Things I've done for money

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.)

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(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

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.

This is one of those days.

Plus, it feels like Thursday but it's only Wednesday.

Why does that happen?

8: The young producers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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.

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?

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?

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

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

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

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?

A short film doc on the theatre doc.

Enjoy.

The Trouble with Looking for Work

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

She makes me read poetry to her pregnant belly.

And I count her freckles when she sleeps at night.

Jigsaw Nation

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

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

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.

"Live-ness"

Jason Grote recently wrote a post about the issues he's been struggling with regarding the press, audience and production in NY. In the comments section, an interesting little piece about the "live-ness" of theatre has broken out.

It's something Isaac has discussed over at Parabasis - and something we've all (people in theatre, I mean) have pondered over and debated while wolfing down coffee and pie at the Westway Diner at one time or another.

Several years ago, I noted it in a response to an article in the Times about the the state of theatre. In it, several well-known playwrights suggested that whatever the state of theatre might be, it might also be irrelevant.

Here was my response:

To the Editor:

Re ''In Times Like These'' by Kenneth Lonergan, Arthur Miller and Wendy Wasserstein [Feb. 23]:

Certainly, there's nothing like the power of human beings assembled in a room to witness a work of art as the artists create it. In times when people want to keep us separated, that in itself can be a political act. But there's also something that goes deeper. In the dark, in the moment when something happens on stage and radiates out, actors, writers, directors, technicians and audience merge in a celebration of ''aliveness'' that other arts can only suggest.

At a time when both our leaders and our enemies consider killing a means to their ends, could anything matter more?

MALACHY WALSH
Manhattan

The letter was published in 2003.

My life...

Working on a play that's being developed at South Coast.

Writing radio for a client in Orange County.

Writing television spots for an agency in NY.

Rewriting a TV spec.

Rewriting a play for a workshop at PCPA.

Thinking about producing DRESSING THE GIRL.

Entertaining my brother Peter who's here for an art gallery opening of his work in downtown LA.

Trying to stay sober.

Interested in going to La Jolla to see the latest Aaron Sorkin play.

Being pregnant. Or rather, being the male half of being pregnant.

Pretending that this blog entry is not a repeat of the one before because it's a list instead of something more directly narrative.

Am I making progress?

A friend shot me an email the other day saying he enjoyed the blog and all, but he couldn't tell if I was making progress out here in LA.

Early in this blog's life - a life that will end around one year from my first blog entry here (Aug 15th or so) - I was probably better at giving a sense about all that.

In the last month, there's been a decided drop-off in that direct kind of reporting because I've been trying to scrounge up work.

Luckily, I've found some, but it's clearly made it difficult to pursue other goals as well.

I have finished my MEDIUM spec and am about to start a Pilot for something original.

I also have a workshop of BEYOND THE OWING coming up at the PCPA Theatre Festival up in Santa Maria.

In addition, over the last few weeks, I've reworked my screenplay, UNIONVILLE, and a producer asked to look at it when I told them what it was about.

Finally, I'm working with Relentless Theatre on JIGSAW NATION at South Coast Rep later this week. It's a project that I helped start and I was one of the original contributing writers for the piece in New York.

Considering what Heather and I have done since August - left NY, found a place in LA, moved in together, looked for work, discovered we're pregnant - well, I'd say we're doing pretty good.

However, I've been low about my writing. Re-reading my screenplay, I felt it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. Re-reading my MEDIUM, I thought it was actually too funny for the show. Re-writing BEYOND THE OWING, I thought, well, I was lost. Plus, I got the rejection letter from New Dramatists which always casts me into deep self-doubt. (Though it did have an unusual paragraph about how well my work was recieved, plus hand written notes of encouragement from Todd London and Emily Morse at the bottom...)

This dip in confidence is consistent with the way I work and feel about work. I go up and down all the time.

The stakes, however, have been made higher by the new, aforementioned clock in my life, our pregnancy.

Plus, while I've found some work here in LA, it's not been as convenient as I'd like - or as constant as I need.

Believe it or not, despite my new passion for THE END OF FAITH, I have found it quite comforting to hit the floor with my needs and say out loud that I'm a little lost and need some help.

So, am I making progress? I don't know. I'm actually trying not to think about it.

Though I am getting itchy to bring a project to production. And I'm starting to look at my plays with an eye to producing one of them on my own. Trouble is, I just don't want to do it in a theatre, for a theatre crowd.

I want to do it for myself. And a few friends.

That makes it very tricky, indeed.

Though, on the upside, LA is not a temporary place to make work for me - unlike New York.

Anachey in the UK (sic)

This is how I want to feel when I leave the theatre. ON FIRE with such enthusiasm for what I just saw that I'm trying to repeat it for myself. The kind of passion that inspired these two to make a video like this.

The kid with the flyswatter, the tenement in the background, the schoolboy shirts.

Yeah. Anachey - like the way the kids spelled it.

In lieu of a real post...

I've got a freelance gig this week. Between that, revising a play and my MEDIUM spec, I've been too busy to blog.

But I've been thinking about theatre a lot lately, especially since I'm certain I won't find a staff job on a TV show this season based what I understand of the hiring cycles.

Until I can get my thoughts together for a real post later in the week, I thought I'd "share" these ads I wrote a billion years ago for my theatre company in SF. They ran in a Fringe Festival program for less than $200. (Proof that not all marketing has to cost an arm and a leg.)

Though the ads sold no "specific show", it generated interest. Our summer short play festival was packed from opening to closing.

I "stole" the "Lights come up..." line from my friend Kurt Bodden.

Nachi Sanchez art directed.


























The theatre company was called The Iron Workers Local 202 Theatre Company. There were three founders, myself, Cameron Galloway and Eric Schniewind (who now writes for Killing My Lobster). Our mission stated that we were "devoted to producing Bay Area Playwrights" since nobody else seemed to be doing that, despite there being "no paucity" of talent there.

We mostly worked out of the EXIT on Eddy Street.

It was a good time.

The Blog Roll - The Internet equivalent of your high school lunch table

Let's face it. Who you were in high school was defined as much by what you did and how you dressed as who you sat with - at lunch.

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMNONT HIGH certainly made that clear. The Dorks sat at the Dork table. The Jocks at the Jock table. Preps with Preps. Freaks with Freaks... and so on.

Today, this high school mentality is mirrored in the blog roll. It says, I read these people. I look at these pages fairly regualarly. And, most importantly, look at me and my cool friends.

It's quite natural. But it's also interesting since people make a big deal of updating their list of friends. Those who get on are given special status. Do those who don't make it continue to buzz around with trays of grilled cheese sandwiches looking for a place to sit? The recent need for a "blogroll amnesty day" (thank you Mr. Excitement) suggests they do. Afterall, why else devote a day to remove names from the rolls without feeling guilty? You wouldn't if feelings couldn't get bruised by such things.

Some people are very persnickety about who's on their list.

Some people aren't.

Some lists are made early in a blog's life and then forgotten about. Links that linger and ossify long past their expiration date.

I imagine there will be books about the history of the blog that go into the social and intellectual implications of this phenomenon.

But for now, in the theatre world, looking at these rolls, you also get an idea of what theatre cliques people belong to. Because who is not on that list says as much about a particular blogger's tastes and attitude as who is.

Just like the school lunch table.

My policy is simple. I try to put people on my blog when:

They comment on my blog.
They put me on their blog roll.
I read their blog and think it's interesting.
I know you and I discover you have a blog.
I find a blog that I feel has particular relevance to the idea behind my blog (working and finding my place as a writer in the United States with a more than strong interest in theatre).

I remove you from the roll if it looks to me like you've stopped posting.

Or you send me an email that says you don't want to be friends with a dork like me anymore.

***********

EDIT: Interestingly, I've also noticed that I often navigate to other pages/blogs through my own blog roll but rarely use other people's blog rolls to get around. I suspect I am not alone in this.

Everybody's problably read this already, but maybe we should all reread it anyway

I watch football with a friend who suggested I pick it up.

It's frighteningly direct. And strikes me as frighteningly right.

At one point, he asks us to imagine a world where it's believed - on faith - that certain films were made by God. Or that Windows 98 was the word of God in code form, written with Divine inspiration.

Preposterous? Why is it any crazier than believing - on faith - that the Bible was written the same way and should be taken as the Word of God?

Here's an excerpt from early in the book where he attacks "religious moderates".

**********************
"...While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live by the letter of the texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist. He is, in all likelihood, going to wind up in hell with the rest of the unbelievers. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don’t like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. The texts themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to fully submit to God’s law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question—i.e., that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us—religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness...."

Jealousy

Last week, I had the pleasure of watching my friend and ex-roommate - Adam Szymkowicz - have a successful reading at South Coast Rep.

I mean, really, it couldn't have gone better. The audience ate up his play like a kid eats up candy.

I felt good because it was a good thing for him - plus, South Coast flew him out so I got to see him. (We've been missing each other in New York the last few times I've been out there.)

However, I couldn't help but feel a little jealous.

Which is somewhat crazy since I not only love Adam's work, but I've personnally tried to get his work read everywhere I've been as a reader.

Still, it got me thinking about the pig farmer who starts with 2 pigs and 10 years later finds himself the owner of 200 hundred pigs. He is unhappy, however, all the time. His wife asks him why, since his stock has gone up 100 fold. He replies, because our neighbor has 400 pigs. Would it make you happy, she inquires, if he had the same number as you? He answers: Only if they were all dead.

Obviously, artistic jealousy is absurd. You do what you do because you're crazy inspired. Because the work you're doing calls for you to do it this way, not that. Accomplishments can't be measured apples to apples. "Good" is subjective. "Better" even moreso. "Bad" is a judgment that really doesn't help make anything clearer.

But while I'd love to be as noble as those thoughts, I'm afraid I'm not as often as I'd like to be.

Which is why, for my part, when this kind of thing comes up, I try to remind myself of those simple artistic principles. And that nothing I have done has been based on what I deserved, but rather what was given to me - usually as a surprise to my best plans.

What do others do?
**********************************************
In advertising - an often cutthroat business - this problem is dealt with head on. So, for instance, when someone you know wins an award, you look at the piece that won it for them and you say - out loud and to someone else - "I don't know. Is that really good? I mean, I could've thought of that. In fact, a couple of years ago, I did. I just don't have a good client like that. Fucking asshole, got lucky. His partner probably did it all."

You only get back to healthiness when you get back to work.

Reasons...

While it snowed and sleeted in the Northeast, this is what I was doing with my wife in California.

The Agent Thing - Again

Ken Levine (his link is in the margin) posted about the absurdity of finding an agent for a play he wrote.

Mr. Excitement (a link is also in the margin) posted a response.

I've been pretty vocal in both places about it, but rather than post more about the subject, I thought I'd just offer links to my previous agent entries.

Here's where you'll find my experience with a Hollywood agent. It was - overall - a good one.

Here's where you'll find my take on theatre agents - as I've known them so far.