EXTRA CRITICUM

Still Life with Bus Driver

            Back when I was an undergraduate, approximately a million years ago, I visited my friend Miles in Boston. We had shared a house together in England the year before and were currently finishing up college, he at Boston University and I at Sarah Lawrence. So one weekend, with no particular agenda or expectations, I hopped on a bus and went up there.

            I remember that I was studying The Iliad at the time, which made for very poor bus reading. When I got there, Miles and I weren’t sure what to do with ourselves. There were no movies around we wanted to see. So Miles, who was a huge jazz fan (he was named after Miles Davis), suggested we go to a jazz club. I at least liked the idea of jazz, so I agreed.

            It was a smoky club (as I said – a million years ago). We got a seat near the front. Sitting to my right was a small African-American man with tonsure-pattern baldness. He looked old to me, but almost everyone did back then. My guess is he was in his 50s. He was a bus driver, which I could tell because he was still in uniform. I don't recall the name on his nametag, but I remember what was on the table in front of him.

Starving Myself To Live

If you’re like me (God help you) you feel like you need to earn your spot on earth through work. This has an upside – you’re very disciplined, you get a lot done. It also has a pretty serious downside – it’s very difficult to truly relax.

When you’re an artist, however, the ability to “relax” plays a very important part of your work. This makes the line between working and relaxing is a lot more fungible than if you’re, say, an accountant. It’s one of those lessons people like me continually have to re-learn.

How to Write a Play in 24 Days

I was late to work. My son’s school had invited parents to observe the first half hour of class, and there was no way I was missing that. I hoped to catch a train that would make me tough-time-getting-out-of-bed late rather than missed-a-whole-chunk-of-the-day late. I failed. When I got into the office, I saw that I had missed a big meeting. There was an email from my boss asking me to come to his office.

I darted in there, all apologies, but he shook them off. He told me that I had a meeting in 15 minutes with the head of HR. That stopped me cold. I’d never had a meeting with the head of HR.

“What’s the subject of this meeting?” I asked.

 A pained expression crossed his gentle face. I knew the answer before he said it.

On Courage and Inspiration

In my younger and more vulnerable years I spent a lot of time with my friend, Carol, smoking and drinking in various venues in Brooklyn.  We lingered long and tipped well, so they were always glad to see us (“Norm!”).

Carol was then in the midst of making her first documentary, the superb Camp Victory: Afghanistan. It took her all around the world, particularly to Kabul and it’s environs. She met many interesting people there - renegades and ex-pats and idealists - and they would occasionally come through New York and drink and smoke with us.

One of these people was a woman who ran a children’s hospital in Kabul. Like many interesting people, she asked more questions than she ever answered. Specifically, she asked me about playwriting.

Between Projects

Sometimes I get sad and I don’t know why. This happens to everyone, of course, and can be caused by anything from hormones to weather. The idea that sadness is a problem – that you are supposed to be happy every minute of the day and if you aren’t there is something wrong with you – is a particularly American mania, and a destructive one at that. I try to ignore it.

Still, when sadness persists, and no cause from my life or psyche rise to the surface, I start to wonder.

I was sitting at a diner in Westport, CT with Extra Criticum's estimable founder, Roland Tec. He was describing how, when he writes, he can get to feeling isolated. But if he can just see other people, even through a window, down several stories, he's fine.

I have been thinking a lot about community lately. I've been thinking that much of what ails me in my creative life stems from a lack of community. We created our own little community last weekend, Roland, David Licata, and I. We spent a writing weekend up at Roland's beautiful childhood home.

My Late Night Cinematheque

Movies are the easiest art form to catch up on. If I decide I want to read one of the many classics I’ve neglected (Moby Dick, Remembrance of Things Past, etc.), it’s a pretty major commitment. Even at the rate I read, we’re talking about a couple of weeks. On the other hand, if you want to see what the fuss is about this Ozu guy that all the cinemaphiles always yammer on about, you’re about ninety minutes away from knowledge.

Well, you are now. Thanks to Netflix. We all like to wring our hands about how technology has de-humanized us, but that’s only because some of the miracles it has brought now seem utterly mundane. If you had told any film student up to 1990 about Netflix – how you could basically have the entire history of cinema delivered to your door (often letterboxed, digitally re-mastered, and with commentary) for about $15 a month, their head would have exploded. Yet this is how we live now. We’ve come to expect it. We’re even annoyed that we have to wait a few days for those non-streamable titles to appear at our door. 

 

My Favorite Opening

There was no red carpet. There were no lights. Well, there were no lights outside. It would have been odd for there to have been lights outside since it was the middle of the day.  It was one o’clock on Saturday afternoon at a storefront in suburban Cincinnati. It was the opening of my play for young audiences, Fake Flowers Don’t Die.

On this day, however, the audience would not be made up of young people. This production is touring all over the Cincinnati area, playing just about anywhere that will have them. Today we were at a center for adults with developmental disabilities. They were to be our first real audience.

I was a little concerned, but I shouldn’t have been.

Things That Never Happen Happen All the Time

Note: The play I wrote for young audiences, Fake Flowers Don't Die, is going to be performed in schools, theatres, and community centers in the Cincinnati area throughout the month of October. I was asked by the Education Director of Cincinnati-Playhouse-in-the-Park to write something about the origin of the play for those who are interested. It is written so that it can be read by anyone 10 years or older.

It started with a title. It never starts with a title for me, but if you write long enough you’ll find that things that “never” happen happen all the time. So it started with a title.

2nd Look: Five Underrated Movies

A certain consensus seems to get agreed upon about movies before they recede into the past. A combination of popularity and critical response are the primary ingredients, and it’s usually more-or-less right. Movies like The Last Emperor or Crash may capture the zeitgeist enough to walk off with a Best Picture Oscar, but they tend to disappear as time goes on. Whether this is because they are beautiful but somewhat ephemeral (The Last Emperor) or thuggishly manipulative and self-important (Crash), time takes care of what we could not see in the moment.

The opposite, however, happens as well. Really wonderful films get disregarded and slip away largely unseen. It’s a shame, so I’ve decided to do my small part to undo the process and pick out five films that I think have been unfairly maligned. I’m sure everybody has some version of this list in their mind (I could probably get to 20 without breaking a sweat), but here’s mine:

Time, Nature, Mortality... A Life's Work.

Recently I caught a few minutes of a nature documentary on TV. I’m not sure what the whole thing was about, but what I remember was the fish. Lying in a rapidly evaporating stream, it was just barely covered in water. The day was blazingly hot. It flopped around madly, but there was nothing to be done. It had only minutes to live.

I was riveted by this spectacle, horrified actually (I’ve dreamt of it several times). Thinking of it later, I wondered why this image so burned itself into my mind. Then it occurred to me – that fish is me. And not only me. That fish is EVERYONE.

Back in Cincinnati

It was a skinny envelope. We all know what skinny envelopes mean (all of us in the arts do, anyway). A skinny envelope means “no”. I didn’t feel like hearing “no” that day, so I placed the envelope, unopened, on my printer.

I got a lot of no’s back then, but they didn’t bother me much. These days, when I sit on a panel like “Making Your Career as a Playwright”, one of my fellow panelists is always talking about how you should research all the places you submit to ensure your piece is right for them. It sounds like very good advice. I did the exact opposite. I sent everything I had to every place that would read it. I accepted a lot of rejections as the price to be paid for playing.

That Weird Sense of Clarity

The great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami never intended to be a writer. When he graduated from college, he took out a loan and started a jazz club. The club was a great success. He ran it for 10 years.
One night he was at a baseball game, watching an American player named Dave Hilton bat. Hilton hit a ball deep into the outfield (it would end up being a double). As the ball sailed through the air, a thought, clear and unadorned, came into Murakami’s head – “I’m going to write a novel.”

He did, a novella called Hear the Wind Sing. It won a prestigious writer’s prize. His second novel was also a success, so he sold his jazz club in order to write full time. More than a dozen books later, with sales in the millions, translated into dozens of languages, Murakami is regularly mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

A Play I Happened to Have Written

Every writer can tell a version of this story:

For one reason or another, you are called upon to look at some of your old work. As you go through it, a disquieting feeling arises. Lines are unfamiliar. You look at passages and can no longer remember writing them. The decisions that went into each and every word, decisions that lived in the forefront of your consciousness for months, or even years, are gone like vapor. There is a foreign quality to the whole project. You find yourself asking questions: What was the impetus for this scene? Where did these characters come from? In the end, it all crystalizes into a single, almost existential query:

Who wrote this?

An Experience

I once heard a talk by the Artistic Director of one of the country’s largest and most respected children’s theatres. One of the great benefits of writing for kids, he said, was the response of the audience. “For children,” he said, “theatre is not an aesthetic experience. It’s just an experience.”

Those words came to mind after I saw the Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman last month. However great most theatrical experiences are – thrilling or funny or heartbreaking – they usually are, for me, aesthetic experiences. I have an amazing time, leave the theatre elated, and relish it for days afterward. This production of Death of a Salesman, however, felt qualitatively different. It wasn’t like I’d seen something. It was like something had happened to me.