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.

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.

My friend Terence Anthony just got interviewed about his terrific play “Blood & Thunder.” Here’s what he has to say.

The play has been running at Moving Arts for six months, but it must must must (must!) close last weekend of this month. It is definitely a don’t-miss, so if you’re in LA, well, don’t. Here’s where to get more info — and tickets.

When I was a kid, comic book editors were thoughtful enough to include the mailing addresses of fans who wrote in. There’s a whole generation of us who made a lot of good friends that way.

Now we have the internet.

Which is how I received this communication today:

Hi, my name is Isabel R–. I am 13 years old, I live in Mexico City and I now study in the American School Foundation. Right now in my civics class we are making a project about our future. I currently love theater, and it’s my lifetime dream to be a part of it and spend my whole life on it. I want to study acting, but I seriously don’t think I could be that good, so instead I would just love to direct, be in charge of everyone and be responsible [for] the whole play. This is why I was wondering if you could answer me an interview about your studies. I seriously respect you because you are a director, and in my opinion it takes a lot to be one.
I hope you will answer,
Isabel R–
P.S if you don’t have the time to answer or email me back, don’t worry I know you must be full of work 😉

Here’s my reply:

————

Isabel, I am indeed full of work. (And full of a lot else, too.) But I’m happy to answer you. The theatre is a wonderful thing to devote your life to. If you want to, you should do it.

Before we get to the questionnaire you attached, I’d like to say this:  You should study acting. Why? Three reasons:

1.    Because you want to. Thirteen is far too young to decide that you can’t be good at something. Know what the right age is? Never. Last month I heard a radio interview with an 82-year-old woman who had just piloted a plane for the first time. At age 80, she decided that she wanted to learn to fly, and now, two years later, she was flying solo. It’s not a good idea to limit yourself at any age. (It’s also good to have grandchildren to take away the keys, if necessary.)
2.    You should act because you want to, and you should act because it will help you as a director. Directors work with actors. That means you need to understand acting and actors. No, I was never an actor. But I did some acting in both high school and college (poorly, I might add), and since then I’ve done staged readings that I’ve been drafted into. And every Saturday I get to read at least one part in my workshop. Do some acting. It’s fun. And even if you’re bad, nobody dies as a result.
3.    It’s good to fail. Failure teaches you things. It’s also good to succeed. What isn’t good is to not try. Don’t avoid failure, or you won’t try enough new things.

Okay, let’s tackle that questionnaire.

1.    What did you study?

I have no formal theatre training. None. I have degrees in Communications (Associate of Arts), Literature and Language (Bachelor of Arts), and Professional Writing (a Masters degree). This qualifies me to answer your questionnaire, and to answer things for people even when I don’t know what I’m talking about. You learn that how you say things can lend a certainty to your tone that convinces others; that’s useful. It’s amazing what you can get away with when you sound confident. I also took a lot of science in college, and I’m glad I did. Other than the writing classes, the classes that stuck with me the most were probably Logic and Philosophy which, compiled with the others, form the backbone of criticism. Oh, I did study playwriting in graduate school, but it didn’t teach me how to write plays – I was already getting produced, after all. But it helped build my circle of contacts.

2. Where did you study?

I think you’re asking me theatre-related questions. What I would say is this:  To learn the theatre, you get involved with theatre. You attend plays, you volunteer, who do photocopying and script reading and chewing-gum-scraping and whatever else they need. And then, one day, an actor doesn’t show up and you read that part to help out. Or, in my case, the cool kids are putting on a high school play and even though you’re invited to participate, they don’t invite your other friends (the non-cool kids), and you don’t feel good about that, so you wind up writing your own play expressly for those uncool kids.  And then when you hear people in the audience laugh at your funny lines, you are hooked forever.

The simple lesson:  In most things in life, you learn by doing. So go get involved with directors and actors and playwrights and costume designers and stage managers and lighting designers and all the other theatre people and you’ll learn everything. Because theatre people – honestly – can do everything. They have to.

3. How long?

To this day. On Saturdays I convene a playwriting workshop (for almost 20 years now), and I’m always glad to learn new things from the smart talented people who come. And at least a couple of times a month, I go see plays. Even bad ones are useful (although annoying). You can learn good things from bad plays.

4. Did you study an MBA?

That’s a business degree. (Now I own a business (not my first) and am once again completely self-taught. Libraries and book stores and the internet are wonderful things.) I believe you mean an MFA. I have an MFA-equivalent degree. It is a terminal degree, but I am living with it.

5. If yes, where did you study it? How long?

The University of Southern California. In general, a graduate degree requires two years. What you learn may not be as important as who you meet. Building a network of contacts is important.

6. After studying, in what have you worked?

I have written radio commercials, billboards, plays, advertising copy, fundraising letters, essays, poems, cartoon strips, short stories, websites, interviews, speeches, public service announcements, headlines, newspaper stories, technical specs, instructions, magazine articles, and just about everything else you can imagine. At some time or other I’ve been paid in almost every conceivable field of writing. (Yes, I even got paid for poems once.) I own a creative marketing agency (with another theatre person!) named Counterintuity. That allows me to offer creativity all over the place. Leonardo da Vinci was an artist and a scientist; Benjamin Franklin was a writer and statesman and scientist and inventor; Will Eisner was one of the founders of comic books and graphic novels, and also a businessman. I am inspired by their greatness.

7. What have you been doing lately?

See above. Plus, I travel frequently. And I read a lot. And I like to take long walks with friends and my dog and smoke cigars. (The dog doesn’t smoke.) And I like to play games with my family and by myself (“Risk” on my iPhone, “Civilization” on my laptop, and “Oblivion” on the xBox.) I also go to the theatre, of course. Last night three friends and I went to see a play that we didn’t like at all, but we had great fun afterward, and that made it worth it.
8. As you have worked in plays, what have been your favorite or most famous?

Almost all the plays I have directed are new plays. The theatre I founded in 1992 does only new plays. I’ve directed world premieres by Trey Nichols, Werner Trieschmann, Sheila Callaghan, EM Lewis, and many others. I don’t direct as often any more because I don’t have time, but I make an effort to do it at least once a year. Last year, I directed four times and am still unclear how that was possible. Famous playwrights whose work I like include Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco, Mamet, Labute, Albee, Kushner, and August Wilson. I think that Shakespeare guy is pretty good too. I am a big fan of Buster Keaton, so any well-done commedia del arte excites me; a couple of years ago I flew across country just to see Bill Irwin’s new show. It was well worth it.

9. In the play, what is your job?

To make an impact other than boredom on the audience.
10. What [do] you get out of this career?

Brief bursts of intense satisfaction. Followed by an addictive need for more.

11. Do you live well with your job?

I’m not sure what you mean, but I’m going to try to answer what I think you mean. I make my living being a creative storyteller, sometimes for business clients, sometimes for audiences or students. Stories are at the core of who we are. The human brain has grown and expanded because we developed language, and we developed language because we needed to share stories – about the hunt, about our struggles, about who we are and want we want. Without stories, we would all still be in the trees. It’s enormously gratifying to move an audience with a story you’re telling – whether it’s a ticket-buying audience watching one of my plays, or an audience of two in a business setting. It’s also enormously gratifying to get pulled into the stories of others whose voice you respond to. I’m lucky enough to have very smart, very funny friends who keep me surprised and entertained.


12. Has this career choice made you happy?

I don’t believe in happiness. Pursuing it is fine, but I don’t know anyone who has gotten it, and if anyone were to get it, I don’t know what he or she would do next. I do believe in work, good work, and in remembering that on any given day, most people in the world are worse off than I am. Bear that in mind and it’s easier to focus on your work.

Thank you for emailing me. Keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll always be someplace interesting. I apologize if my reply isn’t as good as Rilke’s, but no one’s is.

Last night, this year’s Moving Arts one-act festival closed. Afterward I hung around ’til 1:30 in the morning with a few other people and dismantled the set flats for pickup and storage the next morning. I was sad to see the festival close, especially because I was proud of so much of the work, including the three plays I was most closely involved with: one that I wrote, and two that I directed. (I wrote a scene for the event at the Natural History Museum, too, but never got to see it. I hear it was good.) But while I was sad to see it close, another side of me wasn’t sorry at all. To give you an idea why, I share my Halloween costume this year:

This was our 15th annual one-act festival, so I think at this point we know how to do such events. But we had so many problems it’s like we were cursed:

• an actor in one of my plays was hospitalized with a heart infection
• another actor was hospitalized after passing out in a bus
• the understudy I cast to take over for actor #1, above, suddenly came down so ill he was laid up with an IV drip
• another actor almost broke her wrist because a flat was moved into a position it didn’t belong, blocking her entrance in the dark
• another actor slipped and fell outside on the cement — twice
• the lead in my play was in a car accident just prior to opening
• a supporting actor in one I directed was in a car crash and hospitalized with a concussion

You might (somehow!) chalk that up to actor problems, but we had major ongoing tech problems, too.

• At the end of an 8-hour cue-to-cue rehearsal in which all the light and sound cues were programmed, they mysteriously disappeared. All of them had to be reprogrammed, which added nine hours onto the day. (I said, “I won’t be here at 2 a.m.” And wound up leaving at 1:56 a.m.)
• Some nights the stage lights would seize, stranding the actors in the dim lights set for scene change. After this happened a second time, the tech crew spent an entire day checking every cord and cable and instrument and all the impressive buttons and levers on all the tech equipment, but couldn’t duplicate the problem.
• One night prior to opening when we’re getting our press photos taken, it starts to rain. Water starts to drip onto the stage floor. Our producer wisely puts down a bucket and a towel. Naturally, in all the press photos for my play, the bucket and towel are front and center. Later someone Photoshops them out (but not before we nickname them Mr. Bucket and his sidekick, Towelly). But more editing is necessary later, because the actor on the left is one of those who wind up hospitalized.
• Props and set pieces and costumes would mysteriously vanish. One night the bottle of Rolling Rock so emblematic of my lead character’s small-town truck-mechanic milieu was gone, substituted quickly with a PBS-subscriber Heineken someone helpfully located. Another night the prop baby openly referenced in one play couldn’t be located, so the woman playing its mother had to mime carrying a baby. When the mother shared her distress about the baby, her fellow actor helpfully chimed in, “But Mom — the baby isn’t even there!”
• Previously, I shared the story of  the incredible professionalism of an actor who went on for one of those hospitalized actors, off-book, with no rehearsal, and who was absolutely terrific in his performance.  What I didn’t share at that time was the rest of the story. The play starts and I’m sitting in the house and I’m just blown away by how great this actor is — in fact, by how great all three cast members are. I’m very proud of this play and them and my work directing it, and I’m enjoying the stark lighting that I wanted, and then… I start to hear something. It sounds like… music. In Spanish. Like a Mexican radio station, slightly not tuned in. I pull out my iPhone and text the board op in the booth:  “Why is there music on stage?” I get a text back:  “I don’t know. It’s not coming from the booth.” In other words, she doesn’t show it and she can’t hear it. My actors, including the understudy who has taken over, bravely soldier on, but everyone in the theatre is well aware of this music now, and of course, it’s the night that we’ve got a critic from one of the more important papers. I sit there and seethe.I don’t know who, but someone must die. And so I go down the mental list of suspects and as I pick through that list scratching off one name after another because really none of them is to blame, I start to realize that it’s even worse than I’d imagined:  There is no one to blame. No one.

No one is responsible for the out-of-tune Mexican radio station providing lively background for what should be the searing drama about a passenger getting beaten to death on a commercial airliner. No one is to blame for the vanishing props and the tumbling actors and the car crashes and the deadly airborne toxins and the wandering electrical shorts and on and on. We’ve done a festival for 15 years, and many of the people involved in this festival have been involved in many of those years. No, we’re just somehow… cursed.

My friend Trey blamed his play “Move”:  “This is the last time I write a play with a ghost in it.” My wife picks up this theme and says that a la “Macbeth,” which theatre people superstitiously call “The Scottish Play,” Trey’s play should now be referred to as “The Motion Play.” That was funny — but whatever ghost might have been the root cause plagued all the plays in all three evenings.

The night of the Mexican radio broadcast, I figured that somehow the equipment in the booth had become a receiver. This can happen. (It never happened again, and no, we never figured out how it happened that once.)  But once I realized there was no one to blame, I did the smart thing after that night’s show ended:  I gave up. Uncharacteristic, I know, but it’s one thing to struggle against oneself or others, it’s another to shake your fist at the sky. We had surmounted every possible torment and soldiered on, and no amount of testing and retesting and trial and error had been able to replicate any of the tech problems — they simply happened or didn’t. So I gave in and guzzled wine in the courtyard with about 20 other Moving Artists and we all laughed and laughed great rolling waves of laughter, the cascading eruptions of people who’ve been electrocuted but lived. The only thing left to befall us would be a meteorite crashing from the sky, and if that was going to happen, well, there was no stopping that either. So we all just gave in and gave up.

And after that we never had another tech problem.

My play “He Said She Said” opened tonight and now it’s 1 a.m. and I’m back at my office to catch up on some writing work. But before I get to that, I just have to take time to note the moment. The response to the play was tumultuous:  big laughs right where they should be, matched by a keening audience-wide sense of the lead character’s plight. Thirty years of doing theatre, and that was one of my best opening nights ever. It’s true what they say:  you can get pretty far with great actors and a great director.

Here’s where you can go for ticket info. There are only 4 or 5 more performances.

Here’s actor Bostin Christopher’s take on how he got cast in my play “He Said She Said,” which opens next Saturday here in Los Angeles. My quick response:  Yes, I wrote it with him in mind — and yes, he still had to audition for the role.

Why?

Because the director, in this case Ross Kramer, had never seen him. Never even met him. So while I had the benefit of seeing Bostin’s work in a variety of venues the past two years, it would have been a lot to ask someone else to cast him sight unseen. That was my thinking anyway. And how much do I trust this director? I didn’t even go to the auditions.  I’ve worked with lots of different directors, and I can’t think of another time in 30 years of getting produced that a play of mine was auditioning in town and I didn’t go.

So here’s the thing:  Bostin is terrific in my play. Unsurprisingly, he’s doing a good  job of playing a role that I wrote with him in mind. As for the female role, I saw that one very differently than how Rebecca Davis is playing it (and how Ross is directing it), but now that I’ve seen this take it’ll be extremely hard to see it any other way. Until, that is, I do. Nobody wants his play to be done just once.

What playwrights do want, though, is for their plays to be done well, with a director and actors bringing things to the production that add to the experience.  Playwrights who get productions in which people detract from the experience know exactly what I’m talking about. My first production was in high school and went fine; for my first production in college I was saddled with a female lead whose habit it was to deliver every line like a crazed magpie: “Got any MAG-a-ziiiiinnnnnes?” Some years ago in New York a director decided that my play about artists in hiding from the government actually was about a lesbian subtext that he freely invented — and directed for accordingly. (On opening night, the cast and I, by now thoroughly creeped out by this guy, ditched him for our own party elsewhere.)

I’ve got more such stories — you do this long enough and you collect them. But I’ve also had many productions that left me awash with gratitude. To fly in somewhere, especially a small town, and see how hard and how well they’ve worked on your play, how much they’ve committed and achieved, leaves you humbled.  Whatever alchemy produced the run-through I saw of this new play of mine the other night, I’m grateful for it.

Tickets are now available for that extra-long, extra-wide one-act festival that opens (or, begins opening) next week here in Los Angeles. (The one that has me out at rehearsals and tech rehearsals and dress rehearsals and so forth at all hours.)

My play “He Said She Said” is part of “Passions,” which is a “Keystone” event; I’m directing “Move” by Trey Nichols on the same night; I’m directing “The Incident Report” by EM Lewis as part of the “Special Presentation” called “Flight”; and word has it I’m writing one of the segments of the “Spotlight” event “Arachnatopia” at the Natural History Museum. (Which means I’d better start writing it.) Can’t follow all that? Go to this link and… just buy all of it.

Hope to see you there.

Yesterday a friend and I went to Long Beach to see the Brian Eno installation, “77 Million Paintings,”  at the University Art Museum of California State University Long Beach. The genesis of the 77 million paintings enumerated in the title — which, Eno later said during his lecture, would actually be 77 million cubed —  is described well in this piece by the LA Times’ Reed Johnson. In short, a video mosaic of 12 individual screens pulls images randomly from grouped sets contained in databases held by three different computers, generating an ongoing series of freshly executed video “paintings,” which are sonically supported by a soundtrack of  sound loops on six separate tape decks, resulting in randomized musical accompaniment. The intention is to remove deliberation and intention from the artistic process; the result is mesmerizing. As my friend and I found, it was quite easy to get lost in the neverending self-generating inventions of the computers and the tape decks. For one brief period, I felt detached from space and time. I’ve had this feeling before with some art, in various disciplines, but only rarely.

Later, we attended Eno’s lecture at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center (also part of Cal State Long Beach). After 30 years of following the man’s career in all its phases — rock star, record producer, artist, writer, thinker — this was our first chance to see him in the flesh. Eno proved to be thoughtful, puckish, droll, and concerned, in equal measures. I would characterize the first third of his lecture as an admonishment to let go. (This should be expected from an artist whose visual work is created largely from computer generation.) He started by reminding us of something we’ve known for 566 years, since Copernicus:  that not only we are not at the center of the universe, we are off in a small corner, in one of a billion billion solar systems, and we exist as only one of innumerable species just on this one planet, where only an estimated 10% of species have been cataloged. In other words,  Get over yourself. Again, this viewpoint should be expected from someone extolling the virtues of random, unemotionally generated, art.

On the way home I wondered aloud how well these theories that can work so well  in visual art and music would work in long-form narrative. Having read (or tried to read) Samuel Beckett’s novels and some of William S. Burroughs’ longer pieces, I unfortunately believe I know too well. In such cases, even a little plot can go a long way. Organic writing — which I practice and preach — benefits from pruning and shaping. Effects can engage an audience, but only for so long; the best effect is an emotional verisimilitude, however achieved, that transports people into a deep level of caring about what happens. That occurs in better productions of “Waiting for Godot” because Didi and Gogo are present and we can relate; it never happens with “The Unnameable,” which is a true chore to read. When he’s collaborating with, say, Robert Fripp, Eno is free to produce an album of electronic feedback loops, but when he’s producing records for U2 or Coldplay, he must serve the song. To his immense credit, he never claimed in this talk that he was abandoning all oversight; rather, he talked about intentional balance, moderating oneself along the continuum between surrendering all control, or controling all elements, depending upon the desired outcome. I think that’s about right.

If you’re interested in “77 Million Paintings” and cannot make it to Long Beach, where it runs through December, here’s some good news:  a beautiful software-and-DVD version exists. Here it is on Amazon.com.  I bought a copy at the museum, and at about 35 bucks, it’s a steal. The package includes the software to run these self-generating images on  your computer, with accompanying soundtrack. In addition, there’s a beautiful booklet with notes from the artist, plus an interview DVD. Get it and surrender all control to it.

• President Obama’s health-care speech last night (great job!) and his killer tactic of inducing that thick-necked GOP jerk to yell out “You lie!” That alone will have swung enough support. Once again, other people have misunderestimated you, sir president. We watch and learn.
• The Gallup-originated “Strengths-Based Leadership” test I took today, which sized me up as having strengths in Strategic, Activator, Individualization, Responsibility, and Input, resulting from oddly dichotomous choices like “You believe in ghosts” vs. “You like chocolate.” More on this tomorrow, I think, when my neck isn’t killing me. I also would have preferred that the test conclude in words of the same form — all adjectives or all nouns or all gerunds or all something the same. These qualities — Strategic Activator, etc. — sound like mistranslations from the Chinese, like Glorious Serving Sword of Destiny.
• My second night of rehearsals with my cast, and hearing my rewrites for the first time. Short version:  New opening line sucked (and my actor rightly asked for the old one back); new purposely bad poem is deliciously bad and probably earns a laugh right where I planned because, as I suspected, the actor has the chops to get that laugh and got it right away; still very glad to have the director and actors I have. The director has better ideas than I do, so again, I’m glad he’s directing and I’m not.
• How “lack mentality” drives me crazy. Brief definition:  “I lack [fill in the blank], so I can’t do [fill in the blank].” It’s just reflexive with people. (Most people?) Once you’ve trained your ear to hear it,  you hear it all the time. Why not instead:  “I want to [fill in the blank], so I have to [fill in the blank].” That’s more actionable; you can actually do something about it. I think today I heard the lack mentality about six times. In one case, I’m concerned that an important arts institution is going to go under — or at least suffer greatly — because of all the lacking going on.
• My thrill at getting a new script by one of my favorite playwrights. In fact, right now I’m going to go read it in the jacuzzi because, for some reason, my neck is killing me.