Good news, everyone! I was completely wrong about what the selection of plays would be like at the Brooklyn library. BPL, I have underestimated you. I was rushing, so I didn't have time to linger in the stacks, but they had enough of a spread that I was reminded of the terrifying number of famous plays I haven't read. Impulsively, I grabbed some William Inge and The Normal Heart. Pretty embarrassing that I haven't read any of that, right? Jokes on you, because I'm educating myself, and there's nothing embarrassing about that. Ha!
Help Me! Help Me Read More Plays!
I have a dirty secret. I'm a playwright. I write about theater. I like to watch theater. I like to talk about theater. I sometimes even have very tedious dreams about theater. But I don't read a lot of plays. And by that I mean, I never read plays.
I used to have all sorts of rationalizations about this, but the real explanations are simple. Plays are among the least exciting things to read. There are a few authors whose work leaps off the page—Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, Tennessee Williams, Martin McDonagh—but if a playwright isn't highly verbal, his writing can sag in print. If you're not in the mood to act it out, at least in your head, even a great play can put you straight to sleep.
And it can be hard to find great plays in print. Unless you're in a bookstore that specializes in carrying them, the drama section can be depressingly understocked. I don't need to buy another copy of Chekhov's plays, or the best of Eugene O'Neill. I'd like to buy something written in the last three decades by someone besides Tony Kushner, and I would like to pay less than $10 a play to do it. That can be a tricky thing to arrange.
But none of that is an excuse! I'm a playwright, dammit. I only have time to go see so many new plays—the ones that I can't see, I should read. There are plenty of classics I'm not familiar with—famous and less famous—that I need to cram into my mind-bucket. It will make my work better. It will make me sound smarter. It will make me a happier theater-dude, which is the kind of happy dude I want to be.
Since January is the season of sweeping declarations of self-improvement, I have decided to start reading a play a week. That's not really that much, but I know myself. Trying to read a play a day would be rather overshooting the mark. If by the end of this year I've read 52 plays by people not named W.M. Akers, that's about 50 more than I read in 2012. To keep me on task—and to make sure I get something out of the plays, instead of just napping through them—I'll make a weekly feature out of it, writing about whatever I learned or failed to learn from whatever I've just read. I think that would be not-boring, and I think you might enjoy it.
But if I'm gonna do all that work to entertain you—for free, mind!—I'm going to need some help. After all, it's about time you started pulling your weight around here. You see, I have a bookshelf problem. My girlfriend and I own quite a lot of books, and every shelf in the house is full to overflowing. We're stacking them on the floor now—something I thought I had put behind me when I graduated from college. While I like the way that this gives our apartment the look of a Woody Allen movie, it means that if I announced that I was planning on buying a whole bunch of new books, she would hit me on the head with a spoon.
So, as much as is possible, I would like to read plays for free or electronically. I see that Samuel French has started offering e-books—are they any good? Although I do a lot of work for an e-book publishing company, I've always resisted buying a Kindle. This might be a reason to do so. If you know of any bookstores with a good supply of used plays, tell me and I'll go. Or—and imagine I'm whispering now—if you have an electronic copy of a play you'd like to share, email me and I'll read it.
For now, I'm going to see what they've got at my local library. That's right, baby. I've got a library card, and I'm not afraid to use it. That will get me through a few weeks, but I have a hunch it will quickly run dry. So please—post in the comments, email me, or tweet at me and tell me what to read. I've got no standards. Reading at all would be more than I'm reading now.
My Dullest Play Yet, Brought To You By The MTA
Did you know that if you suffer delays on the New York City subway, and your boss/teacher/girlfriend doesn't believe you, the MTA will help you prove it? By inputting incredibly specific information about when you entered the system, when you transferred, and when you were stopped, they will present you with what I can only assume is a gold-leaf certificate reading I Am Not A Liar, You Petty Bastard.
I imagine this unasked-for service is intended for schoolchildren who need proof of absence, or midtown's most-enslaved wage slaves, but the thought of anyone having to use it makes me bluer than the A train. "The trains were all screwed up," is supposed to be a golden excuse—impossible to disprove, impossible to deny. Taking away our standard excuse for lateness will force the rest of us to get more creative.
It wasn't a stubborn L train that made me late, but a tiger in my bedroom. No, the 3 train was running fine, but I was hit by a comet on the way up the steps and suffered a Class 5 concussion. The trains were no slower than usual this morning—I was late because I am a ghost, and had business in the netherworld.
Reading about the MTA's peculiar new service—actually, I'm not even sure if it is new—reminded me of a dream I had a few nights ago, where I had a brilliant idea for a new play. When I woke up the next day, I strained to remember it. There is no worse feeling than knowing that your unconscious gave you a creative gift, and you were not able to hang on to it. Searching the trash heap that is my brain, I found the little nugget of inspiration. It would have been better forgotten.
The pitch: a perfectly realistic simulation of the experience of riding on the New York City subway. And not an interesting ride on the train. Not even a crowded one. Nope, just an ordinary, nearly-empty subway car, chugging along on a hot summer morning.
It's the worst idea I've ever had. It's so bad, that I just had to go ahead and write it. It's only two pages long, but I think that, performed faithfully, it would run at least a half hour. It's called Bronx Bound, and it begins:
The grubby interior of a New York City
R62A subway car, riding north on the
IRT Broadway-Seventh Avenue Line. It is
the middle of summer, the air
conditioning is broken, and the car is
empty save for a homeless man in the
corner, bundled up in hundred degree
heat and immobile.
CONDUCTOR
This is a Bronx bound one train making all local stops. Next
stop Fourteenth Street. Stand clear of the closing doors.
Doors close.
The train sways slightly for a minute
or two. It stops.
The doors open.
CONDUCTOR
Fourteenth Street, transfer here to the F, M, L, two and
three trains. Bronx bound one train making local stops.
Eighteenth Street next. Stand clear.
It's the most realistic play I've ever written! Download the full version here. It's even duller than you expect.
Rather than try conning a producer into spending $75,000 on a detailed recreation of an R62A, I'm going to let the MTA do it for me. Consider this—one day this summer, the air conditioning will be broken on a northbound 1, and the conductor will know my script by heart. I may not know when it happens, but the city of New York is producing one of my plays this summer—and every summer after that.
I've hit the big time, baby!
The Half-Baked Spring Preview You've Been Waiting For
There are plenty of awful things about January, but it's not all bad. As we stagger across the hellish waste that is the first month of 2013, there are plenty of things to look forward to. More specifically, there are four.
Once, summer was dead. Heat choked New York City, forcing culture-consuming citizens to flee boiling theaters for polo grounds of the Hamptons or the sideshows of Coney Island. Even after air conditioning made culture possible year-round, the arts have never really given up the summer break. Opera is strictly a cold-weather pursuit. Almost no Broadway plays dare risk a July opening. Until cable TV upended the schedule, summertime on the tube meant reruns, game shows and more reruns. Even film, which feasts on summertime, follows its own nine month schedule, with January, February and March serving as the dead period.
There is something reassuring about all this. How nice it is, at season’s end, to look back over the last nine months and remember when it all began. To rank your favorites, to remember the worst of the bunch, to mourn those plays or television shows that closed before their time. But even better is to be where we are now—in the middle of it all. The holidays, thank God, are behind us, and the next great wave of new stuff is about to hit. We have new plays, new operas, new TV shows, and the worst movies we will see until August. Some of it will be worth remembering—most of it will be trash. In either case, this is what I’m looking forward to loving or hating, across four formats—because in 2013, all culture is the same, so long as it’s longer than 140 characters.
But what are they, you ask? Bwahahahahahahahahaha. You have to click on it to see.
I Quake At The Thought of Dancin' Pinstripes
Because the happiest kind of Mets fan is a rabid Mets fan, part of me welcomed the news, announced a few months ago, that the Yankees are coming to Broadway. When a fan's team is failing—and the Mets look to fail for the conceivable future—the only solace is sports hate, and there is no fatter target than the Bronx Bombers. I thought that Yankee narcissism was maxed out in 2010, but a Broadway play, produced by the same team responsible for Lombardi, promised to take tone-deaf hagiography to the next level.
But what would it be about? Would it give Act I to Murderer's Row, Act II to Mickey and Maris, and Act III to Big Stein and the Core Four? Would it focus on an imagined father-son-duo, who learn to love each other by rooting for the easiest-to-root-for team in sports? Or would they take the Moneyball route, let Bill James write the libretto, and treat the audience to three hours of songs about the poetry of UZR, BABIP, and 162WL%?
New details emerged today about the play that is tentatively titled The Yankees. Well, they sort of did. The off Broadway Primary Stages announced their 2013-14 lineup today, and The Yankees is batting second. But beyond that, we learned little. To wit:
The Yankees tells the generational story of a most extraordinary baseball family, and the game itself. Follow the revered New York Yankees Yogi Berra as he struggles to keep the focus on the team, transgressing the tricky world of dreams, celebrity, and the ever-changing landscape of this beloved American pastime.
A few things are clear. Mentioning this "most extraordinary baseball family" in the first sentence suggests that this play will paint the Steinbrenners in as affectionate a light as the United Scenic Artists can provide. The story will be pegged to Yogi Berra—as good a choice as any, due to his quotable charm and stubborn refusal to die.
(As an aside, let me present my favorite Yogi Berra story, from a Joe Posnanski profile from a year or two ago:
Or the time in Boston that it was so hot that Berra decided to get thrown out of the game. The umpire that day was Cal Hubbard, a former football player who did not listen to much talk before throwing players out of games. Berra figured it would be easy. So he made a few cracks. Hubbard didn't say a thing. Then, Berra started openly arguing about balls and strikes. Again, Hubbard didn't say a thing. Finally, Berra turned and tried to show up Hubbard, the surest way to get thrown out of the game. Hubbard calmly said, "Berra, if I have to be out here in this heat, so do you."
Heh.)
But that one paragraph description raises questions. If the story is pegged to Yogi, does that mean we skip Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio? What does a "generational" story mean, exactly? Generations of Steinbrenners? Generations of Berras? Generations of Yankee fans throwing beer at generations of Sox fans?
As a Met fan, I'll hatefully feast on whatever they put forth. As a theater-type, I'm less gleeful. On the one hand, I'm all for theater companies producing work not targeted at typical theatergoing audiences. It's a fabulous way to make money and introduce new people to the art form, and both of those are nifty things to do. In a way, this kind of fawning sports dramatization is in the tradition of movies like Knute Rockne: All American and Pride of the Yankees.
(Fun fact: when shooting Pride of the Yankees, Gary Cooper could not, no matter how hard he tried, bat left handed. Rather than force the star to be uncomfortable, the director got him a uniform with a backwards 4 on it, and had him run up the third baseline when he hit the ball. They reversed the image in editing, and everybody was happy.)
But there's something about a project like this that smells like a rat. Will it be cynical? Will it be lazy? Well, it depends on how tough the creators are on the Yankee legend. My dream Yankees would be nothing but the franchise's dark side. Here are a few moments that I would pay Broadway prices to see on stage:
1925. After half a decade of blistering play, Babe Ruth barely made it out of spring training. Severe gastric distress tormented him for the entire train ride back from Florida, forcing him to have intestinal surgery just after the season began. Ruth claimed he upset his stomach by eating "too many hotdogs," but it's long been an open secret that the "stomachache" came from some combination of boozing, whoring and overeating.
Mickey's Outstanding Experience. In 1972, the Yankees sent form letters to ex-players, asking them to relate an "outstanding experience" from their time at the Stadium. Mickey Mantle replied, "I got a blow-job under the right field Bleachers, by the Yankee Bull pen." As the invaluable Letters of Note relates, his recollection got filthier from there. And by filthy, I mean filthy, so the delicate among you should cover their eyes.
It was about the third or fourth inning. I had a pulled groin and couldn't fuck at the time. She was a very nice girl and asked me what to do with the cum after I came in her mouth. I said don't ask me, I'm no cock-sucker.
Signed: Mickey Mantle, The All-American Boy
The Wife-Swap. 1973's Spring Training opened just as cheerily as 1925's, when pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich announced that, as was the style at the time, they had decided to trade wives. It's a well-known, rather sad story, which Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have talked about turning into a film. Based on the superb '70s hair that distinguished Argo, I imagine Affleck would do a knock-up job.
The 1980s. If postseason success were chest hair, the Yankees would look like Austin Powers. But despite their tradition of smothering success, there are a few bald patches. They never played in the World Series until 1920, when they picked up Babe Ruth, and the decade between Mantle and Jackson was a dry one. But there was no more impotent stretch than the '80s, when the Yankees were, briefly, the second-best team in New York. Also, this happened. I doubt the slow roller towards first will get much stagetime.
Howie Spira. New York sports were more fun when George Steinbrenner threw his weight around. In 1990, he was banned from day-to-day management of the team for paying gambler Howie Spira $40,000 to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield, a big-name player who Stein felt was underperforming. The magnificent pettiness of that action, which saw him kept away from the team for three years, is the kind of savory delight that could keep The Yankees from giving audiences a toothache.
Despite their squeaky-clean, sideburns-free image, the Yanks have their dark places. (Particularly the spot under the right field bleachers.) The irony of a show like The Yankees, or whatever it ends up being called, is that is the dark side that makes a character, or a team, palatable. A whitewashed stage show may sell tickets for a few months, but will only be as memorable as Babe Ruth's 1925.
Becky Byers and August Schulenburg—having exactly the kind of fight that every good play needs. Photo credit Isaiah Tanenbaum.
If Only Every Play Had This Many Fistfights
Becky Byers and August Schulenburg—having exactly the kind of fight that every good play needs. Photo credit Isaiah Tanenbaum.
Adam Szymkowicz has the kind of last name that keeps reporters up at night. How many Ys? How many Zs? It's giving me heartburn just thinking about it.
But it's worth it, because he's a nice guy and a good playwright. I saw his Hearts Like Fists on Wednesday, and interviewed him yesterday. We talked about Kansas!
Now Adam Szymkowicz, a playwright known for quick-witted genre play, has dipped his toes into the ever-pleasant waters of geekdom. His Hearts Like Fists has been running for the last few weeks at Long Island City’s Secret Theatre. It closes tomorrow, but like all great superheroes, Adam Szymkowicz will return—in next spring’s Clown Bar, produced by the good people at Pipeline Theater Company. We spoke to Adam yesterday, about, well, all sorts of things.
Where did this play come from?
I don’t remember, exactly. It was a few years ago. I’ve played a few times with genre—like I have a cowboy comedy Hamlet, and a film noir play. I wanted to do something with comic books. I started reading a bunch of X-Men and some other Marvel stuff, and I tried to do my own version of that genre. A world that’s normally more about action, I made about love.
Unfortunately, Hearts Like Fists closes tomorrow. But Clown Bar, which opens in March, is gonna be even better. Watch this space for more information.
Well, you don't have to spend all your time watching this space. I probably won't mention Adam again until March. If you want up-to-the-minute information about him, you're better off hiding in his closet or just following him around. But if you're just interested in Clown Bar, check back in spring.
Two Non-Terrible Theater Promo Videos
The inimitable Howard Sherman pointed out today that theater companies are about a decade behind when it comes to using Internet video to promote their show. Unasked-for interviews with cast and crew, slideshows of production stills, and gruesomely tedious humor videos are, sadly the norm for this kind of thing. It really should be no surprise that theater people don't always get video. If they did, they would be working in Hollywood, making grown-up money. But, Sherman points out, those who are lost in front of an editing bay should really hire someone who knows what they're doing.
I liked this part:
Let me digress for a corollary story. In the mid-1980s, when I started working professionally, every company heard that they needed to get into “desktop publishing,” a means by which they could create all kinds of printed materials without resorting to waxing machines, t-squares and razor blades to create print-ready mechanicals. All they needed was one of those snazzy new Macintosh computers (PCs were woefully behind in this area) and a piece of software called Pagemaker. The result was, for a few years, a rash of the worst-designed documents you’ve ever seen. What no one seemed to catch on to was that desktop publishing was simply a new set of tools – you still needed a designer to operate it.
I can think of two genuinely clever theater promo videos. Just two! And I watch lots of videos—they're a premier way of using the Internet to avoid doing actual work. The first is from earlier this year, when Qui Nguyen's Agent G was playing at the MaYi Theater Company. Qui and the Vampire Cowboys did a series of videos showing Qui annoying the hell out of David Henry Hwang. They were short, funny, and the last one featured the kind of excellent violence for which I so love Qui's work.
See? Violence! Wow!
Even better were the widely circulated videos of David Furr and Santino Fontana, of Roundabout's 2011 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, reading quotes from the Jersey Shore in costume and in character. You've probably seen it before. It's worth watching again.
So why did the second video draw over a million views, when Qui's didn't crack 1,000? Well, as funny as the sight of Hwang on Nguyen violence is, it's funny only to a segment of the theatergoing population—which means an infinitesimal sliver of the population at large. Just because your video isn't terrible doesn't mean anyone will watch it. The viewer needs a reason not just to laugh, not just to remember it, but to force his girlfriend, landlord or cat to share in the fun. So, to sum up:
Angry playwrights = funny.
Fancy people saying dirty things in spiffy costumes = gold.
Never Be Opening———The 'Glengarry' Switcheroo
I really liked Charles Isherwood's story in the Times about the producers of Glengarry Glen Ross and their cynical decision to hold the show's opening, so I wrote a thing about it.
Times theater critic Charles Isherwood caused a stir this week with an essay about the craven behavior of the producers of Glengarry Glen Ross, who used Hurricane Sandy as an excuse to postpone the official opening of their show by a month. While some imaginative conspiracy theorists have fantasized that this was simply a ploy to give marquee star Al Pacino a bit more time to learn his lines, Isherwood paints a more cynical picture, of producers selling high-priced tickets to something that is a preview-in-name-only, allowing them to rake in around $1 million weekly without having to face potential critical wrath.
When news came this week that Mamet’s other show on Broadway is closing—something his plays have done a lot of lately—hiding from critics suddenly seemed like a bright idea. Reviewers hated The Anarchist—a turgid think-piece about, sigh, the nature of evil and truth and stuff—and so The Anarchist died. But Glengarry might be a special case: a serious play that doesn’t need to be reviewed, because the critics can’t affect it at all.
Read it! Read it, you fools!
The Musical That Won't Die Continues Not To Die
Have you had a nasty taste in your mouth all day? Keep spitting, and it sticks around? Brush your teeth, rinse with Listerine, chug some whiskey—and it's still there? That's because Bono and the Edge are writing new songs for Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. And something tells me that Broadway's dumbest musical isn't about to get any smarter.
This could be the worst non-Romney-related idea of 2012. Having already paid out well over $100 to see the show, I can’t imagine anyone coming back for the sake of one or two new songs. That Spider-Man congealed into anything remotely watchable is something of a miracle, and tinkering with it could undermine the fragile foundation that supports this utterly nonsensical play. If Bono and the Edge break the play, it could be bye-bye Spidey, hello Kong. (I really want to see that Australian King Kong.)
So, just how bad could this be? Here are some ideas for Bono and the Edge as they sharpen their pencils and get down to making theater magic. Note: if any of these appear in the show, I look forward to the protracted, life-shattering legal battle that will ensue. It’ll make me Broadway famous!
What are the new spidey-songs going to sound like? Well you'll just have to click and find out.
Dear God! Why Isn't Everyone Screaming All The Time?
"Oh look. A body." Ginny Mayo, the dumb girl who talked.
A young woman is captured by gangsters and marched down an apartment building's stairs at gunpoint. When the police appear, the gunmen try to use her as a human shield. In a hail of gunfire, she's shoved face forward down the stairs, miraculously surviving as her captors are gunned down. Two minutes later, she's walking down the street with her best beau, cheerfully ruminating about the experience.
"You know," she says, "in his own way, I think saving my life was [the bad guy's] attempt to make things right."
This is the limp climax of Smart Girls Don't Talk, a 1948 Virginia Mayo job that I just caught on Insomnia TV. It's a classic bad ending, necessitated by the structural demands of an 80-minute thriller. We need a big shootout at the end, but everybody's gotta be smiling and lovey-dovey for the thirty-second final scene. Do you know how I would react if I were caught in the middle of a firefight?
I would scream like a Godzilla-nibbled toddler.
Showing the reaction to trauma is a tricky balance. Subjected to the kinds of things that characters go through on stage and screen, real-life people would be reduced to a quivering pile of sweat, tears and shit. But no matter how frightened, your hero has to be back on his feet in a few minutes, ready to crack wise and keep fighting.
I've always had a soft spot for movies that let their characters show fear. The car chase in Risky Business, for instance, is great not just because everything that features Joe Pantoliano is awesome, but because Tom Cruise—an ordinary boy in a terrifying situation—looks shit-scared. My favorite Bond movie is (no kidding) On Her Majesty's Secret Service, primarily because of the epic alpine chase that ends the film's second act. By the time Lazenby gets away, he is scared to death. This isn't Bond as Superman—it's Bond as human being.
I like that.
(God the music in that scene is great. The dialogue, not so much.
Henchman: He's making for the village.
Blofeld: All right. We'll head him off at the precipice.
Positively crackling.)
Lots of terrible things happened to the characters in my last play. People got shot, emotionally abused, sexually trifled with and kicked in the shins. I wanted to be honest about how my characters would react to these horrors, but I couldn't have them shut down. Even though it's realistic, a shut-down character is a useless character. (See: Schuyler, in the last season of Breaking Bad, who spent the whole season too angry to talk, and basically turned into an inert mass of scowling jelly.) So by the second act, all of my characters were either in a very active form of shock, too stupid to realize what was happening, or sociopaths who were simply bemused by the horrors around them. Having them react to the trauma they were suffering made them more extreme characters, and made the whole thing a hell of a lot funnier.
If you're chugging through a script that's got action—and if you aren't, you should be—and your characters aren't scared to death by what's happening them, either your action isn't terrifying enough or your characters are inhuman. Life is scary. Life on stage or screen is even worse. React accordingly.
So there's your unsolicited playwriting advice for the day. As you were.