Two or three times a year, I get called upon to judge theatre competitions of varying sorts. This year, I’m one of the readers for the PEN USA literary awards, which is always an honor. And this Saturday evening, I’m a judge of this playwriting and performance event at the Secret Rose Theatre. It sounds like a lot of fun. If you’re around, stop by.

I have mixed feelings about contests, awards, and prizes. In grad school, one of my playwriting professors, Jerome Lawrence,  told me he was against writing contests because it pitted writers against writers. I understood his point of view (and that’s an indication of just what sort of a guy Jerry was:  generous beyond measure), especially as someone who at that time had already been on both sides of prize-winning — winning one when I wasn’t sure my play was the best, and losing the same contest the next year when I was sure mine was. Especially when there’s a performance element in judging  a playwriting contest, a lot rides on elements outside the playwright’s control:  How responsive was the audience on the judging night, how “on” were the performers, was it too cold or too hot in the theatre, how was traffic on the way there, was the box office friendly or surly, and so forth.

At the same time, believe me when I say I understand the marketing value of winning any contest or award (and, sometimes, the prize value). I don’t care which movies have won which awards, believe me (especially when  it’s a system that awards “Best Picture” to “Avatar”). But do awards build careers, and would I put the full thrust of marketing and PR behind any awards won? You bet.

There is a story — and I don’t know how reliable it is — that, 40 years ago, the Nobel committee was deadlocked between giving the award for literature to either Samuel Beckett or Eugene Ionesco. Finally, after much deliberation, one of the Ionesco champions who felt that Ionesco’s work had a broader scope than Beckett’s (and there may be something to that), switched sides to end the deadlock. And so:  Samuel Beckett won the Nobel, and Eugene Ionesco never did. Is the work of Beckett, the Nobel-prize-winning writer, better than that of Ionesco? Beckett has become far more deeply rooted in the cultural consciousness — referenced in “The Simpsons,” name-checked on “Quantum Leap,” parodied on Sesame Street — and a lot of that came from winning the Nobel.

As I’ve written here before, digital technology and the internet allow me to do pretty much everything I wanted to do when I was kid but couldn’t because I didn’t have access to people or tools, and couldn’t afford it. But now I’ve got potentially full access — everyone does — through the internet. It’s allowed me to make some very interesting connections — to the founder of Cosmic Encounter (a game I bought at a science fiction convention when I was 14, and which the next generation of Wochners now plays as well), who once commented on this blog; to writers like Christopher Priest and Mike Daisey (who’ve also commented here); and to people whose work I admire and follow, like David Thomas of Pere Ubu. My latest interesting connection:  I just got an email from a PhD candidate in Egypt who is doing her dissertation on American drama;  she found my website and blog and wanted to know my thoughts about playwriting. I’ve made theatre friends in England and Iceland and Turkey and even New Jersey through the internet. It’s a thrill to add Egypt.

I just came across this new video about Moving Arts, the theatre company I co-founded in 1992. You know you’ve built something successful when now you find out by accident about marketing initiatives like this, when you’re even name-checked in the video, and you had no idea about it previously. (In other words: They don’t need me any more. Sniff sniff.)

By the way, I saw the one-act festival mentioned herein last week and there’s some terrific work in it. I’m sure that at some point I’ll be stealing that set-design concept, which ingenuously unifies the five plays. Here’s where to get tickets.

We’re less than two weeks out from The One-Day New Play Playwriting Workshop I’m running with Trey Nichols. Click here for more info. To answer some anticipated questions: no, you don’t have to already be a playwright to enroll; yes, actors do well with this; and no, we don’t give feedback in this style:

This weekend I was supposed to take my wife and two kids to a mountaintop family resort  in Banning, CA for RV camping, fishing, barbecuing, hiking, and playing in the snow — man-made snow that they were having trucked in. But my wife broke her toe, so hiking was out; then they informed us that the fishing was off because they had to drain the lake to clear reeds; then we were informed that the man-made snow was canceled because rain looked likely; and just when my wife and I were trying to envision four days and three nights in an RV with squabbling siblings and no wifi, I was contacted by two board members of the resort and the executive director that maybe we shouldn’t come because it looked like there was going to be a massive snowfall — of snow generated the old-fashioned, natural way — and we would be either snowed in, or stuck on the mountain trying to get in. So instead we stayed home and watched “Fringe” and other things Friday night.

On Saturday, newly unscheduled, I decided to tackle some chores:

• putting the year’s worth of unread “Hulk” and “Incredible Hulk” comics into chronological order so that I can read them later
• taking all 20 of my unlaundered dress shirts to the dry cleaner’s
• getting together all my tax records for my CPA; this took four hours
• cleaning my email in-box down to 58 emails I need to respond to — that’s real progress
• editing something I’m writing for publication
• sending my revised bio to the nice people at the Great Plains Theatre Conference
• buying beer and beef sticks
•  buying a form-molding pillow for my bed, and a form-molding bath pillow for the bath, because yes, my neck is still killing me off-and-on from the car accident four months ago
• buying a soldering iron so that I could fix a shoe buckle and a belt buckle
• coming home to do that soldering, abetted by my daughter who has learned in school to solder far better than I ever did
• reading the new issue of New Avengers
• taking a long jacuzzi bath, during which I tested out that new bath pillow and read most of that New Yorker story on Paul Haggis’ resignation from Scientology; I don’t have an opinion one way or the other about Scientology because I can’t quite figure out why it’s any of my business, or how it varies that widely from almost every other religion except that it’s new, but I do have the opinion that this story in no way merits all that space in the New Yorker
• coming downstairs to drink one of those beers and work on my play, “I, Teratoma,” which is what I was doing just before…
• … writing this blog post.

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.

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.