By The Numbers, Tales Of Love & Lasers = 100% Awesome

Tales of Love & Lasers opens tonight—dear god, tonight!—and as I explored yesterday, this has left this playwright with little to do. Rather than twiddle my thumbs, I turned my attention to something that has kept playwrights amused since the days of Aristotle: the statistics report offered by Final Draft, which gives all sorts of information about scene counts, word counts, and profanity counts. How can a sabermetrically-inclined playwright make use of this raw data? I ran the numbers and tried to find out.

(Before we get into this silliness, do remember that you can buy your tickets here.)

Tales of Love & Lasers is 5.206% about baseball. 

This, I think, is a safe amount. Although the baseball-chatter in the play is concentrated, heartfelt and important to the plot, there's not so much of it that it might overwhelm the sensibilities of the baseball-adverse. By setting these three short plays in the early '70s—a spaceship-heavy version of the early '70s—I'm able to resist my natural urge to chatter infinitely about the New York Mets. Instead, I rely on memories (not my own) of the New York Giants, achieving something closer to universal interest than any of my Metsian blabberings. So, if we were to break this down further, I'd say this play is probably 1% Mets, 4.206% New York Baseball Giants. This is a playwright demonstrating restraint.

Tales of Love & Lasers is 72.498% science fiction.

This feels like a bit of a cheat, since I've been promoting the play as straight sci-fi comedy. The fact is that, while not every moment in the play is death rays and turbolifts, on balance it is a piece of science-fiction. The remaining bits…well, you'll have to come see and find out what they are. Some are real world-ish, some are more fantasy, and some have the air of a Robert Louis Stevenson acid trip. You know—your standard theatrical experience. If I wanted to improve the play, would I look to increase or decrease the sci-fi percentage (SFP)? Rather than up this base number, I would look to improve the sci-fi density in the 72.498%—adding lightsabers and Klaatus and frivolous Rod Serling-type characters, who wander around the background intoning about the grave doings that have been presented for your approval.

Tales of Love & Lasers features two "bullshits," ten "damns," and fifteen "shits."

Again, a special thanks to Final Draft for providing the endlessly amusing profanity report. Special recognition to Stella Starlight—our oft-mentioned queen of space—who is the only character who gets to say motherfucker. (That's according to the script, anyway. Once they get out on the stage, I can't control them any more.) A slightly less special mention to Wayne, who has the less satisfying distinction of being the only character to say "Crap"—not because he's so special, but because it's simply not a very popular curse word. While shit is the most common Final Draft-approved swear in the play, the 24 variations of the word "Fuck" beat it out. Those 24 words make up just .194% of the play, but I promise they'll be your favorite part.

Tales of Love & Lasers is only 12,370 words long.

Playwrights don't think a lot about word count. We may scramble to get under a certain page count, or snip tiny bits from our stage directions so that the phrase The End doesn't appear, forlorn, on its very own page. But we seldom get so nitpicky as to worry about the raw number of words. This is good, since we don't actually write that many of them. It had been a while since I ran a word count on a play, and I was startled by how short it is. 12,370 words? The New Orleans murder story I wrote for Narratively in March came in around 5,000 words, and took only a couple of weeks (and a month or so of research) to turn out. Writing plays, on the other hand, takes fucking forever. Perhaps if the public libraries were good enough to corral all the information I need for one and put it on microfilm, I'd be able to churn through them faster.

Tales of Love & Lasers is 1.083% sword fights. 

As far as words on paper, the swordplay segments of Tales of Love & Lasers occupy just under a page. In an art form where you only need 12,370 words to make up an evening of theater, some words count more than others. While uhs, ands and mmms can be dispensed with in a moment, those pesky words "They fight" can eat up quite a bit of stage time. When I started working with the good women of Squeaky Bicycle on this production, my only request was that we shell out for a fight choreographer. We got a good one, and it shows. That 1.083% of the play will hopefully stick in your memory more than the stage direction itself sticks on the page.

So, Tales of Love & Lasers is 5.206% baseball, 72.498% sci-fi, .194% fuck, and 1.083% sword fighting. That adds up to a scant 78.981%. What makes up the remaining 21.019%? You'll have to come tonight and see for yourself.

You Can Tell It's A Good Play Because It Has Blasters

A playwright gets very used to seeing things happen only in his head. A massive space battle runs through your head for a few nights while you're trying to sleep, and finally you decide to set it to paper. "He explodes and exits," reads one stage direction. "They fight. It's very, very exciting," reads another. In your mind, this is all very clear—a dreamy hybrid between fantastic science fiction and the reality of what it might really look like on the stage. And then, once a group of very kind people spend a couple of months actually putting it on the stage, it doesn't look how you imagined it at all. It's real, now, and that's better than any nonsense you could ever dream up.

We had our dress rehearsal yesterday for Tales of Love & Lasers. Opening night is tomorrow. I'm less nervous about this than I have in the past, and I'm not sure if that's because I'm getting more used to opening nights, or because this has been a nearly painless process. (Of course, like painless dentistry, painless theater is an impossibility.) The production team is extremely talented, and has worked together before. The actors are game, hardworking and fun—which is to say, they are actors. And because we're squatting in another play's space, the set was built when we walked in. (Thankfully, it's just a few abstract metal sheets, and not the set for a revival of Superior Donuts.) And because we've been developing these scripts for the last year, I was called on to do no late-night, post-rehearsal rewriting—a shame, if only because nothing makes me feel more like Moss Hart.

So at dress yesterday, I sat and drank a very large cup of tea. And then I drank another very large cup of tea. And then I snuck out to go to the bathroom. At this point, that's all that's required of me. 

If you haven't bought tickets yet, shame on you. Get them here. We're running from tomorrow until May 21st, at the Drilling Company, a cozy little theater on 78th Street, just east of Broadway. If you come by tomorrow, say hello. Look for the slightly drunk man trying not to laugh at his own jokes. 

Lastly, we had an excellent production photographer, Joshua Sterns, in yesterday. He took several hundred pictures, and I've included my favorites below. All photos are Sterns', and the actors are Kate Garfield, Nathan Brisby, Kevin Russo, Monica Jones and Jeff Johnson. Look on our work, ye mighty, and despair. 

WARNING! This Play May Contain Nuts

We are just a few days away from opening night of Tales of Love & Lasers, and something has become disturbingly clear: this is a silly play. What's more, it is all my fault. Where a normal playwright would be kind enough to restrict his actors to sitting, crossing slowly, and speaking quietly, I have forced five good souls to make fools of themselves. I've got them jumping around, making silly noises, even cursing—and all so a few dozen anonymous audience members can enjoy themselves.

It's sick.

In case you're one of those parasites who's planning on coming out next week—and if you are, you should really go ahead and get your tickets here, you twisted monster—I think it's fair to warn you of a few things. Although it only runs about 80 minutes, Tales of Love & Lasers may contain the following:

• Power tools covered in colorful duct tape
• Voices, each sillier than the last
• Spells performed badly
• The entirely accurate but potentially hurtful phrase, "A lot of shit happened in Boston"
• Three or more spurts of dancing
• Debates about the intergalactic importance of Willie Mays
• Cardboard used fancifully
• Jars
• Three references to buckets
• A cadre of swamp monsters
• Ships of sail engulfed in flame
• A menacing black hole
• Hesitant references to vending machines
• Tubes of cake, consumed with abandon
• Baseball cards that are not as old as they look
• Cannons

If I cared about my actors, I would have kept them safe in the living room of a tumbledown family mansion, where they could silently fume about unspeakable secrets that threaten to drag them all back into the past. I would have kept conflict buried in subtext. I would have restricted any excitement to an area just off-stage, allowing my protagonist to lean wearily against a window frame, intoning stately dialogue like, "Ma, ma. Look out the window. Once again, the universe has exploded."

Instead, we've let the universe explode on stage. Everyone's going to get hurt, and I hope you're there to see it.

The Stunning Return of Stella Starlight: Queen of Space

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Hooray!

The world's prayers have been answered. Children sing in the street. Trees erupt into bloom, and not because it's springtime, but because of theater. And by all that I mean, I've got a goddamned play going up! Once again, I've combined forces with the brilliant women of Squeaky Bicycle to bring you theater the likes of which you've never seen, unless you've seen some of our work before.

And not just one play, but three plays. Three not-very-long plays which, like Voltron, combine to make a supercharged evening of theater that can crush monsters and knock over power lines. Three plays which operate under the combined title of:

Tales of Love & Lasers

Sounds pretty all right, right? I thought that baby up myself. So, just what are these Tales of Love & Lasers? They are as follows:

—Hyperion Calling: A saga of a woman stranded in space, with nothing to comfort her but the knowledge that this 10 minute short is way better than Gravity. 

—R. For Roxy: First produced in last fall's Bad Theater Fest, this story about love aboard a derelict space cruiser will make you laugh, cry, and hunger for liquified cake.

—Stella Starlight: Queen of Space: Oh boy, this is the big one. The one y'all have been waiting for. The one with jokes, and fighting, and dancing, and leaping, and, oh my god I'm just too excited.

So, when does this magic come to pass? Just under two weeks from now, at the Drilling Company on the Upper West Side. We'll be running Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Sundays (May 6 - May 21) at 7 PM. Come on May 6, and afterwards you can watch me get drunk around the corner at The Dublin House. I promise, it's just as exciting as the play will be.

For more details, see the Facebook invite here. Please do RSVP, so we can let you know when tickets go on sale, and so on.

Behold! Stella Starlight: Queen of Space!

Good news, everyone! On Sunday afternoon, the inestimable women of Squeaky Bicycle Productions are producing a staged reading of my superexciting new one-act play, "Stella Starlight: Queen of Space." As a bonus, you will receive a helping of "Private School," a long one-act (or short full length?) by the supremely talented actor/playwright/Minneapolitan Dylan Lamb.

Dylan may insist that because his play is the longer, and comes second, it is the main event and mine is the opening act. But like most playwrights, he is a scruffy-faced lie machine, and should not be trusted.

I wrote "Stella Starlight" as a present to my then girlfriend, now wife, last year for her birthday. It's personal in a way that I often have trouble making my work (but am trying to get better at!), and also includes lasers and sword fights and all that good stuff. It's probably the best thing I've ever written, and if you miss it, your life is null and void.

The reading is at 3 pm, which will happily allow me to miss most of the Titans game. It's happening at:

Joria Productions

260 W. 36th Street, 3rd floor

New York, NY

Make reservations here. Make them! And if you can't make it for some probably deceitful reason, email me, and I'll send you the script. You can produce a reading in your own home!

Loud And Proud And Also Loud: Julius Caesar In Dumbo

A few weeks ago, I took in a bit of Shakespeare near the Brooklyn waterfront, screwing my bladder to the sticking place along the way.  My review of the Donmar Warehouse's production of Julius Caesar is up today at Howlround, and you can read it if you like.

In the teeming yard of an English prison, a convict named Brutus tries to get the attention of a gang of joggers. He speaks of love and honor and fairness, finally winning their approval with a simple question: "Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves," he asks them, "than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men?" From the vantage of the prison yard, a single death is a small price for freedom. But as Brutus and his throng soon learn, the transaction is not so simple.

The Donmar Warehouse's Julius Caesar premiered in London last December, and has been imported to Brooklyn to play in a warehouse of our own: St. Ann's, a half a block from the East River in Dumbo. This all female production, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, is set in a women's prison, and uses that harsh setting to remake itself into a meditation on the nature of freedom. Compelling but flawed, it is a fine example of the benefits and drawbacks that come with using Shakespeare to make a point about something larger than the play itself.

I walked away from that production feeling very good about it, and wrote the review in that mood. But this was not a love that lasted. The more I thought about the production's noisy tricks, the less I was impressed. Most of the acting was superb, and the first half of the play—when the production's premise was still unclear—was discomfiting in an interesting way. But what's stuck with me over the last couple of weeks is the noisiness of the production, and the shallow flashiness that seemed design to deafen the audience and drown out the text.

I had complex feelings about this production, and wanted that to come through in the review, but reading over my words, I worry that they sound a little too sunny. There are very good things in this Julius Caesar, but they come in spite of the production itself. Even so, I'm glad I saw it, and I'm glad I spent the last two weeks wrestling with the way I felt about it. A perfect production (if there were such a thing) could never make you think the way an ambitious, badly flawed one can.

Two Plays By Me: As Short As You Want Them To Be

Those of you who read this blog may sometimes ask yourself, "Who is this W.M. Akers?! And what gives him the right to talk about theater?!" Well: 

1. W.M. Akers is me.
2. I have absolutely no right to talk about theater. 

While I'm not blathering unfounded gobbledywhatnot about other people's plays, I am writing my own. This month, I've got two short plays in production, both of which are utterly ridiculous, and both of which want you to see them very bad. The relevant info: 

 October 29: As part of their monthly TinyRhino theater/drinking game, the Gowanus theater company UglyRhino is producing my stirring ten minute play "The Most Dangerous Cat In The World"—a comedy about love, evil, and the dangers of the atomic age.

November 2: The wonderful women of Squeaky Bicycle are producing my sci-fi one act "R. For Roxy" as part of the Bad Theater Festival. (Which is not for bad theater so much as it's for unpretentious theater.) While I can guarantee the delightfulness of my play—which is about a lovelorn astronaut composing an encyclopedia in space—I have no idea what the rest of the programming will be like. Let's assume it will be spectacular.

So, come one come all! Or come none, come none! If you do happen to be at either of these events, come introduce yourself. Or if you can't make it, but are interested in reading either of those little tidbits of inspired nonsense, email me.

Does Anybody Want A Play About The Mets?

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Ain't no pathos like Stengel pathos.

This post is not a joke. Bronx Bombers closed Off Broadway Saturday, and though it was been dismissed as (big surprise!) hagiographic pap, it is on its way to Broadway come January. This play, which centers vaguely around the 1977 Bronx Zoo, but features ghostly cameos from Ruth, Jeter and all the rest of the fresh faced Yankee heroes, is not a play for people who care about plays. It is probably not really a play for people who care about baseball, either, since those in the know understand that the only important lesson to be drawn from the sport is how to deal with heartache, 162 games at a time. There is no possibility of heartache in a Yankee story, and so (it seems, anyway, to me) no possibility of real drama.

But there is heartache in Flushing. Permanent, asinine, endlessly churning heartache. A cycle of disappointment and false hope and disappointment that has gone on for some time now—climaxing endlessly, like a bad piece of organ music or a particularly drawn-out high school break up. I speak, as I do too often, of the New York Mets—a team bad enough, beautiful enough, interesting  enough, to deserve a spot on the stage.

Does the horrifying futility of the New York Mets make them a more worthy baseball team than the Yankees? Of course not. Although at this point I'm more comfortable with a losing franchise than a winning one, I'm not Stockholm syndromed enough to suggest that failure is superior to success. (Though some May nights I think it may be.) But as far as tragedy goes, the Mets are Death Of A Salesman . The Yanks are a second rate middle school Thanksgiving pageant. 

Bronx Bombers has a good shot at a long, healthy Broadway run. There are enough fans out there of inspirational codswallop to keep the theater lit up. And the longer it reigns on Broadway, the sharper acid reflux will hit theater-minded Met fans, who expect the offseason to be a time when Mets and Yankees are equal, and will instead be confronted endlessly with nightmares about the pinstriped minstrel show on 50th Street.

So it seems right to even the score. The Mets don't need a play on Broadway, and they certainly don't deserve it. But somewhere in New York there is a 99 seat theater perfect to host a play about misery and meaningless failure and ceaseless anxiety which is a good thing only because it keeps us from worrying about the real problems that life has a habit of tossing our way. The potential topics are endless. Some pitches:

120: A riff on crinkly-faced Casey Stengel and his 1962 Mets, who lost more games than any team in modern history but won the city's heart. 

SATURDAY NIGHT MASSACRE: While the boys of the Bronx Zoo were jibing and jawing and winning championships, the Mets imploded, trading Tom Seaver for peanuts after a nasty Dick Young column soured him on the city.

THE COLLAPSE: A collection of 162 vignettes, telling the story of the Mets' epic 2007 collapse. Or maybe just an hour in the life of a family watching Tom Glavine implode. (Couldn't find a clip of that, so enjoy this vintage Carlos Beltran.)

THE PASSION OF JOHN MAINE: A moment in the life of declining Mets prospect John Maine, whose fastball deserted him just two years after a near-perfect game at Shea Stadium. Based on an article by Patrick J. Flood.

LET'S GO METS—A TRAGEDY: A fantasy based on one of my recurring nightmares, when I'm at a stadium but can't find my seats or see the field. So it's the Inferno , but set on the escalators of crumbling Shea Stadium.

I'm not interested in putting famous sports heroes on stage. What could be more boring than a not-quite-portly-enough Broadway star trying to cigar chomp his way through an impersonation of the magnificent appetites of Babe Ruth? I'm interested, as ever, in the fringe players, the grounds crew, the sportswriters and the fans, whose stubborn refusal to quit on a lousy franchise—badly run, badly managed, badly owned—is a testament to all that is great and stupid about mankind. 

This is not something I want to write on spec. But if there are any Met fan/theater producers out there, or directors, or actors, or anyone who's interested in providing some counterprogramming to Bronx Bombers,   drop me a line.  We can bat around ideas, come up with an outline, get started on a workshop. I like to write about the universality of sports pain, the sadness that comes even in success, the pleasant futility of the whole mess of corporate nonsense. I think it could make for a cathartic night at the theater.

This play is not meant to be self-flagellation. Met fans love to harp on their failures, picking at them like old scars, but most of us understand that this is how most fans feel, most of the time. Most people, even. Like Jimmy Breslin asked in 1962:

“The Mets lose an awful lot? Listen, mister. Think a little bit. When was the last time you won anything out of life?”

Dreaming About Plays Is Easier Than Writing Plays

I've been dreaming of plays a lot this year. Not nearly as often as I dream about zombies and heights and getting inexplicably lost on the subway or late for airplanes or in weird parts of stadiums where I can't see the field, but plays are in there, churning around my unconscious to bubble up while I sleep. Mostly they are terrible, and sometimes merely terrifying, but once in a while they are really wonderful. 

Last night, perhaps in response to that altogether troubling Julius Caesar which I saw at St. Ann's Warehouse last week, I dreamt of a thoroughly modern take on Romeo And Juliet. It started with the audience standing around a square counter, like at the Apple Pan, where the play's opening lines hummed softly in the background, as an actor explained that we were about to see something strange. It was a press preview—I took notes the whole time—and a critic beside me got all peevish about the fact that he was possibly in for a surprise. He left, and the whole lunch counter rotated down through the floor, spiraling into a massive underground gymnasium where a few dozen teenagers sparred with each other: our Montagues and Capulets. 

"Man—they really threw some money at this," I thought, as I noted the disappointing influence that The Hunger Games seemed to have had on the production.

The first act proceeded through the gym, where the kids did all sorts of different American Gladiators-style fighting, and played an ancient Italian form of basketball where the court shrank gradually over the course of the game. For Act II we were transferred to the top of an ice-covered mountain—again, fabulous production values, especially for Off Broadway—that looked like something out of a Lovecraftian dreamscape.

By now the play's narrative had completely collapsed, but the spectacle was enough to keep me happy, since even in sleep I'm a shallow sort of theatergoer. On the other side of the barrier, I saw a pair of water bottles floating in space, and I was gripped by my customary sleeping terror that comes whenever something is suspended in thin air. (Remember that fear of heights I mentioned earlier?) The water poured back and forth from one bottle to the other, and I realized that they were being manipulated by an invisible stagehand, suspended by wire, and pouring the water to simulate a rainstorm. It was terrifying, but in a sublime way, and I noted the effect in my notebook, impressed.

I woke up relaxed and giddy—the same warmth that comes after seeing a really wonderful play, but without ever having to leave my really wonderful bed. As I replayed it in my mind—the best way to remember your dreams, by the way—I was struck by one minor flaw that hadn't occurred to my dream-critic. 

If you're going to go to the trouble to create an invisible floating stagehand, is that really the best way to use him? 

It's all concept, no execution, that unconscious of mine. 

In any case, I'm seeing a real-life production of Romeo And Juliet tomorrow at CSC. Hopefully it will keep me awake.

Questions of Comfort, At The Theater & In The Loo

The performance begins at 7:00 PM and runs 2 hours and 15 minutes without an intermission. . . . We strongly recommend that you use the restrooms at Brooklyn Roasting Company. The St. Ann’s Warehouse restrooms will only be available immediately prior to the start of the performance. For the safety of our audiences and actors, there will be no re-entry to the theater if you have to leave your seat during the performance. There will be no intermission. 

So I was informed this week by an email confirmation of a ticket to the Donmar's Julius Caesar, at St. Ann's Warehouse, which is playing this month just a half block for the East River. This is not a review of the performance—that will come on Howlround, I think, sometime this month—but rather of the particular bit of anxiety engendered by that email. 

 "Two hours fifteen?" it made me think. "No bathroom? Jeez."

(Be here warned that this post acknowledges certain facts of human biology—namely that sometimes men and women have to go to the bathroom.) 

I've been wary of theatrical bathroom problems since February, when I made the mistake of having a couple of beers before Good Person of Szechwan at La Mama. The beers ran right through me, as beers have a way of doing, and I spent the first act of that lovely show in squirming agony, like a five year-old on a road trip with Mitt "No Bathroom Breaks" Romney. Thankfully, that show had an intermission, and I was able to enjoy the second half in comfort. Julius Caesar would offer no such escape hatch. 

We are grown ups, of course, and can control our bladders, but that doesn't mean it's very much fun to do so. Coffee, tea, beer and cigarettes are all wonderful things to have before a play, and all are diuretics. Being told that you have to hold it for two hours plus, I think, is a mental diuretic as well. 

A few hours before curtain on Saturday, I set aside my tea, and looked away from any offers of beer. Water, I sipped sparingly. A trip to the theater had turned into the night before surgery. This proved moot, however, when I reached the theater, and found out that all of my nervous skittering had overlooked an important fact: my ticket was for Sunday, not Saturday. This was a particularly boneheaded mistake, as you could see if you looked at my datebook, which contained exactly one item for the entire week of Nov. 30 to Oct. 6: "Julius Caesar," it said, on Sunday. But who bothers looking at their datebook?

The front of house staff was gracious, and offered to seat me that night for the performance beginning an hour later than I had thought, but I decided I'd rather have my Saturday to myself, and went home. I repeated my procedure Sunday, scorning anything that might later cause a tickle in my bladder, and by the time I arrived at the gloomy Brooklyn waterfront, mouth and bladder were both stone dry. St. Ann's had set up a makeshift lobby inside the adjacent Brooklyn Roasting Company—a cruel gag for those who were about to have their restroom rights stricken—and the winding line for the bathrooms had the nervous buzz of the crowd waiting for the last helicopter out of Saigon. 

I waited by the river—where some civic art-minded goon had thoughtfully woven plastic strips through a chain link fence, obscuring the view of the skyline and Manhattan Bridge—and listened as the Pirates took a 3-2 lead over the Cardinals, on vital sacrifice fly. They were still leading when the Donmar company, dressed as prison wardens, herded us into the space. "There are toilet facilities on the left," they told us, "and we suggest you use them now." Truly, theatergoing is a romantic pursuit.  Behind me, a grizzled Englishman announced, "It's a fucking prison, shut the fuck up. I don't want to live the experience, I just want to watch it."

The auditorium had been given a jailhouse makeover. The seats were plastic, armless and hard, and the only air conditioning was a few ceiling fans which seemed to have no more than ceremonial value. I'm not usually one to whine about a theater, but the seats, heat and explicit prohibition of bathroomery perplexed me. Where is the line between pampering your audience and abusing them? How long can a play get before the value gained by not having an intermission is outweighed by the distracting effects of stiff backs, jittery legs, and overfull bladders? (90 minutes, as far as I'm concerned.)

The Donmar's Julius Caesar moves quickly, and 2:15—or actually 2:00 flat, since that :15 was built in to allow the crowd time to get settled—is wonderfully short Shakespeare. But in a play that breaks so easily into halves—"Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war" is as good an act-out as any in the canon—it seems silly to risk losing your plastic chair-tortured audience by refusing them a chance to stand and stretch their legs. The honorable deaths of Cassius and Brutus, it seems to me, will not make much of an impression on an audience member whose ass is numb.

It could be that I'm making something out of nothing. Last night's crowd survived intact, save for one man who was overcome just before Caesar's assassination, and scurried out towards the bathroom, never to return. When the lights went up at the end of the performance, the grizzled Englishman leapt to his feet, and let out a war whoop of approval. A good play can make you forget discomfort, and this Julius Caesar largely manages. It's a compelling production, but a fiendishly uncomfortable one. Leave your sweater at home, skip the coffee, and bring a bottle of water—to sip on, and never gulp.