Plays I’m always talking about here. This is the animated version of my friend Terence Anthony’s play, “Choke,” featuring three terrific actors I’ve been lucky to work with a little bit myself (Sara Wagner, Rodney Hobbs, and Bostin Christopher). If you’ve seen Terence’s other cartoon, “Orlando’s Joint,” you know what you’re about to get: really funny, really dark. (Which is why I love his work.) Enjoy!

Choke

Last night my son Lex and I watched the film version of “The Kite Runner.” When it was over, I asked him what he thought.

“It was okay,” he said.

And he was right:  It was okay.

Except when I read the novel just six months ago, it was a gut-wrenching experience. I even cried. Twice. The tragedy of childhood betrayal and mixed-up identity against the background of poverty and lowered circumstances was breathtaking. As was the palpably new sense of how horrible it would be like to live under the Taliban.

None of that is in the movie.

Well, actually, all of it is in the movie — all of the scenes. In making the adaptation, they didn’t monkey around with the story or the characterizations. There’s only one scene I noticed missing from the book, and I have to agree that it could be cut. (Although given a later scene that’s in the movie, I suspect they shot that earlier one as well.) But what’s left out, somehow, is the impact. Some things just don’t translate to other media.

A notable example:  To get out of Afghanistan when the Russians and then the Taliban movie in, the boy and his father and several others have to be transported across the border in the belly of a fuel tanker. We have that scene in the movie, but there’s no resonance:  The boy gets into the tanker. His father tells him it will be all right. The boy says he can’t breath. To distract him and provide what comfort he can, his father has him turn on the small iridescent light on his wristwatch and recite a poem. Next scene:  They are in India.

This is pretty much the form the scene takes in the novel. Except Khaled Hosseini is able to convey the lingering, choking, searing stench of fuel, and the utter darkness of the tank. Film can’t do smell (although fiction can), and film can’t do darkness (although fiction can). When the boy looks at his watch, we see a closeup of a boy looking at his watch; there’s no context because there’s no way to see deeper in the frame. The novel isn’t limited by frames. The book, a seemingly sightless medium, offers greater vision.

Sadly, I don’t think they’ve done anything wrong in this movie. It just doesn’t make a statement the way the novel does. The impact was lost in translation.

I’ve  thought a lot about translation over the years. I remember reading “Ubu Roi” in French in college and wondering whether it just shouldn’t have been translated into English; no matter how hard one tries, a pun in French doesn’t work in English. (One of Pa Ubu’s recurring outbursts is “Merdre!” which makes a pun of “murder” and “shit.” In English, I’ve seen this translated as “Pschitt!” Which is just “shit” misspelled, and with none of the menace.) I wonder how far off the mark the translations of some of my favorite writers, Kafka and Rilke among them, must be. I remember translating “La Cancatrice Chauve” myself as part of my graduation obligations and wondering just how absurd my translation was. I remember one semester in particular raising the question of translation with several different professors, all of whom gave what amounts to the stock answer:  While a translation is not as good as the original, you usually get a fair amount.

I hope that’s true. And if I had to wait to learn German and Turkish and Spanish and Norwegian, I wouldn’t have read Kafka, Goethe, Kant, Rilke, Orhan Pamuk, Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Knut Hamsun, to name just a few. Still, I would think it’s harder to translate from one language to another than from one medium to another, especially from novel to film, because film exists in the universal language of sight. And yet here we have a powerful, wrenching novel, faithfully translated into a film that, finally, is just okay.

Every year for 16 years now, my theatre company has held a one-act competition. We get hundreds of submissions from around the country, and some more from various other countries (in the past, England, Iceland, Ireland, and probably other countries ending with “land”). Each submission gets read by at least three different volunteer readers who are playwrights, actors, directors, and producers in the company, with plays that survive that process then getting a live cold reading during an evening of closed company readings. Which is what we did earlier tonight. Winning nets the lucky playwright a small cash prize, plus production. We then build the rest of the one-act festival around that winning play, accompanying it with plays written by resident playwrights, or some of the other submissions, or one-acts by playwrights we’ve previously produced.

Some years we get so many great plays via blind submission that it’s hard to winnow down the list. Other years we have lengthy discussions about how to somehow change the submission guidelines so that plays like these never, ever, ever show up again — at our place or any place else on planet Earth. More than once, someone has suggested for some reason that we should have one person who has to read all the submissions, and more than once my rejoinder has been, “Who do we hate the most?” Because while there might — might — be 5 or 10 terrific plays in there, and maybe a handful more good ones, there are still the other 200 or 300. If we forced someone to read all of those personally, I’m sure that  human rights groups would intercede. Even if that someone were Dick Cheney.

Fresh as I am from an evening of these readings, I thought I’d share a few thoughts about what separates the good short plays from the bad ones. Here goes:

1. Comedies should be funny. (If you think otherwise, don’t.) That means they have to be clever. Unexpected. That most certainly does not mean that the comedy should hinge on puns. In fact, it means the precise opposite. Comedy does not hinge on puns. Repeat after me: Comedy does not hinge on puns. Unless you’re Groucho Marx and you’re going to be in the play. Then we’ll make an exception.
2. If your play isn’t dramatic, it’s because you don’t have enough conflict. If it’s intended as a comedy but isn’t funny, it’s because you don’t have enough conflict. Comedy relies upon conflict taken to a high level, in an unexpected way.
3. In all cases, it’s stronger to have conflict than to have two characters sit down and share their feelings. I don’t care about their feelings, and 30 years into this, I can say with authority I think just about everybody who ever sits in a theatre agrees with me, whether they can articulate it or not.
4. Plays about sex should be sexy. At least once. Call me old-fashioned. People talking about the sex they are or aren’t going to have isn’t sexy. It’s annoying. Too many people already get too much of that in their marriage. Why would they want to pay twenty bucks for more of that? Especially when twenty bucks will get them more than that on Hollywood Boulevard.
5. “Subtext” means that there’s something going on subtextually. You need this. No, no, no, don’t have your characters say it, have them not say it.
6. If we all know what the next line is going to be, you shouldn’t write it. It’s even worse when we know what every next line is going to be.
7. If people are getting ready to do something in your play — if all the action of the moment is moving toward that — then for God’s sake, please have them do that. No matter how wrong or disturbing or repulsive or upsetting it may seem. Because that’s what we go to the theatre for — an interesting and unique experience — and if you don’t give it to us, you’re just a tease.
8. Please do not — and I’ve said this many times — please do not write sequels to famous plays in which, for example, Godot shows up. The guy who got there first made a pretty good showing with it, and you’re not going to. Also, do not take a famous play and change the title so  you can write your own version. If the play has been running in New York for more than three decades, at least two of us will know of it. The world does not await plays entitled “The Park Story” or “Burn That” or  “Indian Head Nickel.”

That’s just off the top of my head.

So:  the one we picked. Here’s why we picked it:  It’s really funny. It’s inventive. Every character, including the small one-scene characters, is well-written. We enjoyed hearing this play, and now we really want to see this play.  For several weeks. And because we picked it, now we’re going to get to. I’ll let you know when.

I have to admire The Second Pass. While everyone else (including me) has been compiling lists of books we believe you should read, their contributors have compiled a list of 10 highly regarded novels they want chucked from reading lists and academia.

I am particularly pleased to see “Absalom, Absalom!” on the list. (Which they misname, omitting the all-important exclamation mark from the title.) No, I still haven’t been able to read it. And I’ve been trying for more than 20 years. Similarly, still unsure why its sloppy lazy prose has been so exalted, I felt a frisson of glee at seeing “On the Road” on the list. I’ve seen the ecstasy it spins some people into, but to the rest of us it’s just a bad trip.

I don’t remember “One Hundred Years of Solitude” being as bad or as arrogant as it’s made out to be here. But I read it about 25 years ago, so who can say with authority? I can say that some of the scenes of magic realism that I so enjoyed then — when, for example, a woman simply floats away — now seem to me to be, well, cheats. (In much the same way that most of Dali’s paintings now seem.) But I’d have to reread the book to formulate an informed opinion, and I don’t see that happening.

The title that I think they’re deeply mistaken about is “The Road.” I’ve written about that novel often enough here that I’m not going to go into it again (this link sums it up, and provides links to a few other references here). I’ve read the other Cormac McCarthy books mentioned by Second Pass (“All the Pretty Horses” and “The Crossing), and they are necessarily different tales told differently. In these books, young men are experiencing the challenges and responsibilities and wonders of adulthood for the first time, and doing it in a foreign land; these books are adventures. “The Road” is told from the opposite point of view:  that of a man desperate to shepherd his eight-year-old son somewhere safe after what appears to be a nuclear holocaust. Like the terrain, like his psyche, the language is accordingly stripped bare. It’s a book with deep resonance, one that sticks deep in the subconscious and leaves readers more aware. At least, that’s how it left me:  feeling far more glad for everything I have, and far more aware of how easily it could all be lost. That’s the power of a truly good novel; complaining about the stripped-down prose seems like beside the point.

I’m sad to see “The Corrections” on this list, though the criticisms enumerated in the essay ring true. To me the novel’s core achievement is in the way the family history is gone over repeatedly from the different points of view of individual family members, until finally the father’s seemingly inexplicable behavior is revealed and with it the extent of sacrifice he has made for his children. That’s the “moving last section” that the critic mentions here. Something else merits mentioning:  Despite all the books flaws, it was tremendous good fun to read. That’s worth noting.

One night last week I took my wife to see my play “All Dressed Up But Going Nowhere,” which was presented as part of The Car Plays. The play concerned a husband and wife broken down in their car, awaiting AAA and reliving arguments past and present. This was probably the first time in 10 years or more that Valorie didn’t like one of my plays. “It wasn’t funny,” she said. On the way home, she added that it wasn’t funny because “I say those things!” Which elicited in my memory the response my writing professor gave me in college when I asked how his wife felt about his nakedly confessional poems:  “She knows how much I fictionalize.” (Later, they divorced.)

Last night we had my son’s (second) 18th birthday party. The time came for cake, and Valorie asked me what kind I wanted. I saw two kinds laid out:  chocolate and carrot. Here was our exchange:

Lee: I’d like chocolate.

Valorie: You’re kidding me.

Lee: What? No. Chocolate.

Valorie: I made this carrot cake from scratch.

Lee: I don’t care for carrot cake.

Valorie: I made it from scratch.

Lee: Sorry, I just don’t like carrot cake.

Valorie: I even made the icing from scratch. I can’t believe you.

Lee: Okay, I’ll have the carrot cake.

Valorie: You can have the chocolate, you know.

Lee: Uh… now I don’t know what to do. What’s the right answer?

I looked down on the plate she handed me and there was her solution:  two slivers of cake, one carrot and one chocolate. Diplomatically, I ate them both. Then she asked me, “How was the carrot cake?”

Lee: Amazing. Incredible. Never have I had cake like that!

Valorie:  I know this is going to wind up in a play some day.

She may be right. Luckily, she knows how much I fictionalize.