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.

On Monday night starting at 8 p.m. at the Hudson Backstage Theatre in Hollywood, we’re hearing two plays that have come out of my workshop recently, “Awake” by Michael David, and “Successor,” by Ross Tedford Kendall.

These are good plays. Trust me. Directed by talented directors with a history of getting good actors into the roles.

Afterward, there’s wine and cheese and, doubtlessly, cigars outside.  Admission is free.

Please join us.

The Hudson Backstage Theater (on Santa Monica just east of Highland).

Hudson Backstage Theater
6539 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90038

And here’s the Facebook event page.

If there’s one question that writers mock people for asking them, it’s this one:  “Where do you get your ideas?” I don’t know why that’s seemingly so insulting. Maybe it’s because some people think it comes from the hoi polloi, and therefore merits only a sneer. (The equivalent question to actors from audience members would therefore be:  “How do you remember all those lines?” I’ve stood next to some  well-known actors while my sister has asked them that. Their derision was palpable.) I’m willing to answer almost any sort of question at any time (unlike at least one far far far far far far far far better known writer). Maybe it’s because I’m less clever (certainly) or less stuck-up, or some combination of both. I think that David Lindsay-Abaire, a contemporary playwright of unequaled skill who retains the good grace to be polite, a Pulitzer-prize-winning writer with the temerity to self-assign Barney Rubble to serve as his Facebook icon and who has the self-confidence to publicly admit that he watched “Lost” and didn’t understand the ending, should serve as our role model:  be kind, be thoughtful, be respectful, be funny, don’t be a jackass. I imagine it’s that much harder when you’re a Pulitzer prizewinner, or, as in the other case linked to above, when your ascension to fame is catapulted by your public  repudiation of self-made billionaire book lovers with the audacity to proclaim their love of reading and for your work specifically on fantastically popular talk shows they host (and own). The rest of us, with scattered publications or play productions every year that may or may not add up to a “career,” have no cause to be haughty.

Why bring this up now? Because this morning it occurs to me for the first time in my life that I actually get two sorts of creative ideas. Where I used to believe that “ideas just come to me,” I now see that that answer applies to only some of my ideas. The other ideas are actively dredged for. In other words, while some ideas land on me like bees collecting pollen, for the others, I have to don clamming boots and wade out in the muck treading gingerly until I feel something worth picking up.

Before I get further into this, a little background. My entire life, I’ve had twin pursuits:  business and art.

At age 11, I was selling collectible comic-books through the mail. A few years ago I bought up some back issues of the only “professional” fan magazine I knew of at the time, the Rocket’s Blast Comic Collector (later shortened to “RBCC,” as its scope broadened), so that I could check out the hand-typed and stenciled ads I placed as a prepubescent and cringe. I bought and sold comic books professionally for about eight years. For some years, I ran a healthy mail-order business with a business partner I later acquired (my father was my first, silent, business partner); we also displayed our wares at innumerable comic-book conventions, often three times a month, and sometimes simultaneously in separate cities. What stopped this activity? 1. It was “time” to open a store, and neither of us wanted to run a store. 2. He was expected to take over operating his family business. 3. I wanted more time for sex and drinking. So we liquidated. I sometimes think back to the inventory we had — first issues of all the major Marvel comic-books, plus the first appearance of the Justice League of America, plus countless other key books, in high grade — and think of the secluded Pacific resort we could buy with it now.

Also at age 11, I started mailing my short stories off to magazines. I learned how to type at age 11, and for my birthday that year, my father bought me an IBM Selectric II. For many of us, there was life before the IBM Selectric II, and there’s been life after it. While calligraphy was the most important thing that Steve Jobs ever learned, typing was it for me. My handwriting is miserable — exacerbated by skipping the grade that taught penmanship; working as a reporter for some years without knowing shorthand; and too many lecture notes taken during college — and to this day I don’t like to hand-write things, partially because later on even I have difficulty reading them. But typing! I can work a keyboard all day and all night, generating words only a fraction of an instant less quickly than I can think of them. Some years ago my eldest brother told me that he thought in terms of mathematical formulae. I understood immediately, because whenever I’m working with the language I’m seeing it in my head as transmuted from a QWERTY keyboard. Whatever those other people are doing with their Moleskin journals and their fancy pens, I’ve been doing for 37 years on a keyboard. Initially, that keyboard was part of an IBM Selectric II, but since then it’s been part of a variety of computers, all of them powered, fittingly, by the OS conceived by Mr. Jobs’ company Apple. And for those 37 years, beginning even before the first sprout of puberty, I’ve been writing stories and sending them off. Initially, my targets were genre fiction outlets like Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and my professional habits were every bit as clueless as one would expect those of an 11-year-old to be. While I learned from their submission guidelines that a SASE was required, and was able to parse out that a SASE was a Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope, invariably at the beginning the SASE I sent was a half-size envelope with a single first-class stamp on it, not large enough or with enough franking to return the submission. In retrospect, both from the quality of the prose and the format of the submission, it’s obvious that a boy was mailing these pieces off, and the odds of a boy cracking literary marketplaces that adults were struggling to enter, were nil. With that in mind, I have never forgotten the kindness shown to me by some anonymous female secretary who added these words in her own loving hand to a form rejection letter:  “But thank you.” No, thank you, because that kept me going for years.

And so, in one way or another, my life has followed this course ever since:  running a business, and plying an art. I did not grow up thinking I would own a marketing agency, and I did not plan to become a playwright. For quite a while I thought I would be a reporter who wrote novels. There were only two problems with this:  I didn’t like being a reporter, and I have no talent for writing novels. I had one great scoop as a reporter, something about a toxic waste coverup, and even during that interview I kept recasting the source as a character in a story, and rewriting the dialogue. (And the fact that I can’t remember more about this story — my one great scoop — tells you all you need to know. I could add that because I was so headstrong I didn’t like reporting to editors, and when I became an editor, I didn’t like the way the reporters didn’t like reporting to me, that news journalism and I were not made for each other.) As for novels… they just seemed too long. It took forever to write one! I wrote, I think, three — all in various phases of completion — or maybe it was four. I can remember parts of two of them, and got one well near completion when I was 14 or so, but I was bursting with new discoveries and things I wanted to write about, and it was constantly problematic that these new ideas wouldn’t fit into whatever novel I was already writing. This explains why the almost-completed one has probably six dozen main characters and just as many storylines, one of them concerning a king who has barricaded himself into his bathroom — or “throne room,” get it? — and escapes down the toilet. But plays! Here’s what I discovered:  that sometimes I could write a full-length play in two weeks, and that sometimes I could write a short play in a day, or half a day, or, sometimes, even under an hour! Long before the BlackBerry, and then the iPhone, turned us all into people with Attention Deficit Disorder, I had discovered my medium. And best of all, once I developed a circle of actors and directors, I didn’t have to grind through months or years of mail submissions to see something in print — now I could assemble people and hear it read within a day, if not later that very same day! This was the sort of production timeline that appealed to me, even moreso than the newspaper story that would appear in a day or two. Is it any wonder that I’ve written dozens of plays, but haven’t finished one novel?

I  know where my lifelong interest in writing comes from. The house I grew up in was stuffed with books, some of them left over by older siblings long gone whom I didn’t grow up with. Those siblings also left behind a handful of comic books, including one issue each of The Avengers, Tales to Astonish, and Tales of the Unexpected. (That first item was a first issue (!); the second featured Giant-Man and the Wasp versus The Human Top; the last featured Space Ranger. Given that I last saw these comics almost four decades ago and can remember that, far moreso than the biggest news story I reported, might lead one to the conclusion that they were somewhat important to me.) For the first 10 years, growing up in a house fronted by a highway and girded by deep forest, these and comic books were my only companions. Many of the books, as well as the comics, were set in either Manhattan or outer space; to me, in one way or another, they offered clues to avenues of escape.

I also know where my lifelong interest in business comes from. My father worked for himself, in a company founded by he and his father. My grandfather worked for himself. My great-grandfather worked for himself. My brother worked for himself. My brother-in-law, when he arrived on the scene, worked for himself. It seemed to be what we did. And, in the classic sense of entrepreneurs in history, they all had more than one business. My father’s successful contracting business built roads and bridges, and schools, and gas stations. But that wasn’t enough for him, so he built a car wash and ran that too. My brother started out selling cars on someone else’s lot, decided he could make more money selling cars on his own lot, then started offering repair services to the new owners of those cars, then decided there was even more money to be made selling the parts needed to fix those cars, all of which led him to be the automotive parts importer he is today, with 60-some employees, and warehouses and stores in three states. I don’t know how many interconnected businesses my brother-in-law has, but I can say that when I saw him last week he was knee-deep in three different projects. I come from a line of industrious people; rightly or wrongly, just writing stories and sending them off was never going to be enough.

So here I am, at this stage of my life, 30 to 40 years after these seminal moments, and the duality of my career, a duality that I hope is interwoven to provide a stronger fabric, continues:  art and business. And this morning I realized that I get my ideas in two different ways, because they are two different sorts of ideas. The ideas for my plays just come to me. No one needs them, and so, they alight. The ideas for  client projects are demanded by necessity, and those, I have to go get. In some ways, those are harder, and therefore sweeter when caught.

On Friday I came home from my office utterly wrung out.  I’d been traveling frequently, and my body wasn’t sure what time zone it was in or what was expected of it at the moment. Getting just three hours’ sleep on Tuesday morning because of flight delays, and then having to fight traffic down to Long Beach for a conference and a meeting, and then returning Wednesday through Friday to a staggering amount of work, all contributed. So when I got home on Friday and discovered my kids ensconced in Halo: Reach on the xBox, I lay down for a brief nap and then it came to me:  a strange line of dialogue skittered across my brain, followed by another, then another, until I had four lines of dialogue, and then a stage image, and then, suddenly, I knew I had a new short play, and there, just as quickly, came its title. I knew the characters, and the two voices that each would have, and the lighting, and the opening, and the two stories that two of them would tell, and the opening sound effect, and I even had a tenuous grasp on the ending. None of this was unusual. I’ve written about it here before: Usually, the play just comes. The less thinking about it, the better.

Creative work for an agency is different, though. Those ideas have to fit certain parameters, whether the client is in the public sphere (government, or non-profit, or a political campaign, where the measurement of success is either in changing people’s actions or in winning) or in the private (where the usual gauge is sales). Now the ideas have to be clever — one hopes! — and doable. And they have to result in something. And they have to meet with client approval. Granted, there is some similarity with the theatre, where you have to be able accomplish your idea on stage, and you work to result in a certain response from the audience, and you’re looking for approval from, well, someone. (Audiences, or critics, or theatre makers, or yourself, or others you know personally. Arthur Miller said he wrote all his plays for his father, even long after his father was dead.)

Both kinds of ideas are creative. I do a lot of writing and directing — but some of it is for the theatre, and some of it is for clients. (And guess which pays better.) I get enormous satisfaction from the successful execution of an idea in either arena. It’s a wonderful feeling sitting in the house for the production of one of your plays on a night when it’s working — when the audience laughs where they’re supposed to, or seems somehow emotionally caught up just in the way you’d hoped and worked for. But the other work I do is no less important, although it sometimes feels less respected by the creative community. I would submit that this sort of work is just as important, because it generates tremendous impact in people’s lives. (Just as we hope that the arts do.)  It’s difficult to describe how good it feels when your insight, your idea, your understanding of someone’s problem or need, is transmuted into the creative impulse that manifests a result. Many of our clients are educational institutions, or environmental initiatives, or non-profits helping people deal with very real challenges such as autism. Others are small-to-medium-sized businesses like those owned by my family. You can see why I take my work for them very seriously:  It’s important. And why those ideas have to be gone and gotten:  because, in some ways, more is at stake.

So now, after more than 20 years of people asking me off and on where I get my ideas from, I have a new answer:  What kind of idea?

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?