LitDept

Hello.

2007-08-15T22:19:00.000-07:00

Grady Burnett Walsh.

Born Wed, Aug 15 at 4:02 am.

8 lbs, 15 oz - or 9 pounds, give or take an oz.

21 inches.

All are very very healthy - including MOM!

To see more pix of the birthday party, just go here.

It's all new, now, isn't it?

ps. Thanks for all the calls and emails from everyone about this. The support means a lot to Heather and I. You may get an email about this too - depending on how well I know you. Given the difficulties of wifi at the hospital, it was simply easier to post this first. I hope you understand.

Late. Very Late.

2007-08-14T00:44:00.001-07:00

So, you're probably saying, "I thought he said his last post was going to be coming up. But didn't he say that like, two weeks AGO?" And you'd be right. But if you think I'm hanging on too long, you should see the woman I'm married to.

After all, we are officially overdue. And she is officially tired of it.

But what can you do?

Us, we're playing tennis, going on long walks, planning ways to shoot more of a movie idea, kicking around a screenplay idea, seeing lots of movies (Rush Hour 3 - bad; Stardust - good; Once - excellent; Bourne - excellent; Harry Potter - whatever), watching TV shows (Damages - fucking fantastic; Mad Men - fucking fantastic; First Season of The Wire - REALLY FUCKING FANTASTIC!!!!) and, as the video embedded in this post shows, hitting the swimming pool late at night. (I apologize about the squashed look - I shot it in HD and must of captured it incorrectly because I can not get it to compress to the right format (16:9 letterbox) - though it's all part of the very steep learning curve.)

One good thing that has come about - BEYOND THE OWING will be getting a reading at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis next year as part of their Roundtable Reading Series. It's a million years away, but it's nice to have something. Always nice.

In the meantime, I'm closer than ever to being done with this thing.

I thought it would be worthwhile - or at least worth the self-indulgence - to link to "People I'm Meeting In LA" posts that I've had written through the year. There's only 10 of 'em. And if you're interested, well...

I like the agent piece in particular.

The Actor

The Agent

The Dream Factory

The Story Analyst

The Playwright

The Library

The Director

The Young Producers

The New Writer

The Executive

************************
Finally, weirdly, "WHY BLOGGING MATTERS" has for some reason disappeared. Anyone know why that might have happened, aside from the crack that maybe it doesn't matter?

Did You Know?

2007-08-13T01:18:00.001-07:00

In a few days - maybe even today - a baby is going to make me a dad.

This is the world he's being born into - and that we're all writing for - today.

Amazing. Frightening. Terrific.

Next.

2007-08-09T00:41:00.000-07:00

One piece of advice I've gotten from everyone here, from all angles. Do it yourself.

This follows Anne Bogart's "Don't wait."

You'd think theatre would be faster, but actually, it's not. For theatre, you not only need actors, but you need a space to rehearse in, a space to perform in and people to run lights, the house, the sound and the cues - every night.

Then you have to find an audience to make it worthwhile.

In film, you need those actors and technicians for one day (more if you have a budget and you're doing something bigger - but still less than theatre). The performance space can be as low rent as YouTube and my experience with videos on YouTube has been, you're likely to get more people watching your work by accident than you are to get in a theatre without a decent ad budget, a huge cast and a rave in print.

So I took all the collective advice and bought a Canon XH-A1. It's the low end 24f (or p, if you believe the hype) HD camera. I also picked up a Sennheiser mic and one lighting instrument.

My wife bought me a copy of Final Cut Express.

Two weeks ago I shot my first short. The script was from a play I wrote that imagines a conversation between Helen and Clytemnestra just before Clytemnestra gives birth to Iphigenia, (Iphigenia, the girl who will later be sacrificed by Agamemnon - her father - in order to please the gods enough to put wind in his Greek fleets sails and begin the quest to bring Helen back from Troy. Hilarity, right?)

The stills here are from the edited short - which runs about 10 minutes. I won't post the video of it because what I learned is just how limited my equipment is, but it gave me hope about continuing down this road.

And, it was fun.

I may in fact stop blogging soon, but I may start posting video shorts instead. All the while trying to find a place to do Dressing the Girl here in LA - naturally.

NOTE: While writing this, we had a 4.5 earthquake here in California. The bookshelves definitely SHOOK.

My Irish mind.

2007-08-08T00:21:00.001-07:00

We're close to being parents.

And these days we're a bit edgy waiting for that. But now that Denver is taking some space, we're not only waiting, but we're -er, well, I'm - thinking overmuch about what comes next.

Mixed into it, I've received a few rejections - one of which actually surprised me (though I should know better) - and one of which was very detailed about why a play I'd written wasn't being accepted. This detail was offered in good faith by someone who likes my work. But I have to remind myself - a lot these days - that nothing happens overnight. Or on any schedule that I have.

On the other hand, i'm making plans to do what many here have recommended - making something myself.

It's a lot to have in the air on the eve of so much more. And sometimes I feel a little like I did last November when I was thinking we might be living in a car rather than an apartment when there was no money and no prospects.

Of course, that's not at all how it worked out. But my Irish mind went there anyway.

And I while I have to wait for what comes next, I really can't wait. It's pretty amazing to think that a year ago I never thought I'd be in such an amazingly fortunate place.

Good things to come. Good things.

In that spirit, it seems like a good time to point out some of my favorite posts by others. So, in really no particular order, here's a list of posts (an inadequate list to be sure) that were worth a look when when they were written. And I think are still worth a look now.

If you don't find one you like, just check out anyone I've put a link to on the right. They're there because I read them. You should too.

Enjoy.

******************

1.
This is the first post that really caught my interest and wouldn't let go: A speech from Eduardo Machado that questioned the way playwrights are being supported by the theatre culture we live in. I believe that Isaac had found it elsewhere originally. The text and the responses it inspired at Parabasis made me take the "theatrosphere" seriously and made me want to contribute.

2.
This manifesto from Adam was great. Certainly made me think a little more about what I wanted to see in theatre. I suppose you might expect nothing less from Adam, who suggested I create my own blog just a little after we left school.

3.
Ever feel stuck? You are not alone. Another gem from Szymkowicz.

4.
I used to read George Hunka very regularly. I still peak occasionally. Whatever one thinks of his style, he sticks up for seriousness and against the trivial. His "Organum" is a perfect example of his maddening tone and his incisive thinking. If you can't get one without the other, well, I'll take both rather than neither. So, look around.

5.
Matthew Freeman has few things to say about the "Organum" too - and why he prefers practice to theory.

6.
Of the many things discussed in the "theatrosphere" funding is one of the more important topics. Here Freeman talks about the arts funding decline.

7.
Another popular discussion has been the way writers have wrestled with narrower production opportunities and the rise of development. The Playgoer led a lot of these conversations.

8.
But he's not the only one as these posts from Mr. Excitement and Laura - who no longer writes about theater - show.

9.
It all lead to a lot of yelling and kvetching until, eventually, Jason Grote weighed in with some tempered observations based on his experiences.

10.
The subject got explored from a different angle when Isaac quoted Albee and delved into questions about our collaborative natures.

11.
And there's this from Playgoer about the economics of what we do.

12.
One of my pet subjects is the need to do more than theatre when theatre isn't keeping the lights on. The always provocative Don Hall had this to say. Laura also had some thoughts that are worth reviewing. That of course is one reason why I believe Joshua James made this declaration.

13.
Then there are big subjects that get broached. Like the one that unspooled from this post by David Cote. Religion seems to do that.

14.
David also wrote this piece that exemplifies one aspect of what I'd like see instead of theatre reviews - the think piece.

15.
Finally, I'd be totally remiss if I didn't point out the great thinking of Dave Tutin as exemplified by this observation about where we discover who we are.

Beyond the Owing

2007-08-07T00:02:00.000-07:00

This play will be produced July 13 -26,
at the Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis,
directed by Genevieve Bennett.

Check it out.... right here.

Beyond the Owing

Drama, full length, one intermission.

It’s Easter and Liz has come home with her fiancé Sutton to put the finishing touches on their wedding plans. With the big day only three months away, a financial storm of debt swells on the horizon of their life together. Has Sutton lost hope in their future or does he just have cold feet? Will Liz's mother roll the dice on her own future to prop up the young couple? In a tempest brought on by the crushing cost of pursuing a dream, Liz is swept up in the tragic struggle over who owes who - and for what.

CAST: 2 M, 3 F

Drama Guild Writing Fellowship – semi-finalist - 2006

NJ Rep – staged reading, directed by Matthew Arbour - 2006

Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, OR – staged reading, directed by Robynn Rodriguez – 2006

Clubbed Thumb “New Play Boot Camp” at Playwrights Horizons, NY, directed by Matthew Arbour – 2006

PCPA TheaterFest workshop/reading - 2007

Here's an early review of the production referenced above.

BY LYDIA HOWELL
TWIN CITIES DAILY PLANET
July 16, 2009

If you’ve never seen a play, Beyond the Owing by Malachy Walsh is the perfect introduction to theater. Strong characters deal with universal emotional conflicts in a very current context—the economic crisis and crushing debts.

Out of college and planning to marry, Liz, a waitress and aspiring actress, and Sutton, a carpenter who wants to write, face tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. When the couple visit Liz’s mother Ruth to finish planning their wedding, a troubling secret is unexpectedly revealed, testing all these relationships. One theme of this play is being a young adult “going home” and seeing the distance (and disconnects) between where we’re from and where we want to go in life. The debts owed here are not only financial, but emotional—and not easily resolved.

Genevieve Bennett is a self-described “independent, self-producing theater director” responsible for last year’s Twin Cities Chekhov Festival; all the actors except one worked with Bennett in that endeavor. Bennett met playwright Walsh in graduate school five years ago, read an early draft of Beyond the Owing three years ago and, with actors, she collaborated on the script, acting “as more of a dramaturge than a director.”

beyond the owing, presented through july 26 at the red eye theatre, 15 w. 14th st., minneapolis. for tickets ($10-$15) and information, see beyondtheowing.com. hear an interview with genevieve bennett on kfai’s art matters (july 9 episode), archived at kfai.org.
Bennett, a Columbia University graduate, told KFAI that she identified with the couple in the play. ”They’re in an artistic field, so they’re not going to make big bucks right out of college—maybe not ever. This was a self-reflective play for me and the actors. It makes you reflect on ‘was it selfish or right to go for my dreams?’ Of course, it’s more interesting to ask questions than to make a statement. This play asks a lot of questions.”

“Beyond the Owing” features an ensemble of creative talents in synchrony: Bennett, the actors, and a near-perfect script. I found myself thinking of a young Arthur Miller or Lorraine Hansberry: big issues are explored within everyday lives we can relate to.

Sasha Andreev plays Sutton as a passionate lover and practical problem-solver, who as the outsider seems to be the only solid ground in the midst of this spinning family drama of three women. He has a way to solve the money crunch he and Liz are in—but how ethical is he? Andreev communicates charisma with a smoldering question: when confronted with a huge challenge, does he have character? Will he stick it out or split? Andreev subtly implies an ambivalence to keep you guessing until the end.

As played by Sara Richardson, Liz is an emotional pinball. Madly in love with Sutton, but facing unfinished business with her mother and reuniting with her best friend Trish, Richardson masterfully shows a complex range of emotions: playful, angrily defensive, stunned devastation. Veteran actress (and member of Theater Unbound) Delta Rae Giordano plays the mother, Ruth, as an emotional vortex. She’s vague, lost and dependent one moment, petty and vindictive the next. Your sympathies ricochet back and forth between Liz and Ruth, because neither one is painted as an unambiguous villain. Nicole Devereaux plays Trish, left behind after high school, simmering with contradictions. Trish’s past admiration of Liz vies with her present envy, and she may have become a substitute daughter to Ruth. Certainly, the different paths Trish and Liz have taken add another source of conflict to the mix. Mario (Leif Jurgensen), a wedding planner, is an almost comic fringe character who adds another twist that will ultimately lead to revealing the big secret that cracks these characters wide open.

Beyond the Owing takes place in Ruth’s house with a marvelous “soundscape” created by Elliot Durko Lynch, a Sage-Award-nominated sound artist, part of the recent podcast series RadioBrain. Without the multimedia gimmickry that too many plays today resort to, Lynch is ingenious in his use of usually unremarkable sounds to create an increasingly tense atmosphere.

“At first I thought this was a play about being in debt,” said Bennett. “Then, I realized it’s about attempting to reconcile what we dreamed our lives would be with what our lives have actually become. The chasm between those things only grows wider with financial stress. Huge tragedies are going on in the tanking economy. But there are everyday tragedies [involving the gap between] what people dreamed their life would be and what it is—often due to financial obstacles.”

Beyond the Owing is an emotionally powerful mirror to many of our modern dilemmas. In our money-mad culture, this play ponders the prices we pay in our most intimate relationships and the costs that can’t be calculated in a credit report. You owe it to yourself not to miss this instant contemporary classic.

++++
Lydia Howell is a Minneapolis journalist, winner of the 2007 Premack Award for Public Interest Journalism. She hosts Catalyst: Politics & Culture on KFAI. Hear a conversation with Dee Mosbacher archived on the Catalyst page at kfai.org.

Finally, here's a photo of Heather (2007), at the pool, where we talked for an hour or so before coming up to bed.

Logic of Clawed Feet

2007-08-06T08:35:00.001-07:00

I'm still working on this one.

Michael Kenyon at the Public used to call it the "flower-penis" play.

That's not a horrible description. Plus, there's a wrestling match between the flower-penis and its owner.

Don't know when I'll ever finish it.

The Logic of Clawed Feet

Comedy, full Length, three acts.

Is Iris a witch? No one knows for sure, but when she decides to stop turning her lovers into cupcakes and swears men off for good, she casts one last spell on poor Earl, the cab-driver who haplessly picks her up at the Ritz. Things get really crazy however, when, after falling for her, Earl grows a Gerber daisy for a penis. Can Iris control her fears long enough to settle into a relationship with a man? Should Earl use Miracle-Gro or start weeding the garden that’s sprouting out of his pants? These questions and more get asked in a whimsical comedy that uses San Francisco as a fairy tale backdrop.

CAST: 2 F, 2 M

78th Street Theatre Lab - workshop presentation - June, 2006

78th Street Theatre Lab - reading - 2005

American Theatre Co-op quarterfinalist - 2003

Finally, a worthwhile essay on the state of theater that Adam linked to earlier today after seeing it at Mike Daisey's place.

Rinse Tank

2007-08-05T09:52:00.001-07:00

Rinse Tank

Drama, full length, one intermission.

Dana collects stories. Stories about broken marriages and one-night benders with bad boys. But when her attempt to take control of her own story leads her into a degrading tryst with an old grad school friend, she picks up with a guy she meets on a blind date - Brian - and looks for a new plot line. Can Dana leave behind the rock-star-lifestyle story she was trying to live when the Internet was riding high? Is she really creating a new story line for her life? Or is she just repeating?

CAST: 2 F, 2 M

This one hasn't gone out much. I can't really say why except that I write faster than theatres read.

Which I'm sorry about.

It's not the understaffed lit department's fault.

But there it is.

I loosely used this play to create a screenplay about the aftermath of San Francisco's tech boom. It's a good story about what happens when everyone comes back to earth after thinking anything is possible in business and in relationships. The short hand film pitch: "A coming of age story for the Entourage generation."

Fire Baby

2007-08-03T00:51:00.001-07:00

I usually describe this as a "horror" play.

I mean it in the sense of BURIED CHILD is a horror story and ERASERHEAD is a horror story.

And I explain it this way because most people don't understand it, though those who get it, really GET IT.

The year I was a finalist for New Dramatists I was told the play caused major rifts. The people who loved it, LOVED it. The people who hated it, HATED it.

I wasn't sure what side of the fence I was on when I was writing it. Half the time I wanted to hide under the bed from it. The other half I was, well, on fire over it. A close friend told me not to worry. "It's great," he said. When he saw the reading with Estelle Parsons, Billy Crudup and the late John Seitz, he hated it.

Others loved it.

One producer told me they wanted to produce until they saw its effect on an audience. It was very unsettling - though no one left.

Another said, "But the only character I have any empathy for dies in the middle. Why don't you write him back into the second half? I'll take another look."

Right.

A lit manager for one of the big New York non-profits known for producing new work by new writers met with me after reading it and said "You have to get this produced." She then told me that her artistic director wouldn't like it. "The mother and father are about the age of our audience and they wouldn't be able to take it."

That comment tells us a lot about what's wrong today.

If it ever gets done (which, in truth, I've pretty much given up on the idea of), it does need just the right people. In fact, allowing an audience to have any kind of empathy for the parents in this one is a huge mistake - which requires a fearless lead actress.

Want a copy? You know where to reach me.

Fire Baby

Drama/Horror, full length, one intermission.

A Christmas holiday: Callaghan and Aideen have been married too long. He claims that she stinks of horses and hounds. She blames him for thwarting her life's ambitions. Callaghan thinks if he only had a gun he could "live as he really wanted." It would just take a shot to the back of her head. Into this "festive" atmosphere walks Michael, their 35 year old son. A failed screenwriter, Michael has a darkly threatening habit of singing an old Bing Crosby song "Mono Maleke Maka" in a voice that makes Callaghan suspect he's homicidal. Has Michael returned home to kill his parents? Does Aideen know what's in the black plastic trash bags? A bloody, darkly comic struggle for power ensues. Who will hold the reins and who will wear the bit?

CAST: 2 M, 1 F

Semi-finalist for the Princess Grace Award – 2005

NJ Rep – staged reading, directed by Matthew Arbour - 2005

DR 2, NY - staged reading with Billy Crudup, Estelle Parsons, John Seitz, directed by Trip Cullman - 2004

Magic Theatre, SF - reading at monthly Lit Committee Series - 2004

Nominated for the 2005 Cherry Lane Mentor Project by Eduardo Machado, NY – 2004

Semi-finalist for the Princess Grace Award – 2004

John Golden Award for Playwrighting - 2004

Dressing the Girl

2007-08-01T22:00:00.000-07:00

This is the space the Soho Think Tank calls home. It's where the above titled play was generously workshopped in 2005.

A first draft was finished in 2002.

I began heavily revising it in late 2003. The current draft was finished in 2005 and is radically different from the draft that was heard at the Think Tank. It took much longer time to get it right than I thought it would.

I'm currently looking for a dress shop in LA to produce it in. If you know of one, email me.

Here's the entry for its last New York reading in late 2006.

I've written about it before, so let's not crap around...

***********************

Dressing the Girl

Drama, full length, one intermission (optional).

Anne and Ian, once romantically involved, still emotionally and intellectually entangled, try to pick up where they left off. Unfortunately, Anne hates sex and Ian’s recent decision to quit drinking has left him thirsty for just about any diversion he can find. Searching for a way into Anne, he starts buying her the same dress over and over again even though it doesn’t fit. His relentless pursuit eventually pushes him into the arms of a dress shop girl who shows him just how dangerous a dress can be.

CAST: 2 F, 1 M

Time/Warner Center, Montmartre – onsite reading, presented by Relentless Theatre Co, directed by C. Maryan - 2006

Neighborhood Playhouse – reading, directed by C. Maryan - 2006

78th Street Theatre Lab – Equity workshop presentation, directed by Matthew Arbour - 2005

Soho Think Tank – staged reading at the 6th Floor Series, Ohio Theatre, NY – 2005

Nominated for the 2004 Cherry Lane Mentor Project by Frank Pugliese, NY – 2003

Magic Theatre, SF, inaugural script to be stage read at the monthly Lit Committee Series - 2003

Tomorrow: FIRE BABY

The Chair & smaller

2007-08-01T00:26:00.000-07:00

Below are a synopsis for smaller and The Chair, the first two plays I wrote at Columbia.

Both were produced fairly quickly after writing them - at least in theatrical terms.

smaller was produced in San Francisco where it should've been. Unfortunately, the ceiling of the space we did it in was too low to light the play called for. So the glass office it took place in - symbolized by a harshly defined trapezoid of light that gradually gets smaller and smaller - never really happened. It would've been cool, but sometimes you have to let things go.

The Chair was first produced at the Hangar in Ithaca and later at the NY Fringe.

If you'd like a copy of either, email me at malachy14@mac.com.

Tomorrow, the second play I wrote at Columbia: Dressing the Girl

*********************

smaller

Drama, full Length, one act.

Matt and Paul, an advertising art director/copywriter team, have been together just a little too long. Like a marriage gone bad, they fight over everything from which women are desirable in the office to what makes a good boss. But when the dot com bubble they’ve been living on bursts, the bickering gets bitter and the fish bowl office they work in becomes smaller and smaller until only one can survive.

CAST: 2 M

NOH Space, SF - production - 2002

Tensions mount in an ad agency as two men wait to see who's getting the ax, in this skillful play by Malachy Walsh
By Michael Scott Moore
August 14, 2002, SF Weekly

"...humor and suspense are character-driven, and the actors tangle skillfully... {Walsh's} 'candid look at just how small life in a cubicle can get' isn't as familiar or dry as it sounds, and Walsh deserves to be watched."

The play was also featured in Wendy Lesser's Three Penny Review as an example of what a good theater going experience should bring up in an audience, particularly in a changing SF landscape. She GOT it.

*********************

The Chair

Drama, One Act – 50 minutes.

San Francisco in the winter of 2002. The economics of the economy are not good, but Lauren, young, ambitious, hard working still wants a raise. Actually, she NEEDS a raise. But when it’s clear that it won’t be coming, she confronts her boss, Katherine, about why. The two women, at opposite ends of the career spectrum, face off in job review that calls into question just who's career is being evaluated - the one in front of Lauren, or the one Katherine has left behind.

CAST: 2 F

NY International Fringe Festival, Relentless Theatre, NY - 2004, OVERALL EXCELLENCE IN PLAYWRIGHTING AWARD

Hangar Theatre Lab, Summer Play Lab winner, Hangar Theatre, Ithaca, NY – 2003

Bay Area Playwrights Festival, SF - Honorable Mention – 2003

Patricia Neal Award for Emerging Writers, National Arts Club, NY - 2002

Thanks and Stats

2007-07-31T09:51:00.001-07:00

First off, though I already said this in the comments section of the previous post, thanks to everyone for the supportive thoughts.

And I didn't mean to say that I was leaving because of a lack of civility.

Laura had made an opening for me and, unwisely, I used it to jump.

Guilty as charged of conflating.

My exit has been planned. Though this blog is no SOPRANOS, I think planning an end into the start of something is always good. (Though I'm not making a case for closed endings.)

A year seems like enough. And I've said a lot.

So, today's post is about numbers.

So far, I've posted 180 times.

Generally this blog is visited by about 100 unique visitors a day - though yesterday the number was tripled.

About 30-35 visitors a day are return visitors - which is to say they haven't reset their browser in a while.

Lately, I've been getting a lot of traffic from Chicago. It's probably the best theatre city in this country, so it's not a suprise.

Weekends are slow. Obviously people are looking at this thing on company time. (YES!)

Here are the big numbers (over the past year):
Page Loads - 25,280
Unique VIsitors - 15,434
First Time Visitors - 10,687
Returning Visitors - 4,747

My biggest referrer has been Parabasis. But I got a lot of hits when Playgoer noted my recognition of our theatre communities woes in a real estate story about Mr. Spinella. Adam has also sent a few people my way.

I get a lot of hits from people looking for tips on spec TV scripts.

The theatre houses that have looked at this blog from time to time include Seattle Rep, South Coast and Playwrights Horizons.

I also get hits from Sony Pictures, Dimension, Disney and MGM.

Recently I got a hit from somebody looking to find out if a producer I've worked with is single. Yikes, huh?

Okay, that's enough of that.

The Long Goodbye. Or soon anyway.

2007-07-29T23:49:00.000-07:00

So, this morning I got up to an email and a post from Laura Axelrod (Gasp!) that she's going to stop writing about theatre on her blog. In essence, politely declaring she's done with the "theatrosphere".

I'm not sure exactly why, but she's alluded to the lack of civil discourse of late.

Certainly, this long drawn out war over ideas about groups versus individuals and plays in the regions versus plays in New York has been repetitve. We've had this discussion before. And we've had the development discussion before. And the discussion of color blind casting and, well, you get the picture. And there's been lots of cat pictures in between with shoutouts to all our favorite playhouses - SoHo Rep, Clubbed Thumb, etc.

On August 14 last year, I made my first post. It's coming up on a year and it's close to time for me to say goodbye as well.

My interest in blogging started with Adam Szymkowicz. Talented dude, to say the least. And great roommate. And fantastic advice giver. And all-around funny, smart guy.

The interest grew when Isaac published a speech from Eduardo Machado that basically said playwrights were being failed by the theatre world, among other things.

It was all interesting and new and I started to comment quite frequently on a few blogs. And I started reading more of them: George Hunka, Jason Grote, Playgoer, Mr. Excitement and Don Hall.

Then I moved from New York to Los Angeles. And because I thought it woud be interesting, I decided to blog about the transition, naively thinking that it would just take a year. And also thinking that I'd land a job quickly and get going without much else but a good portfolio of writing and an open mind.

Naturally, the process isn't over. I don't have a full time job (though I've been freelancing enough to keep the cupboards full) and it hasn't been as easy I'd thought or hoped it would be. But the one thing I moved for that was most important to get has come to pass - My wife and I are living under the same roof after two years of trying to make things work on two coasts.

PLUS, I've got some great things going that I didn't count on - namely, a boy on the way.

Over the last 11 and a half months, I've tried to talk about the generous people I've met here in LA, share the ways I've tried to get around the obstacles to percieved success (some of which live within) and add my voice to an interesting group of bloggers who are as afflicted as I am with theatre.

In other words, it's been a blog about my actual life, not simply theories about theatre.

Sometimes I've been shrill. Sorry.

Over the next few weeks, I'll continue blogging, but what I am saying is that I am very close to the end - an end that I felt was much overdue just a few days ago when I realized how repetitive I'd become myself lately (I posted a Joel Meyerwitz photo twice).

I plan on linking back to a few of my favorite posts - some by me, some by others. Offering a few stats. And putting the synopses of my plays up - as a final act of marketing (yes, George, marketing!). I'm sure there will be a list or two.

Here is my first swan song link - to a recent speech by Ed Sobel, Lit Manager at the one of the greatest theatres in our country, Steppenwolf.

Please take time from any theoretical postings about groups and individuals and arcane discussion of Greek and Latin roots for the word "radical" and read it. We could all learn something from it.

I'd sing a song, but my voice is just horrible.

Errors.

2007-07-28T07:59:00.000-07:00

The other day I was talking to my mom on the phone and she said she was reading the New Harry Potter Book.

I asked how it was.

"It's good, you know. But Rowling can't write well."

Oh?

"She's got these sentences that are just horrible."

So, you don't like it?

"No. She's very imaginative and she's got a great story so it really moves along. She's just not a very good writer."

Writer?

"Or maybe it's the editor's fault."

Oh.

Which got me thinking about my own transgressions in writing, many of which readers of this blog have witnessed.

As I look back at my writing here, I have to say I'm certainly glad I've done it, but I'm also appalled at some of my mistakes. And while I don't want to blame blogging for the state of my poor grammar and spelling, I must say, what happens here seems to be happening elsewhere and I don't like it.

In fact, the other day I wrote a note to my wife that went something like, "Please be they're."

Jesus.

She said she'd noticed this switching of "they're" and "there" a lot lately.

A recent post found mispellings of "commission" and dropped helping verbs and many double letters and plenty of dropped "d"s from "and" and lots of "it's" for "its" and vice versa.

Is it the blog form? Is it writing too fast? Being too quick to put a first draft down?

Does it even matter?

I see errors in other people's posts and wonder if it has any effect on the reader's willingness to keep reading. Depending on the blogger, the tenor of the post and the logic of the post, I don't let it change my own reading habits, but still.

Which is why I occasionally return to posts and correct them where I see they're poor written.

If only I could do that with some of my comments.

Of course, I could fire my editor. But he's already got enough problems finding work.

Yup.

2007-07-27T08:56:00.000-07:00

Glad to know I'm not the only one who thinks about these things.

Great post from Patrick.

Days past....

2007-07-26T01:15:00.000-07:00

Taken just after we got married when she did Belle's at Ashland. I've always thought it funny that we got together - an actress who's made her bones on classics and a playwright who complains constantly about the lack of opportunity in theatre for the living writer.

10: The Executive

2007-07-25T13:43:00.000-07:00

Recently, I had lunch with a network executive (from one of the big three) who is a friend of a friend of an aquaintance.

It was not a long lunch, though it was clear that he'd read some of my blog and was very nice about it.

"What's it like to have done work that's been inducted into the NY Museum of Modern Art?" he asked.

I gave him my standard line: the best part about it is that if any of my kids (or my kid - who really knows) get in to Harvard I can always say, "So what? Until you're in MOMA, that's nothing." It was a quintessentially Irish answer and very, very Walsh. (I can hear my Dad in that quip.)

He confessed that while he'd received my play, my screenplay and my spec TV script, he hadn't read any of them. Which was cool with me because these days, I've yet to find anyone who really has the time to read. And that he was meeting me at all was a total fluke and more than generous on his part.

It was indeed a favor.

Then he asked what television I was watching. DEXTER, THE SOPRANOS (eventhough it's over), FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. I said I'd enjoyed the first third of HEROES but that I'd fallen behind somewhere and that when I got back to it, it was so convoluted with so many stories I couldn't follow it. I said I had been peeking at the new JOHN FROM CINCINATTI which had been intriguing but that I was also having trouble following along. Finally, I noted the show DAMAGES which at the time was to start soon with Glenn Close. (I missed it, by the way, but am hoping to catch it on the rebroadcast this Sunday.) Finally, I mentioned THE TUDORS which for some reason hasn't hooked me the way it promised to.

He commented that at least some of the shows I was watching were still on and that he was tired of meeting writers who gushed about DEADWOOD.

I volunteered that I understood why people would mention it and that it certainly was a gushworthy show.

He asked why I'd written a MEDIUM spec. I told him why the DuBois family interested me - the focus on her job eventhough he's a Rocket Scientist, the way Allison's girls affected the flavor of the show, the way the whole family seemed to be a pretty good metaphor for the way most Americans are making ends meet. I made my way back to the beginning by saying that while I wasn't sure I loved the way the show was produced (they're always whispering), the scripts at the WGA were great reads from start to end.

I asked him what he looked for in new writers. He said, "I look for people who are interesting. People who don't just watch TV. When you come into my office, don't have the same conversation that everyone has. Talk about something different."

I knew what he meant, but since our conversatiion was already the same as everyone else's I didn't know what he meant at all.

Then he told me that writing quality would not be the factor in my finding a staff job. He said my biggest obstacle to getting into televsion would be that I'm a white male. Apparently, they already have a lot of those and then some.

This, I've heard before.

We chit-chatted a little more and then the check came. We split the bill and went our separate ways.

Nice guy. Though, when I reflect on the meeting, well, I have to say, I somehow don't think I'll be hearing from him again. But all in all, that's all right.

It was a nice thing for him to do - meeting me - a writer with a handful of plays, screenplays and more, looking for a break.

A year ago, I wasn't here.

2007-07-23T23:24:00.000-07:00

We gave the MINI a bath tonight and then, like people who can't get off the associative logic train, went over to Target to buy a bathtub for the boy that we expect to be coming into out lives in just a matter of weeks (that would be two weeks).

Last night, I spent the evening frantically working up some theatre applications and looking over the plays I've been working on for the last year.

For some reason these actions all got me thinking about what I was doing last year at this time - and how, at that time, I probably could've only really predicted one of these two evenings: the one where I frantically worked up the theatre applications.

Why? Because that's what I KNOW how to do. It's the way I've been living for the last 6 years.

But last year, I certainly wouldn't have thought I was going to be here, in LA, washing a MINI and buying a baby bathtub.

Oh, no. Last year, this week, I was sitting in a Manhattan office being told by a very concerned HR person that I HAD TO DECIDE IF I WAS WORKING FOR THE AD AGENCY. OR NOT.

Okay, so it wasn't put in big capital letters. Or shouted at me.

But it was a kind of ultimatum that was asking me, I felt, to choose between being in NY without my wife, or being on the West Coast, with my wife, but without a job. Being pencil pushers, they were unwilling to see it any other way even though the split life had given them an advertising campaign that had gotten them more attention than they'd recieved in years for their creative work.

Obviously, I made the right choice.

Interestingly, the people who pushed me to leave were all pushed out themselves within 8 months and the agency that they were once part of is, itself, from what I hear, falling apart.

I do not mean to gloat. I've got plenty of things to work out and financial uncertainty is certainly not fun.

But, on the other hand, I took a risk - along with my wife - to try something different.

Others stayed where they were not realizing that that was just as risky a thing to do.

If not moreso.

Ah, the gut. Such a good thing to follow.

Second only to the heart.

For more on this subject, Don Hall has a few things to say. As you'd expect.

(By the way, that's my pregnant wife back there in the picture - she looks GOOD doesn't she?)

Does this mean I have to write about Derrida now?

2007-07-20T00:00:00.000-07:00

I hope not.

Because if I did have to write about Derrida, I'd have to write in columns that compete for attention on the same page in long, maddeningly circular sentences that purposely defy comprehension as a way of refuting the silly idea that language can actually communicate anything to anyone.

Plus, I'd have to write in French. And my French is no good.

But I suppose that's just the kind of absurdities you have to put up with when you've been given a "Thinking Blogger" Award.

Thanks to E. Hunter Spreen for presenting me with this thing. The best part about it, of course, is that the logo I'm supposed to display (below) seems to depict an Alien having bowel problems.

Anyway, as a recipient, it's my "duty" to award five other bloggers who make me think.

The origin of this award is The Thinking Blog.

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote (you have a choice of a silver version or a gold one).

Here are five blogs that make me think - Parabasis, Joshua James, my old roommate and still colleague, Adam Szymkowicz, Mr. Excitement, Don Hall and, a sixth, because 5 senses aren't enough either, Dave Tutin.

I'd pass it to Laura Axelrod, but she's already got one.

This is a picture of Derrida. Of course, he's smoking a pipe.

My critical problem with theatre.

2007-07-18T08:59:00.001-07:00

Over on Jaime's blog, there's a nice little write up of Beau Willimon's show at SPF. One of the things that Jaime marvels at is how much she liked a 90 minute, intermissionless two-hander. So used to being bored by this type of play (often called an "elevator play" since you get on with two characters and then stay in the same place with them until everyone exits), she was quite taken with Beau's writing (he's a Columbia grad) and how well it moved.

She prefers less naturalistic work, overall.

Later, in the comments section, she said when something's bad, she'd much rather be watching something that's bad but less realistic than something that's bad and realistic.

It got me thinking about how I approach theatre pieces and particularly work by others that may be very very different from an approach I might take.

I used to be quite adamant about what I wanted to see on stage.

I still can be.

However, as a student at Columbia, I was lucky enough to work side by side with 5 other very talented writers. The way Eduardo Machado and Kelly Stuart taught, sense memory exercises (based on Eduardo's work under Fornes) were done by all of us, every week. That is to say, in-class writing.

I balked at first - having had a lot of professional experience already as a writer I felt "writing in public" was a big waste. My reluctance wasn't helped by Eduardo's dictum that we were to type exactly what we'd written down each week and bring it to the following class. The work was then read out loud by the playwrights before the next in-class exercise was started.

One of the ideas behind the exercise was, of course, to just get us writing. Another was to get us to trust our first instincts in writing.

An unintentional side-effect of this program was to show me how many different ways there were to solve a problem that differed from the path I took. Not that there weren't weeks when I hated some of what I was hearing. But since we were discouraged from critiquing work in part due to its truly embryonic nature, I searched for ways to listen differently.

I found myself asking questions instead. Why were they doing that? What's happening underneath? What's the rhythm saying?

It lead to an openness that was useful when working under Anne Bogart where we were tasked with writing a short play a week and producing it the following week. Again, work was wet and fresh but this time we recieved a formal critique of the pieces every week. Yet Bogart herself created an atmosphere where questions were asked about how to discover the rules of a piece without overanalyzing it and trying to make it something it wasn't. And since I knew what kind of work Anne created, I also knew that there was plenty of work that she never would've made and that aesthetically rubbed her the wrong way, so that was a pretty amazing thing to be part of.

It's an openness that lead to more interesting conversation about the work and what it was than we currently get from the critics in most of the press where an aesthetic opinion is being pushed.

It's an openness to ideas and methods that, in the corporate world I got my chops from, is rare. In advertising, anyway, things "suck" or are "brilliant" immediately. Being curious is not always rewarded. Experimentalism is only considered worthwhile when it's funny or bought. Formulas (believe it or not) are generally frowned upon (though everything may end up there after battling clients and others, most creatives stay away from work they've already seen).

It's an openness that required understanding that you had an idea of what you thought theatre should be and setting it aside long enough to see what other people thought theatre should be. (Or any piece of art for that matter.)

Going to see shows in New York, I tried to apply this openness to seeing work. To be sure, it was harder to do in places where I was being charged more than $25 a ticket. For some reason once this financial barrier was crossed, a "prove to me this was worth it" visor came down over my eyes.

This "prove it to me" attitude could also strike if somehow the theatre - or the presentation of the theatre - made me feel like an outsider being taught what good theatre was supposed to be. (There were a few downtown theatre companies that I never felt welcome in, and so no matter how good or interesting the work was that they did, I was always wary of going to their shows.)

I discovered similar feelings could be stirred up by productions done in rep where I felt I was seeing technical skills but not much heart.

Occasionally, jealousy stepped in the way, too.

This weekend, however, I was asked by someone about a show I'd seen here in LA. They had recommended the show and then were amazed that I'd actually gone to see it. Maybe this is partly LA. But I know that it also had to do with the fact that the show was not of the same kind of professional standards that other shows might be. The troupe was mostly made up of non-actors. The writer had worked in the community over a year long commission to create the text.

My friend, the recommender, asked me, point blank, did I like the show?

Looking into his eyes, I saw he was not just really wondering, but also showing a little fear. Fear of being wrong for recommending the show. Fear of liking something.

I also was fearful of saying I liked something that wasn't perfect, but was interesting and heartfelt and worthwhile. A show that was introduced by an artistic director and managing director to the audience in a way that made me experience it that way, rather than the easier-to-do arms-folded-across-my-chest way.

Theatre is very hard to do well, under even the best circumstances. It's a difficult way of life and a hard choice to make as a way of life when everyone you know who went the way of law or technology or medicine is making 6 figures and buying nice coffee tables.

I'm not sure why we tend to make things harder for ourselves with ideas about what should be on stage and what shouldn't be. Or why we think its important to take stances against this kind of genre or that.

I was taught something early on in my advertising career that I've unfortunately not paid well enough attention to: When you don't like something, don't say anything about it. Let it go its own way.

An unusually sensitive piece of advice from an ad guy to a future theatre person.

Something else.

2007-07-16T07:45:00.000-07:00

My blog is looking a little wordy lately. So, here's a picture, taken at the Getty. It's a Joel Meyerwitz photo.

Wordy post about wordy stuff to follow later.

Why we're still at war.

2007-07-15T10:33:00.001-07:00

I usually stay away from direct political commentary on this blog. There's plenty of it elsewhere, and I often feel that I fall into the trap of provocative didacticism when I'm at the dinner table, so on a blog, where there's no one to curb my passions whatsoever, there could be real problems - especially when it comes to wiping the foam from my mouth.

However, I can't help but relate a conversation that I had with a close, close relative about the current war in Iraq. This relative is super well educated - a BA from one of those very expensive liberal arts schools on the East Coast that claim to teach you to think for life - and advanced degrees in writing and business to boot.

It started with taxes. I mentioned some rather recent large payments Heather and I had made to our Federal and state governments.

My relative jumped in and complained about the amount she had had to pay last year. $50,000.00 is what she said she'd forked over.

I said, "Oh, please. If that's what you paid, that means you made nearly $250,000 last year and you can afford to pay that amount. I mean, you made A LOT of money."

"But that's sooo much money to give the government. It's ridiculous," she said.

I repeated my lack of sympathy, but added that I had no objection to paying taxes. I belong to a society. That society needs money to operate. What I really obected to was the way our politicians spend our money. I added that I wished that we had a system whereby - whenever I voted - I could vote for how tax dollars were spent. Ie, I apportioned percentages in the voting booth instead of voting for people who I hoped would do it for me.

"For instance," I said, "The money we're spending on this war is just mind-boggling considering all the things here at home that need to be paid for. We're in effect pouring money into a foreign country when we have roads, schools, hospitals, alternative energy resources and other social infrastructure elements that are currently underfunded."

"But if we stop fighting that war," she said, "Those people will attack us here."

My reply: Put that money into security here and it might be even more effective than fighting a war that is also killing our sons and daughters and tearing families apart. Even if that means not putting it into roads, schools, etc, we'd be better off since it would be money spent here, adding to this country's overall wealth and well-being. Spending it over there is getting us nowhere. Besides, right now our presence there is making those people want to attack us. If we leave, no one know what's going to happen - especially not the current administration which has one of the worst track records of predicting behavior in that region going.

And, anyway, I added, their efforts in Iraq are side tracking the hunt for the real culprits of 9/11 - those people are in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Get them and you might really put a dent in the organization with the stated goal to attack us.

"What are you talking about," she interrupted, "Iraq was involved in 9/11."

My jaw fell off.

How many years has it been since the 9/11 Commission published its findings? How long has Keith Olberman been pointing out the truth? How many times do newspapers, magazines and internet sites have to report it? I mean, I've seen the polls that say a huge number of Americans believe this to be true, but I haven't met one of those Americans yet. (Turns out I'm related to one.)

I pointed out to my relative what the 9/11 Commission said - no link. I went on about it just a little too long, but I was clear. No one has ever shown a link between the events of 9/11 and Saddam Hussein.

After a pause she said: "I really don't think about politics too deeply. I've got two kids and a job to hold down. All I know is that I had to pay the government $50,000.00 last year and that's ridiculous."

The furniture's paid for. The past is not.

2007-07-13T02:00:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've reported on the money plight - and since the curtain looms on my year of blogging, I thought I should offer an update.

The short of it is, we're solvent.

In fact, due to the job in Denver which lasted from the beginning of May through the end of June (and still continues a little here in LA where I'm editing videos for them), we have even paid off our credit cards - about $10,000 altogether.

More importantly, we've been able to sock some dough away and pay for all the furniture we got in April and March, as well as a few other things.

I'm still not a staffer anywhere, but after Noodles arrives, we may have some time where I don't have to work on work work but can focus on a play, screenplay or TV pilot.

These are not gifts of theatre. (Mr Spinella can tell you more about that.)

But they don't come without cost - mainly that I'm not doing theatre right now the way I'd like. I felt this keenly today when putting together a submission. I read through the scene of a play I've never had time to really finish and liked the damn thing. It made me miss trying to figure out how to present work. (Despite the sounds I've made about making my own work, I'm still a ways from doing it.)

Still, there could be worse things. Only four months ago I was collecting unemployment between short stints and wondering how we were going to make it. Serious consideration was given to destroying a retirement fund.

And we have yet to make a real dent on our collective grad school debt - which, though we're making the monthly - still tops out at around $177,000. For those of you who add things up, that's about $1400 a month out the door in cash. (If the Republicans really wanted the country to grow, they'd forgive all school debts and put those Sallie Mae big shots out into the cold.)

The baby will cost $500 a month in insurance.

Lack of work will not be tolerated long.

But, in the meantime, we're paying taxes, eating watermelon in the evenings and drinking juice and coffee in the am, so it's not all bad.

Now, if I could just work out my screenplay....

What's less interesting? The opening of Heroes? Or commercials on fast forward? Turns out they're equals.

2007-07-08T14:37:00.000-07:00

The article below is a report on the desperate attempts by the networks to slow down their increasing irrelevance to advertisers.

Unfortunately the conclusion I take from the quote below (which links you to the NYT site - though I cut and pasted the whole article as well) is that NBC shows like "Heroes" may be increasingly irrelevant. Period.

After all, if the opening of "Heroes" creates as much excitement in a viewer as a commercial played on fast forward, what does it say about "Heroes"?

Just how uninteresting is that show?

(By the way, from what I read, the numbers went down for the show as it continued to play out. Why? My guess: Way too many story lines dragging out way too long for viewers to really care. This saddens me since I loved the series first few shows - the pilot was especially compelling.)

If networks want to prove that people watch commercials on their shows, they should insist that advertisers make commercials worth watching.

That means, relevant, pointed, thoughtful, interesting entertainment about what you offer or make .

Advertising creative departments have been suggesting this solution for years, but they are consistently denied by both clients who are fearful of making the bold simple dramatic statements they say they want in their advertising and media departments that insist repetition is more important than quality.

(Apple's 1984 shows just how blind this "repetition logic" is. It ran once. Yes, during a Super Bowl, but it only ran once. Whereas most of the other commercials that ran during that years Superbowl ran again, over and over, elsewhere, the commercial STILL talked about from that year was Apple's 1984. Repetition is NOT the best way to connect to a human being through advertising. Relevant entertainment is.)

Anyway, here's the article.

"...judging from the biological reactions, the test subjects were just as engaged while watching fast-forwarded advertisements as they were while viewing opening scenes from the NBC show “Heroes” at regular speed."

FROM THE NY TIMES.

Engaging at Any Speed? Commercials Put to Test

By LOUISE STORY
Published: July 3, 2007
In new experiments for NBC, people are hooked up to sensors as they watch television, and researchers observe changes in their heart rate, palm sweat, eye movement and breathing patterns.

Alan Wurtzel of NBC Universal monitoring a method of testing commercials played at a fast-forward speed.

But the panelists are not watching just NBC programs. They are watching commercials — in fast-forward mode.

So far, the findings have been just what NBC hoped: judging from the biological reactions, the test subjects were just as engaged while watching fast-forwarded advertisements as they were while viewing opening scenes from the NBC show “Heroes” at regular speed.

And that conclusion — which is still preliminary — could have big implications for NBC and other networks as they negotiate rates for air time with advertisers. Although advertisers have steadfastly refused to pay the networks for viewers who fast-forward commercials, as more households buy digital video recorders like TiVo, the networks may one day argue that this system should change.

When it comes to fast-forward advertisements, “the assumption has always been that they have no economic value, that they have no communication value,” said Alan Wurtzel, president for research at NBC Universal. “But the fact of the matter is we’re learning that they are valuable.”

The thesis flies in the face of the assumption among advertisers that their ads have no effect when played at a high speed on a DVR. Over the last month, as advertising agencies and television networks negotiated billions of dollars in deals for commercials during next year’s season, executives who buy commercial time did not waver in their position that people who zap past the ads are of no value to them.

“Would we pay when they’re fast-forwarding? No,” said Jason Maltby, president and co-executive director for national broadcast at MindShare North America, an agency in the WPP Group that buys advertisements. “You’ve created a message that in theory requires 15 seconds or 30 seconds to get that selling message across. On a high-speed DVR, 30 seconds gets pushed down to 1.5 seconds with no audio. It just wouldn’t work.”

For decades, advertisers have paid for advertisements based on how many people see them — or how many “impressions” an advertisement receives, in industry terms. Now that technology has reshaped people’s viewing habits, advertising executives are looking for other ways to quantify their audiences and gauge the impact of messages.

Some researchers said efforts like NBC’s to find alternative measurements are a step in the right direction.

“Whether people watch or not is not a useful measure of anything,” said Joe Plummer, chief research officer for the Advertising Research Foundation. “Exposure has very, very weak correlation with purchase intent and actual sales, whereas an engagement measure has high correlation and are closer to what really matters, which is brand growth and creating brand demand.”

Media executives have long discussed the potential of using physical reactions and brain scanning to track their messages, and advances in medical research in the past few years have made this more practical. NBC is working with Innerscope Research, a small company in Boston that uses wearable sensors to translate physical responses into what the company calls “emotional engagement.”

Panelists wear black-netted vests with tubes running out of them. Sensors on fingers measure sweat or “skin conductance,” as the researchers like to say. A monitor picks up on heartbeats, and an accelerometer tracks movement when panelists wiggle in their seats or chuckle. A respiratory band can tell if the abdomen and chest stop moving — noticing when someone holds their breath, for example, in a scene of suspense.

Innerscope has developed its own scale for engagement that combines the biometric factors that it tracks. On a scale of 1 to 100, a 50 is neutral, and above 60 is engaged. In Innerscope’s test for NBC, viewers of the first 20 seconds of live advertisements clocked in with a 66 engagement score and those fast-forwarding scored 68.

“People don’t turn off their emotional responses while they’re fast-forwarding,” said Carl Marci, the chief science officer of Innerscope. “People are obviously getting the information.”

Innerscope is working on a second study for NBC that will try to pin down which types of commercials generate the most engagement in fast-forward mode. Innerscope will monitor things like how often brands are shown during the advertisement, how quickly the camera cuts to new images, and whether audio is important in the storyline.

From there, NBC may be able to offer tips on how to make commercials stand out, even at rapid speeds.

“We can then go through our advertisers and help them optimize a commercial for fast-forwarding, while also not denigrating the quality while watched live,” Mr. Wurtzel said.

Millward Brown, an advertising research company in the WPP Group, has also studied physical responses to television commercials. The company found that people who have already seen an advertisement will tend to experience the same emotional response when seeing the same advertisement again in fast-forward mode.

Fast-forwarding should not scare advertisers because consumers are engaged to some degree, just by the act of pushing the button, said Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst for Millward Brown.

“We probably pay more attention to doing that than we do when watching a regular TV program,” Mr. Hollis said. “You’re sitting there saying, ‘when is the program coming back on?’ You are actually attending to it.”

But even if physiological measures become more accepted, media buyers said they do not see them replacing viewership ratings anytime soon.

“I can’t imagine the logistics of actually buying and selling commercial time based on physiological responses,” said Steve Sternberg, executive vice president of audience analysis for Magna Global, an agency that buys ads in the Interpublic Group. “We need data that is projectable.”

Mr. Wurtzel of NBC acknowledged it was early in the research process. But over time he hopes to expand bio-testing of commercials to the facilities NBC has used to test potential television programs in front of an audience. General Electric, the parent of NBC, has worked on security technology that can track people’s facial expressions and follow eye movements. He said he may also put that to use.

In time, he said, he hopes to shift NBC away from discussing advertisements based on eyeball counts to something incorporating physiological measures and engagement. But advertising executives said they plan to go only so far.

“I would say I’m not ready to jump on cost per perspiration,” said Mr. Maltby of MindShare.

What was my father's dream?

2007-07-06T05:13:00.000-07:00

Before I was born.

Before I was even thought of.

My dad had a dream about how his life might be.

What was it?

He told me once that he liked drawing. Did he dream of being an artist?

His father did. But then the Great Depression happened and he came back to South Chicago after a year at Notre Dame to work in tin mills.

It turned out to be a good life. A life that included creating art. A life that was even enriched by it. In fact, when he began creating models of the floor process at the tin mill out of a purely aesthetic interest, he discovered a whole new way to complete the tin making process.

Even a stroke couldn't stop him from creating work. Despite severe paralysis later in life, he continued to work in pastel chalks that had an abstract vibrancy that earlier work never had.

What about my dad?

He's never talked about his itch for art, though I know it's in there from the way he attends opera and talks about movies. But still, what was it? That dream? Was it art?

Or was it something else? Was it the simpler, easier to express dream of a family and a house and a good retirement plan?

A relative who helped him get the mortgage for his first house told me once that when she asked him what his goals were, he replied he wanted to be a millionaire.

But that was after his first child, me.

I'm wondering about before that.

Before he was a young Naval officer in Hawaii married to a woman named Ursula who was going to be my mother.

What was his dream?

What?

Did I and my brothers and sister make it better? Or worse? Or the diplomatic "different"?

After all, I'm not sure he ran around in the south Chicago streets saying, "Some day, when I grow up, I'm going to the father of a guy who writes for a precarious living."

Or maybe he did.

I'm going to be a dad in about a month. I'm wondering about all that. Not that there's really any real answer.

But still. Sometimes a question is worth asking just to look at the curving mark it leaves in the air.

I can tell my boy what my dream was and how it all changed and accelerated and everything - everything except whatever it was in my head to begin with. Which is how it always is - with, or without, kids.

Above, a photo from 1962, two years before I was born. My dad, William George, sits closest to us. Then my grandmother, Mary Kay, followed by my Aunt Jan and my namesake, Malachy (who is himself named after his uncle, Malachy Flanagan, who raised Mary Kay and her sister Helen after their father was killed in a boating accident.) Finally, my grandfather, William George - a painter, sculpter, dad of three, tin mill worker - several years before his stroke.

July 4th

2007-07-04T23:30:00.001-07:00

We spent the night at Dodger Stadium.

The boys in blue lost to the Braves, but there were fireworks afterwards.

I wore my Yankee cap.

These are probably all reasons some in the "theatrosphere" don't consider me a serious theatre person, can you believe?

The plane below flew overhead at taxpayer expense.

Below, Heather and her cousin Kathy at the Dan Flavin exhibit at LACMA earlier in the week.

A few words from Liviu Ciulei

2007-07-03T00:30:00.000-07:00

I was rummaging around the house yesterday when I came across a few pieces of paper that my wife had pressed between the pages of our Riverside Shakespeare edition.

They were quotes from Liviu Ciulei during his tenure at the Guthrie. Heather got a copy of them from a stage manager when she worked with him at NYU (Heather played Nora in Ciulei's DOLL'S HOUSE and later was part of his NYU version of WOYZECK; she also played Celia in AS YOU LIKE IT when he directed it for THE ACTING COMPANY).

I thought they were worth posting.

Whatever you cut nobody can boo.

Words shouldn't be faster than the thought. Only the thought creates reality.

On AS YOU LIKE IT: It is a very hard play and we have so very little time, so we must go very slowly.

Righteousness is in the jawbone.

To see the thoughts. THAT is the great spectacle of theatre.

Hamlet is a very difficult role - 5 acts, no pockets. What do you do with your hands?

Sometimes you have to create a little scandal to get what you want.

Take the holes out of the cheese.

We have to pay attention to the small logics. We have to help the audience.

The secret of good lighting is not to light the feet.

This moment is Turgenev, not Dostoyevsky.

I like what you do. You do it very well. Cut it.

You cry here. You cry there. Symmetrical crying, please.

But you can't stand there, like that. They'll fire me. At least they should.

Don't look - SEE.

You are just wasting your tongue.

Each line is a thousand shades of grey.

You'll meet a lot of directors who want to impose their own imagination on top of the play without regard for the logic of the play. Sometimes they are lucky and they get a good play. But rarely. The modern theatre has too many examples of such directors.

Muslin doesn't inspire me.

Acting means thinking with someone else's mind.

Those little things without importance which count enormously much.

I think it's time for another script intervention.

The shoes will tell me what to do.

Sometimes I'm wrong. If I'm not ever wrong, I'm not learning anything.

If you are talented but not intelligent, be a poet. If you are intelligent but not talented, be a playwright. If you are talented and intelligent, be a novelist. If you are not talented and not intelligent, be a critic.

And my favorite...

You see, they didn't have a television, so instead, they lived.

This is a production photo of Heather in THE GLASS MANAGERIE, the same season she played Ciulei's Celia. Also pictured is Danny Schwartz. (yes)

Real estate goes up. Theatre gets a cough.

2007-07-01T17:03:00.000-07:00

It took more than a quarter century and two TONY awards for this incredibly talented, fairly famous and very lucky guy to buy an apartment in New York. Jeesh.

From the NYT: “If you want to be a theater actor, where do you live now?” said Mr. Spinella, 50, sitting in the bright, spacious Harlem apartment he bought last winter, after finally moving out of a rent-stabilized tenement that had been his home for 27 years.

Young actors “struggle on a Broadway salary,” he said. “A lot of them live in shoeboxes; some of them are literally three to a shoebox. New York has gotten prohibitively expensive.”

Um, tell me again: Why is New York a good town for new theatre?

What is viral?

2007-06-30T15:26:00.001-07:00

Theatre is one part of my life.

Movies and television another.

And then there's this thing called advertising which pays bills.

It kind of uses mutated forms of the first three elements to interest people into thinking about products and services differently than they did before. And, lately, it's been leaning ever more heavily on those things than before becasue of this little thing called Viral marketing.

However, the definition of what viral marketing is seems to vary widely.

Hell, even the definition of viral varies depending on who you talk to.

Oh, the big, broad, basic definition is the same - something that gets passed around a lot - but as the video spoof above suggests, what leads to "pass around" is something to be debated.

What leads to useful or good "pass around" is even more debatable.

The video below is a case in point. Created by Chuck McBride and company in San Francisco, it's for Ray Ban. There are clues to this within the video (they're wearing the damn glasses, throwing the damn glasses in every frame and, finally, the Ray Ban tagline is written in the dust of a dirty car window), but most people I know - outside of the advertising industry - don't or haven't picked up on these clues.

To them it's just an entertaining video. And it is.

Then there's Mascot Roommate from the Coffee Bean.

Apparently, the marketing folks at the Coffee Bean asked a couple of guys to make some viral videos that used their mascot. Somehow they bought a bunch of comic videos in which a lot of fun is made of the Coffee Been employee who has to stand around in a big Frostee Mascot suit.

It's long, but funny. But once I know that it's sponsored by the Coffee Bean, I'm not sure I think it's all that cool.

However, it got a lot of attention. As you can see from the clip below, CNN - among others - bought the trick hook line and sinker.

Again, however, branding is incidental, rather than stamped at the end with a card a la a TV commercial.

Which is not to say that TV spots can't be viral. Certainly if a spot is funny or interesting enough it will garner attention. The VW spot below has something like 3 million hits. (I count for at least a hundred of them).

Anyway, lately, my clients have been asking for viral ideas.

What many don't seem to understand is this: in viral the emphasis is on entertainment, not product (per se). So the idea behind anything "viral" needs to be easy to understand and grasp, hard to misinterpret (which by the way, seems to me like a very good summation of the much bandied-about but not-often-defined phrase "Big Idea") and the schtick must be interesting enough for people to WANT to watch it.

This doesn't mean you can't talk about yourself. You just can't be talking to yourself.

Ie, you need to have a lot of confidence in your brand, so much so that you're not afraid to make a little fun of yourself. More importantly you need to have a strong understanding of your brand so that no matter what you say, to whoever you're saying it, you are second-nature re-inforcing your brand.

That is to say, your brand must be more than a few words on a piece of paper. It has to be an actual culture, with real values that live in the organization. No, actually must be the organizing principles around which a company has grown.

Perhaps you can fake some of that, I don't know. But I do know that it'll be easier for you to get a successful viral compaign if these kinds of things are already in place throughout.

Every Apple message is simple - simple to look at visually, simple verbally to understand. EVERY ONE.
Every Apple message has an understated ease about it. EVERY ONE.
Every Apple message has a charming and not-over-the-top sense of humor (even when it's schticky like the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" campaign). EVERY ONE.

Is it any surprise that one compoonent of iPhone viral marketing looks like this?

Note that these video don't demonstrate anything about the new iPhone except that it will make old phones seem obsolete. The demonstrations are left for the sales floor.

So, what's the best viral campaign I've ever seen?

Probably one of the first. In fact, I think it's the model for all the best that's come after. It has a site that houses the overall idea and where it can all be viewed at once. As you can see below, the videos are also episodic but self-contained, they are all availabe on YOUTUBE and they are all funny enough to want to see more than once. Finally, they are structured around the product in a way that's emphasizes what's great about the product - ie, they're neither pointlessly entertaining nor are they so self-effacing about the product that you have to wonder if the damn thing is any good (a question that I have about the Coffee Bean after watching Mascot Roommate).

Which is to say, someone might actually want to buy Chad's Monkey Ball game after they watch it.

For more on viral, check out: Feed Company.

If they do it with songs, they'll do it to everything else too...

2007-06-26T09:35:00.000-07:00

My friend Dave Tutin heard about a music competition that evaluates the quality of the entries through a "Music X-Ray."

From his blog:

"First, all songs will be analyzed by the innovative new Music Xray™ technology, which analyzes the underlying mathematical patterns in music and compares them to the patterns of past hits. All songs that score “blue", meaning that they have tremendous hit potential, will move on to the second round of judging, which includes deeper Music Xray™ analysis as well as human input."

Dave had some pretty strong feelings about it.

I do too.

For years, of course, we've had versions of this for movies from people like Syd Field and others. It's lead to a predictable three act structure in film that's meant boredom for two hours in the dark instead of real excitement. (Sorry, to advocates of the Campbell idea of universal stories, but I don't think he meant all stories should be told the same way.)

Painting by numbers....

The Chairman for the NEA tells it like it is at Stanford

2007-06-22T10:50:00.000-07:00

I found this over at Crowded Fire's BANTER.

It's quite a beautiful argument for the need to re-adjust the way the arts are understood in America.

***********

Prepared text of June 17, 2007, Stanford Commencement address
by Dana Gioia,
chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

**********

Good morning.

Thank you, President Hennessy.

It is a great honor to be asked to give the Commencement address at my alma mater. Although I have two degrees from Stanford, I still feel a bit like an interloper on this exquisitely beautiful campus. A person never really escapes his or her childhood.

At heart I'm still a working-class kid—half Italian, half Mexican—from L.A., or more precisely from Hawthorne, a city that most of this audience knows only as the setting of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown—two films that capture the ineffable charm of my hometown.

Today is Father's Day, so I hope you will indulge me for beginning on a personal note. I am the first person in my family ever to attend college, and I owe my education to my father, who sacrificed nearly everything to give his four children the best education possible.

My dad had a fairly hard life. He never spoke English until he went to school. He barely survived a plane crash in World War II. He worked hard, but never had much success, except with his family.

When I was about 12, my dad told me that he hoped I would go to Stanford, a place I had never heard of. For him, Stanford represented every success he had missed yet wanted for his children. He would be proud of me today—no matter how dull my speech.

On the other hand, I may be fortunate that my mother isn't here. It isn't Mother's Day, so I can be honest. I loved her dearly, but she could be a challenge. For example, when she learned I had been nominated to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, she phoned and said, "Don't think I'm impressed."

I know that there was a bit of controversy when my name was announced as the graduation speaker. A few students were especially concerned that I lacked celebrity status. It seemed I wasn't famous enough. I couldn't agree more. As I have often told my wife and children, "I'm simply not famous enough."

And that—in a more general and less personal sense—is the subject I want to address today, the fact that we live in a culture that barely acknowledges and rarely celebrates the arts or artists.

There is an experiment I'd love to conduct. I'd like to survey a cross-section of Americans and ask them how many active NBA players, Major League Baseball players, and American Idol finalists they can name.

Then I'd ask them how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and composers they can name.

I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social thinkers they can name.

Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O'Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

I don't think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture was. Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a broad range of human achievement.

I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Music Hall, I saw—along with comedians, popular singers, and movie stars—classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.

The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American—because the culture considered them important.

Today no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.

The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young.

There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.

Of course, I'm not forgetting that politicians can also be famous, but it is interesting how our political process grows more like the entertainment industry each year. When a successful guest appearance on the Colbert Report becomes more important than passing legislation, democracy gets scary. No wonder Hollywood considers politics "show business for ugly people."

Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial.

I have a reccurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo's incomparable fresco of the "Creation of Man." I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam's finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.

When was the last time you have seen a featured guest on David Letterman or Jay Leno who isn't trying to sell you something? A new movie, a new TV show, a new book, or a new vote?

Don't get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market. I have a Stanford MBA and spent 15 years in the food industry. I adore my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented prosperity.

But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing—it puts a price on everything.

The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.

There is only one social force in America potentially large and strong enough to counterbalance this profit-driven commercialization of cultural values, our educational system, especially public education. Traditionally, education has been one thing that our nation has agreed cannot be left entirely to the marketplace—but made mandatory and freely available to everyone.

At 56, I am just old enough to remember a time when every public high school in this country had a music program with choir and band, usually a jazz band, too, sometimes even orchestra. And every high school offered a drama program, sometimes with dance instruction. And there were writing opportunities in the school paper and literary magazine, as well as studio art training.

I am sorry to say that these programs are no longer widely available to the new generation of Americans. This once visionary and democratic system has been almost entirely dismantled by well-meaning but myopic school boards, county commissioners, and state officials, with the federal government largely indifferent to the issue. Art became an expendable luxury, and 50 million students have paid the price. Today a child's access to arts education is largely a function of his or her parents' income.

In a time of social progress and economic prosperity, why have we experienced this colossal cultural and political decline? There are several reasons, but I must risk offending many friends and colleagues by saying that surely artists and intellectuals are partly to blame. Most American artists, intellectuals, and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.

This mutual estrangement has had enormous cultural, social, and political consequences. America needs its artists and intellectuals, and they need to reestablish their rightful place in the general culture. If we could reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public, the results would not only transform society but also artistic and intellectual life.

There is no better place to start this rapprochement than in arts education. How do we explain to the larger society the benefits of this civic investment when they have been convinced that the purpose of arts education is mostly to produce more artists—hardly a compelling argument to either the average taxpayer or financially strapped school board?

We need to create a new national consensus. The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.

This is not happening now in American schools. Even if you forget the larger catastrophe that only 70 percent of American kids now graduate from high school, what are we to make of a public education system whose highest goal seems to be producing minimally competent entry-level workers?

The situation is a cultural and educational disaster, but it also has huge and alarming economic consequences. If the United States is to compete effectively with the rest of the world in the new global marketplace, it is not going to succeed through cheap labor or cheap raw materials, nor even the free flow of capital or a streamlined industrial base. To compete successfully, this country needs continued creativity, ingenuity, and innovation.

It is hard to see those qualities thriving in a nation whose educational system ranks at the bottom of the developed world and has mostly eliminated the arts from the curriculum.

I have seen firsthand the enormous transformative power of the arts—in the lives of individuals, in communities, and even society at large.

Marcus Aurelius believed that the course of wisdom consisted of learning to trade easy pleasures for more complex and challenging ones. I worry about a culture that bit by bit trades off the challenging pleasures of art for the easy comforts of entertainment. And that is exactly what is happening—not just in the media, but in our schools and civic life.

Entertainment promises us a predictable pleasure—humor, thrills, emotional titillation, or even the odd delight of being vicariously terrified. It exploits and manipulates who we are rather than challenges us with a vision of who we might become. A child who spends a month mastering Halo or NBA Live on Xbox has not been awakened and transformed the way that child would be spending the time rehearsing a play or learning to draw.

If you don't believe me, you should read the statistical studies that are now coming out about American civic participation. Our country is dividing into two distinct behavioral groups. One group spends most of its free time sitting at home as passive consumers of electronic entertainment. Even family communication is breaking down as members increasingly spend their time alone, staring at their individual screens.

The other group also uses and enjoys the new technology, but these individuals balance it with a broader range of activities. They go out—to exercise, play sports, volunteer and do charity work at about three times the level of the first group. By every measure they are vastly more active and socially engaged than the first group.

What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens? Curiously, it isn't income, geography, or even education. It depends on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts. These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of individual awareness and social responsibility.

Why do these issues matter to you? This is the culture you are about to enter. For the last few years you have had the privilege of being at one of the world's greatest universities—not only studying, but being a part of a community that takes arts and ideas seriously. Even if you spent most of your free time watching Grey's Anatomy, playing Guitar Hero, or Facebooking your friends, those important endeavors were balanced by courses and conversations about literature, politics, technology, and ideas.

Distinguished graduates, your support system is about to end. And you now face the choice of whether you want to be a passive consumer or an active citizen. Do you want to watch the world on a screen or live in it so meaningfully that you change it?

That's no easy task, so don't forget what the arts provide.

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world—equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being—simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory, and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images.

Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions. And it remembers. As Robert Frost once said about poetry, "It is a way of remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget." Art awakens, enlarges, refines, and restores our humanity. You don't outgrow art. The same work can mean something different at each stage of your life. A good book changes as you change.

My own art is poetry, though my current daily life sometimes makes me forget that. So let me end my remarks with a short poem appropriate to the occasion.

[Part III of Gioia's poem "Autumn Inaugural"]

Praise to the rituals that celebrate change,

old robes worn for new beginnings,

solemn protocol where the mutable soul,

surrounded by ancient experience, grows

young in the imagination's white dress.

Because it is not the rituals we honor

but our trust in what they signify, these rites

that honor us as witnesses—whether to watch

lovers swear loyalty in a careless world

or a newborn washed with water and oil.

So praise to innocence—impulsive and evergreen—

and let the old be touched by youth's

wayward astonishment at learning something new,

and dream of a future so fitting and so just

that our desire will bring it into being.

Congratulations to the Class of 2007.

5/5 Meme

2007-06-20T14:06:00.000-07:00

E. Hunter Spreen tagged me with a meme started by Laura.

...its purpose is to get people talking about their passion in life. It’s called the 5/5 meme. Five questions, then pass it to five people. “Expertise” could be your profession, hobby, or area of intense interest.
If I haven’t named you specifically and you would like to do it, feel free. I’d love for everyone to answer these questions. I’ve named five just to get it going.
Remember: This is a “get to know you” meme. It’s supposed to be breezy and fun.

1. Name your area of expertise/interest:

Writing - specifically in theatre.

2. How did you become interested in it?

I studied theatre for a year at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England. It was accidental becasue I was really there to just be abroad while continuing my English program from the U of I in Champaign-Urbana. Between reading a lot of socialist literature, Bond's SAVED, Pinter's HOMECOMING, visiting Stratford every month and seeing a production of GODOT at the student union by a group travelling from Moscow, I became what you might call "hyper-interested."

I then wrote a play in response to FIVE FINGER EXERCISE (which I thought was terribly corrupt and middle class) but my own play was so awful I quit and returned to writing short stories. Years later, I took a class at Chicago's Second City in an attempt to meet people in advertising which I hoped would support a bad novel writing habit.

I had no real agenda to be any good and I loved the class. However, I was stone cold broke and so I quit, vowing to take another class later in life. It was alomst 6 years before I was able to scrape a few hundred bucks together to take a class at Dudley Riggs Brave New Workshop in Minneapolis.

I did a regular children's improv show on Saturdays at the Bryant Lake Bowl in the Twin Cities and was invited by Mo Collins (later to go onto MADTV) to join a late-night show based on my performances there.

I started writing sketches when I moved to San Francisco for an advertising job. The sketches became scenes and the scenes became plays. In 1997 I produced my first show, THINKING LTD. It was a fun show with a lot of talented people, but not any kind of high art. But I was totally hooked after that.

In 2004 I got my MFA in playwriting from Columbia.

3. How did you learn how to do it?

By making lots of mistakes. And I feel like the riskier the mistakes, often the more successful were the results.

4. Who has been your biggest influence?

Sam Shepard, Edward Bond, Pinter, Mamet, Viola Spolin.

Anne Bogart taught me a HUGE amount at Columbia while Eduardo Machado and Kelly Stuart taught me to never be afraid of taking a play to the most dangerous place it could go, even if the conclusion meant making the audience unhappy. TRUTH was the only thing that counted for them and I appreciate that even now.

I'd also say working directly with directors, actors and dramaturgs has had a bigger impact than I'll ever know about.

And then, of course, there's my wife whose involvement in my life has injected a lot more hope into my plays than they had before.

5. What would you teach people about it?

Trust your instincts. And follow the voices that are speaking to each other in there.

Don't "think" about your play until much later - long after you've written the whole thing at least twice. It will show you how to think about it and it will tell you what it wants to be.

If it's ugly, let it be ugly. It it's funny, let it be funny. Just don't try to tell it what it should be. Let it tell you.

I tag three people outside the theatrosphere but who read here regularly: Jeff Shattuck; Dave Tutin; Ms. Food Musings. I also tag Patrick and someone I don't know very well, though I've seen some of his work: Enrique of Pimp My Blog.

When Bohemia left New York, it probably moved to Austin. Who knew?

2007-06-19T20:27:00.001-07:00

For reasons I can't go into right now, I've found myself in Austin, Texas tonight where I had dinner at Stubb's (just a block down from the Club de Ville shown here) and was given a tour of the place.

A shack outside. Wood tables inside. Very cool.

Meanwhile, Les Claypool from Primus (he's the pink blob in the blue light between the women - he wore a "pig" mask for one of the numbers) was playing in the backyard. Literally. Apparently he just happened to be in town.

In the process, I checked out the area. Probably one of the most bohemian cities I've come across - and I've lived in a few places (NY, Wasshington DC, Minneapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco and LA).

Anyway, very interesting place Austin - about as different from my idea of a place in Texas as it could be. Cheap to live in, I understand it's got a big art community and a fantastic small-house theatre scene.

This, by the way, is the "pit" at Stubb's. It holds a thousand pounds of meat. They go through something like 2 and a half tons of meat a week.

I'm not sure this "meat fact" is all that appetizing, but it is astounding.

**********

In a side note, I've seen George Hunka has replied in appropriate bemused way to my post below about his assertion that marketing theatre is useless. While he's right that the work should come first, I stand by my opinion that he's mistaken on the marketing matter. And I disagree that audiences are getting smaller because of what's being put on stage. That kind of purism is great, but the reasons are much more complex. And they can be countered.

Ultimately, I believe there's lots of good theatre out there. I believe we could all use a fresh look at how we talk about it to people who have crossed theatre off the list of things that might be enriching for their lives.

There is an opportunity today to make a space in our society for the kind of direct intellectual, physical and emotional engagement that only theatre offers - and that I love. "Marketing" correctly helps.

That marketing, whether we like it or not, begins the moment a playwright drafts a letter to an artistic director as part of a submission.

Finally, as noted, while I find George's thinking often provocative and interesting - and I'm sure he does take joy in them working them out, I'm not gonna pretend his expression of those ideas doesn't occasionally cross into pretension for me. Which is why I definitely take exception to Alison Croggon's comment on George's blog that pointing out pretension is equivalent to anti-intellectualism.

You just have to read George on a regular basis to see what I'm talking about. And while I know George has threatened not to change, and while I'll always take a look at what he's saying even if he makes good on that threat, I think you can call for a "radical rethinking" in theatre without sounding like a 12th grade teacher, can't you?

And didn't Hemingway get everyone to rethink American literature with simple, bold sentences?

Anyway, here's a really great and thoughtful summation of the heart of the matter from Store Front Rebellion.

Is this the right way to market the arts? Not for me, but at least it's a start. I guess.

2007-06-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

These ads were done by GSD&M in Austin. As you can see, they are exceedingly clever.

While that cleverness is a good thing, they are not what I would consider to be examples of "good" marketing for the arts.

Why? Simply because their big point is that the arts are necessary but underfunded.

Not until you get pretty far into the copy, do you discover why the arts are actually worth funding.

Here's an excerpt from the AD COUNCIL site about the subject these ads are supposed to address:

An impressive 89% of Americans believe that the arts are important enough to be taught in schools, and that it fulfills an important role in a well-rounded education. And they are right; studies show far-reaching benefits of an arts education:

• The arts teach kids to be more tolerant and open.
• The arts allow kids to express themselves creatively.
• The arts promote individuality, bolster self-confidence, and improve overall academic performance.
• The arts can help troubled youth, providing an alternative to delinquent behavior and truancy while providing an improved attitude towards school.

Unfortunately, the truth is that the average kid spends more time at their locker than in arts classes. This PSA campaign was created to increase involvement in championing arts education both in and out of school. Parents and other concerned citizens are encouraged to visit www.AmericansForTheArts.org to find out how to take action on the behalf of the arts and arts education. The campaign stresses that some art is not enough and reinforces with the tagline: Art. Ask for More.

But who do these ads actually talk to and what do they actually tell us?

They alert people with the mildest knowledge about dance, classical music and American Jazz to the less-than-secret truth that kids today don't know much about those subjects.

(Big whoop - I also remember a study that showed students at the University of Florida could not identify the state of Florida on a map of the United States.)

Worse, the ads do it with a self-congratulatory joke.

Are they funny? Sure. Are they well art-directed and written? Yes and yes (and they've won a few very hard-to-win advertising awards). But people who don't know the figures in the ads will miss the jokes. And I don't care what the focus groups said in a white room over soggy sandwiches and luke warm sodas, I'd bet a ticket to a Broadway show that those people will not be likely to care more about the arts after they see the ads than they did before.

And let's face it, every year we hear how much shrinking arts spending.

School band programs that get dropped. Art classes that get canned. Theatre programs pushed aside to make way for football jerseys.

So what should the ads be about?

Since the ads are meant to get us - as a society - to put more $$$ into the arts, the ads should tell us something we don't know about why the arts are valuable to us - as a society.

So, I go back to the block quote above and this is what I think these - or any ads about the need for arts funding - should be about:

...studies show far-reaching benefits of an arts education:

• The arts teach kids to be more tolerant and open.
• The arts promote individuality, bolster self-confidence, and improve overall academic performance.
• The arts can help troubled youth, providing an alternative to delinquent behavior and truancy while providing an improved attitude towards school.

Don't you think these three points are all excellent reasons to fund the arts? I do.

And I believe if you want to get a country that's at least half Republican to reconsider the value of an arts education, the last two points are especially convincing because they show that the arts add value to all parts of the educational system.

Which brings me to my last question: Why the hell isn't the TCG lobbying like crazy for more theatre funding based around these findings?

But here's what really pisses me off: I know - as a working creative - that the people who did these ads don't care if these ads are the right message for this category.

The people who did these ads did them for their portfolios - to show how clever they are. And the ad agency let them do the ads this way because it gave their creatives a chance to stretch after working on more corporate clients who make them do rate ads for Southwest Airlines and other bullshit to keep the lights on.

Perhaps I'd be less bitter if I had done them - they are funny.

But it's the WRONG MESSAGE and, according to the people who hired GSD&M to come up with this campaign, the ads received more than $118 million in donated media.

That's wasted money to my way of thinking since it means a lot of people saw the ads, got a laugh and then went on with their day.

Frankly, I think we can do better. I know I could.

And you wonder why people don't go to the theatre...

2007-06-15T22:13:00.000-07:00

44. The attempt to market and sell theatre is as useful a concept as an attempt to market and sell air.

This is from George Hunka's superfluities as part of his "Organum".

It was brought to my attention by Don Hall.

George says a lot of theoretical things about theatre that I agree with - or find worth thinking about - on his blog. Unfortunately, it's often so pretentiously written, that when someone says to me they hate theatre because it takes itself too seriously or makes fun of it by pronouncing it "the-ah-t-ah", I think of George's blog.

However, the gem above is really sad. It's a demonstration of a myopic understanding of how people in our culture value information. And more importantly, how information is disseminated.

Of course, maybe George is working from a different definition of "marketing" than the rest of us.

But that would be telling too.

If this is the way many people in theatre think about spreading the news that there's a show in town worth seeing, theatre deserves to die the slow horrible death it seems to be enjoying.

I, for one, think marketing theatre, marketing shows, marketing anything that might make people think, act or reconsider life very very useful.

Getting people to look at something they don't care about: Theatre

2007-06-13T23:01:00.000-07:00

You have a magazine in front of you.

A magazine that you can only go through in the sequence some editor you don't know has laid it out in. And while you can't skip ahead and you can't go back - you can page through it as fast you want - or as slowly as you need to.

What's more, you don't really remember how the magazine started or when the magazine will end.

You only know that you are moving through the pages and each page - love it, hate it, feel excited by it, be bored by it - is its own experience.

That's right, the magazine is your life. And inside it are all the things you will ever know or feel. And it's up to you what you're going to pay attention to. The articles, the pictures, the cartoons.

But of course, knowing that life is short and that your magazine may end at any moment, there are some things you're not sure you ever want to look at.

Namely, the ads.

Yes, those pesky ads that are always trying to get your money with promises of everything from good real estate to stopping that bald spot to finding bliss in a bottle of gin.

And if it's not enough that they suggest you can have impossible things, they've been placed there by people you've never met right smack in the middle of articles you really care about.

Articles on things like, finding your soulmate, building a home, having children, enjoying friends, getting over the loss or death of loved ones - you know, articles that you're pretty sure you bought the magazine for in the first place.

Now, at first you might have paid attention to some of these "ads". In fact, you might've thought they were part of those articles. But they weren't. And when you learned they weren't, well, you decided not to read them.

At all.

Occasionally, however, you find yourself chugging through your magazine and you find yourself stunned by a page that's a little out of the ordinary.

A little angry or warm or loud.

Whatever.

But it stops you and there you are, reading an ad.

Why? Because it's visually arresting in a specific way. A way that throws the rest of the page into relief. A way that has an internal logic that makes you actually want to read it because that logic actually connects with something inside you that maybe you weren't even aware was there.

Let's call it a universal.

Interestingly enough, you occasionally find yourself realizing that this universal is not only something you already know, but something other ads may also say, but not in a way that had ever found its way into your heart before.

So why does this ad get there when others don't? Partly because this ad doesn't use a cliche, visually or verbally, and yet isn't so original you can't recognize it or understand its value. And, in fact, all the things that make it something you notice are also all things that make it relevant to where you are in your magazine.

That's right, a page earlier, not interesting. A page later, not worthwhile.

This is why people experiment in theatre (or any art for that matter).

Some of the experimenters know they'll fail, but they do it anyway.

Others only want to succeed - which is why they fail.

And still others have enough money to be able to place their ads so often in the magazine that we can't not notice them no matter how much we try - or how uninteresting they actually are.

Which also means that the people with no money except for the tiniest ads must be that much more innovative to get your attention. Afterall, the space they have to work in is so small, they may never have much of an audience - though, if they put their ideas up often enough, in the same space, in generally a similar way, they may, after a long period of time actually have an audience that means they can step up in a space size or two.

And that is what small theatre must do if it wants to survive.

But the worst thing an ad can do is pretend it's something it's not.

It's not a television show. It's not an editorial - though it could make you look at editorial differently.

It's not a movie.

It must be true to the idea of the original creator in every way (the playwright or the director or the actor) or it will do something more tragic than bore. It will fail to put the original energy of the creator into the magazine - and thus the magazine you have would be less interesting than it was before.

Relevance and Innovation in Theatre - Whattup with all THAT?

2007-06-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

It seems the "theatrosphere" is in the throes of examining why theatre has become a third wheel on a bicycle for a culture that's been doing everything via rocket-powered motorcycles.

A lot of it has been focused around postings by Scott Walters that include a list of how great theatre artists should go about being great theatre artists as well as some interesting responses to an essay by Peter Birkenhead at Salon about why more people will be watching the Sopranos tonight than the Tonys.

Between the posts, the articles and the responses, everything is blamed from the "formal experimentation" of off and off-off Broadway theatre that is apparently not very experimental to the play development system in the US which over the past 12 months I've been taking blogs seriously has been very very well explored and torched.

And the advice about how to right all this ranges from "stop being ambitious" to "stop thinking your work is important" to "stop pandering" to "stop thinking you're smarter than your audience" to "stop trying to be so thoughtful." More positive exhortations are made to "start being more entertaining" and "start listening to communities" and "start thinking locally".

I have, of course, paraphrased. And the quotes emphasize what I heard in the conversations - ie, they aren't literally (in most cases) what was said.

Or maybe they're the things I want to hear - after all, some of these bandwagons are very attractive to jump on. It all seems so contrarian. It seems to say, hey, there's a better way.

And I'd be the first to say that the current system hasn't really worked to my advantage in any kind of big way.

I'm not getting done by big, well-established non-profit theatres.

And it's slow going in the downtown off-off broadway scene for me - despite some good things with CLUBBED THUMB and the SOHO THINK TANK.

And let's face it, depending on what kind of work you do, what theatre companies you work with, where in the country you're doing that work, well, a lot of these critiques about the state of theatre ring as completely true.

But then, the more I thought about it, the more it all felt a little, I don't know, generic.

I mean, depending on what kind of work you do, what theatre companies you work with, where in the country you're doing that work, well, a lot of these critiques will strike you - at best - as pretentious to offer, and - at worst - completely baseless.

These "depending on" factors that determine how you see these things are part of problem, aren't they?

Another part of the problem with all this conversation - for me anyway - has to do with the absurdity of the Birkenhead essay to begin with. It compares apples and oranges because the medium of TV allows him to - not because it's appropriate, or even helpful.

To state the obvious, television is a cheaply distributed mass media. Its popularity is in no small part due to this. At any point in time, in any day, millions of Americans are watching it. Even at 3 in the morning. In the battle for the biggest number of eyeballs, the powers that be have found certain tried and true formulas to ensure people are watching their shows. Eventually it's lead to a lot of programming that's violent or funny or thoughtful or salacious or sexy or whatever that keeps people watching. Television that can't prove people are watching, even if it's interesting television for some people, usually disappears.

More importantly, television's cheap access meant that it surpassed theatre's popularity almost before television even got started.

Which means that it will never matter whether theatre addresses any of Birkenhead's criticisms. Television shows about theatre in ANY capacity will NEVER be watched in big numbers. Period. (If more people were watching the Tonys than the Sopranos tonight, it would not even be news, because the real news would be about why the power failed everywhere across the country to prevent anyone from watching TV.)

I think we'd all be better off to look at something else when trying to address how to fix the woes of theatre.

We should look at advertising.

Yes, corporately sponsored, pro-capitalist, evil advertising that nobody ever wants to watch.

Just like theatre.

And I don't mean television advertising. I mean the lowest of low advertising, the stuff no-one cares about, the stuff that no longer brings in real money (as opposed to TV money): Print advertising.

Why?

Because even with TIVO, print is still the most ignored, least read, easiest to avoid kind of artful messaging there is in the world. Plus, print has to BE READ to be understood, which means you have to work at it to "get it."

Just like theatre.

So, what does it take to get someone to look at something they don't care about?

A good woman.

2007-06-08T22:32:00.000-07:00

That would be my wife, who, when I arrived in LA from Denver, made a summer dinner of grilled ribeye, corn, tomato & mozzarella salad, biscuits and a dozen beautiful cupcakes.

She put some candles on the cupcakes and here was the result.

***In a strange, ironic side note, I understand I was also the victim of a theft tonight. My Nokia campaign which got into the AICP, was inducted into the MOMA and featured on NBC's TODAY SHOW last summer, won a bronze EFFIE tonight in New York. However, I was not credited as having worked on the campaign by the offices of Grey Advertising a part of Martin Sorrell's WPP Group.

The Effies are a measure of advertising Effectiveness that also takes into account the quality of the creative - IE, it has to work and be interesting for people to watch.

It's a big deal.

The theivery is sad.

43.

2007-06-08T07:44:00.000-07:00

It's one more than the Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything.

And it means, I remember television not just before cable, but before remote control.

I remember Howard Cossell on Monday Night Football and the first Star Trek series and Vinny Barbarino.

I remember when the Cubs played every home game in daylight.

I remember the Vietnam war as the confusing thing that my son may remember the Iraq War as (should it, god forbid, continue much longer).

I remember when you got on an airplane and were treated like a king.

I remember having a Sting Ray bike with a banana seat and one speed: Yours.

I remember not just CDs, but albums and mix tapes and 8 track tapes.

I remember when Secretariat was the greatest Athlete on the planet.

I also remember the World Trade Towers - I lived for two months in the summer of 1983 in what was then the Vista Hotel between One and Two.

I remember when CBGB's was not only open, but was still a place where music lived (the last years are the years I like to call the "museum years).

I remember reading REMAINS OF THE DAY in its first printing.

I remember seeing Star Wars during its first run at the Eden.

I remember Burt Wieman, your TV-Ford man.

And I remember a lot more - only I also remember that nobody really cares about old men who remember.

Released today, 3 years after I was born.

Weather in Denver - Whattup?

2007-06-07T10:54:00.001-07:00

Last night, there were 100 mph winds.

Last week, hail the size of chicklet gum fell from the sky (see pic below).

I'm going back to LA tomorrow for the weekend.

Definitely looking forward to it.

Take Me Out

2007-06-06T14:35:00.000-07:00

No, not to the Greenberg play. To the real thing.

Here's a few pix of us at COORS FIELD on Saturday.

The Rockies won. So did we.

Can you balance one of these on a pen?

2007-06-05T05:22:00.001-07:00

Heather's been looking for them on the Web.

Finding one that fits into a MINI is very tricky.

Finding one that fits into a life shared by a writer and an actor is even trickier.

But we are looking forward to the ride - which is supposed to really start in LESS THAN 60 DAYS!

Tagged by another Meme

2007-06-03T01:13:00.000-07:00

It's Laura's fault.

Here's the deal.

Bloggers must post these rules and provide eight random facts about themselves. In the post, the tagged blogger tags eight other bloggers and notify them that they have been tagged.

1. The hospital I was born in was pink.

2. My grandmother Mary Kay was raised by her Uncle Malachy after a boating accident took her father's life. That's how I got my name.

3. My paternal grandfather worked in a Tin Mill on the South Side of Chicago.

4. My maternal grandfather was a Doctor and a Marine serving in the South Pacific during WWII.

5. My cousins Larry and Andy used to play "French and Indian War" instead of "Americans versus Germans". This totally confused me when they told me I had to be the British since I didn't even know the British were involved, due to the title.

6. My brother Christopher and I got into an all out fist fight when he was still in HS and I was a Freshman in college. I don't think I've ever regretted anything more.

7. I think that most plays that are more poetic than they are emotional are fairly boring.

8. I sleep on my stomach.

Okay, the bloggers I tag are Dave, Jeff, Food Musings, Fred, Aram and Sarah, Kyle and, uh, Don Hall.

The Brainstorm - Why, OH, Why?

2007-06-02T08:09:00.001-07:00

It's not to be found on a weather map and you don't have to be outside to feel it coming.

Oh, no. Rather, all you have to do, is look at your email to see the clouds gathering that will eventually produce it. The emails have headers like, "THOUGHT STARTERS?" and "MEETING REQUEST" and "IDEA FORMATION CONFERENCE".

Other tell-tale signs include hallway meetings in which people constantly scratch their heads and business briefs about projects with vague objectives and very short deadlines.

Yes, we're talking "Brainstorm" time and boy do I hate it.

It's not so much the idea of it. No, it's more the misuse of it. The insistence on holding one to make everyone on the team feel like we're all going someplace. The irrational belief that every problem can be solved in a group - especially those problems that simply require one person to sit down and write out a thought or two. The utopian business belief that useful ideas can be group-generated.

I think we all know what I'm talking about.

Here are a few things I've noticed happens in these "idea formation conferences".

1) One person dominates and everyone is frustrated.

2) Junior people wait to find out what Senior people say before they say anything.

3) (Conversely to the above) Junior people use it as a place to prove their value to Senior people and say whatever comes into their head.

4) Men and women flirt with each other shamelessly.

5) You find out the Woman at the whiteboard who is supposed to write everything doesn't write down what you said and you get frustrated - meanwhile she writes down what Frank says every time he says it.

6) You find out the Woman at the whiteboard has a tattoo of Chinese letters on the small of her back when her shirt rides up because she has to write at the top of the whiteboard. (And you wonder where she got it and what it means.)

7) Senior people use the Brainstorm to make sure their ideas win and pretend that the group came up with it and now endorses it.

8) You hear the same idea a hundred times even though it was no good the first time.

9) The people who think the number of ideas are more important than the quality of ideas feel a lot better.

10) After the meeting, the lowest person on the totem pole has to type it all up and send it out in an email.

11) You get an email 24 hours later that the lowest person on the totem pole has typed up with a long list of ideas from the brainstorm but none of it makes sense.

Unfortunately, I'm working at a place that's very very fond of them.

Now don't confuse what I'm saying here to be a condemnation of meetings where people hammer out something - a la "The Room" in sitcom and television writing.

Nor is it a condemnation of large meetings where an open discussion between participants comes up with a thought.

These are often useful because they're spontaneous and specific, usually built around a concrete detail. They're not a conglomeration of people throwing things up at the barn to see what sticks.

Is there anything that can be brainstormed successfully? In my experience, yes, but only one thing. NAMES.

Okay, enough. Back your regularly scheduled blog about theatre and writing.

Insightful article about the industry known as theatre

2007-05-29T14:28:00.001-07:00

I'm not the first to link to this (Frank's Wild Lunch is), but everybody should be reading this.

It's provocative, thoughtful - and respectful - about the organizations it critiques.

PROOF: You LIve On A Planet

2007-05-28T21:02:00.001-07:00

This'll be my last video post for a while.

However, I'd like to point you to a post by Dave Tutin inspired by the movie BOBBY and about the failure of the Vietnam Protest generation. As usual, amazingly insightful.

Dave also posts a Richard Harris quote that's a good reminder that when you're the artist, your job isn't always to get along. Sometimes it's to inspire a little fear in those around you.

Angel in the Snow.

2007-05-27T02:52:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we drove through Rocky Mountian National Park.

Everything was shot yesterday in the park - including the snow.

All clips are reversed. Except for one. Can you tell which one?

The track is from Elliott Smith's latest, NEW MOON.

Eric Overmyer's ON THE VERGE

2007-05-26T07:40:00.000-07:00

I recently got a call from Mr. Overmyer's office about a possible meeting with him. If you'll remember, I couldn't do it because I'm not in LA but out in Boulder, CO (where he was born) hustling words for an ad agency for the months of May and June. But it gave me an excuse to re-read one of his better known plays again, ON THE VERGE.

It's one of my wife's favorite plays.

In it, three Victorian women set off across the globe to explore terra incognita.

The Himalayas. The darkest hearts of Africa. Parts of the New World. Along the way, they argue about whether women should wear pants, stop for tea and cake, make journal entries about their expedition and complain about manioc, a pasty native foodstuff.

They also begin to find things behind bushes, in the dirt, elsewhere, that seem to belong not to their era, but some other, more mysterious era.

The first of these artifacts is an eggbeater.

As they move on, it comes to light that they aren't just moving through new spaces, but new times. Eventually, they end up in 1955 dancing with Eisenhower to big band numbers. This comfortable era is a place that two of the three women decide to stay, while the third, truly intrepid, moves on, deeper and further into the unknown.

It's a play that's a play in the best sense - it's playful. And it reminded me a lot of Clubbed Thumb's work. A play that requires strong women. A play that's funny, strange, provocative.

Some people in the "theatrosphere" (as dubbed by Parabasis) have occasionally maligned Overmyer (and others like him) because he seemed to leave theatre to make a living in TV. Of course, as a writer on ST. ELSWHERE, HOMICIDE, LAW AND ORDER and THE WIRE, he's much more than a writer. He's really gone on to shape a part of our culture, creating some realistic, gritty and true drama that set a high standard for what's good in the television procedural and redefined the cop show.

Maybe they should read ON THE VERGE, which still feels fresh today. It's clear his heart lays in the same place most us in theatre love - with actors making something amazing happen in small dark spaces using only language and movement.

What have you been exploring lately?

Everything is Miscellaneous.

2007-05-22T13:34:00.002-07:00

Yes, it's true. Everything. Except, of course, you.

And now I'm reading all about it. And you should, too.

TRUE WEST in Fort Collins

2007-05-20T17:33:00.000-07:00

I finally got enough time off during a weekend to check out some local theatre and headed up to Fort Collins to see TRUE WEST.

The drive itself would've been worth it. We followed 34 over from Estes Park through the narrow, spectacular canyons of the front range. It was more than fitting for the show's title.

Held in the "historic" Armstrong hotel, the show wasn't perfect, but it was definitely worthwhile. It's a play that always clicks for me in certain places no matter who is doing it. Visceral, funny, muscular and emotionally rigorous, it does what a lot of plays these days don't - it stays in one place for a condensed period of time. (I suppose it could be considered an "elevator play" that way.) In other words, it's not television. It's not a movie. It's a play.

I always appreciate that.

Last night's show also got me appreciating the play from another angle: Austin's angle. As the straightlaced, uptight brother, I always thought of his character as the less interesting of the two protagonists. But sitting in the back of the audience watching Lee take apart a typewriter, I found Austin to be the richer territory. He's the brother that Lee has come to see. And he has something Lee doesn't: An actual relationship with the "old man". He's seen the old man's teeth in a bag of chop suey. He knows what makes the old man tick. Lee, who wants to protect the old man too, doesn't. And no matter how much time he spends in the desert, Lee never will.

That understanding suddenly steered me away from always thinking that Sinise's version of Austin is the only one to do. From the new perspective, I could see the teeth speech as a taunting moment as well. And I could see that the play's early scenes could be enriched - since Austin at the top wants to leave the old man alone and get on with his life. And that is some of what drives his fear of Lee from the start.

There was one other great thing about the show - its scrappy sense of production. The lights weren't much more than up and down. The set looked pieced together from a junk yard. The whole thing had a kind of finger-in-the-face of more polite kinds of shows - a sort of we-don't-have-much-but-that's-not-gonna-stop-us attitude that is always good to be in touch with.

It mirrored the uneven scene work that Shepard's writing has and that today would make it an unproduceable play from a dramaturgical point of view.

After it was done, I asked my theatre campanion - Gregg Foster - if he thought it felt dated. Even with the typewriter, he said it worked pretty well for him. Not bad for a 30 year old play.

I know a lot of theatre has come and gone since it was first produced at the Magic in SF, but I wonder we might be better off going back to that uneven, unweildy, surreal naturalism that Shepard showed us so long ago. It has a spontanaeity that often feels missing from today's theatre (McDonagh excepted).

After all, audiences haven't been getting bigger since then.

H comes to Denver.

2007-05-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

The freelance gig in Denver looks like it's going to be a long gig. Maybe until the end of June. This is good for financial reasons right before we have the child whom I'm still calling "Baby Noodles", but also tough because we're apart.

Luckily, Heather's been able to come out and visit. This week she was here from Sunday through this morning. Which meant we enjoyed our 2nd wedding anniversary in Boulder (we ate the St Julien; I gave her a massage from the spa there; She gave me some new Yankees caps). We also went on the "peak to peak" drive from Nederland to Estes Park.

But maybe the most important thing to happen is that I got a full dose of baby kicks from the Noodles. He is growing stronger every day and it's quite something to feel him become more and more real as time passes.

It's also given me a whole new subject to dream about - taking care of someone else. Both anxiety causing and sort of wonderful at once, I find myself worrying in my sleep about him and wondering while I'm awake how I'm going to do it.

Other thoughts drift in too - why I'm not as produced as I'd like to be. How will I help my work find its way to the stage. Why I'm not better and faster at writing. Why I've been unsatisfied with my achievements so far.

These are all questions that come from the nature of who I am, of course, but also, in light of the coming change, seem more than self-concerned. They seem small.

It seems like a long time ago when I wrote this ominous thing.

And, of course, it was.

Back then, I hadn't worked in months. I didn't know where Heather and I were going to live. I'd only just finished DRESSING THE GIRL. BEYOND THE OWING was still a complete mess (now it's just a mess, maybe). I hadn't worked with Clubbed Thumb.

And, most importantly, I didn't know that I was going to be a father.

What I did today for a dollar.

2007-05-15T20:42:00.000-07:00

In advertising, the day is long.

I started the day at 8 am. This photo was taken at 7:21 pm.

I'm still at the office. It's 9:43 pm.

Best of luck to you.

A stray thought about the NY Times...

2007-05-12T21:17:00.000-07:00

This morning as I was paging through the NY Times over an expensive omelette at the Boulderado Hotel in Boulder, CO., I noticed an article on a new VH1 reality show in the Arts Section. Now, I know it's not news that the paper has made a big push to cover more television and rock 'n roll and pop stuff in general. But most of the criticism I've heard voiced about this has been about what it means the paper is NOT covering - theatre, more serious or unusual films, dance, orchestral stuff, etc. Even more ire has been leveled at Isherwood for his troublesome reviews of new theatre work.

But the question that struck me was - Do the people running the NY Times really think that by covering "Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School Starring Mo' Nique" people are going to think that the paper's suddenly "with it" and worth a $1 every morning?

I once thought the paper was worth that and more when the Book Review under Anatole Broyard published a weekly essay on some interesting subject regarding trends in criticism, culture and letters and Mel Gussow's name was still appearing regularly in the paper. But seeing well-written, well-thought out articles about the latest Flavor Flav show on what was once the music channel for people slightly too old for MTV, it makes me think the paper's too expensive to even considering for packing material.

I also wondered if the author of the article, Virginia Heffernan - who I'm sure is very smart - was told to write the article or if she thought, "DANG! THAT SHOW NEEDS TO BE COVERED IT"S SO DARN IMPORTANT!!!"

Of course, even if she didn't think that, certianly, someone at the paper did.

Why?

And why do I need an AO Scott reveiw of Spiderman III or The Dukes of Hazzard or Paris Hilton's House of Wax?

Again, I have to believe that someone wants to show how "with it" the paper is to people who currently are getting more of their news from other sources.

(I have similar questions about the "Rock Show Reviews" that they occasionally run. Why does the NY Times review an Oasis concert? Who cares? Especially when concert tours usually mean the performers are in town only for a day or two and most likely the article is running AFTER they've left town?)

Now, I'm not saying that an occasional article on pop culture is a waste of time. Pop cultural trends are important to cover. But couldn't that be done with a more interesting and more in depth article that appears once in a while as opposed to making a "beat" of television shows that really aren't worthwhile?

My guess is that despite all the write ups of American Idol and The Apprentice, the papers circulation is continuing to go down and, worse, the number of advertisers dumping $$ into the paper is continuing to shrink.

And the kids who the paper hopes to win back to newsprint probably look at those articles the way I used to look at my parents when they used the word "cool". Simultaneously, people like me, who once turned to this self-proclaimed "artibiter of taste", turn away from it because it is less and less useful in identifying and exploring interesting ideas in culture at large.

Makes you wonder if there's an underserved market out there just waiting for another paper to voice its interests.

The cast of Flavor Flav's new show, in case yer innarrested.

Posts I'll probably never write.

2007-05-10T22:03:00.000-07:00

In Denver, the air is thin. So thin that you tend to dry out more quickly and thus, if you drink coffee like you usually do, you get dehydrated and sick.

This was my fate this week as I worked many many hours on Dell Enterprise ads and Qwest television spots.

It also led to not calling Heather as often as I'd like and missing the important developments of the young man Heather and I now call "Baby Noodles". Apparently he kicks at every opportunity and can now be seen through the belly.

But, I'm here in Denver making money. And this is a good thing because 1) I need the money, 2) I'll need the money and 3) It's put me back in touch with that industrious adverting guy who was me back in the 90s - which is to say I'm very very busy.

Interestingly, I'm surrounded by some of the best ad people of the last 20 years. David Stohlberg, Mark Oakley, Ron Saltmarsh, David Ayriss, Gregg Foster, Ken Markey and Bob Rickert - to mention only a few.

It's a little like going back to ad school and feeling both inspired and depressed by all the good work you're around.

Or put another way, it's kinda nice to have the ass kicked.

The busy-ness however has also got me thinking about all the posts I mean to write but that, when I'm busy like this, I don't.

I figure it might make a nice post in itself, so here goes.

POSTS I'VE THOUGHT ABOUT WRITING BUT PROBABLY NEVER WILL:

1. I don't like it when people post big chunks of their latest plays. (I suppose someone reads these things, but I don't.)

2. Why fishing sucks.

3. THE HOAX, ZODIAC, HOT FUZZ, FRACTURE - reviews of these movies. (I liked the first three, not the last one)

4. A theory of Baby names

5. A list of all the celebrities I've met and worked with

6. A list of all the "famous" authors I've met at Stuart Brent Books

7. How to play tennis with a pregnant woman and still lose (I may write this yet)

8. 6 uses for flowers in a relationship

9. Why getting rid of a landline when you're in a long distance relationship is a bad idea

10. Cavities and other gifts advertising gives your brain

11. My first year in AA

12. So, you moved across the country from SF into an apartment in NYC on Sept. 10, 2001 - now what?

13. Living without furniture: Please sit anywhere you like

14. Artists and writers I admire and who made a difference to me

15. What it's like to have a production in a LORT theatre

16. Here are all my letters of rejection, scanned and posted

17. A very short guide to prayer

18. Why I bought Danskos

19. CHRONIC TOWN by REM. The best EP ever made by anyone?

20. Life without coffee is not worth living

21. How to practice contraception when you're not sure where you're living or how you're making a living after you leave NY and move to LA

22. Bloggers I feel slighted by

23. What I would do to the NYT if I ran the Arts Section

24. People I'd like to punch and people I should've punched

25. The art of making comments

26. Playwrights who get produced eventhough most of their work seems to be crap to me

27. A list of posts I'll never maybe never write

And the clock ticks on...

2007-05-06T07:21:00.000-07:00

Tick, tick, tick... KICK!

Yes, I love you and I'll call you soon. Really.

2007-05-03T22:45:00.000-07:00

When we moved to LA, we were warned that there would be people that we would see, people we would meet, people we'd get to know who would seem to love us while we were in their presence, make promises to call us when parting, but whom we'd more than likely never hear from again.

This has turned out to be untrue for the most part. A cliche that is repeated ad naseum until you think it's a law of nature.

Part of this is that I've found that most people will talk to you at least once in LA. Why? There is the fear, of course, that you may turn into someone someday and partly because nobody knows what will happen later. But I also believe there's a real curiousity among people there to find out what's happening. Film making is, after all, a highly social art.

The last two days are a case in point. A few weeks ago, I sent a letter to two well-known Emmy winning producer/writers. I wanted to meet them.

One of them, a playwright, called me yesterday to see if I was around.

You cannot understand the disappointment I felt when I had to say I was working out of town and couldn't do it. But I also felt it was ultimately left in a way that means it will/could happen some day. And that anything, indeed, can happen.

And I love my wife.
***************************
a picture of my desk in denver

Do schools today kill creativity?

2007-05-01T20:25:00.001-07:00

Too busy to write a real post this evening, but I thought this was thought provoking and worthwhile.

So is the site from which it came. I've put a link to it on the blogroll under "Ideas worth spreading."

A warning - the clip is 20 minutes long.

Something I learned at the theatre...

2007-04-30T20:38:00.000-07:00

It's something I forgot to mention way back when I saw the FARNSWORTH INVENTION.

A gift really.

See, I was sitting there in the theatre with Heather when, about 2/3's of the way through the show, Farnsworth and his wife had a child. A little later, the script called for the child to die. This death - which I assume Sorkin put in there because it actually happened - seemed like an overt playwright tactic, a lever pulled to wratchit up the stakes.

And I felt upset.

But not because of its machine like quality.

No. I was upset because I thought about what it would be like to lose a child. And for the first time in my life, I felt it as a prospective father. I truly considered it in a way I never had before.

Afterwords Heather said this had upset her too. In the same way.

It made me feel differently about myself. Like I'd gone into the theatre thinking of myself as one kind of man and leaving the theatre having discovered that there was so much more, rooted in something good.

Crazy.

Whatever my aesthetic quibbles with the piece, Aaron Sorkin, that fine cast, director and technical people gave me that.

Sleeping in separate beds. Again.

2007-04-29T22:32:00.000-07:00

Writing for a living isn't easy. And it's even harder when you're able to make a living doing it.

Yep, that's right, I've unexpectedly picked up some freelance in Denver for the next few weeks. This means no immediate writing on movies or tv or play ideas. And I'm separated from Heather for the duration. Sure, she'll come out and visit, but with the doctor saying that she can't travel after June 1st, the window is small.

Worse, we're trying to do all those baby/birthing classes and that's not going to happen the way it's supposed to.

The blogging will slow down, I'm sure - but it's been a little crazy lately anyway.

Just when we thought we had the problem of living apart licked...

Midnight in a prehistoric forest of rocks

2007-04-29T02:51:00.000-07:00

I'm flying to Denver today (Sunday) for a freelance thing. I could be gone for a while. So, at the last minute, we drove out to Joshua Tree for a midnight drive through the park.

Spooky. Spiritual. Strange. Unearthly. Prehistoric. You've heard it all before. And it all applies. Native Indians claim the trees are spirits of dead Indian warriors ominously guarding their desert domain; there is an energy dome built in the 1950s to commemorate some extraterrestrial race; and it’s home of the largest freestanding boulder in the world and the oldest living organism on the planet, the creosote bush.

We had the park to ourselves and drove mostly - perhaps dangerously - by moonlight. The photos don't show it, but it was bright. And wonderful. Like travelling through a landscape of ghosts.

It reminded us that we are just small sensitive beings on a round planet orbiting a star in the dark.

This last photo here below is of "Baby Noodles" - his first trip to this amazing place, but hopefully not his last.

Working People

2007-04-28T00:22:00.001-07:00

I had some extra Super 8 footage that I used to cut this together.

Feels like a million years ago.

Have a good weekend

SPF announces

2007-04-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

Check it out.

Several Columbia alums in the mix. Cool.

9: The new writer

2007-04-27T06:55:00.000-07:00

Okay, a friend of a friend sold a pilot last summer and came to town.

Being that we're all theatre people, I gave this friend of a friend a call and asked him to dinner.

A very good guy this friend of a friend. He says yes.

So... over steak, he talks about his search for representation, a staff job and film pitching.

Apparently, even AFTER selling a pilot he found getting representation difficult.

"Everybody met me. It was great," he said. "Then, afterwords, nothing. I eventually signed with a smaller boutique."

I thought this was good. Certainly, an accomplishment. A "boutique" always sounds good to me. Plus, you won't get lost.

He agreed, but also had a reservation. "The big agents control everything and have directors, writers, actors, you name it. My guys are primarily literary. So putting together packages...." and he trailed off.

About staff jobs and pitching, he sounded like someone who was enjoying the merri-go-round.

"You go in and talk to these people for like 15 minutes. My stuff is funny and the manager I'm working with has encouraged me to think of it like a stand-up act. At first I wasn't so sure. Then, the more I did it, the more I realized how right he was. My job was to not just write an entertaining script but to entertain. It's kinda fun, but it's different than how I thought it would be."

I liked his attitude since, while on the one hand he seemed to be a little jaded, on the other, he seemed to be learning and having a good time doing it - which, of course, is quite the opposite of jaded.

But from my side of the table, I also felt that the eye of the needle I'd come to LA to thread with my life had gotten smaller.

This blog is a liability

2007-04-26T10:04:00.000-07:00

a printing press

I went to a movie yesterday with a friend and fellow writer trying to break into the world of TV and film. He's had a lot more experience in this world than I - work he's done has been nominated for an emmy - but he's still having trouble getting staffed.

I casually mentioned I had a blog.

He told me to never tell that to anyone in the industry. He implied I should stop doing it altogether and delete the whole thing.

"I know a guy," he said, "who was told by a network executive that he'd been passed over because they didn't want him writing about their show on a blog."

Perhaps this is wise advice in a place that's inspired book titles such as "YOU'LL NEVER EAT LUNCH IN THIS TOWN AGAIN", but I told my friend that it was already too late. Anyone googling my name will find out I have a blog.

And, of course, I'd already considered this possible reaction and made my own decision about it. Which is that anyone re-acting this way toward a blog published under my own name is so paranoid that you've got to wonder what other strange contortions you might have to go through to work under/for them. Afterall, if people are afraid you have ideas on a blog about them, well, they're going to be afraid you have ideas about them elsewhere too.

The position of "I won't hire someone who blogs" is even more absurd when you consider how easy it is to blog anonymously. And how simple it is to create one at ANY time.

Now, I know people in a position to hire/help me have read this blog. I've seen the link referrals from MTA, Revolution Studios, Disney, Paramount and ABC. Plenty of theatre companies have looked, too.

None of these folks are banging down my door with contracts and options and production opportunities. But my guess is that it isn't because they're afraid I'm going to "tattle" - which is decidedly not the purpose of the blog anyway. It's that they haven't felt strongly enough about the work they've seen from me to do anything other than look.

I remember something one of the Farelly brothers (of all people) said at my MFA graduation ceremony: Have an opinion and don't be afraid to voice it.

This blog is part of that. But it's also, interestingly, made me more careful about what I say. That is, when writing out my opinions about what's going on with me and what I see in the world, I actually have to reflect in tranquility (thank you, Mr. Wordsworth) on what it is I'm saying. And how I say it.

If nothing else, that's been worthwhile.

And even then people have their own impressions. An ABC guy told me that my blog seemed to be "a shrine to your wife."

And truth be told, I've written about her a lot. Why wouldn't I? She's pretty much the reason I do everything anyway.

Thoughts?

a printing press destroyed

So, how's the writing going...?

2007-04-25T09:06:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of weeks I've been blogging way too much and way too much of it has not been about the writing.

So, here's the update.

While I feel particualarly slow, a lot has happened in the last month. After the reading of BEYOND THE OWING in Santa Maria, I revised the play and sent it out.

Then, I took another week to revise a screenplay that had been languishing. To give you an idea of how much my process has slowed down, it took 4 days to read it carefully and thoroughly and another 4 to actually implement my notes. This used to take 2 days tops - and more often than not, 1.

After that, I took another pass at the MEDIUM teleplay, fixing a few things here and there that I'd meant to work on back in March when I finished the last draft.

Notice a pattern here? All revising, no new work.

I changed that last week when I looked at some screenplay ideas that I have. They're all movie ideas that have big roles for women since that's what's interesting me right now. I mulled them over, chose one.

Yesterday afternoon I "completed" the first draft of the outline. I printed it out but, to be honest, it has giant holes in it and I don't have to read it to know. I'll revise it this morning. The story is a simple action story. I'm primarily writing it to get away from the more personal stories (MEDIUM aside) I've been producing over the past few years.

Of course, I feel like a failure because I haven't "finished" anything brand new since mid-February when I churned out the first draft of MEDIUM over a weekend. And I've got 4, maybe 5, projects that I'd like to complete.

In between all this is the search of work. An interview at Paramount has been postponed 3 times - which does not bode well. An out of town free-lance gig that was supposed to be 2 months of work is now 3 weeks of work. And an agency that had me on hold before Easter has backed off entirely.

All I can say about that stuff is: In the desert, water evaporates fast.

Finally, check this shit out. Great new LA Band - from Shattuck: http://myspace.com/theyoungs

The more things change, the more they stay the same: Young playwright, you are not the first to have trouble getting produced

2007-04-24T20:37:00.000-07:00

Others have discussed some of Albee's comment's about playwrighting recently.

But this, from today's NYT, stood out to me with concern to all the discussion we've been having lately about getting new work up.

It talks about Albee's first big creative breakthrough. Apparently not even Inge and Copland could convince producers to sink money into a show penned by a guy who was, at the time, a no-name.

A freakin' GERMAN premiere.

For Mr. Albee, that was his first play, “The Zoo Story,” which he completed in just three weeks in 1958. Still, not even William Inge and Aaron Copland were able to help him get it produced in the United States. It wasn’t until after the play’s German premiere, when a critic from The New York Times happened to comment that it was a shame a young American playwright couldn’t get attention back at home, that it made it to Off Broadway.

An interesting post from Wickham

2007-04-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

I try to stay away from direct political rants since that's not the main concern of this blog.

However, this post from Fred about the strange standards and perspectives of the supposedly liberal media is worth a read.

Thanks, Fred.

Pie? Yes.

2007-04-24T00:02:00.000-07:00

I was at the WGA today (at Fairfax and 3rd) and after a bit of writing, I headed over to the Farmer's Market for a little lunch.

And discovered DuPars is open again.

It was hard to resist. Apparently they baked all the cherry pies that were used in David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS.

And the place itself it said to be the site of James Dean's last meal before he headed north to his death.

Me? I just think of the night I extended a date with a beautiful redhead with a simple question: Pie?

Then the place was Utopia at 72nd and Amsterdam.

Now it will be, well, you know where it will be.

I'd like to be cool, but I'm not - here's proof

2007-04-23T07:33:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend - before H left for Oregon - I saw GRINDHOUSE. And then, last night, I saw 300.

I went to GRINDHOUSE hoping to find some mindless, but fun, fun. The old EL MARIACHI and PULP FICTION thrill. You know, a good sense of violence, a snappy story and some tense, terse, hip dialog.

The spoof trailer certainly seemed to be going in the right diretion. It was full of phrases like, "When you hire him to take out the bad guy you better be sure the bad guy isn't you." Etc.

Then the Rodriguez thing started and I was looking forward to following the story of Rose McGowan and her machine gun leg. But from the top I started having trouble. The Go-Go dance she did took forever. Then the dialog felt slipshod and uneven. The gore that followed didn't help at all. And, finally, the story was so fractured and shattered I just couldn't be bothered (at first I hoped to be exhilarated with finding out how/what was happening, but I gave up about 20 minutes in since there was so much going on besides Rose McGowan). I could see they'd done a good job crossing their t's and dotting their i's with regard to genre, but such slavishness to form lead to the same dead end the genre leads to: So fucking what?

Probably the best thing that happened is that I started thinking about my wife and her pregnancy. I wasn't interested in exposing this crap to her - or even to my yet unborn child. Perhaps absurd, but still.

Heather did her best to convince me to stay - she thought I might enjoy it without her. I knew she was wrong. We got up and left.

I'll never forget the faces of the people watching us leave in the dark. "You are not cool" they all said.

We're not.

The other movie I was hoping would be more fun was 300. The horrible review in the Times gave me hope that the show would fantastic. Certainly, it's a visual stunner. But it's so humorlessly racist, homophobic and misogynistic I developed a sore sitting through it.

Plus, the bombastic tone is so thorough, it's completely boring. (I actually thought it was the kidn of movie George Bush and Dick Cheney would like us to believe is the script for Iraq - but that's a whole 'nother tangent.)

It reminded me of Paul Verhoeven's STARSHIP TROOPERS in which a world of perfect people with Nazi-like tendencies is justified by an invasion of inhuman insects. Except less interesting.

Again, I guess I am just not cool.

The bed's too big

2007-04-23T00:00:00.000-07:00

Heather has gone up to Ashland for the next few days.

It's the first time I've been alone in the house for any kind of extended period.

I sound like a wimp, but I miss her. And the place is weird without her.

And the bed's too big.

Kinda amazing

2007-04-21T13:10:00.001-07:00

Kudos to Mike Daisey - whose work I don't know - but who had the poise and grace and courage to deal with this honestly and directly and beautifully in the moment at the moment.

Fantastic. Amazing.

Things I've done for money

2007-04-19T21:20:00.000-07:00

With all the talk about class and making a living, I started thinking about all the things I've done for money.

(I think Adam Szymkowicz did this once, but here's my list.)

************************
(in no particular order)

waiter (TGI Fridays - "Would you like a balloon with that?")

raised thoroughbred yearlings (payment for the summer of work - a 1969 Volvo)

stall mucker (i did it more than once)

dog kennel cleaner (the guy I did it for had had his front teeth knocked out by a horse at the track in Mexico City)

newspaper boy (my first job - which I thought would qualify me to become President of the United States)

babysitter

lawn mower kid

snow shoveler

dry cleaner clerk (used to find small vials and coke spoons in our clientel's pants)

over-the-counter stock exchange clerk (once upon a time traders had their transactions tallied by hand - I did that)

pizza boy (at Pistilli's where Mrs. Pistilli spent her days mixing sauce with severly arthritic hands - a photo of Christ over the sauce pot was laminated to protect it from the red splatter bubbles)

book seller (at Stuart Brent Books on Michigan Avenue in Chicago - probably the best independent bookstore in the country at one time - also at the now defunct Oxford Books in Atlanta and Borders, the evil gentle giant)

video store clerk (when money was stolen from the back room I was forced to take a lie detector test)

gas station attendant/pump jockey (for David Adiv, one of the best human beings on the planet)

security guard (at 120 lbs I was less than imposing so they paired me up with a guy who spent the hours getting high and telling me stories of when he was a gigilo in Atlantic City)

caddy (it was not like the Bill Murray movie, but boy did I want it to be)

raccoon hunter (a short story I wrote about this won the Senior Scholastic Fiction Contest when I was in high school)

dishwasher (also for Mrs. Pistilli as well as Nino at Grandpa's Deli in Barrington Il)

market research telephone interviewer (My name is Malachy Walsh, I'm calling from Kapular and Associates a market research firm located in Arlington Heights, Illinois....)

horse trail path-cutter (behind rich people's houses there are paths for rich people's horses. I blazed them one mosquito-infested summer in which I was chased by many large dogs)

book/library page (at the University of Illinois in C-U)

freelance writer at the Washington Post (the newsroom looked just like one in All The Presidents Men; I witnessed the stock market crash, Iran-Contra-Gate and the ascendency of the first Bush there - I also saw Ben Brantley strut around the newsroom saying, "We got him. We got him by the balls now" when Marion Barry was caught in a hotel with a hooker and crack pipe)

tack washer (for Amy Ylvasaker whom I had a mad crush on when I was like 12)

research assistant (for a guy who was writing a book about Custer - I wasn't good at it and I got canned)

script reader

theater manager (I was actually the intern who was the only left to run the shows after everyone went on summer vacation)

ditch digger (in Atlanta while putting myself through ad school)

literacy tutor (actually I never got paid for this but it was the best thing I ever did)

advertising copywriter (see my work at www.malachywalsh.com)

Rabbit Hole at OSF

2007-04-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

In theatre blogs, this play has been pummelled as being too simple and accessible and direct as a narrative.

Some have even hurled the worst insult you can ever throw at a play these days in calling it film-ready and worse, no better than TV. At Time Out New York, David Cote - a pretty good reviewer and writer in my book - claims to have felt trapped to the point of hallucination when he saw the show at MTC. He used as an example of everything that's wrong with MTC programming - and, by extension, American Theatre.

It doesn't help that the play was awarded the Pulitzer earlier this week over three more obscure plays (one of which I've read - BULRUSHER - and the other of which I saw - ELLIOTT) that the Pulitizer Jury recommended.

In the blogosphere, THAT just fueled even more hatred - though I think the bloggers who fostered the conversations (Hunka and Playgoer) where most of the mudslinging occured in the comments sections were actually talking about something more interesting than the play. They were making a point about the Pulitizer process - and its meaning to theatre as they see it. (My opinion is, the Pulitizer counts, big big big time and as much as anyone might not like it, it stamps the work it endorses as the standard to work by and against.)

I had my own experience with the play about a week before all this happened. On Good Friday to be exact.

I did not hate the play.

But as it's not my cup of tea, I didn't love it either.

It is a simple, direct and most importantly, accessible narrative about grief. It is also a thoroughly middle class play. It is well constructed and has some funny things in it and even a dangerous moment or two.

Writing one of these kinds of plays is extremeley difficult because it has to all be logical so all the levers that get pulled work. In this sense, the play wasn't completely perfect. I'm not sure I bought that the wife was trying to erase the kid by selling the house, getting rid of his stuff, etc, while the husband was trying to hold onto him by making sure his fingerprints weren't wiped away from walls etc. This is largely because the husband wanted to have another kid to restart and the wife didn't.

Now, I actually do not like language plays. I find them very boringly intellectual (sorry, but sic at Soho Rep was not for me at all). But straight up narratives - in the theatre - don't float my boat either (I like Shepard and Fornes and Machado) unless they're about something stunningly new to me. Or carry major insights. Or have some kind of Greek-ness to me (BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE).

So certainly, I sat in the theatre watching this play with some serious fidgeting. But unlike David Cote, I didn't hallucinate.

I'm still searching for the visceral play at OSF.

And while Rabbit Hole wasn't it, I didn't find it objectionable.

And since I'm a love it or hate it kinda guy, that indeed may be the problem.

EDIT: I have had a couple of great moments at OSF - I was reminded to my chagrin by someone who knows. My wife. Indeed, I had forgotten how great the production of KING JOHN was last year - in particular the scene where the kid's eyes were about to be put out by a hot poker. Fantastic. Then there was THE PIANO LESSON they did a few years back. The hair on the back of my neck rose whenever that freaking piano came alive. It was great.

Some days you just don't know anything.

2007-04-18T08:30:00.000-07:00

This is one of those days.

Plus, it feels like Thursday but it's only Wednesday.

Why does that happen?

8: The young producers

2007-04-16T01:02:00.000-07:00

At the corner of Fairfax and Sunset, there's a Coffee Bean that I've been told is THE place in West Hollywood to be seen.

On our way to the Ralph's a few blocks away, we pass it in our Mini-Coop and say, look there it is, can you see anyone there? And, of course, in the nanosecond we have to look, we see plenty of people in a brief blur. But none of the blurs look like anyone we know. From our film life. Or our real life.

And so I never think I'll go there until one day, a producer calls me and says, "I read your script. You're a great writer. Let's talk." and he suggests we meet there because it's near where I live AND near where he works.

I arrive a little early to scope the place out. It's basically a patio where the tables have been bolted down to the contrete with a little glass enclosure attached where lattes are born.

There are people there, but the people who are PEOPLE aren't there - which means, in the Hollywood sense, no-one is there.

When my meeting guy pulls up, I'm playing backgammon on my phone. I look up and admit I'm a retard for playing and he introduces me to his business partner. I feel even more retarded for not knowing he had a partner.

They both laugh however at my self-deprecating comment in a way that I realize they got a kick out of the somewhat uncool admission about fooling around with a game on my phone.

As we wait in line for passion lemonade ice teas and double espresson shots, we chat about where they're from. One is from Northern California, the other is from Chicago.

There is some more in depth introductions as we sit down on the patio that is suddenly crowded.

I tell them about myself. Playwright. Married. Baby on the way. Move here from New York. Making money writing advertising as I try to see if a transition is possible. I'm honest and as funny as I can be - which isn't very. (That is, it's more honest than it is funny.)

But they laugh. And they seem relaxed. They tell me about their lives. Both are married, both have worked together awhile. One has spent some time doing theatre. They both want to make movies, own a few scripts and are trying to put some packages. They don't want to make my script which they like, but, honestly, would be too expensive to make for them.

I ask them what kind of material they own.

They have two scripts that they've developed, they say, one a family movie, one a very weird horror story with a heavy psychological bend to it. Though each piece of material is quite different from the other, they talk about both with a sense of sincerity about making them that I like. They don't want to make trash, but they do want to have fun.

I like them very much.

They ask me what else I have. I describe a play I've written that I'd like to transfer to the screen and another movie I've written that I'm considering reworking so I could shoot it in LA rather than SF.

They're intrigued by both. After about an hour and a half, we go our separate ways. As we part, they ask to see the scripts I described a few moments ago. Of course, I say. And I mean it.

When I get home, Heather asks how it went. I tell her that we hardly talked about the script I sent them but they'd like to see more.

She says, well, you've had your first real Hollywood meeting.

I just think, man, I'd like to work with those guys. They seemed real.

3 signs of optimism

2007-04-14T18:23:00.000-07:00

With all the chatter about money and class and the personal cost of doing theater, it was ironic that my wife and I wandered into a store today and picked up three different signs of optimism.

Here they are in no particular oder. (Right.)

1.

2.

3.

Now we have a house. Or at least another couple of places to sit - and change diapers - besides the floor.

funny, strange, provocative

2007-04-13T00:16:00.000-07:00

The ecology of a theatre community is always fragile and unique. Theatre artists are uniquely dependent on institutions to allow their work to flourish – painters may require dealers to sell their work, poets and novelists publishers to print and distribute theirs, but playwrights require theaters in order to make their work in the first place. Without a venue, a place to come together with actors and directors and designers and audiences, a playwright can’t even fully practice their craft much less grow to maturity as an artist. This places a special burden on producers and leaders of theaters: not only to make their company succeed, but to create a venue where artists can create and the new can come into existence. Without such producers, no theatrical culture can hope to flourish.

- Oskar Eustis
in the Foreward to FUNNY, STRANGE, PROVOCATIVE
seven plays from Clubbed Thumb

And then, when you don't have institutional support, you do what the people from Clubbed Thumb did. You start making your own institution, one play, one production at a time.

Class and theatre, the right stuff, having it all

2007-04-12T09:34:00.000-07:00

Most of the conversation going on about theatre and class right now in the "theatre blogosphere" is centered around money with a strong emphasis on school debt.

I've indulged in this kind of thing, too.

However, I think something is missing - which is what the pshychographics of class do to our heads with regard to how we make a living and how we judge "success".

Most people in this country, whether they qualify financially for membership in the middle class or not, have a middle class mindset, if not an upper middle class mindset. Even the so-called "working class" who, while their work may put them in the stereotypical blue collar bracket, almost always want the same things "middle class" people want - homes, cars, stereos, college educations, boats, coffee tables, Playstations, etc.

And, more importantly, they often want these things for the same reasons - to impress the neighbors.

Television sitcoms and advertisers have done this.

Specifically, advertisers have done it by always presenting an idealized lifestyle in which what you have - especially when it's their product - is what other people want, thus making you attractive, desireable, etc.

In television, with few exceptions (MARRIED WITH CHILDREN, ROSEANNE), everyone lives in a huge apartment with all the right stuff. In fact, the most working class family on TV right now is to be found on MEDIUM - though Joe IS a rocket scientist at NASA and they seem to have enough money for high end NOKIA phones and VOLVO's.

THE OFFICE describes most of our lives pretty well.

However... back to the subject.

Theatre - to me - certainly has a lot of class issues.

But WHAT you find playing in theatre is not the biggest of these issues. If anything, I think the moneyed people who go to theatre are more open minded about different perspectives than you'll find in the visual arts where a lot of direct commenting on culture has been largely blunted by abstraction and irony.

What I mean is, if you look around at regional theatre programming, you don't see only old white men getting produced. You have the Culture Clash at Berkelely Rep and La Jolla. You have Dael Orlandersmith at MTC. You have Cassandra Medley at the Magic and elsewhere in NY. You have Suzanne Lori Parks winning Pulitzers. You have Tracey Scott Wilson all over the place a few years ago. You have all the programming at The Public - even with Neil LaBute plays there. You have Nilo Cruz and Octavio Solis at OSF and elsewhere.

In other words, you have anything BUT a homogenized group of voices being heard and seen on some of the biggest non-profit institutional stages around the country.

(Weirdly, I've even been told that being a white male could hurt my chances of being produced - indirectly when it came to theatre and directly when it came to television.)

To me, the largest issue concerning class and theatre is NOT how much we borrow to do it.

It's how much we expect to get back from it when we put our blood and sweat into it.

After all, have we not all been raised on the very common middle class idea, "Do what you love and the money will follow"? Have we not been told to "follow our dreams" to exclusion of all else? Have we not been indoctrinated with the thought that "success" means "making money" to live on and buy stuff with?

Theatre does not owe the people working in it anything. It doesn't owe me a living, even if I want it to give me one. It doesn't love me because I love it.

And graduate writing/acting/directing programs don't usually reveal percentages of "successful" (ie, people working in the field) alumni because it would be embarrassing to do so. Most aren't "successful" in the common middle class definition of that term.

What we think we want comes from a place of the ego - ego formed in a cultural environment where middle class values and aspirations are as inescapable as air.

Part of that is a sense of entitlement.

Or, put another way, when we're honest about why we want to do theatre - and for me, it's not to make a living - then we can move forward.

But if we're hoping that theatre will fulfill the middle class dreams we have, we're deluded.

Theatre is not a middle class profession - even if it's the middle class who buy tickets to those shows at the non-profits.

It's not designed to buy all that stuff I talked about up there.

Its purpose is to do something else entirely.

Stealing from theatre

2007-04-10T01:08:00.001-07:00

How many times have you sat through a play or an evening of short plays to find yourself in the dark pretending not to notice the inept scene changing happening onstage?

Good directors know that one of the most enthralling things about theatre is being in the presence of transformation.

Really good directors make something of even the most mechanical of these opportunities - the scene change.

Here some commercial makers use the effect to, well, great effect.

And now for a personal plea: Please make scene changes interesting for us. We can see you in the dark. We really can.

The law of attraction

2007-04-09T10:05:00.001-07:00

As I've made clear, I felt New York pushed me away to some degree.

But it took more than pushing to get me going.

There was the life I was attracted to.

Here's a video about that.

Another "Why Theatre" - from the SF Chronicle

2007-04-06T08:36:00.000-07:00

I've been a vocal critic of Steven Winn's reviewing in SF since he trashed every show in the SF Fringe one year without ever seeing one of them, but a friend brought my attention to this article, which despite the lukewarm words towards some of the plays he's reviewing (surprise), has some value when it comes to WHY THEATRE.

As my friend said, it echoes thoughts I - and many others - have shared elsewhere.

Forget computers, videos, HDTV -- the play's still the thing
Steven Winn
Wednesday, April 4, 2007

There's a scene in "After the War," the Philip Kan Gotanda play in its world-premiere run at the American Conservatory Theater, that made me settle back contentedly in my seat on opening night. One of the characters, the Japanese landlord of a San Francisco boardinghouse in 1948, has just acquired a new Philco TV. He and several tenants (one white, one black) gather to hoist an aerial onto the roof. As they do, a Russian tenant, Olga, charges back and forth from the parlor to the back steps to report on the reception.

"How's it looking?" the men call from the top of the house.

"How's it cooking?" Olga breathlessly asks of a Japanese woman peering hopefully at the 10-inch screen.

As it turns out, the play itself never comes clearly into focus; "After the War" remains diffuse and dramatically unrealized. But I relished that moment -- and there were a few others -- when a new play, in its first public test, seems poised to capture an audience and carry it along as one on a route never traveled just this way before. Here, in a few invigorating, economical strokes, is the world "After the War" sets out to create -- a world transformed by progress, by the compression and mingling of races and the challenges of cross-cultural understanding.

Nothing else quite matches the charge that can run through a theater when something new is first revealed onstage. The audience transcends its role as receiver of culturally certified goods and becomes a collective participant, completing the work that the playwright, actors, director and designers can take only so far.

New plays -- more so than new works of music or dance, which carry the conventions of silent attention followed by applause; and more so than the finished products of new movies or novels -- reconnect us directly to our communal natures, to the urge for experience that both stretches and unites us. Laughter, hushed apprehension, a chorus of tiny startled gasps or those arctic spells when an audience chills -- all those things aren't merely responses. They are integral parts of the social enterprise that any play premiere undertakes. New theater is participatory democracy in action.

It's a singular and salutary feature of the region's cultural life that the production of new plays remains so vigorous here. Even in uneasy times, when safe bets are tempting and screens of all kinds (computer, video game, movie, high-definition TV) exert a mesmerizing hold, local theaters continue to bet heavily against the odds and venture into the unknown. More than 130 new plays premiered in the Bay Area last year.

Without trying very hard, I caught six world premieres over the past several weeks. One of them, Dan Hoyle's dazzling monologue set in Nigeria, "Tings Dey Happen," at the Marsh, was pure exhilaration. Another, Mark Jackson's "American " at the Thick House, rode its antic momentum to a terrific party scene. "To the Lighthouse," a Virginia Woolf adaptation at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, weirdly turned into a musical after intermission. A play about sexual fantasies at the Magic Theatre, Chantal Bilodeau's "Pleasure & Pain," was like a numbing shot of novocaine.

So how'd you like it? Was it any good? Should I take my son? That's how we package, process and exchange our responses. We crave a currency, a known rate of exchange to fix the value on something unfamiliar. But such measures may finally matter less, when it comes to new plays, than what happens in those moments when something suddenly takes hold, when a door you didn't notice flies open and the light shines in on the audience all at once.

It's been a few weeks since I saw "American," and I couldn't begin to detail the plot or recall the characters' names. But I can still see and feel the throbbing pulse of the final scene, when one power-glazed manipulator after another urges the hero on toward a fatal celebrity. And then at the dinner party in "To the Lighthouse," where the guests all speak their thoughts aloud and silently mouth their spoken dialogue, the hostess (a sublime Monique Fowler as Mrs. Ramsay) delivers this exquisite, enfolding irony: "There is a profound stillness holding us together." A shivers runs softly up my back now as I remember it.

In a night of feverishly drawn characters, Hoyle hits his devastating peak in "Tings Dey Happen" at the end of the first act. Bathed in a sickly green light and speaking in a thick, strangely lucid pidgin English, the actor becomes a Nigerian mercenary describing a 2003 oil war with a blend of rage and eerie detachment. A few minutes later, in the lobby of the Marsh, an old friend introduced me to a friend of hers. This woman must have seen in my face what I saw in hers -- the shaken-to-the-bones astonishment of that last scene. "Can you believe what just happened?" she said. "No," I said. "Can you?"

Why we write

2007-04-04T07:57:00.000-07:00

Mr. S made the comment below in response to my post about why I go to the theatre.

I thought it was worth its own post.

******

I don't think any of us write to be liked (I mean, sure, we want people to like what we write, but I don't think it's the over-riding priority). I think we write to engage, to challenge. Engagement relates to the work--being liked relates to the ego. I think we write to create an experience or to share an experience of some depth, not just likeability. A play is a broken-hearted love letter to a lover (the beautiful horrible world) that could care less. That sort of love letter demands attention, demands anger, demands hatred, demands indignation, demands love. Like is the consolation prize.

******

So, so well put.

Beyond the Owing at PCPA Theatrefest

2007-04-03T09:41:00.000-07:00

This play is being produced at the Red Eye Theatre in Mpls, July 13-26 2009.

Check it out.... right here.
________

Drove up to Santa Maria for a reading of BEYOND THE OWING.

After working on it for two weeks and doing and in-home reading, I finally have a draft of this play that I like that's based on what started at the Clubbed Thumb boot camp. The naturalism of the first few scenes gives way to a surrealism properly as the play progresses now and the emotional logic between the characters works the way it should.

About a month ago I was ready to throw it out, so it was a great relief to hear it in new hands and feel like it could be stageworthy.

Here are a few pix from the reading.

IN OTHER NEWS....

I'm picking up work suddenly. An ad agency in LA has asked me to come in next week at the same time that an ad agency in Colorado has asked me to fly in and work for them.

Then, I have an interview with the ad dept at one of the major studios in LA - which I'm very interested in.

Cross your fingers. I do need work. And I do like to work.

Clubbed Thumb on the West Coast

2007-04-02T00:35:00.000-07:00

Here are a few pix from the West Coast Clubbed Thumb fund-raiser gala. If you'd like to know what they do, check out the book at left on Amazon.

Great people. Great time.

And that's the beach - and the Pacific Ocean - on the other side of those windows.

The Lives of Others

2007-03-30T23:07:00.000-07:00

The problem with art and politics is that too often the political message becomes a hammer to be used on the head. This not only dates a lot of political art, but dehumanizes the characters who carry the story and thus the message.

That's why, for me, art is better when it's deeply personal and spreads out from there.

Politics can provide the circumstances, but as the world shows, everything changes.

And as a lot of political art shows, start with an agenda and you bore from moment one.

(Edward Bond's work is a good example of the personal story being more potent than the directly political - SAVED is terrific, feels personal, clearly written from sharp observation; his later work about people pulling together to weather river floods and crony-ism bore me as the characters are flavorless shills for ideas. Only broad satire - a la SF MIME TROUPE and SNL sketch work - really escapes this for me.)

BUT... Here's a movie where the humanity of the story transcends the political issues - and yet couldn't exist without the politics.

Beautiful. Terrifyingly human. Can't stop watching it in my head.

Go see it.

THE LIVES OF OTHERS.

It'll make you remember what art is for.

Thanks, Eric.

Advertising - Music - Television - Movies: WATCH OUT!

2007-03-29T10:24:00.000-07:00

The text below is from one of the smartest cultural thinkers I've had the pleasure of knowing - and working for: Dave Tutin. (Click on his blog to see it on his site.)

Very insightful about some of the changes that the internet has created for advertising and music and that are now coming to television and, I'm quite sure, movies.

In what seems now like another life, I was once the global creative director in charge of the Oracle advertising account. I was, in fact, the only person from the agency that the infamous Larry Ellison would talk to. I used to fly from New York to San Francisco every other week for two years. On flight 93. Yes, that flight 93! I've never worked out if 9/11 would have been my week. And I don't want to. I'm just grateful to Larry for saying to me only a couple of months before that I didn't need to fly out quite so often!

Larry's favorite phrase which of course made it into our advertising was "The Internet changes everything." We believed it at the time. The entire country (not the world as Silicon Valley believed - parts of which still don't have reliable, uncensored, affordable access to the Internet) was willing to believe it. It was this belief that fueled the ridiculous tech stock bubble of the 90s. As it turned out we were all clueless as to how it would change everything!

OK so we know what happened next. But fast forward a few years and take stock of the situation. I have had a foot in two camps - advertising and music. Depending on who you talk to, both industries are either dead or dying. And it's all because of the Internet. Or more specifically the digital technology that made the Internet possible, that made music easier to record, copy and share.

The music industry refused to accept change. It took a computer company - Apple - to show how money could be made from digital music downloads.

But not the kind of money the music industry was used to.

The advertising industry refused to accept change. It took technology companies - yahoo and google - to show how the new ways of reaching customers could generate revenue.

But not the kind of revenue the ad industry was used to.

Interesting parallel. People say these industries are dying yet there's MORE music out there right now than ever before and there's MORE advertising out there than ever before.

So what is dying? All that is dead is the ability of a handful of people - major ad agencies and major record labels - to bleed the kind of cash out of their audiences (or clients) that they used to.

Long before we had today's technology, music used to be in the hands of troubadours. Wandering minstrels who sang songs. Strangely enough these songs were often the means by which people got their news and information. They were an early form of advertising. They advertised heros (from Jesse James to Robin Hood), they unified beliefs and strengthened common bonds. But nobody did it for the money.

Somewhere down the line we decided that pop stars (and sports stars, incidentally) were worth obscene amounts of money. Which they are not. They are lucky bastards who get to "play" and get paid for it.

So, Larry, I think you were right all those years ago. The Internet has changed everything. But some people are still unwilling to accept it because it hurts their ability to make money, because it has demystified some industries that were based on nothing more than the trick of doctors who once wrote prescriptions in Latin! (Next, I hope we see the tech giants themselves demystified with the earnings of the Ellisons and the Gates' brought back to some rational level!)

When a handful of TV networks held sway over the entire American audience, it was different. When a handful of major record labels held sway over what we heard, it was different. Now these two industries do not know how to deal with the splintering of reality into a world where just about everything ever recorded, filmed or written can be available to anybody any time. And because neither of them can generate the easy money they once did, they think they are dying.

Music and communication will never die. But there will always be things that 'change everything'. And until the major companies that make up these industries embrace change and accept that the days of effortless profit are long gone we will have to endure all this talk about dying - while we listen to the most varied choice of music we've ever had and learn about new products and new ideas in the most varied ways we've ever known.

What 4 I go to the theatre

2007-03-28T21:15:00.000-07:00

Since moving to LA I've seen very little theatre. In New York, I used to see 2 to 3 shows a week - on average. You'd think there'd be some withdrawl going on, but it's been so busy, I haven't missed it. Yet, I've found myself returning to plays to work on them and I'm still strongly drawn to the blogs of theatre lovers and the conversations they foster.

It got me thinking about why I started going to theatre in the first place.

The truth is, I've never gone for "entertainment." There's plenty of television and film that can do that for a lot less money. And often better.

Engagement, however, has been a much more powerful motivator when it comes to getting me into - and keeping me in - the theatre.

It comes in a lot of forms - laughter, anger, sorrow, horror, sympathy, sharp thought, pure bafflement, joy, mystery, beauty, scathing relevance, vigorous truthfulness, provocative ugliness, delightful whim, etc.

What makes it unique in theatre is that it's an experience you're living in at the same time the actors on stage are living in it.

So when Austin and Lee go at it in TRUE WEST, I'm not just watching it, I'm witnessing it. When Marion in Fornes's ABINGDON SQUARE awakens sexually, I feel it the way she does because I'm in the presence of it. When Mag burns her daughter's letter in the fire of THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE, she relishes the sense of injustice and dismay and pity that she inflames in me and the rest of the audience just to see the flames go higher. When the hat parade happens in Churchill's FAR AWAY, I am completely disgusted and horrified by the juxtaposition of each hat's beauty against the brutal world that produces them.

It's what makes theatre dangerous and compulsive and terrific (in the archaic sense) - which it ALWAYS has to be for me if it's to be good.

I don't even have to like it when it finds this place and holds my attention - Mark Schultz's EVERYTHING WILL BE DIFFERENT was a play I couldn't stand even as I couldn't help but watch it.

Engagement dies the moment I ask the question, "What's the point?" (In some ways, the bitterness I feel when I find myself asking this question grows exponentionally with the quality of the production. The better it looks, the better it's acted, the funnier it is just for the sake of funny - the more I begin to hate it.)

Of course, engagement can die and come back several times in a show. And that's okay.

And I don't have to be able to easily sum up the point of a show to be completely immersed in it - in fact, sometimes when I thoroughly get it, I'm totally UN-engaged. Nice endings, sincere apologies, warm understanding, untruthful dialog, punning of ANY kind, schtick (unless we're talking improv), smugness, uber-coolness, arrogance are all other ways to ruin a perfectly nice time in the dark.

A Single Woman

2007-03-25T00:14:00.000-07:00

By Eleanor Robison - as told to Malachy Walsh
on 12/30/04

I think we’d only been going together about 5 months when R asked me. He didn’t get down on his knee, he asked me in the car. We’d been to dinner and then just, in the car, he asked me. There was nothing romantic about it whatsoever. I don’t know if we’d stopped, I have a feeling it was still so maybe we were stopped, maybe it was we were outside the house… and then he just kinda said, We’ve been going out together for quite a while and I’ve come to love you and I would really like to marry you – something like that. Just like that. Very simple.

As I’ve always said since, I don’t know if I really loved him or I just loved the idea of being married and especially to a minister.

It was very big news. We went over to a big congregational dinner and I was introduced as the minister’s fiancé.

So I was going to get married and thought I should go to the doctor and get things checked over. It was right around Christmas and the doctor found this large growth in my abdominal area. He thought it was on like a fallopian tube or something so he really thought he had to get that thing out. But when he got in, he discovered it was a big fibroid tumor in the uterus and he took the uterus out. So I had a hysterectomy and all with absolutely no preparation for it.

I found out after when the doctor came in in that dizzy time, you know, when you’re coming out of the anaesthetic and you act like you’re understanding things but you can’t really… But I do know that he came and told me, the doctor… that he’d had to remove the uterus and that really upset me because I’d always wanted to have children. That was one of the things that…

So I knew I had to tell R right away, which I did when he came to visit.

He was wanting me to get better and heal up and everything and he came and visited two or three times and I really didn’t get much of an inkling of how it was going to be.

Then it was the day I got out of the hospital that I was at home and I was lying down on the sofa out in the living room and he said, he said… he said he wanted to pass along his mental abilities to someone on down the line and that that was something he should do. He said I was not a suitable vessel for his seed.

I took the ring off and handed it back to him and told him to leave. A day or two later he came back with all the gifts I’d ever given to him and gave them back to me and I guess then he told the people in his church about it – he just told them - and they learned I wasn’t able to have children and then they rose up, in fury basically, and said that was no reason and said they didn’t want him anymore and asked him to resign. They finally got the Presbytery – the next, higher part of our church government – involved and that’s what did it. He left the church. Left the town. Left the whole area.

Anyway, I didn’t give up on the idea of having a family and when it became legal for a single parent to adopt in 1969, I just decided to find a little baby. That’s really what I wanted. But when I didn’t have a lot of luck with the agencies, I talked to our minister - and family friend - BJ. Then, one evening, after a Presbytery meeting, BJ asked me to come to sit on a curb with him. He asked me if I was still serious about adopting a baby. I said "I sure was." He told me about a baby he'd seen at the Ashland Hospital that didn’t have a name.

We got back to Ashland on a Saturday and BJ went to the hospital to find out more about the baby. He called the doctor on the birth chart at home and told him about me. Monday, my mother and I went met with him. We talked to the doctor and after the interview he said the baby would be ours and I went to my lawyer, Sam Harris, and he started the paperwork with the birthmom.

By Friday, all the paperwork was done and Sam came to the house with the baby. He told me that everyone at the hospital was impressed with the fact that the little baby was red headed and that I was, too.

I don’t know if I have the right words to say how wonderful it was, to have her put right in my arms. I felt like it was just meant to be. She was mine. Now she was itty bitty because she was premature - a bare 5 pounds. She was very little. But she had good lungs.

I’ve been told it was the first ever single female parent adoption in Oregon and the third in the country, but I’m not sure I believe it.

Years later a friend ran into R somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico or some place. They said that he was married and that he had a wife who’d had a couple of kids from another man, but that he, himself, had never had any – and they, the people from the church, were so happy about that: he’d never got a chance to plant his seed anywhere.

I was 38.

Joy, Illinois.

Eleanor was born here. She came to Ashland, Oregon in the mid-50s to teach school - which she did for 38 years.

Downtown Ashland, Oregon today.

It's a boy.

2007-03-24T04:07:00.000-07:00

The test results are in. Due date: Aug 3. And I posted this photo of his mom just because I like it.

Eleanor - Who knew you'd be a greater influence on my writing than Hemingway, Faulkner, Rushdie, Fornes, Shepard, Shakespeare or Bond and Churchill?

2007-03-22T23:35:00.001-07:00

She is not very tall, but when she decides she wants to be heard, she uses a voice than no-one can overlook.

She’s humble to a fault though she’s often the smartest one in the room.

She has a true belief in God, but a tolerance that might make an atheist think twice about saying no to the town square Nativity scene.

She seems like the last person you’d ask to maneuver a big truck around, but she could slip an RV into a compact parking space outside the COSCO, no problem.

She used to drive the great all-American muscle car, the Mustang.

She’s stood on the Great Wall of China.

She remembers a Fourth of July in Joy, Illinois where the fireworks were wheeled onto the local school football field and set off so people in the bleachers could watch them from above.

She uses words like “jiminey” and “rattle-trap” and “who-gee-whatsits” and phrases like “I’ll take another wonk of cake.”

She was David Fincher’s first film teacher.

On Thursdays she gets into a bathing suit to do water aerobics.

Her name is Eleanor Robison.

She’s my mother-in-law.

And she has turned out to be a great influence on me in ways that are still surprising and amazing to me.

The first time I met Eleanor I had come to Ashland to be with her daughter for a week during a Grad school spring break.

It was early in the relationship, so I was anxious about what it might be like to meet her - evenmoreso with so much riding on it.

I knew Heather was worried, too, when she suggested we stay for the first night at a local hotel. In retrospect, we were all hedging out bets, but it was probably for the best because at least I got to be with Heather before anything new got introduced to our relationship.

When I finally did meet Eleanor, I immediately liked her. She had that rare quality of being wise and curious at once – of giving off the sense that she’d seen a lot of the world and was interested in seeing more.

That still didn’t make me think I could just get around the bases without care.

Maybe she saw that I knew that during our first meal. Or maybe she saw that I really loved her daughter.

I’m not sure.

But boy was I happy, when, as I washing dishes, she marched up to me and said, “Malachy, I approve of you.”

It’s led to many, many good things.

Like the video above that became the start of an unusual tv campaign that eventually wound up in MOMA.

I’ve even put her – or a character like her – in a play about people trying to make livings in the arts despite all the financial problems that brings.

Next, the story of how she and Heather found each other in the world – in her own words.

Theatre people seem resentful of this. Why?

2007-03-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

Theatre is something I love. And it will always be there for me.

If I were a regularly produced playwright, I'd be there for theatre, more often.

But I'm not. And the few playwrights I know who are getting produced are usually found on their knees looking for money.

That's why I'm in LA, not NY (where the showcase code and real-estate mean a three person play can cost as much as $30,000 in a house that doesn't seat 50), and not SF (where there's no business to live on). It's also why I work in advertising.

So, this note from The Playgoer didn't surprise me. And shouldn't surprise anyone else.

If I ever do make a decent amount of money, one thing I'll definitely enjoy doing with it is putting together a theatre company and producing my work - and the work of my friends - as it should be made.

The good thing about LA is that, here, not only do I think I can have kids, but I think I can put up some of that theatre even WITHOUT a decent amount of money.

Dexter

2007-03-21T00:15:00.000-07:00

Just finished watching the entire Dexter season.

I don't think I've had a better time with a first season since The Sopranos.

Dexter is particularly, powerfully delicious in its depiction of a character addicted to murder and who - through pretending to be human - eventually becomes more human. A human who kills, that is.

He reminds me very much of people in AA who build secret lives around drinking and drugs and sex but appear to function normally in the world.

Best new show all around (acting/writing/direction) on "TV."

The TV Spec Script: 5 - done

2007-03-20T00:41:00.004-07:00

10 weeks ago I walked into a classroom without an iota of an idea about writing a TV spec. Oh, sure, I'd read a couple, but when the teacher/professor asked which of us did not have an "industry standard outline", I was the only dummy honest enough to say I didn't.

It may have been the moment that the teacher became cold to me.

Or maybe it was an hour later when I said I was a playwright and working copywriter and that I'd drop the class in three weeks if I didn't have an outline that was passable by his standards.

After that, I never fit in. Perhaps with a baby on the way and a dwindling bank account, I expect too much. Need too much and I should just do the easy thing...

Which, when I think of it, was very very hard to break into as well.

However, outside of giving me deadlines and pointing out typos and getting a tutorial on how to use Final Draft, there was very little help about story until way late in the "semester" - and even then it was prompted by my own pushing, which in turn was prompted by questions my excellent writer friend Ross Berger posed after he read the script.

Still, I have to hand it to the teacher. He did read the work. I just feel we may have all learned more had we all read each other's scripts out loud. But if I were king, of course, the trains would never get where they were supposed to - much less be on time.

When asked where I thought the script was, I replied that I thought that was for others to say.

I should've just said, It's done. And time to write another one.

And it is.

But with so many spec TV scripts out there, I think I'll write a pilot this time.

However, if anyone asks me if I've ever written a pilot before, I'll sadly lie through my teeth and say, yes, many many times.

And I've also won the Nobel Peace Prize. Humbly, of course.

Sorkin's Farnsworth Invention

2007-03-19T08:45:00.000-07:00

Went down to the La Jolla Playhouse this weekend to see THE FARNSWORTH INVENTION by Aaron Sorkin.

While the play's style with its heavy narrative spine isn't my cup of tea, Sorkin isn't exactly slumming it either. He started in theatre with A FEW GOOD MEN for which he was given a TONY.

The play's plot is all about the invention of television.

The theme is all about What's better for humankind, sharing information or owning and exploiting it? Interestingly the character with the most narrative responsibilities, William Sarnoff, played terrifically by Stephen Lang, is also the villain. He tries to have it both ways - make TV a personal trust and make money off it. You can guess which wins.

Philo Farnsworth (a great Jimmi Simpson) is much more noble. But he's also destroyed before he can show us whether or not he has a greedy side.

Advertising and commercialism both take pretty big hits, which seems disingenuous since commericial television has made Sorkin rich, but the subjects were clearly an interesting and important part of figuring out how television was going to work.

Sorkin is very erudite and witty. And he's able to keep the material light and thoughtful through-out - which you'd expect.

My guess is New York will be able to weigh in on this one shortly.

Non-fiction film on non-fiction theatre - who sez meta-whatever is so over?

2007-03-18T19:18:00.001-07:00

A short film doc on the theatre doc.

Enjoy.

The Trouble with Looking for Work

2007-03-16T01:22:00.000-07:00

The table during the day.

Lately, I've been freelancing. From home.

This means that I'm doing everything from our big table - cold calling, producing radio, rewriting copy and doing conference calls - while Heather is in the house.

Theoretically, this should be fine, but occasionally, as happened today, she'll ask me question like, "What would you like for dinner?" and I'm in the middle of doing something else - editing, whatever.

At the moment, I'm not interested in being pampered.

So my answer is a little petulant. And non-committal: I don't know. What do you want?

Today, she interpreted it as resentment that she hasn't found work. She's worried about people not calling her back. She's feeling trapped by the apartment. By our always narrow circumstances. By her pregnancy - our pregnancy.

Of course, I don't mean to do this. I'm stressed out too. About all the same things. And my answer isn't to place my energy where she does - but elsewhere. Which is easier for me since I'm a writer. I can write whether or not someone hires me. I can always work on the script a little longer, a little harder.

Acting isn't so easy. And even less so when you're pregnant.

Last night, we played tennis and went for a drive along Mulholland. But we can't do that every night.

What to do... What to do.... besides give up and become a lawyer.

No one said it would be easy, but it's these little stubs that worry me the most.

At night.

ps. this is amazingly COOL.

Beautiful

2007-03-14T22:39:00.000-07:00

She makes me read poetry to her pregnant belly.

And I count her freckles when she sleeps at night.

Jigsaw Nation

2007-03-14T12:16:00.000-07:00

I realize some of us think that theatre should be a hammer of leftist thought, but I don't. In fact, I think it's one of the reasons most people are not interested in theatre - they expect that it will not only be boring, but that it will lecture them on what to think while simultaneously telling them that they're dumb if they don't understand what they're seeing.

Unfortunately, these expectations are all too often fulfilled.

And since there's very little in theatre right now -- {at the always unnamed "institutions" of "homogeny" (someone else's idea, not mine) or in the churches that are apparently now considered theatre in the same sense that the Lincoln Center is (again, someone else's idea, not mine)} -- with truly revelatory, revolutionary or even mildly incisive weight on it, there's almost no reward for going to theatre at all.

Worse, theatre seems to have lost its status as a place to explore, fail, explore again. Shows are now considered products that are either digestable and likeable and ready to be forgotten -- or they're tossed aside, where they're also forgotten.

Which is why I got involved in JIGSAW NATION. I saw it as an honest process-oriented effort to bring new voices to the stage - not just the one's we're used to hearing in shows like STUFF HAPPENS.

If you're around, check it out. Even if stylistically it isn't for you, you might still get something out of meeting people who name their kids after conservative presidents while others work coffee carts at 50th and 3rd after fleeing Iraq.

The pr clip is below.

************

What does "American" mean to you? Relentless Theatre Company sets out to document the thoughts and feelings of citizens across the U.S. in a new, traveling theater piece, "Jigsaw Nation." A series of overlapping monologues culled from hours of man-on-the-street interviews, Jigsaw Nation comes to Costa Mesa, California at the invitation of South Coast Repertory for two free performances on March 16 and 17 at 8 pm.

In Costa Mesa, the writers and actors continue their quest to craft a rich tapestry of stories that reflects the American experience. Originally produced in 2005 as a workshop for the New York International Fringe Festival, "Jigsaw Nation" re-opened for a series of performances on New York's Ellis Island, and recently completed a stop at Minneapolis's Mixed Blood Theatre. Each step of the way, the company brings on local actors and spends two-to-three weeks in the community conducting new interviews to add to the already-existing script. Next destination after Costa Mesa: Louisville, Kentucky as the guest of Actors' Theatre of Louisville.

The New York Sun wrote, "Jigsaw Nation draws its considerable power from the startling immediacy of real people's speech. As the five simply dressed actors turn from veteran to teenager, immigrant to red stater, the script's uncanny ability to deliver the original voices intact makes the characters crackle with life."

The Relentless Theatre Company (RTC) founded in Los Angeles in 1994 by Honegger and Rachel Malkenhorst is committed to exploring various characteristics of the American experience. From 1996 -2003, RTC presented critically acclaimed productions, and was hailed as "L.A.'s most relentlessly gritty company" by the Los Angeles Times, "A group of first-rate artists" by Drama-Logue, "Always adventurous" by Back Stage West, and "One of the finest and most committed theatrical companies in all of Los Angeles" by Entertainment Today. In 2003, RTC relocated to New York where it has since presented Shelia Callaghan's The Hunger Waltz at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre, Malachy Walsh's The Chair as part of the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival (Overall Excellence Award for Playwriting) and Suzanne Bradbeer's The Sleeping Girl at The Peter Jay Sharp Theatre on Theatre Row.

Two performances of Jigsaw Nation take place on Friday, March 16 and Saturday, March 17 at 8 pm. Admission is free to the public; reservations are not necessary.

Velvet Bark

2007-03-11T01:36:00.001-08:00

My brother Pete was in LA this weekend for an opening at Infusion Gallery that featured some of his art.

He's been working in color fields lately and his work has a texture in person that's like velvet bark.

He says that he wants people to come up to his paintings and feel the surface with their hands.

When I lived in Europe I remember my artist friends insisting that Americans couldn't understand painting because the only way they saw most work was through 2-d reproductions in books.

My brother's paintings seem to second the demand that art can only really be experienced when you're in the same room with it.

And touching it.

It was a great show.

LACMA - cropped

2007-03-09T22:44:00.000-08:00

Went to LACMA today.

Among these cropped images are arguments that contradict notions that art should be "nice" and "pretty" and "like-able" and, even, "comprehensible."

Not news. But nice to hear from a few artists who know.