That was drowning time, but old friends helped me through

Love to my friends. I was surprised to find out how many I had on my side.

Every day, I am a little more like me. It comes and goes. Your support means more than you know.

I’m doing one of the Seven Deadly Sins shows at Rude Guerrilla from July 25 through August 3. The material is pretty wacky… I’m the World’s Most Eligible Bachelor, and a couple dark hooded figures show up and beat the shit out of me with whips. It’s a comedy. In any case, it’s good to get some of this negative energy out in an artistically positive way. The table read of The Hermit Bird at Long Beach went well. It’s locked for a production in 2009. Also, The Death of Ayn Rand is apparently getting a production in San Francisco sometime this month. I’ll let you know when I know more.

Chapter one, the man who died

Las Vegas International, slot machines hollering at us from between the gates. Manchester, New Hampshire. The car-rental guard inspected my driver’s license for half a minute. He had not seen a California license before. To Mandy’s parents house. Her mother Mudd is here, tired, alternating between crying and relating how kind her relatives have been.

Emerson Hospital. Mandy’s father Nurn is here. There is a white band of skin where his wedding ring was. He is tired but coherent and emotionally stable. They removed some of the cancer but by definition it could not all be removed. An oncologist hasn’t seen him yet.

[Section redacted.]

To stay alive, I’ve been writing. I can’t tell if the play’s any good, but at the very least, regardless of what happens with the play or anything else, I can say: I meant it.

What’s down in the dark will be brought to the light

Depression, dark and pointless, over these past few weeks. Haven’t felt like moving, thinking, or breathing much. I cry a lot. Travelled to San Francisco last weekend, met some good friends who did their decent best to cheer me and remind me of my humanity.

Mandy got the call yesterday from her mother. Her father went into the hospital with stomach pain. They sent in a camera and found what they think is a lot of colon cancer. We’re on a plane tomorrow morning to Boston.

It comes in waves, sometimes.

The vines are good, the fruit is sweet this year

“The Hermit Bird” is a short play, less than one act, that I wrote in an all-night marathon at school. It won a writing contest and convinced me to write more. Eighteen years later, I’m working with Virago Theater to expand the piece into a full-length play.

Such a length of time for the development of a play is not unheard of. Tennessee Williams’s greatly underappreciated “Orpheus Descending” cooked for seventeen years from the original version to the final. And Peter Shaffer has hacked away on “Amadeus” for more than two decades running. Thornton Wilder compulsively rewrote “Our Town,” rarely letting be staged without tweaking something. And don’t get me started about Star Wars. Ultimately, I feel that if a story lives in the heart of the teller, then it has an indefinite shelf life.

So every time I sit down and try to type this thing out, I am quite sure that the story has vanished from me and I’m simply a poseur pretending to be a writer, and then I start and then the story is there and I’m quite sure it’s not me doing the telling anymore, and I’m simply a reporter telling the facts I’ve witnessed.

Anyway, whatever happens, you’ll be able to watch it at Virago in the spring of 2009.

J’ implore votre gr?ce, d’avance merci

Decent all-women plays are scarce. I wrote “The Knitting Circle” as a short bravura piece for six talented actresses. My intention was to let women conduct stage combat and operatic violence, which is, even in our supposedly enlightened age, reserved almost entirely for male actors. Additionally, I hoped that the characters and their conflicts would be more rounded than the agonizingly common slut/virgin female stereotypes.

The only really good all-female drama I have ever read is “The House of Bernarda Alba” by Federico Garc?a Lorca. (The play is readable in the original, even for us polyglot dummies who studied Spanish for only a few years.) Thus I have lifted Lorca’s structure of a tragic matriarch, torn by anti-male sentiment, grasping for control of her rebellious brood.

Here’s a lithograph of the original picture, “Une Affaire d’honneur,” by Emile Bayard, that inspired the script:

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And here’s the opening tableau from the staged read:

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But they got a lot of forks and knives and they gotta cut something

My new short play, “The Knitting Circle,” will receive a staged read at STAGES Theatre on March 22, 2008 at 3:00 p.m. Four other short plays will be presented as well. Admission is $5.

The staged read of “The Knitting Circle” is being directed by Jenni Dillon, and it will include the following talented actresses:

Claire – Jill Cary Martin
Roxane – Jami McCoy
Eugenie – Jen Bridge
Hortense – Melanie Gable
Berthe – Jessica Lynch
Georgette – Valerie Curry