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.

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.

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

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.

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.

“The Car Plays” are back, and once again just about nobody’s going to be able to get a ticket. Except, perhaps, you, if you act soon.

What’s “The Car Plays?” It’s an evening of plays, produced by my theatre company Moving Arts, taking place in — you guessed it — cars. For the past two series, the event’s taken place in the parking lot of the Steve Allen Theatre in Hollywood. This year the good people at Woodbury University have made available a large parking lot up in the hills of their beautiful leafy campus in Burbank. The 20 plays are separated into four different rows — this year called Ventura, Figueroa, Ocean, and Hollywood, after some famous L.A. streets — with each ticket getting you one of those rows of five 10-minute plays. What goes on in those cars? In the past we’ve had comedies and dramas featuring adulterous couples, transvestite streetwalkers, pickups, pedestrian accidents, hitmen, marital calamity, parental freakouts and everything else you can imagine might happen in a car. (Including having a dead pedestrian getting thrown througha moon roof.) It’s quite an event, it’s been on every critic’s choice list in L.A., and it’s always an instant sellout — because each showing plays to an audience of two. That’s right, you and your friend are voyeurs inside the car.

The show returns end of this month with mostly new plays. My new car play, “All Dressed Up But Going Nowhere” is a sequel to my previous car play, “All Undressed With Nowhere to Go,” is directed by my designated driver, Trey Nichols. And I’m directing a remount of the wonderful “It’s Not About the Car” by Stephanie Walker, with the same great cast I had last time (Liz Harris and Joe Ochman). The show runs Friday and Saturday June 26th and 27th at 7, 8, and 9 p.m. Here’s where to get tickets. (There’s also a special gala performance on Thursday the 25th that includes a full dinner from the Brazilian steakhouse Picanha, plus a silent auction and some other fun programming. Here’s where to get those tickets. They’re more, but they’re worth it.)

Each play runs at least 48 performances in the regular run — but already almost all those tickets mentioned above are sold out. Ventura, which includes my play, is sold out for the run (but there may be a couple left for the benefit night). But here’s the inside scoop, which I’m sharing with you and other loyal readers of this blog:  We’re about to add performances for Sunday the 28th at 7, 8, and 9 p.m. That means 16 more chances to see each of these plays. All you’ve got to do is keep watching the Moving Arts website for that extension notice. And as soon as I see it, I’ll post an update here, but don’t wait for me. Last time we put tickets on sale, some of the rows sold out in 9 minutes. (That’s even faster than rooms sell out at the San Diego Comic Con.)

I’m in Omaha, Nebraska having a fine time serving as a lecturer and panelist at the Great Plains Theatre Conference ’til June 1.

Here’s what theatre conferences are good for:

• expanding your network of good actors and directors. This week I’ve been collecting a big pile of paper scraps with names and email addresses scribbled on them.
• reminding yourself what makes for a good play and makes for a not-good play. In most cases, the not-good play could use more conflict and more subtext. In all cases, the good play leaves you wishing there were more.
• getting spurred on to do more of your own writing. I’ve written two plays in the past three days — that feels great. I got to hear the one right away, and I’m hoping there’s going to be time for me to corral some actors to hear the other one as well.
• eating and drinking on the host’s tab.
• seeing lots of other theatre on the host’s tab.
• staying up most of the night talking theatre and drinking and smoking cigars.

So while I’m sorry the posts have been few and far between, now you know why. And now I have to go shower off the aftereffects of two cigars and half a bottle of wine so I can make it to the dinner reception and tonight’s performances.

At the moment I feel very indebted to the fine people running this conference.