I’m gonna do my best to start throwing up some shorter blogs on the production experience. We are now at June 18th, and we’re very close to being on schedule and on budget. We’ve had to make some tough decisions, but all of the really hard decisions lay ahead of us. Let me just do a rough timeline.

February – Mac, who wrote the play, finished up his script for “VIRAL” and gave it to me and Jordana to read. I read it very, very fast, got really excited, got freaked out, got even more excited and then started thinking about some of the production problems. Jordana read it slowly three times, digested it, and immediately started envisioning its existence on stage.

That has worked out pretty well for us, when we really have specific jobs. There are times when I desperately want to play a role in Mac’s play, but when there’s no role for me, it’s really liberating. I love, LOVE, to think about how best to make the story work and then let the story happen with Mac and Jordana. That means, I read the script and my heart cracked and the sky opened… and then I started thinking “does she have to cook *eggs*? How many pieces of furniture actually *have* to be on stage? Do we need a sound designer, will we need a scrim?…”

We applied for the Fringe, and then Jordana and Mac went into re-writes and, of course, we started thinking about casting. For this show, the exciting thing is that we just didn’t have any idea who would be playing all the roles. For a lot of our smaller projects, we like to write *to* a group of actors. We’ve even, on occasion, listed the actors instead of the character names. This is only when we’re writing together for a a festival or something, when Mac writes on his own, he’s really crafting the show to fit in his own twisted mind. I’m sure he thinks about actors sometimes, but mostly he’s just making a warped world that matches the crazy voices in his head…

May – Once we found out we were accepted into the festival, we really started flying. In the past, we’ve spent a lot of time on conversations about the actual art of the play, but over the last ten years we’ve learned – those conversations happen and those questions are answered in rehearsal. Now, the minute we’re sure a production is happening, we go directly into meetings about financing and marketing. How much money do we have, and how are we gonna let people know about the show.

At this point, we’re all done being tricky. For Fleet Week, we had condoms with our logo at every bar downtown. For Air Guitar, we tried to tie in to the movie that was opening in the summer film festival. For Hail Satan, we talked to other religious groups, even getting damn near sued by the Church of Satan.

Now? Our marketing campaign is entirely about just letting people know we’re doing a play, that it’s written by this awesome crazy dude, and that we’re more than just producers, we’re fans of theater. This is part of a body of work, written by Mac and produced by us, that is gonna be fun to be a part of.

Then we had a couple of meetings about financing, and those meetings… suck. But again, after ten years, we’ve got a pretty good idea about how we’re doing this stuff. We do have a brand new idea this year, to hold a sort of fundraiser. It’s interesting, we go out with our theater friends and get drinks, or have dinner parties, and we all blow money while we sit around and talk about how hard it is to raise money for theater. It took Sandy, our newest production team member, to point out that we’re all going out on Saturday anyway, we’re all spending twenty bucks on drinks and food, we may as well host the thing and help pay for the show.

June – This month has been about assembling the team, and that includes casting. Our entire financial theory is basically this – we’re gonna lose money on the show, we all know that, so let’s try to pay *people* rather than junk. In other words, if we hire a lighting designer who’s really creative, we don’t have to rent expensive lights. If we hold rehearsals in free space, we can pay the cast a little better.

So, choosing the team is really one of the funnest parts of producing. It’s not so much trying to find a group of people who get what we’re doing, I don’t think we’re reinventing the wheel or anything, but it’s really awesome sitting down with someone who looks at the work as *fun*, like they’re excited about getting to make this particular play. Even with the darkest, strangest plays we’ve produced, it’s always fun when you get to the hard part and you hear the costume designer giggle. It’s not that people like making plays where bad things happen or where people get hurt, but the laughter is just nervous excitement.

I’m gonna write a whole post on casting tomorrow. We’ve got callbacks tonight, and we’re over the moon about the people coming in. We’ve *never* been in this position before, where we aren’t choosing the best actor, we’re choosing between a bunch of actors, all of whom are different shades of perfect, and we just have to see who works best with whom.

So that’s where we are today. Still assembling the team, and implementing the marketing plan. I’ll keep updating as we go. These posts are a little inorganic, but I wanted to get everything down and published. We just keep making plays, and I don’t know that we really have a system set down, so it’s interesting to me to look back on what we’re doing as we do it.

I need to write about two of the plays I’ve seen in the last month, both of which deserve attention and neither of which I’ve had a chance to speak about. I’ll do it, even though they will have closed, I will write about them both because it’s bullshit not to. I scribble notes during shows, often in the pitch dark (although my handwriting is about the same regardless) and there are ideas and feelings that have stayed with me long after I’ve left the theater, so I really feel like I owe it to myself to record what I thought of them and then share it with the, um, probably like, eleven people who read this blog.

I can’t do it tonight. I have a flu, and in a sort of fever pitch, I’ve had terrible trouble sleeping the last two nights. It’s isn’t anxiety, and it isn’t the disease. It feels like… I could be wrong, but it feels like something really, really amazing is happening right now, under my nose.

If I have seen eight plays in the last five months, then probably five of them would, at any other time, be the best play I had seen all year. I went stretches of living in New York where I’d go to plays for a year or eighteen months at a stretch, and largely see stuff that maybe was interesting in spite of it’s self-indulgence, or usually saved from awful by one or two actors, or a really cool set. But now? How is everything this good?

I’ve considered a couple of possibilities. I’ve been sick, off and on, for about four months. Now, it turns out that one of the aspects of ALL my illnesses is that I become emotionally… *available*, let’s say. For instance, my mom called and offered to bring me a sandwich the other day and I’m not to proud to admit that I cried for half an hour. So, maybe these shows are just treacley disasters and I’ve been just ripe for the picking.

Another possibility, almost everything I see is produced by people my age, of my generation, and maybe we’ve just gotten good at it. It’s true that I’m not really seeing plays written and produced by good-looking 23 year olds. Nothing against ’em, but there’s no way an undergrad degree from NYU is gonna ‘splain the full how-tos of producing the way ten or twelve years of moving your couch up and down the stairs at the Access Theater will.

(True Story: We almost got arrested, driving around in a cab with a borrowed mailbox sticking out of the trunk. I thought the cab driver was gonna kill himself when we got pulled over, especially when the cops got out of the car and they were straight out of central casting. One puffy Irish guy, probably 22, peach fuzz on his fat cheeks, about six foot seven with his belly just barely losing the fight with his blue shirt, and the driver, a five foot three Italian guy, drenched in Drakar Noir, smoking a cigar that was almost the exact same size as my forearm…)

One great theory, posited by my wife Jordana, that maybe the economy has something to do with it. That, in a world where we are losing our own money with no hope of getting it back, and in which we have less time to devote to this endeavor because of how much more work we’re having to do to get by, it brings a kind of clarity and devotion to the work itself.

There are distractions to producing great theater. Most of these fit pretty neatly into “worrying about stuff that isn’t part of The Conversation”, and the first thing is always money. You just hate how much money you’ve lost, and how few people are willing to give you money for what you think is awesome… so you start trying to figure out what the audience *is* willing to give you money for. And you start reverse engineering. And it quickly becomes crap.

And there are also other distractions. Maybe I’m producing a play, and I really think I’d be awesome in one of the roles. Or maybe I want a very good looking girl to like me, and if I can cast her in a role, she’ll really like me. Or maybe you’ve got a really nice, expensive WWI rifle, and you want to fit it into a play.

Whatever, there’s tons of crap that gets in the way. But when there’s less and less reasons to make plays, when there’s no audience, regardless of what you do, when you get to the age when casting a hot girl isn’t gonna get you anywhere, and when you realized that your own acting career is way less important than making a good play… things become clear.

Maybe that’s what’s happening. Maybe the cream has simply risen to the top, or maybe the seeds in us, those kernels of talent and genius have maybe simply bloomed. The strongest roses fair thrive in neglect and perhaps that’s where we are. Mac wrote a play several years ago in which a playwright was asked if his work could change the world, and, I’m paraphrasing here, but the playwright said, “I don’t think the play can change the world, but I do think it can change one person’s mind, and maybe that person could change the world…”

The conversation is happening right now. And I’m totally ready to be pressured into bringing my A game.

I love cooking, and I really miss it when I don’t do it. I’ve had this weird awful flu for the last three days, and I just made it downstairs and was totally shocked that our kitchen is actually clean. My wife must have cleaned it and, since I haven’t been able to totally screw it up, it has stayed that way.

What I love about cooking is figuring it out on a molecular level. I like building meals based on a snowball routine, to start with tiny little moves early on and then build things the right way. That initial steps you make can change the whole thing.

Like, if you’re making bread, you basically need some flour, some leavening, some kind of sugar, some water, maybe eggs… but how you put it all together will turn it in to a loaf of bread. If you’re making cake, it’s basically the same things, just totally different amounts and different versions of each. Bread requires high protein flour, the leavening should be yeast, and the sugar could be just a little honey. The water could be switched out with milk, and you can just use one egg. For cake, it’s totally different – low protein flour, baking soda/powder for leavening, up to a whole cup of sugar and at least two eggs.

I just think it’s so beautiful, because you can just do whatever you want. All you need is time, and friends or family who don’t care if you make something that sucks. This is *baking* we’re talking about, the kind of thing I always assumed was in the same category as science contest. When you’re doing the stove-top thing… I mean, you can screw with the ingredients and basically be just fine.

If a recipe calls for half an onion, you could put in two whole onions. If it calls for two garlic cloves, you could put in eight. It might wreck what you’re doing, or you might totally love it.

My mom taught me all of this. Cooking without a recipe, she made everything growing up. She was as comfortable on top of the stove as she was in it. I watch a lot of food network television and I see a lot of people talking about things like knife skills and spice rubs and ovens set to temperatures like 385…

I mean, 385? That seems pretty specific. Like, a little bit too specific. Like, they’ve got these shows where they call each other “chef” the same way we call people who spent 14 years in college “doctor”. When your oven is set at 385, how close to 385 is it? The oven cycles anyway, it’s gonna drop down to 350? Maybe?

I think it’s great that we have recipes out there, and that all of them have measurements in quarter teaspoons, because it’s great that we’ve got guidelines. But it means that when a cook doesn’t have their cookbook, they freak out. I was taught to bake by my mom, who measured everything in the middle of her hand. She would knead the dough until it felt right, because the humidity and temperature in the house is gonna change it all anyway.

It’s just a shame that cooking can’t be a blue collar sport. Iron Chef America is certainly fun to watch, but I’d love to see a food network show starring my mom. Covered in flour, holding her hand up to camera so you can see how much salt fits in her hand, and generally making things “hot” and then letting them “cool off” before “we eat it.”

You are walking down the street here in New York and a car cuts you off in the crosswalk as it turns left. You were there, you had the right of way, the car just very nearly mows you down, and as it drives through the intersection, you catch the driver’s eye. He looks right at you, as if to say, “what are you gonna do about it?”

As you walk away, furious, even just for a moment, you might start thinking about that guy’s perspective on life. How did he get to the point where making that left turn was more important to him than the general welfare of regular people, how did his own personal very-small-thing become more important than our community?

As I was watching the utterly engrossing production of When You Coming Back, Red Ryder by Retro Productions, my mind slid away from the horror show for only a brief moment because I was remembering a report that I’d read some time last year, something about the suicide rate of returning veterans. I just looked it up again and it’s astonishing. In 2005, there were 8 suicides for every 100,000 civilians… but 32 suicides for every 100,000 active veterans between 20 and 24.

I have argued in the past that it’s way more important for us to talk about each other’s shows and the ideas contained than it is for us to just slob up each other’s shows in the hopes that they will do the same for us. This production deserves a ton of slobbing, and I’ll do it in a minute, but walking away from the show, there were a bunch of larger things boiling in my tiny brain.

There is an inherent dismissal in saying that we live in a culture full of niceities, full of informal politenesses that keep things running smoothly. The truth is, most of the common courtesies we have in place are there in order for us to remain *safe*, to remain alive at all. We shake each other’s hands upon meeting to show our friends that we’re not hiding a large rock to hit them with, we stay to one side when we walk because we’re instinctively aware that we’re safer with one flank covered. It progresses from there.

We have rules even for rule breaking. Americans are furious right now that we are responsible, as a nation, for torture. Shooting an enemy in the face is part of our civil code, but making them go without sleep is just wrong. When someone robs you, you expect them to hold a weapon, take your stuff, and then go about their lives. We reserve our outrage for rape or humiliation or “senseless killing” (as if to delineate them from the sensible ones.)

Red Ryder is deeply absorbed with looking at these situations. It begins as a very standard piece, a diner in the middle of New Mexico, with a handful of employees and patrons, is held up. Stuff of drama, certainly, but this isn’t Bonnie and Clyde. It’s 1969, and when the thieves walk in, all we know about them is this – they aren’t following protocol, they are unwilling to behave. And that alone is the weapon they, or rather *he*, uses to terrorize the group. The antagonist of the play holds everyone hostage with the fact that he is willing to behave worse than they are, and perhaps worse than they can imagine.

As the group of people finds their situation degenerating quickly, as decorum falls, leaf by leaf, until the cultural tree is completely nude, they find themselves becoming not just passive objects, but willing subjects in the crazed mind of this long haired Vietnam Vet. As a nod to the cultural mores of the time, one character says, “I thought you were all about peace and love” and the vet says, pensively, “No… No, sir, that was a different group altogether…”

My favorite exchange, which I took for the title, is when the Vet is mocking the people’s lack of fortitude to resist him. He says that a man needs to have more than a Cadillac to be a man, and says “I’m sorry to have to show you that”. Another character asks, simply, “Are you really sorry?” and the Vet says, again almost to himself, “… No. No, but I wish I was.”

It’s an amazing piece.

I’ll get to some slobbing now, I’d hate to rhapsodize without giving some people some damned credit. The costumes tell a silent story, perfectly matched to the plot. Red Ryder himself is dressed in the perfect James Dean faux rebellion, complete with idiotic tattoo on his arm. That this play was produced in 1973 is a miracle, how the hell did the writer know that within 30 years, tattoos would be as inauthentic a form of rebellion as a white tee shirt and red jacket with the collar turned up?

The rest of the costumes are pitch perfect, moustaches and buns on the east coast elite, bolo ties or tank tops signifying all you need to know about the character’s stations, but there are two things I’d like to point out, as long as I’m writing a novel here. The hippy girl’s breasts figure into the script, but instead of being too overt, she wears a thin shirt and no bra. As a guy who gets uncomfortable with stage nudity, it was perfect. I think I’m gonna save the waitress costume for later…

As full disclosure, I’m friends with the director, Ric Sechrest, but as my friends can tell you, that won’t stop me from saying awful things about them. In this case, I was knocked out by the work Sechrest did. The play hinges on the balance between control and disarray, and the playing space is very small. He created these invisible buffers, these very tight physical spaces that people were either allowed in or not, and then he shattered those spaces when the script called for it. Honestly, the bravest thing he did was to trust us and the space. There were people sitting with their backs to us, and delivering the occasional line upstage, and he knew it would work. There are a lot of people being acted upon in this play, and it would be very easy for the piece to become passive, but everyone has a reason for everything they do, all the time. You can watch the ancillary characters and see an entire play unfolding.

I probably don’t need to say much about the set because it is clearly a standout among theaters of this size. It was incredibly articulate, perfectly functional and honestly, one of the best I’ve seen in an off-off house. I think only GroundUp Productions is comparable. I particularly like that, behind the flats, waaaay upstage, you can see the diner sign, barely illuminated, backwards.

In talking about the actors, I probably also don’t need to say much about Christoper Patrick Mullen. If you know me, I tend to expect the large roles, the difficult to memorize and even harder to physicalize roles, to be played not just well, but brilliantly, and Mullen doesn’t disappoint. He is terrifying, nauseating and trippingly crackling, like a blowtorch in the wrong hands. And a blowtorch is actually the perfect description, because he underplays so much of the show, letting the lines be the lines, letting the AUDIENCE do a lot of the work. Mullen knows that we desperately want the character to go away, and so he controls Teddy, he lets him swerve back into line just to give us a breather. It’s a master class in how to turn a set-chewing character into something at least a little human.

David Blais as Richard, Dave Koenig as Clark and Richard Waddingham as Lyle all do great work, it’s so difficult to play characters where the whole damn play is happening AT you, where you have almost no chance for catalyst. Blais could easily have played his college educated kept-man with derision and he instead fought for the guy every step of the way. And Waddingham, who is naturally far larger a presence than any of the other actors, managed to create a small man, desperately h
olding on to his own decency. Cassandera Lollar also crafts an active but understated character in Cheryl, the clinging assistant to our antagonist.

I don’t want to single out Ben Schnickel as Stephen (Red Ryder) because he did fine work and it’s an extremely difficult part, but this is one of those Juliet conundrums. The character might be younger than the actor has to be to play it well. I also hate to say I wasn’t moved quite as much by Matilda Szydagis as Clarisse. In both cases, I felt that they were one step outside the play, and I understand it – to be completely in this play in these characters is a kind of hell. I’m loathe to say this, because both of them did some great work, and I’d be excited to see them in any future productions.

Just a word on Heather Cunningham…

I have mocked myself and others like me in the off-off world for camouflaging our solipsism as “do-it-yourself independence”. When I hear of an all male version of “Proof” or something, I immediately assume that the producers are also the stars, and I’m almost never wrong. It isn’t always a bad thing, but it isn’t usually good. When I got to the end of this play and read the program and saw the bios… I realized that sometimes, it’s the best thing.

She is a gut-punch of an actor. Completely without concern for herself when she’s in character, utterly subsumed by the demands of the script. But I know she was also at every step of the process, the sets, the props, everything… including picking the piece.

Now, there are a lot of companies out there trying to figure out a way to sell tickets, and that’s great. You oughta sell some tickets. And a lot of people have figured out a) established writers bring in more audience, b) established plays bring in more audience, c) small cast sizes are easier to produce… they’ve figured out a lot of this stuff.

So, if you’re Retro Productions, and you are making your decision, why not “Children of a Lesser God”? It’s the same writer, it’s far better known, the set is *nothing*, the cast is smaller… why not?

I don’t personally know why not, but I can tell you why I’m glad they didn’t. This play, with the conversation about the devastating effects of war, not just on those fighting it over there, but the effect those soldiers have on us once they get back, the discussion of Rural America vs. Urban America, the look at the violent destruction of the false culture we’d propped up in the 50s… THIS play is relevant to us, to New York Theater, to Americans.

So Cunningham picked a play where her character is humiliated a hundred different ways, and she lot herself in it. Knowing, as I do, the number of things she would have had to do on a daily and nightly basis, before and during rehearsals, before and during the performance each day, made me love her performance even more in retrospect.

And look, I know, I have a thing I do when I see plays. I watch the ancillary characters more than the scene stealing ones, I want to know what an actor can do when given only *some* of what she or he needs. But the fact is, Cunningham’s character Angel becomes the person we identify with. She is who we would be, if we were in the play.

It is a marvelous night of theater. On a personal note, I feel so lucky to be here in the city when so many people are coming in to their own, so many of us that have been here for this awful decade. There was a time when I’d go see stuff just to get out of the house, and I started wondering if I wouldn’t be better off watching TV. RIght now, I wish the week was ten days long, just so I could see more of what the OFF-OFF community is doing.

Let me begin by saying, in no uncertain terms, that Mike Daisy is the real deal. I happen to love a good rant, and my favorite kind of solo performance is done by The Tutor rather than The Actor, by an advocate rather than a solopsist. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good navel gazing tale, but I am more thrilled with a soloist who shows up with more answers than questions.

I’ve heard him, of course, on my headphones, and I’ve read him and read of him a number of times, but the actual presence is far greater than what I’d been led to believe. He leans forward on the lectern, learing out at us and sonorizing his way through a web of ideas, all of which are important although none, at first glance, seem so. His performance feels like the smartest friend you know suddenly flying off the handle because of a stupid comment some asshole just made. When he talks, it’s as if he’s not yet at the table, he’s walking up with the beers he just bought you, and he can’t wait to drop some knowledge… it’s only a half hour later that you realize he never quite sat down.

I couldn’t help but compare him to Wallace Shawn in The Designated Mourner (its own sort of solo performance). I guess the comparison works because the two men look vaguely amphibian, slits for eyes and wide mouths, almost froglike. And once the show started… I mean, if Mike Daisy was a frog, then I was just a tiny insect, riveted and paying close attention lest I be eaten. The man’s mind seems to be moving a thousand miles an hour, and his language choice throughout does as much to disarm as it does to dissect. He’s a wickedly precise storyteller, and I walked away from the show utterly inspired.

Not that I think he’s right about *everything*. I do think he’s right about a lot of things, and I don’t think there are actually *holes* in what he’s saying… I just think that he’s made some logical leaps that aren’t exactly useful.

There were many things that were just downright awe-inspiring in their insight. His comparison of Ronin to solo-performance was brilliant. Samurai are trained soldiers who, when they no longer are needed by their masters, are supposed to commit suicide. Ronin are samurai who lost their jobs and decided *not* to commit suicide, they just figured they’d find their own way. In the same vein, solo performers are largely the cast-offs from multi-cast theater, who decided they weren’t going to work in that capacity any more, for whatever reason. So they have become “masterless”, they get to create, publicize and perform their own work without any concern for the industry that has no support for them.

A different brilliant idea is the pervasiveness of solo performance. If one thinks about it, every class room is led by a solo performer, ever parent at home alone with their children, every cable TV news host, in fact every blogger! We are all solo performers in one way or the other. He even said that he would, that night, have a late dinner and then go home and watch on TV one solo performer (Jon Stewart) and then another (Stephen Colbert) give their opinion of the day’s news.

The problem is really semantic. If you are going to extend this hero status to the solo performer, because they are nimble and cost effective and exist outside the industry that shuns them, then it’s hard to include someone like Jon Stewart. It’s really pushing it to include teachers. Yes, the same talents are required, but teachers are really the *opposite* of masterless men, as most of them are chained to a curriculum, teaching to the tests, and they have unions fighting for tenure and the like. Teachers are not Ronin, and neither are stand up comics.

I don’t disagree with either point, a) solo performers have reinvented the rules for the theater industry and b) the talents that are required to be a good solo performer are necessary in any situation where one person has to tell stories to many. But once you make the term “solo performer” that broad, it has almost lost meaning.

One of the most moving parts of Daisy’s performance was his section on numbers. We have become a culture that doesn’t understand math, we only understand that one number is higher than the other, and that higher number will make us do things we would find unthinkable at a lower number. I loved this part, especially when he argued that there is a special number that makes an audience. He was adamant that an audience is NOT magical, it doesn’t have an energy or some other weird metaphysical thing, an audience’s effect on a performance is anthropological, it is scientific and it is part of our humanity. We all know this is true, we all know that there is a number, usually a percentage of total seats filled, that can change the tenor of a performance.

My tiny quibble is that this is true of all theater. If you have seven people in a play, or even just *two*, it doesn’t change the fact that a story is being told and that the story will be affected by the power of those being spoken to.

He said only one thing all night that I find dubious. He said that solo performance is the most reviled form of theater, and I just don’t buy that. Chazz Palminteri, John Leguizamo, Jerry Seinfeld, Nia Vardalos, every fat comic who got his own sitcom in the 90s, plus anyone who’s ever hosted a late night TV talk show or ever been on one of those VH1 shows would probably disagree with it as well.

Now, he might be right that among the theater snobbery, a large chunk of snobbery is saved for snobbing on solo performers. But I think there’s a healthy chunk of this snobbery reserved for musicals as well. And when’s the last time a musical broke out from the theater world into the larger world. No, I’m not gonna count jukebox musicals (it’s a bit of a stretch to make a claim that Abba’s success in the 70s, and the subsequent film made from the the musical, is somehow an indication that musicals are celebrated), so it’d have to be Rent, right? I wonder how many people recognize Jessie L. Martin from Rent as opposed to Law And Order…

These are quibbles, the truth is that my one problem with the piece is that it was dizzyingly meta. I have always had a problem with the preacher who was saved by Jesus, and now feels he must preach. Or the physical therapist, who was injured and their life was saved by a physical therapist. I have friends involved with things like The Landmark Forum, where they move up in the ranks until they become full time employees and teachers… or even more specific to the downtown theater crowd – the number of people who start taking improv classes and end up teaching them.

Daisy is a masterful story teller, and as powerful a presence as I’ve ever seen on stage or film. He is a laser pointer of a performer, able to delineate and explain, digest and refine or simply create out of whole-cloth some truly mind-swimming ideas, and I would be thrilled to take any journey with him. I just hope that he continues and moves away from taking us on the journey of how important the journey is.

I loved it, I really did. But with “Why Solo Performance Matters” sitting next to “How Theater Failed America” on the shelf, I just want so badly for him to move on to “The Eight Things You Need To Know About The Human Soul” or something. My God, if Mike Daisy wrote that show, I’d pay a big ass chunk of change to watch it. I guess I’m saying, I’m teetering on the edge of becoming a devotee, and if I can watch him talk about something other than live theater, I will dive into the deep end.