“Comedy, Ruth, is terror smiling.” –Blood

LET’S GO ON WITH THE SHOW

What’s more exciting than seeing your words in print? Hearing your words spoken by actors on a stage.

 But let’s be honest here. It’s as difficult to get a play produced as it is to get a novel published, and the process is fraught with just as many perils and pitfalls. And yet when the house lights dim and the stage lights come up, and you see actors playing characters you created and speaking your dialogue as if it were their own, time seems to stand still and the “real” world takes a back seat to what’s happening on stage. That’s the transcendent experience everyone who writes, acts or works in theatre lives for. It doesn’t matter if the theater is a tiny hole in the wall with folding chairs and two spotlights or a state-of-the-art facility seating hundreds, the magic of live performance creates a unique bond between artist and audience.

 The playwright, like the director and the technical staff, is never seen. The actors get all the glory—if there is any. You don’t do it for the money; more often than not, there isn’t any (you might be able to make a killing in the theatre, as they say, but you can’t make a living). So why do it? Why write plays at all?

SHOWMAN/SHAMAN

The simplest answer is that you do it because you have to. As with any creative endeavor, you do it because something within you, some inner prompt, tells you to do it, no matter what the outcome or consequence. You do it because you love language, the sound of the human voice, the cathartic power of shared emotion, and the uncanny ability of a good actor to become someone else. You do it because you like to make people laugh, or cry, or think. You do it to appease the entertainer within you, the showman, maybe the shaman. For like a shaman, the playwright must be able to take people on a journey within themselves.

But really, you just do it because you love the theatre. It’s the most ephemeral of art forms. It forces you to be fully present “in the moment” and to say goodbye and move on when the run is over. It’s often a grubby, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants sort of experience that takes you far from your familiar comfort zones. The glamor is all make-believe. So what? Watching and listening to actors perform my work has given me moments of mind-bending pleasure. (And the obverse, mind-bending horror when they’ve dropped a line or a page of dialogue.)

STAGESTRUCK

I love theatre because as a school kid in Minneapolis I was taken on field trips to The Guthrie Theatre. The Guthrie opened in 1962 and was the first major regional repertory theatre in the U.S. I saw plays by Shakespeare, Moliere, Aeschylus, Sheridan, Brecht and Tennessee Williams, to name a few, performed by actors like Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, Len Cariou, Zoe Caldwell, and Brian Bedford. I had no idea what I was seeing and didn’t know the difference between a Greek tragedy and a Restoration comedy. All I knew was that I loved it all and wanted one day to be a part of it.

I’ve been lucky in that I’ve had my plays produced in a variety of venue in England, Europe and the U.S.s, and have worked with some fine actors. I’ve enjoyed all of these experiences because I enjoy the collaborative process. Writing fiction requires working alone for long periods of time, sometimes years. If you’re going to write a novel, you need to withdraw from the world and its incessant demands on your time and concentration. It’s no different when you write a play, but once the production process begins, you have to turn introversion inside out and work with a whole new cast of characters—the director, the actors, the wardrobe and lighting designers, the stage manager, and the tech crew. You have to attend rehearsals and be able to delete and rewrite scenes that don’t go anywhere and dialogue that sounds flat, stilted or unconvincing. Nothing is safe or certain, even on opening night. But everyone’s in it together, trying to pull off a play that you wrote. Talk about sleepless nights and heavy-duty schvitzing!

You’ll find separate pages with photographs from my produced full-length plays. The pandemic brought a sudden halt to all live-theater projects and forced theatre artists to turn to online platforms to produce their work. My play Oscar & Walt has been staged in Rome and Pittsburgh, but during the pandemic it was given an all-star reading on Youtube and later livestreamed as a video stage prodction from Indiana University Bloomington. My play TRANSITION - The Christine Jorgensen Collection, was given its first performance as a professional, online reading by by Transformation Theatre in Maryland. But now, post-COVID, it’s back to the boards for me and and my new musical, The Christine Jorgensen Show, which opens Off-Broadway in February 2024.

And so, as Ethel Merman so buoyantly belted out at the end of “There’s No Business Like Show Business”:

 Let’s go on with the show!