Starting Gate

Last year, on my facebook profile, I wrote:

So, yeah, that’s four plays. It’s April now, which means I’ve got about eight months. A new play every two months. Plus I got a couple of one-acts brewing and one big rewrite of something else planned. It’s a bit crazy. But let’s also note that William Shakespeare wrote Titus, Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labours Lost and The Taming of the Shrew in about a year. Am I Shakespeare? Hell, no. But you gotta aspire to something.

At least I have an answer when someone asks me, “What are you up to?”

Pretty ambition, no? And when I wrote that, this whole blog was still anonymous, so I didn't even include it. And 2009 turned out to be a bit of a banner year in these parts. A lot of writing planned there, a lot of work. So, how did I do?

Well...not great. But not bad. I got about 50% there. I wrote two new full-length plays (one of which is being read in Chicago this weekend, plug, plug), a couple of short plays and did one major re-write on a full-length. Not to mention, between this blog and my other one, about 200 posts or so (leaving out a guest stint or two at Parabasis). But I didn't finish all of the ones I wanted to. Because, well, it was hard.

Anarchists was the hardest one. I had high hopes (and still do) and a real connection to the material, but the damn thing just didn't materialize for me. My "open source playwriting" plan had some flaws, I admit. Mainly, it's hard to get good folks together in the summer. Maybe I'll take another whack at it this spring.

So...a .500 batting average. Not shabby...actually, for a baseball player, it would be amazing. But this isn't baseball, is it? That was my 2009. What's 2010 got in store? Another whack at it, that's what.

We're nearly through January. I've got about 11 months left in the year. That's a lot of time. And I have a lot of ideas still rattling around in my brain. And I like a good challenge. So back at it. But, as always, with a twist: you get to decide which plays I work on.

Over the next week or so, I'm going to write the first scene or 5-10 pages of some plays I have kicking around in my skull, and I'll post them here, here and even here. You read 'em and let me know what you like, what you want to hear more of, what excites you. And then I write 'em. Then you come and see 'em. Pretty simple, no? Could be fun...could be a total trainwreck. Hopefully, it will be interesting either way.

Time to get climbing up that hill...

Black Playwright Convening Responses

The first two are up. Adam Thurman, blogger for the Mission Paradox blog, is here. Mine is here. There's also a couple of great pictures of the participants here. I posted the pics to my Facebook and got it tagged, in case you're wondering who's who here.

The Next Thing

So. Yesterday, I made my big announcement. And some folks noticed and said some nice things (and made awesome comic book references) about me and my blog.

For a while now, I've led a kind of double blogging life, writing more personal stuff here and saving the theatre stuff for over there. But now the two worlds are, as they say, colliding. And I'm not sure what that means for this blog here. I know most of you read it as part of my facebook page, but the geniuses that make facebook only allow me to import one blog at a time. And I'm not saavy enough to figure out how to cross-post and keep my links (I do love my links).

So...I may be wrapping this one up and shifting over to 99 Seats full time. Or I may not. We shall see. In the meantime, feel free to swing over to my other joint from time to time and say hi.

Pleased To Meet Me

I wrote this. Just so's you know.

A Decade of New Year's Eves

My friend Brandy once said that New Year's Eve is the one holiday for history buffs. Some would argue that the 4th of July counts, but I don't think so. The 4th is about America and patriotism (sort of) and blowing stuff up. New Year's is, okay, a bit about drinking and dancing and who's getting/giving that New Year's kiss, but it's also about the passage of time, reflecting on the year that passed, thinking about the year to come and oddly about connecting to large groups of people around the year. Honestly, New Year's means more to me than just about any holiday. I'm weird that way.

The thing is, though, like most people I know, I can't really remember a great, great New Year's Eve party. Thankfully, I haven't had some of the disasters some of my friends have had, but I also haven't had that special, knock-your-socks-off New Year's Eve, either. Maybe it's always freighted with too many expectations. Maybe it just never quite lives up to the ideal. Maybe, just maybe, there's too much booze involved and that can turn a party bad right quickly. I don't know.

Since we're coming to the end of a decade (holy f*ck!), I've been thinking about the last ten New Year's Eves and trying to think about how they all turned out. I figured I'd share with you all.

New Year's 1999 into 2000: This one was pretty memorable, not just because it was the Millennium and Y2K was going to kill us all. A friend's parents had an empty house in Florida and invited a bunch of folks down. It was a nice house, in the Panhandle. A couple of days of boozing, go karting, puzzle-making, more boozing. For New Year's, we were on a beach, watching fireworks. We celebrated twice, since, being in the Panhandle, we were just over the time zone line into Central Time. We watched the ball drop in NYC, had champagne and then went out to the beach for another one. The part, though, that sticks with me most was the long, 20 hour drive down and back. We started in Baltimore, where we got the car, at 9 in the morning, drove all day past stands for peaches and fireworks, stopped in a Wendy's for dinner, stood in the parking lot and watched the sunset and then realized that we had about 10 more hours of driving to go. That might have been a metaphor for something. I don't know.

New Year's 2000 into 2001: Yeah, this one is gone. Down the memory hole. If we were hanging out and I've forgotten, I'm sorry.

New Year's 2001 into 2002: Maine. Another friend was opening an office there and invited a bunch of folks up to hang out, ring in the new. It was post-9/11 and I'd had a hard year, so mostly I remember keeping to myself, looking out on the dark windows of a cold, strange city and trying to feel at peace.

New Year's 2002 into 2003: Yep, also gone. I might have had a party? If you were there, I hope you had a good time.

New Year's 2003 into 2004, '04 into '05, '05 into '06: All gone. Seriously, I have some concerns about my memory. One of these years, I went to a party on the first floor of the building I was living in, had a fairly bad time and right after midnight went back upstairs and watched an Entourage marathon on HBO. Good times. One of these (I think '05 into '06) was really great, though. I had a nice dinner with a small group of friends, then saw Clap Your Hands Say Yeah at Irving Plaza. The highlight of that show was the balloons. They had rigged up these balloons that were supposed to fall at midnight, but the rigging didn't work and the balloons stayed up there. We could see them, suspended right over our heads. Then, out of the crowd, one guy, one hipster-y guy, got his friends to lift him up on their shoulders so he could reach the netting holding the balloons. It became the focus of the show, watching this guy creep ever closer to the balloons, nearly slipping off his friends' shoulders, doing this obviously dangerous thing for no good reason. Except when he freed the balloons and the whole place erupted into cheers. It was awesome. I think that was my first image of '06.

New Year's '06 into '07: This was good and then it got weird. After hitting a couple of parties, I wound up at a house party on the Bowery. Good little band playing, dancing, random conversations with people. Booze a-flowing, but no ill after-effects. Well, not from the booze. I finally made it back uptown around 3 in the morning, passed out, ready to slumber well into the new year. But life had other plans. At about 4:30, I was woken up by voices. Lots of voices. In my apartment. My then-roommate, a nutty pastry chef, had just come back from the local drug bar's New Year's Eve party with a lot of new friends. New, drunk and high friends. Going to sleep wasn't really an option or a wise decision. So I stayed up. That New Year's Day, I think I got a total of 2 hours of sleep. A great way to start the year.

New Year's '07 into '08: Actually fairly mellow. A local dive bar. A good group of people. No fireworks, just good dancing, moderate boozing and no hangover the next day. Almost peaceful.

New Year's '08 into '09: Not my finest hour, to be honest. Way too much tequila, way too much in the department of expectations. Dancing at a friend's house party, which was awesome, but it was the kind of night that I wound up apologizing to friends for. Never again.

Ten years, distilled into ten nights, half of which I can't really remember. Here's to ten more, with better memories, more good friends and good times. Less living rooms full of cokeheads at 5 in the morning. Less booze and less whining. More, more, more.

Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Not at all. Happy new year, y'all.

How To Become a Misanthrope In Five Easy Steps

1. Follow the news. I've recently found myself filled with what can best be described as, well, hatred for humanity. Not to put too fine a point on it. I used to be a happy-go-lucky guy and all of a sudden, I'm Agent Smith in the first Matrix movie, wiping the sweat off of Laurence Fishburne's bald head and making him smell it. I've been trying to cart how that happened and I've narrowed i down to six simple things you can do to suck the joie de vivre right out of you and shrink that heart two sizes down. The first thing is pay attention.

I've been thinking of this past summer as the Summer of Bad Vibes. Between the long parade of celebrity deaths, mind-numbing scandals, and the free-form craziness available on Fox News, I was pretty ready to throw in the towel on the human race. I thought we'd hit rock bottom. But then, Lord love 'em, humanity found a way to kick open the basement door and keep going down. Well, no one said they weren't resourceful.

Seriously, if this is government by the people, for the people, the people are clearly vain, self-centered, small-minded bigots. I know I didn't vote Joe Lieberman to be the most important man in the world (or Ben Nelson or Olympia Snowe, for that matter), but this is our system and I vote in support of that regularly. A friend of mine paraphrased Bill Maher as saying that we've got the government we deserve because, at the end of the day, we're just not good people. I'm finding it hard to dispute that. And it's not even like America's got a monopoly on the dumb, crazy and bigoted.

2. Support the Arts. I'm an artist and a supporter of the arts (as best I can be) and this has been a pretty glum couple of months for the arts. Hell, it's been a glum year. After a couple of recent studies have broken, it appears that the arts are getting older, whiter and more privileged. Not to mention there's no funding, basically, anywhere to be had. All in all, a heck of a grand time to be a minority artist.

3. Spend too much time on Facebook. Guilty as charged. But despite what another friend says here, I'm actually finding that technology is making me like people less and less. The unending stream of babble, updates and nonsense, masquerading as connection, the half-baked, inside jokes pretending to be discourse, the whole thread of humanity. Ugh. And the worst part? I'm one of those people. I can't avoid it. Or rather, I've been avoiding it. Because there are definitely people who are my Facebook friends that I'd really rather not see in real life anymore (No, not you. Never you. Of course not, you!). Social network, my ass.

4. Internet date. If you ever want to believe in the openness of the human heart and spirit, yeah, don't date on the internet. Or really don't date at all. Very few things reveal us as simultaneously unbelievably shallow, totally untrusting and exceptionally repressed as online dating. Everyone's deal breakers are calibrated to the tiniest things, half of them totally physical. It's a Darwinian world where the strong survive and come out more alone than they went in. And again, like #3, the hardest part is when you confront all of that in yourself. When you find yourself rejecting someone for some small thing that you do yourself and you know you do it, you've found the cold heart of online dating. For those of you who have found real love in this world, a partner and friend who completes your life, treasure that. It's a miracle beyond miracles that anyone can find anyone else to actually love in this world. You're lucky. Fuck you.

5. Live in New York. The front row seat for the show that is humanity. And it is a terrible, terrible show, with an obnoxious cast, a grating soundtrack, smell-o-vision and it goes on and on. I used to believe that people were meant to live together, to connect, that, as Tony Kushner once wrote, the smallest indivisible human unit was two. Yeah, way off base there. Just watching the grim spectacle of people crowding in and out of the subway, ready to kick, punch, hell even knife each other over a cold, uncomfortable plastic seat that doesn't even fit a human ass is really enough to crush your spirit. And to do it twice a day? That's just cruel and unusual punishment.

Add it all together, let it stew for a few months and bingo! You've got a misanthrope. Just in time for the holidays. And because I'm an agnostic, I've basically turned into the World's Angriest Deist. I believe that God set up the universe with the most obnoxious possible rules, put us on a path of nearly unending misery and pain and then jumped the next train to a non-extradition country to live under an assumed name. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett have one of my favorite descriptions of life: they say it's like playing an obscure and complicated variation of poker for infinite stakes using blank cards in a dark room with a Dealer who won't explain the rules and who smiles all the time. I'd also add that He cheats. Boldly. So you know He's cheating, but can't stop him. It's a mug's game.

Honestly, right now, the only thing that keeps me from flinging all of my belongings out a window, setting them on fire and heading for the nearest bell tower, is this: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. And Zach, the ten-year old kid I'm tutoring in English. He's just started reading it and needs some help preparing an essay for secondary school admission (because ten-year olds need more pressure in their life). I asked him to write me a little essay on the first chapter, to test his reading comprehension. But I haven't read it in forever, so he lends me an extra copy and I start reading. And it's actually more wonderful than I remember it. And I start thinking about what it must be like to be reading this book about this smart, awkward girl and this crazy family and the horrors she goes through to save them and the whole world while worrying about her crazy hair and her terrible schoolmates, too, what it must be like to read this at 10 years old. And what it will be like for me to watch him discover this world, these ideas about time, family and love.

And then I remember the old story of Pandora and her big box of all the evils in the world. At the bottom of the box was this one bedraggled, battered, little thing, the only thing that Pandora could keep from being lost into the world, one small pathetic creature called Hope. Poor, beknighted bastard-child that it is.

Crap. I even suck at being a misanthrope.

Mind-Reading

I know it's Thanksgiving and a time for thoughts of family, hearth, and home, but...this just pisses me off so much. A couple of lefty blogs have linked to Peter Beinart's piece of mind-reading and anonymous sourcing as though it were the perfect key to understanding the frustrating actions of Sen. Joe Lieberman. I think it's all kind of bunk and worse, the kind of bunk that if Glenn Beck or Maureen Dowd wrote about Obama or John Kerry, they would all dog-pile on top of it. Beinart's column is a seven-paragraph pile of steaming b.s. that ignores the simplest, most basic fact: Joe Lieberman is running for office again in 2 years.

I'm not the senior political reporter of anything except my kitchen, but I read tons and tons about it, think about it, talk about it pretty regularly. So I feel completely comfortable spouting off. In the internet age, that's about as much license as you need. And this is something I want to spout off about: stop with the mind-reading of our political officials. Or, at least, do better at it. This is one of the places where I think more dramatists doing political coverage would be helpful. Because we understand a basic thing: people do things for reasons.

Joe Lieberman, as far as anyone can tell, used to be a fairly conservative Democrat, maybe less so on social issues, but never really a liberal flamethrower like a Teddy Kennedy. He also does seem to enjoy the limelight, but then again, show me a politician who doesn't and I'll show you a political science teacher at a high school. Wanting the limelight, the power and influence comes with the job.

Sure, maybe his feelings were hurt by the primary of '06. That's legitimate. It might even be key. But I just don't see it as the driving factor behind his swing to the right. Not on issues he had held fairly liberal views on in the recent past. I mean, sure, he's a bit of a Youstabee, but it wasnt' that far a trip. I've said it before: it's about 2012 and about a re-election strategy. Especially if he goes all the way and filibusters health care reform, the way he's threatening to. He's trying to reach out to Connecticut Republicans and not leaving any room for a "real" Republican to enter the race to his right. If he does like he did in 2006 and peel off enough moderate to conservative Democrats, he can win a plurality and keep his job. Not everything is Dynasty, with people motivated by pure emotion. There are calculations to be made, strategies to put in place. Joe's gotta be thinking, "How do I position myself for maximum appeal?"

Now I know that's more mind-reading. And, hell, we could all be wrong. He might have made an actual, personal swing to the right. It happens. He might be bought off by insurance money. That happens, too. In way, none of it matters. What matters is how you (and by "you," I mean the Senate Democratic leadership) deal with it. And that's where the obsession with Joe Lieberman, Egomaniac gets us (and by "us," I mean progressives) in trouble.

If we're thinking that all Joe needs is more time in the spotlight, then you wait him out. He's angry, his feelings are hurt and he's acting out. Like a petulant child. So you ignore his outburst and wait for him to come to his senses. I don't think that will work. I think if the Senate Dems try to wait him out, they'll be standing there, gobsmacked, when he votes to filibuster.

I think Harry Reid has to treat Joe not like a child, but like a conservative Democrat or a moderate Republican: make a deal. Figure out what Joe needs and wants and give it to him. And if that won't work, threaten him. Seriously. Find a charismatic, slightly to his left Republican and convince him or her to run for the Senate. Hell, find a charismatic, moderate Democrat and threaten to run him or her as a Democrat. Make sure that Joe knows the Democrats are willing to lose the seat outright. If it's a choice between being a hypocrite and keeping his seat, I think Joe will try to keep his seat. That's what he's been doing.

But, also: stop with the mind-reading. Or get better at it.