After hitting a mental wall for a very long time, here I am again (tentatively).

And here’s a great quote from Chris Hedges (author of the great book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning) on Truthdig:

There is a meaning to existence. It is found, as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad and Vasily Grossman knew in simple, blind acts of human kindness, especially towards the outcast and the stranger. It is discovered when we confront and acknowledge the inevitable chains and limitations of human nature but do not completely succumb to them. These small acts of compassion, never free from the taint of self-interest, do not make the world a quantifiably better place. We will not be rewarded for them. We will not save ourselves from evil, suffering and death. But these acts mean that we have, if only for a moment, felt what it means to be fully human. We have reacted not as animals in a herd, but as individuals who rose above our baser instincts and the clamor of the mob to defy hatred and bigotry and to cherish life. These acts of compassion allow us to become conscious, if only for a moment, in an unconscious world.

For the whole article, go here.

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Journalist Greg Burk writes with equal passion and elegance about extreme metal and jazz. He’s just about the only person I know besides myself who champions both forms of music, and then some. I’m guessing he has the best record collection in the known universe.  On his site, Metaljazz, he nails the essence of Big Death & Little Death better than any other critic.   Can’t resist quoting my favorite paragraph:

If the script, by screenwriter and playwright Mickey Birnbaum, sounds absurd, it isn’t only that. For one thing, he writes with a fine ear to the way people actually talk. And, obsessed with the pain and futility of life, Birnbaum is after nothing less than complete transcendence. “Big Death” reminds me a little of Sam Shepard’s “Angel City” in one way: It proposes the notion that one action — exactly the correct action — could flip the entire universe around. What, after all, would be the risk? It might not be any better, but it could hardly be worse.

Read the whole piece here.  Big D runs through July 21st at the Road Theatre.

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Well, Bleed Rail is now a part of history, one of those things I’ll be telling someone else’s grandkids about from my Barca-Lounger while they roll their eyes and text message friends in Tokyo.

Here is a good way to look when your show has closed. This is me with girl genius and cast member Lily Holleman. Note that she is still blood-stained from the show. Note that the drink of choice at the post-show party was a Bloody Mary. Note that the corridors of the Boston Court are still blood-spattered and likely to be for some time. What a romp!

Due to a computer melt-down, we lost all of our sound in the final show for a while, but regained it at the very end of the first act. The first sound heard was a baby crying, which seemed eerily appropriate. Until then, our fearless assistant director Sheila Vand had been providing baby sounds from under the stage center grate. She was so good I wanted to burp her.

For the record, everyone involved in this production is a poet. And I mean EVERYONE.

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Back when I was a playwriting pup, my teachers always told me to write whatever cockamamie ideas came into my head. Realism be damned! So I wrote a little wisp of a play with a car hurtling a thousand feet through the air, a pit bull crashing through the ceiling, a soldier Dad with a tail that spit acid, and the end of the world, scored to death metal. Six years later, my reckless little adventure in genre-busting has played across the country, been a finalist for the Helen Hayes and PEN USA awards, and just opened in Los Angeles at the Road Theatre. For the first time ever, we have a live death metal band (at selected performances). We provide earplugs for less adventurous souls.

I’m in love with the brilliant cast, the fearless director, Larry Biederman, and a production design team that has created a dark and magical world. But love it or hate it, I think I can pretty much guarantee your brain cells will be re-arranged.

And that’s a good thing.

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Photo: Bleed Rail

A long couple months of cows falling, pit bulls bursting through the ceiling, the universe ending, cars flying through the air, live death metal, dying fathers, missing babies, and extra-large seasoned fries… and finally we’re open.

Bleed Rail runs at the Theatre@Boston Court through June 17 (the theatre is in Pasadena, by the way, not Boston). Big Death & Little Death runs through July 21 at the Road Theatre in the NoHo arts district.

It’s been great to talk to audience members at both shows… listen to people work their brains around these plays. I’m moved by the empathy audience members have for these fucked-up characters trying to make their way through a hostile world.

Some nice reviews too… Backstage West called Bleed Rail “stunningly provocative”… In a kick-ass incredibly thoughtful review — EXACTLY what we love the Weekly for — Steven Leigh Morris said Bleed Rail’s “a piercing and darkly beautiful view of killers and prey in life and the afterlife…”

On the other end of the spectrum, over on Weebelly you can read an elegant dissection of Bleed Rail by a correspondent who, mostly, hated it, but says why with passion and eloquence. [It’s those capsule reviews, just a summary and a summary dismissal, that really make my stomach churn.]

Anyhow, I feel like the luckiest writer on the planet. I’ve gotten to work with two extraordinary casts, two visionary directors, two ingenious production teams. More effusive fawning to come.

One more shout-out, to Alex Prado, Jaymez Hadley, Tim Jennaway, and Edwin Rodriguez, members of Condemption, in their own words “a Burbank-based metal band derived from every part of the sickest, drunkest, beat-the-shit-outta-your-face, METAL.” They play live in Big Death & Little Death on Friday and Saturday nights, and their awesome musicianship is a dream come true. Big Death was originally conceived as a short play that could be done as the opening act for a death metal show. But the play got out of hand, cars started flying through the air, etc. But I always wanted live death metal in the show and these guys are bringing it with a vengeance. They’ve converted everyone in the company into a metalhead. And except for the guy at the preview who shrieked “HORRIBLE!” at the first chord and covered his ears, audiences are taking it in stride too. Maybe we all have our inner metalhead, and Condemption’s bringing it out. (We distribute earplugs at the door for those with weak constitutions.)

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Cesar Vallejo

excerpted from “Stumble Between Two Stars”

Beloved be the one who works daily, nightly, hourly,

the one who sweats from pain or shame,

that one who goes, ordered by his hands, to the movies,

the one who pays with what he lacks,

the one who sleeps on his back,

the one who no longer recalls his childhood; beloved be

the bald one without a hat,

the just one without thorns,

the thief without roses,

the one who wears a watch and has seen God,

the one who has one honor and doesn’t fail!

Beloved be the child, who falls and still cries,

and the man who has fallen and no longer cries!

Aie so much! Aie of so little! Aie for them!

– Cesar Vallejo, translated by Rebecca Seiferle

This beautiful poem figures in the great Danish film, Songs from the Second Floor. Which, if you haven’t seen it, is waiting for you to watch it on DVD, so that it can make your heart leap in your chest.

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…and here I am in San Francisco, listening to industrial electronica, like early stuff, could it even be Throbbing Gristle? (the heart leaps!) in a chilly hip cafe across from the Travelling Jewish Theatre, where Big Death & Little Death opens Saturday night.  It’s the kind of bleak day you never get in Los Angeles, steel-gray clouds, indifferent rain, cold that doesn’t make your teeth shake, just kind of mildly dispirits you. The play looks fantastic — the director, Sean Daniels, has given it just the light, driving comic rhythm it needs and craves.  Seven years on from inception, this play — this unruly, lumpen, nose-thumbing mutant of a play — thrives.  Strange. None of us knows where life will take us — and I could not have known, six years on from the writing of this play, that I’d be sitting in this throbbing gristle of a cafe watching gloom collect like plaque on teeth — but who could be happier in life than the shivering, vaguely melancholic writer, dislocated and disquieted, but given the opportunity, however mercurial and temporary, to make people laugh?

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Pic above is a snap of my mug when I opened the mail to discover that my play Big Death & Little Death, a head-banging tale of death-metal teens & pit bulls in the ceiling, was a finalist in the PEN USA 2006 Literary Awards for Drama. Okay, so I’m not the most expressive guy in the L.A. basin. But I am deeply honored. For more information on PEN’s numerous programs to support the arts and ensure international artistic freedom, as well as a list of the other much more illustrious nominees and actual winners, head over to their website.

Following productions in Washington D.C., Providence, and San Francisco (in February), Big Death premieres in Los Angeles in Spring 2007, at the Road Theatre in North Hollywood. The director is boy genius Larry Biederman, who’s currently kicking directorial ass over at 24th St. Theatre with his production of Constance Congdon’s No Mercy. If you haven’t seen it yet, wuddayawaitinfor? As the world keeps on illin’ w/ Kim Jong, this is the perfect moment to revisit Congdon’s exquisite meditation on nuclear annihilation and the nature of faith. “But, Mickey,” you ask, “Is this a good date play?” Of course it is. Nothing gets a loved one into the sack faster than a good bout of existential paranoia.

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Harold Pinter is performing Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court in London. Man, wish I could score a ticket. (It’s sold out, duh.) Next up at the Royal Court is Caryl Churchill’s new play, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, starring Stephen Dillane. Who you may remember from his cunning one-man Macbeth stunt at Redcat.

While I’m on the subject of Caryl Churchill, her new translation of Strindberg’s Dream Play — astounding. She’s sucked all the fust and pomp out of the play, infused it with her own voice, and revealed it to be a masterpiece, rather than the eccentric bout of neurotic navel-gazing I always took it to be. It’s hard to imagine that Beckett or Pinter or Churchill herself would have come into artistic being without Strindberg first kicking out the jams. A must-read.

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So—nothing to be afraid of or to anticipate as “hard to understand” in my plays, because one should not try to laboriously translate them into what they are not. They are NOT pictures of the “outer” world. They are NOT even pictures of the “inner” world. They simply use left over pieces of both inner and outer worlds to build a PARADISE where the mind and feelings dance as if the world were in fact—total music. (And perhaps it secretly is!)

Writer/director Richard Foreman has entered the blogosphere with Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead!, which promotes his show of the same name AND provides a useful key to his provocative work. His show What to Wear hit Redcat a few weeks ago. Some crazy third-eye-opening shit, if you ask me. You can also decode Foreman via his notebooks, posted on his Ontological-Hysteric website.

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