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.

It’s holy writ among playwrights that a bad production can screw up even a masterpiece. (Don’t believe it? Imagine William Shatner doing Shakespeare — or just singing “Rocket Man.”) But some plays hold up better than others under all circumstances, and after seeing a production of it this past Friday in a tenement theatre in San Francisco I’m thinking that Neil LaBute’s “The Shape of Things” is one of them.

The basic premise is just so much fun:  An average college nerd given a chance with an unconventional and attractive young artiste is remade in the process and left wondering, in the end, who he is and what just happened. This particular production was the directing debut of a recent college grad, and the casting reminded me of many a production I have myself featured in somehow as director or producer or (worst) playwright:  This actor’s great, this one’s good, this one’ll do, and this one… we’ll make work somehow. One actor telegraphed the play’s finale — if you didn’t know the final twist, you could certainly guess it from every actorly indication starting with Moment One. (Note to young actors (or bad actors, or all actors):  Please don’t play the end, and please don’t play the intention; and please don’t play subtext; just be. Please.) Another was physically wrong in almost every way but brought such bonhommie to the role that I grew to appreciate him and his oddly accidental comic moments. The lead was a sensation. And despite whatever faults — including the introduction of an intermission that the playwright expressly doesn’t want — the production worked well, got laughs, and held the attention of the audience. LaBute’s play asks smart questions about the essence of identity and the nature of art and the authenticity of sexual attraction; its success stems from its ability to entertain while being provocative.

What undoubtedly added to the enjoyment for me was that my son was seeing it with me. We went to San Francisco very last minute for three days on some personal business and decided to see a play on Friday night. My heart is usually found in a smaller theatre, so that’s where we went. Thirty years in, it’s hard for me to look at these things without a critical eye (but boy, when I love it, it is a joy to behold); but for Lex, this sort of thing is still new and young. His enjoyment of the play, which he’d already read, rubbed off on me. Whatever relatively minor faults of the production, I left feeling that I wanted to see another play in another small theatre right away.

The next night, after a day full of errands and obligations all over San Francisco, we went to the movies. We both wanted to see “Taken,” but it wasn’t playing near our hotel, so we wound up seeing “Fast & Furious.” Throwing us, in one night, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Let me just say that if ever in my life I’m having the stuffing beaten out of me, if someone is to grab me, throw me against a hard wood table so hard that it breaks in half, pick me up and hit me eight times hard to the craniofacial area, I hope it’s Vin Diesel, because judging from the recovery of Paul Walker it must be like getting pummeled with soft pillows. Walker sits up, wipes an invisible dripping from his nose, and talks down Vin Diesel with soothing words:  It’s the classic misunderstanding, but it’s all for the good, and no hard feelings. You or I would be on life support, but Walker is made of movie stuff. Earlier in the picture, Diesel’s posse of roadway hoodlums south of the border power their muscle cars down twisting mountaintop expanses of secluded roadway at top speeds in reverse, dropping trailer hitches onto gasoline tankers so they can haul off the precious fuel. (I’m assuming this was conceived when oil was at $150 a barrel, not the $50 it’s hovering at now. In 2009 if you want to make off with that much money, you just get a federal bailout.) The fuel swipe goes awry and Vin Diesel and his car find themselves trapped between a rock and a hard place:  hurtling toward one truck on a dead-end mountain pass while another tractor trailer endlessly flipping and bouncing from midair to hard ground is tumbling precisely their way. His solution:  Expertly timing when the tractor trailer is in midair and driving beneath it, getting out from under by the skin of his paint job. This trick is so neat that, of course, the movie repeats it again later. In big-budget action-adventure movies, if once is good, twice (or more) must be better.

For me, the movie dies 10 minutes in with Michelle Rodriguez’s character. No, I don’t know why I care about Michelle Rodriguez. I just know I can’t take my eyes off her. It isn’t purely heat; she’s got that indecipherable screen charisma that some people have and some people don’t. In a season of “Lost” that I don’t remember much about and didn’t care much about at the time, she was magnetic. (As was Michael Emerson.) Even surrounded by nitro-fueled steroid cars and whatever has been injected into Vin Diesel’s muscles and head, she stands out. But then she dies. In retrospect. We don’t even get to see it (except later). My son, who knew of my interest in seeing this movie because of Michelle Rodriguez, whispered “Uh oh” when we learned she wasn’t going to be reappearing in this movie. Not that her disappearance was a surprise, either:  Once your action-adventure hero somewhat unwillingly parts with his leading lady but leaves her a note (or, in this case, a big whopping bundle of cash; nothing says farewell my lovely so well as stacks of dead presidents), you know she’s doomed. But then, nothing, absolutely nothing, is a surprise in this movie, up to and including the identity of the mysterious drug lord everyone is hunting, and who turns out to be precisely who everyone (except our hero) thinks it is in the first place.

Finally — and I really can’t leave this subject without a word about this — let’s discuss Vin Diesel. I know that we shouldn’t discuss anyone with the name Vin Diesel, and I realize that each of us has only a limited time on Earth and I’m now spending some of mine on Vin Diesel,  and you’re spending some of  yours reading about Vin Diesel, but I can’t resist. Somehow I didn’t mind him in “The Chronicles of Riddick.” Maybe that’s because Judi Dench was in it. Maybe it’s because it was a science fiction movie with enough distractions, including Thandie Newton. (No Michelle Rodriguez, but she’ll do.) But “Fast & Furious” had me asking myself if Vin Diesel isn’t the flattest “actor” since Charles Bronson. An actor who was in a couple of my plays in the 1990’s did a movie with Charles Bronson in that period. I asked him what Charles Bronson was like. His reply:  “Like cement.” Just an inert slab that happened to be there for you to bounce lines off. I recently watched “Death Wish” again — and no, I don’t know why — and it’s true:  the “distraught” Charles Bronson upset over his wife’s murder and daughter’s rape is indistinguishable from the “workaday” Charles Bronson doing business out in the desert is indistinguishable from the vigilante Charles Bronson shooting would-be muggers in the park is indistinguishable from the murderous Charles Bronson evading police pursuing him from the subway station. Each has the emotional consistency of drywall. I couldn’t think when I’d seen that since in a major name film actor — but then seeing Vin Diesel in his latest solved that riddle for me. Say what you will about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who can’t deliver a comic line to save his schwarzenegger, but at least he can crack his face into a smile.

Oddly, though, for all its obvious problems, “Fast & Furious” is every bit as unwreckable as “The Shape of Things” — probably moreso. The latter is clever enough to withstand the uneven application of artistic ability. The former is so witless, so amped up on steroids and meth, that no amount of artistic ability is needed, or even germane. “What I learned from you is to have a code,” Paul Walker’s character tells Vin Diesel; from all evidence, that character’s code is to do whatever he wants whenever he wants wherever he wants, no matter the impact on anyone else. (We call that hedonism. No, Virginia, it is not a basis for heroism.) The movie’s code is similarly easy to grasp:  maximum impact, but no repercussions. Repeat. Faster. Repeat.

I’ll never forget the first time I started to read Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” in my late teens. Or the second time. Or the third time. Without finishing it. There had to be something to this book, its advocates were so legion, but whatever it was, I wasn’t finding it. Each time, I experienced the first 100 pages  as a cascade of names and items I couldn’t place or keep straight:  the Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit, Feyd Rautha, various Atreides and Harkonnens, stillsuits, weirding modules, heighliners, and on and on. Now there’s a Wikipedia page covering just the technology. At the time, there was no such resource. There was just the lonely labor of trying again and again until something started to make sense. Three times, I bailed on this book, until finally one night, pruning in the tub, I made it past page 100 and actually got interested.

The other night my wife saw me hunkered down in front of the bookcase on my side of the bed, looking for the next novel to read. In general, I read two or three books (and multiple magazines) at the same time. I’m looking forward to finishing the history of Germany  under the Nazis (especially delightful because I know how it ends) and then returning to the account of Roman Empires, as well as finishing Julian Barnes’ meditation on death and that account of how censorship ended so many comic artists’ careers. But in the meantime, I was looking for a novel, having recently finished T.C. Boyle’s “A Friend of the Earth,” as noted here previously. My eye landed upon Cormac McCarthy’s border trilogy:  a one-volume compendium of “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Crossing,” and “Cities of the Plain.”

However overstylized his writing may be (or perhaps because of its trickery) I find McCarthy to be a wonderful writer. No matter his overuse of polysyndeton, he has a grasp of vocabulary and flow and scenic description that at times beggars belief. I get caught up and keep reading. In addition to “All the Pretty Horses,” I’ve read “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road,” and enjoyed them all immensely. But I got stopped cold about 160 pages into “The Crossing” by an endless monologue given by an old man unmoored from this life. This old man goes on about… something… for so long I felt trapped in purgatory with him. And finally freed myself by putting the book down. A quick check-in with my son revealed that, unprompted, he had stopped at precisely the same waystation. Neither of us knew what the old man was talking about, endlessly and with seemingly no purpose, and both of us had ditched.

But now I picked it back up and climbed into bed. Even if the plot didn’t advance — and clearly, that’s what I was missing, some action, some sense of forward movement, something that would pick me up and carry me along in the way that made “No Country for Old Men” utterly unputdownable — I figured I would find myself entranced again by some of the prose before quietly slipping off to sleep. Without the aid of a bookmark, I found where I had left off probably six months ago, near the terminus of the old man’s interminable monologue, and started up again. And then found myself reading for hours. Here’s what happens:  The existential treatise ends a mere page or so after I had quit, with the old man bidding our protagonist, 17-year-old Billy Parham, farewell. Billy rather speedily crosses the border from Mexico back into the U.S. (New Mexico; nice touch) and returns to his family’s ranch to discover that the ranch has been cleaned out and his parents murdered. He heads into town and gleans what information he can from the sheriff, then picks up his younger brother, who somehow escaped the onslaught, and returns with him to Mexico, where they seek their horses and, no doubt, the men responsible for the murders.

In other words, now the book is a page turner.

I related this to my son, getting up to the point of Billy’s return and what he finds, when my son called out, “Stop. Maybe now I want to finish reading it.” He’ll have to wait for me to finish it first.

Is all this a very long way of saying that story is important? Perhaps. Is it the most important element? Maybe not. I loved “The Incredibles” because I got so caught up in Mr. Incredible’s personal crisis (a hero forced to reject his heroism, and so subject to the predations of bureaucracy and the 9 to 5); by contrast I in no way care about Ginormica’s problem in “Monsters vs. Aliens” (a young woman supported in marrying the wrong man by her friends and family discovers her true family when she is imprisoned with friendly monsters, of which she now is one). (More about this later.) The key difference is not in the story elements, but in the thematic and character elements. But story is important, and it seems oddly irritating in 2009 to have to say this. It is especially irritating to have to say this with regard to the theatre, where somehow it has become laughable to suggest that we should care what happens, and that actions should have consequences, but here is Theresa Rebeck, in today’s LA Times, having to defend these notions for us. I have stood in her shoes too many times. It’s especially galling to have cut one’s teeth on Ionesco and Beckett and to have one’s view of theatre derided as “nostalgic.”

Audiences aren’t stupid and they don’t lie. With drama we can more easily fool ourselves, but comedy is the truest form because it exposes all falsehoods:  Either it is funny or it isn’t, and either the audience laughed or it didn’t.  It’s that simple. No, not all experiences are universal.  There were many who loved “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” but if I never see another newish Neil Simon play it will be far too soon. (Seeing “The Dinner Party” was for me a singular event; it was the very evening in which I swore I would forever after more cautiously guard my time. This after two hours of feeling my life drain away.)  Every play is not for every body; but many new plays are for nobody — nobody except the people who make them. If the language poets killed poetry, I’m afraid their ilk have now turned their sights onto the stage. Twenty-five years ago, an undergrad professor told me that if poetry lost the educated, the enlightened, the readers, the people it already had and should have, then the fault lay with the poets. I think about that every time I come across a new poem utterly inflated with its own word play and cleverness but resolutely impregnable of meaning. But where I feel worst about this is in the theatre, when audiences are left cold by something obtuse that the playwright and the director are so unjustly proud of. The underlying purpose of all theatre must remain catharsis — that frisson of fellow-feeling, when the emotional brutality of the event whether comic or dramatic is brought upon us. When language is made pre-eminent over feeling, all we’re left with is puns.