Clown shoes padding softly across a stage.  Why is a perfectly rational guy wearing clown shoes?  Why does he feel the need to be so quiet?  Do not answer this question, *dramatize* it.  Eventually, the phone rings, he answers it as if he’s someone he’s not.  The audience is watching him, he’s watching the audience, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

…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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Happy to report that Big Death & Little Death is going up at Crowded Fire in San Francisco next February, and here in Los Angeles at the Road Theatre in the spring.  Also upcoming locally, the world premiere production of Bleed Rail at the fabulous Boston Court in Pasadena, May 2007. Three more steps forward [...]

From Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is [...]

Okay, I’m back. Will try to update more often. Been lost to the world in a flurry of grant-writing, pitch-making, and preparing to leave for accordion camp in San Rafael, which entails learning the bass accordion part to Finlandia, among other strange endeavors. Finally regaining a tiny glop of creative energy in the wake of [...]

Between living and dreaming
There is something else.
Guess what it is.
– Antonio Machado

Coffeyville, Kansas lays claim to being the exact geographical center of the country. I can’t corroborate. Major industry: Amazon.com. The distribution center, plonked down in the middle of farm land, looks bigger than the town center.
Coffeyville’s where I taught playwriting for two months, to eleven talented students from Field Kindley High School.
Four of my [...]

Cemetery, Independence, Kansas 2006
So I’m back in Los Angeles.
Memory-stuck on one night, my last week in Kansas, thunderstorms from one a.m. to daybreak, lightning so bright it blinded me through closed venetian blinds.
I like threatening weather. It keeps me mindful that my presence here on Earth is provisional. Stasis, I’m not so good at. Sunny [...]

It is a dispiriting sign of the times that no Pulitzer Prize for drama was awarded this year. Better the award should not exist, or that no play be nominated, than three plays be nominated and none win. And that these three plays — from the vast body of work produced in this country last [...]

Computer on the fritz for several days. Saved by a genius named Tony Wood, who not only isolated the source of the problem, but spent two days performing software surgery on my Vaio, which now runs like an Indy car. When in Kansas, look him up. He does house calls, too.
All of which kept me [...]

One of my heroes is gone.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Stanislaw Lem, a popular science fiction writer whose novel ”Solaris” was filmed twice, died Monday in his native Poland, his secretary said. He was 84.
Read more here and visit Lem’s official site here.

Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone,
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.
– Richard Wilbur 

I’ve neglected to mention just about ANYWHERE that, following its phenomenal premiere at Woolly Mammoth in Washington D.C., my play Big Death & Little Death has been nominated for a Helen Hayes/Charles MacArthur award for Outstanding New Play. I’m proud to be honored by a theatre community for which I have abiding respect.
Since the [...]

Today, walking back to the Inge House, I fell out of time for a few seconds. Surrounded by Independence’s grand, decayed, Victorian homes and more modest A-frames, walking down red brick paved streets, I slid like a greased eel into early twentieth-century small-town America, a place I’ve always wanted to live ever since I read [...]

So I’m walking down E. Main.
A few cars straggling home down the empty street, the last merchants shuttering their stores.
Around the corner clatters a beat-up ’90s Caddy trailing a wilted tin can bouquet. “Just Married” painted on the rear window, “Horny” on the front.
Three more cars — the wedding party — right on the lovebirds’ [...]

This morning, from Bill Inge’s window, I watched a dog on a neighbor’s porch chase his own tail under grey skies and barren trees. Every so often, he caught himself and bit, then released himself from captivity so the game could continue.
Time’s thick here, without the usual distractions of cable TV, bookstores, and incessant [...]

In the misery of parting, I left behind my umbrella, my warm Hudson Bay blanket, and my digital camera. Which means I have to resort to being a writer, not a photographer, at least for now.
I’ve been driving through the desert for two days. Stopped in Barstow, where in a bustling In-and-Out, a group of [...]

Came across this quote from G. K. Chesterton, who was talking about Dickens, specifically The Old Curiosity Shop:

“Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us or the things [...]

They’re tearing down an old house around the corner from the post office. Judging from the gabled porch and simple wood construction , it was one of the first Burbank homesteads. It had been in a state of decrepitude for many years, its spirit crushed by the encroachment of faceless condos and gas stations. Still, [...]

I’ve borrowed the name of this blog from an album by one of my heroes, the pianist Cecil Taylor. I hope he won’t mind. I think about Cecil a lot when I write. I’ve only seen him in concert once, a few years back, at the Jazz Bakery. He came out in orange pajamas [...]