The meme is simple. You use wikipedia, quotationpages.com and flickr to randomly give you words and images, and then you assemble them to make an album cover.

Really? I mean… that sounds both complicated and boring, why would I do that? Why would you do it, and tag me in it? Why do people who do it, then do it again three or four times?

About two years ago, Ian and I were talking about the different levels of intimacy that our modern world affords us, and particularly the amount of non-intimacy we can have. It used to be that if you wanted social interaction, you had to write letters informing people of visits, and then show up with several large trunks of stuff and stay for a month.

Then, a lot of this got replaced as we got phones. You don’t have to do your hair, you don’t have to wrestle into a bustle, you just call your friends, have a chat, then call someone else and make fun of whoever you just talked to. Then move on to a third and fourth person, talk shit about everyone, and try to pretend they aren’t doing the exact same thing.

Pretty soon, this gave way to email. Now, you don’t have to do your hair or your bustle, and you don’t even have to clear your throat. There’s no social pressure AT ALL, and *getting* email is even better than sending it. You just shove it into a folder and answer it when you want. Or don’t. Let it sit in your inbox for months until, too embarrassed to admit you never got around to it, you archive it or delete it and pretend you never got it.

So… cool. We’re all talking to each other, we still have some social standards set up, and we don’t have to deal with people we don’t want to.

Then… fucking Facebook.

See, all the people who are your friends now, both of you guys had friends earlier, and only one of you is still friends with those people. There was a girl you dated in high school, and her best friend ended up in college with a guy you’re still friends with. That guy who used to sexually harass the waitress when you were doing that show in Nebraska? You’re still friends with the artistic director…

One by one, you line up the people you WANT to be friends with on Facebook, and they accept your invitation and everything’s cool… and then that little “Friends You Might Know” dialogue box pops up at the bottom right. You see those people. Some of them invite you to be their friends.

It’s scary. It’s actually kind of awful. That one girl in high school who’s mom was super-hot and divorced? How did you end up being facebook friends with her twenty years later? Especially since that girl in high school now has three kids, and one is in junior high?

Well, if it really sucked, then Facebook would collapse. But it doesn’t. The truth is, most of the people who are friends with you remember you as a total prick as well, and they don’t actually want to be in touch with you. It’s really hilarious, there are people you would go out of your way to *AVOID* in person, if they were at a party or on the street, but you’ve INVITED them to be your friend on Facebook.

A close friend and I were talking about an old mutual friend, a guy who is extremely difficult but also really fun. She said, “I just wish I could be Facebook friends with him, y’know? So I could see that his profile was being updated and he’s still doing stuff, but I wouldn’t have to ever *talk* to him…” That’s what Facebook is about. If you’re on there, just throw up a new picture every once in a while, and comment on other people’s awesome shit.

So… why the albums?

Well, here’s the thing. Facebook was for college kids originally, but it has totally wiped the floor with crap like Friendster and Classmates.com and the rest of those assholes. Facebook is now for people like *me*. Creepy guys with slightly too much time on their hands who are always wondering whatever happened to 1986.

Well, 1986 was a fun year. There was a lot of drug use, a lot of hair, a lot of sex… it was a great time to be 16 because it seemed like AIDS was something old people got (people who were 23) and you could wear eyeliner and fishnet stockings to school and still get girls to like you. We were listening to the Cure, or maybe Ratt, but whoever we were listening to, they were having fun and feeling feelings. But mostly, we were listening to tapes that we had recorded off of albums.

The covers used to be your first introduction to the music. Would you like it? Man, the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind made me think I would like it. I still remember the cover of Prince’s Controversy, that image was burned into my eyes so bad that I can see it on the inside of my eyelids 25 years later.

Ours is the age of irony, and we do everything we can to make sure that these memories we hold so dear are actually a little bit absurd to us. The cover of the Fables of the Reconstruction album? Yeah, I know, it’s totally pretentious. Maybe the album was as well. We were retarded, we were ridiculous…

We walked through the woods. We-eee- walked…

Anyway. We’re always gonna kill and eat our own gods, and the album cover game is a public sacrifice of our most sacred cow, nostalgia. Album covers don’t even exist anymore, our introduction to music now is usually satellite radio or internet-streaming. Yes, there is cover art, but it’s not gonna end up any larger than a postage stamp next to the song on your ipod, or, at best, the size of a CD wallet. It isn’t worth investigating.

But your facebook friends don’t want to know who you are *now*, for the love of God. If the people you knew when you were 18 were introduced to the people you know when you’re 40, think of how many stories would get eradicated. You’d have to come up with an entirely new story of your life based on these OTHER assholes’ memories, instead of living the life based on the lies you’ve invented for yourself.

(Look, maybe you don’t know you’re lying, but you are. When you’re all “we played so much golf my junior year that I actually failed biology”, believe me, the guy you played with will be like, “What? Yeah, I mean, we played twice a week, which is a lot, but, um… I mean, I still ate lunch every day. I don’t think that’s why he failed biology…” Trust me, the people you tell your melancholy stories about don’t remember it the way you do.)

However, your Facebook friends *do* want you to continue to create nostalgia. And, by making the joke album cover, you’re essentially saying “remember when this meant so much to us? The cover of Houses of the Holy? The Banana Peal? Freeze Frame? Its’ funny that we can generate these randomly, right!”

I know this because I friggin’ love them too. I’ve looked at about 80. Every single one of them cracks me up.

We had a playdate this morning with many of our friends from the neighborhood. Almost all of us has a child near two years old, or a little older, and we’re all beginning to feel the same thing- that our children need to be with other children.

Oh, it’s awful. Harder for my friend Deb and her tender hearted cub, Augie, than it is for me, but for all of us it is just awful. The world is a cruel place, there’s no other word for it, and you have to figure out where the line is between education and disaster.

At the playdate this morning, Barnaby came running over to me with big tears in his eyes. It’s impossible to describe the desperate deep horror of your child showing up with an injury that you were in the room for, but didn’t see and didn’t bother to prevent. The guilt, the recrimination, the sheer torture you put yourself through, wondering what you should have done, wondering what your child will thinking of you… wondering what kind of monster he will turn in to since you’ve so obviously dropped the ball.

Barnaby, with big round wet tears, told me he needed a kiss and was holding his hand. In less than a second, really at first glance, I knew that he hadn’t been injured, he’d just been hurt. He said, “I touched it and it was really hot. You need to blow on it…” and I realized he had touched the radiator and had found it uncomfortably warm.

I was sitting right there and I reached over and hovered my hand above the radiator before touching it. It was warm, sure, but not too bad.

So what do you do? This is the question, and this is what you have to answer for the entirety of your child’s life. In Parenthood, Uncle Larry has asked his father for money to settle a gambling debt, otherwise he’s gonna be killed. Larry is in his thirties. This problem will never stop, these decisions have to be made, and the impact of the decision will resonate for the rest of your child’s life.

Should my parents have done more to steer me away from the mistakes I’ve made? I think so, yes. I think I was allowed too much freedom, I was allowed to destroy my life, and it really is mostly luck that I didn’t end up doing the kind of damage that one can’t return from. I never killed anyone, I was never arrested, I’m still alive and I’ve never declared bankruptcy or discovered a long lost child of mine. But, that’s just luck, I *DID* do things that could have caused any of these things to happen, and the right set of things just lined up to make sure none of it did.

But, I did marry poorly at first, and I did fail out of high school. I do find myself closing in on forty without many discernible skills, without employment or even the hope of it, and without a clear sense of what my obligations are to my family and to the world. The things that I’m very good at are, again, just luck. I have a lot of talent as an actor and a musician, but these ears are a genetic lottery, and my acting talent was never fostered by ANYONE, let alone my parents.

They weren’t bad parents, mind you. I don’t know anyone who loves their children more than my mom does, and I don’t know anyone, honestly, who wishes they were a better father than my dad. One of the reasons that he dislikes my mom so much, in my opinion, is because he wishes he could have been her, when it comes to us.

But neither of them could stop me from laying waste to my life. They didn’t want to have the fight with me. But, I can tell you, if they had, they would have won.

And now I face the same decisions with Barnaby. Hot things are hot, if you decide to touch them, then you will feel the discomfort. Obviously, he’s two, and he just touched a hot radiator, of course he should be comforted. And… of course, that’s what I did. I picked him up and kissed his hand, like he asked.

But the day wore on, and he kept coming back to me, saying he needed kisses. Because the other kids were running in to him, or taking toys, or knocking him over. And… I didn’t draw a line, but I just kinda tried to get him to tough it out. I asked him, “Are you hurt, or are your feelings hurt?” I said stuff like, “It’s okay, Barnaby, there are a lot of toys and you have to take turns…”

Ugh, it’s the very stuff I remember hearing when I was a little boy, and I remember it made me feel like I was alone in the world, abandoned. My first day of school in London, when I didn’t know where I was supposed to go, I made it all the way until lunch before I just fell apart. I have a memory, clear as day, of sitting in the cafeteria, sobbing and sobbing, while a teacher tried to cut up the boiled potatoes. I was alone, I didn’t know where my family was, and this woman, who spoke with the same strange language and accent as every other person here, was in my face trying to get me to eat food that made me gag. And I was hungry.

Today, I hated myself for saying these things to Barno. I don’t want it to be a battle, I don’t want to fight him to do what is right for himself. I don’t want him to have to stand up and suck it up and soldier through. I remember saying to my mom, “It isn’t fair” and being told that age-old parental cop-out “Life isn’t fair.”

Maybe it isn’t, for grown-ups. But is there a golden age when you get protected, when fairness is enforced by those greater in both stature and capacity? How old was I when I first learned that my older brothers couldn’t possible be punished for what they did to me, that there was no rule of law? How long did it take me to realize that I felt better about the tyranny of our house if I passed it on to my little sister?

So… Barnaby said he wanted to go home, and I told him I wanted to stay for ten more minutes. The moms at the play-group are my friends, and I don’t see my friends. I love these women a lot, and it’s incredibly reassuring to be able to talk with a large group of people who are going through the same thing you are.

But, a minute later, he asked to be picked up, and when I picked him up, he gave me an uncharacteristically strong hug. I walked with him into the other room, where it was just the two of us, and he said, “I want to go home and play with toys with Barnaby and toys and Daddy only…” and I knew what he meant. We put on our jackets and left.

Because, I wanted to be there, but maybe for another few months, the decisions need to be about him. Maybe another year. He’ll know soon enough that when he gets knocked down on the playground, his dad and mom won’t be there, and the teacher won’t care. In the same way that he’ll know that when he gets fired, his boss isn’t gonna sweat it, when his girlfriend leaves and steals his CDs, some of his friends will side with her. He’s gonna know these things soon enough.

So, maybe I’m making the same mistakes as my parents, maybe I’m not doing right by him. But, let’s say, he just gets until he’s three… it’s just three years. Maybe I can make it so that his first three years, it seems to him that everything IS fair. And maybe when he touched a warm radiator, his dad will just kiss it better and not try to teach him anything. Maybe he just gets a chunk of time to be a protected little boy, and the world can wait.

If I’m going to tell you what I thought of Universal Robots, I should actually start with a list of caveats that essentially mean that my perspective on this show is utterly worthless. When I tell you what I thought of this show, I’m saying something that doesn’t mean anything to anyone because, although every person’s experience in every live performance is different, I’m bringing a giant bag of stuff to this thing.

At the root of any production of this play is the script, which deserves an entire rant exclusive to the production. The way that information is given to us is pitch perfect, and I think, if anything, is Mac’s real gift as a writer. The script unfolds like a continental drift, like magnificent plates pushing together an inch at a time and leaving you with craggy mountains. All the way through the first act, you get… I want to say hints, but they’re statements, they’re revelations without context, so that when you finally begin to piece together the history that Mac wrote, the intellectual thrill feels like your lungs filling with helium.

There is a meeting of self-congratulatory hyper intellectuals, not unlike my group of friends, and each is a critic of, and an ass to, and a lover of,each of the other members. There is an amazing moment where the playwright’s friends mock his play *As it is happening*, calling from across the room and being shushed. There’s an incredible vision as a poet communist verbally attacks the Christian democratically elected President, and the President notices, understands, and doesn’t really
care.

It could be Mac’s commentary on us, but it isn’t. It takes a good stretch of the play to discover, but it’s a love letter from the Robots to their human creators, a paean to the very inessential things that the Robots revolt against later. Since the show, I find myself thinking – if irony is the mark of a weak man, then existentialism is the mark of an under-utilized mind. If you have time to ponder your place in the universe, there are probably dishes not being washed.

And, the first act of the play involves scattered scenes, disorganized factions who line up and don’t and miss their spot. At one point, in an argument, one character finds herself eloquently losing herself and ending up on the far side of her point of view, and another character says, “Who’s side are you on?”, an incredible little bomb that Mac drops on us, a little reminder of the difference between men and computers – that the beginning and end of our programming isn’t Ones and Zeros but shades of grey.

Rather quickly, the script begins dividing people into pairs, and even though those pairs shift and create different patterns, he’s laying the foundation for where we’re going. A brother and sister. A woman and a Barkeep. A daughter and a parent, the parent and the spouse. A man and a woman. A woman and a Robot. It’s amazing, and that motif continues. When the Robots gather for war, the main character needs a *partner*, needs another Robot to make the plan.

There is so much more. The investigation into our humanity is as scorching and stinky as digging shit out of your nails. Why make Robots look like humans if they really are machines? What’s wrong with a woman using the Robot sexually? What’s wrong with a man doing it? What if he wants a Robot that looks like a child? What is it worth to be good and right? What do you do with the moral implications of technology? How can a machine, incapable of independent thought be evil?

It’s thrilling. It’s invigorating. It’s what is supposed to happen when you go to the theater. Movies are made for explosions and boners, the theater is here for some CHURCH. You can watch Schindler’s List, but the showers just don’t get you WET. This is what theater CAN do, but seldom does, and in this case it does.

And then, the Moment That Mac Rogers KILLS You, which he just loves. I’m did a reading last night, and I know where the line is. This play has it – and it’s smaller than the end of Sky Over Ninevah, it’s better slight of hand than Second String, it’s more deadly than the end of Coffee Girl, it’s more breath-taking than Hail Satan, it’s a deeper drink than St. Ignatius.

Two Robots are faced with a choice, a life or death decision, and they choose love. I hate doing this, I’m going back to the top to write “SPOILERS” because I hate doing this, but I can’t talk about the play without saying it. The Robots are told that one of them must die, and each won’t allow the other. When asked why, they simply say, “We
belong to each other.”

These machines, these tools, these *slaves* understand what ownership is. And in that one moment, they transcend it, they discover, without prompting and without knowing it themselves, love. And the minute that they love each other, they cease to be Robots, they become Things With Souls. They become people.

That’s Mac’s answer. Mac’s answer is simply that the difference between an abacus and a person is love. The beating heart and the cell division isn’t the answer. I overheard Mac saying he wanted to explore the human soul in both this piece and in Hail Satan, and this answer is… Can I admit that I’m crying as I write this? When they say, “she belongs to me” and then “he belongs to me…” That’s my child, my
wife, all of you. That’s the truth.

The acting overall is far better now than it was in 2007. There’s a comfort and a truth to the moment-to-moment in this play in the acting that wasn’t there when Mac directed it. The main characters, played by David, Jason, Jennifer and Ben, are really sensational each. David’s character is self-satisfied to the point of almost losing charm, but he does the really tough thing and holds the line, never allowing his character to become something he isn’t fighting for.

Jason… I can’t talk about it. I’m too close to him.

Ben is so utterly *other* in this role, so befuddled and excitable and ego-less, when in real life he’s a wisecracking ass that drops nuts with the best of them.

Jennifer is a revelation. I didn’t think I was gonna make it through her performance, there are parts of watching her in this play, with David as her adorable asshole little brother, that make it physically painful to be there for.

But the real improvements are in the smaller roles. Tarantino and Ridley have both gone from being good, serviceable actors to honest, deep and true performers. Esther has lost all of her protections, she’s utterly in service to the play and Nancy remains wonderful.

That leads me to the problem I sometimes get in to. We begin seeing the same people pulling off the same miracles, and what they’ve done is created an atmosphere where expectations are so high that they can really only disappoint. Nancy Sirianni is so good in everything that one can’t possibly expect her to be a genius in everything. And yet… she is. Jason Howard is as powerful a force as I’ve ever witnessed on stage, he’s an AWEsome presence who’s very skill needs to be *blunted* for most of his performances, and in this piece he exceeds your wildest expectations.

The costumes and props were insanely cool. The President’s suit was so gorgeous that I just about didn’t care about his performance. Rossum, the scientist who creates the Robots, was downright alarming. The LOOK of the minutiae of the show was really articulate, and that’s note-worthy because you don’t usually get color-pallets and stuff on this level. The wall decorations came across to my asshole brain as really, really good first ideas. They were beautiful and articulate wall boards that look like computer circuitry, and I was like, “Cool. Cool. So… so, this play has Robots, huh?”

The play is breath-taking. I believe it’s a masterpiece, and I believe that Mac’s best work is still ahead of him. I haven’t read a book that affected me like this since, probably, Nine Stories when I was 17. Or Jonathan Livingston Seagull when I was 15.
Or Two Towers when I was 12. I haven’t felt this strongly about a work of art (that wasn’t music) since I was a *teenager*. I hugged Mac for an inappropriately long time at the end of the play, I gave the actors a standing ovation before anyone else did. I love Mac’s plays, and, not counting things I’ve been in, this is my favorite.

This is gonna be a theater post.

Over at The Clyde Fitch Report Mr. Jacobs does a good new-asshole tearing, which is always fun to read, but even more so made me re-visit an inspiration we had last year.

It is really tough to go through the soul-searing craziness that goes into writing and then producing a piece of theater, and when you get to the end of it you have another bout of insane negotiation and buffalo-shuffling bullshit just to get *any* press at all to notice you. When they do, and they send someone who doesn’t know what his or her job is, it can make you tear your hair out. Reviews that list a plot summary and then talk about some of the other artists involved (usually limited to actors and directors)and each gets a one adjective qualifier… it can be really disheartening.

“The Big Balloon is a well-written comic drama set in the late 1950s. Sara, ably portrayed by Karen Actorress, is looking for the right man to help her overcome her past, and she thinks she might have found him in Doug, a charming but sometimes over-the-top Charles Actington. Things take a turn for the worse when they discover a secret about their fathers and their families… to say any more would spoil the ending. Kristin McDirector keeps the action crisp and Jonathan Sibelius’ music really sets the mood. The wonderful supporting cast includes Karen Older, Julia Younging, Charles Fatter, Arnold Shortish and Steve Blank.”

This review is obviously completely worthless. If anything, the only thing it *does* do is sort of spoil the ending of the play. Nothing is here, but you can imagine, right? Does it turn out they have the same father? Maybe their fathers were gay lovers? Who knows? I can tell you that the plot synopsis essentially makes MOST of the play a waste of time, if the plot is what you’re interested in.

I mean, it’s tough to tell stories in our medium. Ignore for a moment that when you submit yourself to live theater, you are making yourself a captive audience at a set time on a set day, and you’re putting yourself in one chair and agreeing that you will barely move, you will NOT cough or clear your throat, you will NOT eat a snack or pause the thing and get a drink. Ignore that, instead of stadium seating, you will either be in a folding chair, a painful off-broadway satin chair or, the VERY WORST, a chair on Broadway that you’ve paid 100 dollars for, and there isn’t room for your femurs. Ignore all of this, because it’s a given.

What you also have is the knowledge that many of the most exciting and exhilarating things you can do in storytelling are not really available to you in live theater. Violence? You can spend six months with a movement specialist, it will still look fake. Sex? At some point, quite quickly, it occurs to the audience that they’re on the edge of a peep-show. A crappy nap (and, honestly, have you ever seen a good one) or a nipple slip, and suddenly, we aren’t really telling a story anymore. We have our hands tied in so many ways.

So, go back to the review. They’re playing by other media rules. They are reviewing a TV show that has been produced live on stage. And that’s not fair, it really isn’t, a play, by its very nature, has something utterly other to offer an audience, and by failing to critique a play on its own terms, the critic is failing those who are searching for entertainment options.

((((((( Live theater gives you several unique things. One) a living person in front of you telling you a story. Two) A continuous immediacy, each thing that happens spontaneously follows from the thing that just happened and there is no turning back. Three) A Meta-level. Every play is a backstager, every play is survived every performance by every performer. Four) Synchronized Collaboration. I don’t believe there’s another art form that requires so much of so many, AT THE SAME TIME. Five) Unadulterated expression of talent. There’s no editing, no double-tracking, no stunt-doubles, no foley, no dubbing and no “let’s do one more to be safe”.

This parenthetical thing is not to argue any kind of superiority, I’m a studio musician and I know the value in getting it right with overdubs and editing. I’m just pointing out, live theater is different that TV or Film.))))))

So, I got to set up a straw man critic and then knock him down, but the fact is, it isn’t their fault. Our audience largely doesn’t know what they’re looking for, doesn’t know why they want to see live theater so badly. Or, rather, why they dread going when they feel like they have to.

We (as in Gideon Productions) felt like it was as much our fault as anyone’s. As much as we all love Pinter, it wasn’t like we were going out of our way, looking for a boiling psychological drama when we read reviews. I honestly look for shows that have hot girls not wearing much, that’s just how I roll. But we were always aware of the fact that we were trying to make sure that the plot and the pressure were as amped up as possible for the plays we were producing and supporting.

We also knew we had to produce an evening of one-acts. It’s simply what a production company does in New York. You get to work with a bunch of people, you get those bunch of people to invite their friends, so it’s totally a win/win. You get inspired by opening up your production company to a bunch of playwrights and directors and actors, and in turn you open up your company to a larger audience.

The problem is, we suck at making things happen for purely business reasons. If we aren’t inspired, we simply don’t do anything. So, when Mac came up with the idea of the Blueprint Project, we jumped at it. A paragraph that contained all the plot and the characters, given to four or five different playwrights, and then we produce the entire evening, one play after the other.

The success of the evening, for me, was that each play was seen as a live theater event. The plot and the characters were already given, they were even printed in the program… so how did each playwright design the show? How did each director handle the playwright and cast the actors? How did each actor create the character when other actors were doing a similar thing in the evening?

The conversations about the plays ended up being about the moments, the shared experience. We featured the meta-drama, we played up the synchronized collaboration… And we were pretty psyched about the whole thing. Now, we didn’t actually achieve anything, it’s not like we were teaching an audience how to see a play, and we certainly didn’t get any reviewers to re-think the way they critique a piece. But at least we know that we’re also part of the problem, and evenings like this are *our* attempt to remedy it.

We do want critics to come see our plays, and we do want them to talk about what they liked and disliked. But, it’s useless when they say “ably directed” or they say “well paced” or “beautifully acted”. None of that actually means anything. If you’re talking about “Lost”, you don’t need to tell me about your couch… but if you’re seeing “The Homecoming”, and the AC got turned on too high at the end – I mean, that could be amazing, just amazing. Think about that, how amazing would it be if the room kept getting colder and colder as that play headed towards its end. I would love for a critic to transport me to the theater, to let me know how it felt to be there. Even if it was agony, I’d be far better served with the description of the horror, than to be told is was “bad”.

I haven’t written in this blog for a long time, and although it would be best to avoid explanations, I think the fact that I’ve avoided writing about writing is the reason this place froze up.

It’s possible for some people at some points in their lives to point to a transitional moment and say, “that was the day that everything changed”. I certainly can do that, there was an interesting moment one day in the middle of my tenth grade when I got beat up badly enough to end up in the hospital, and responded by borrowing a tux and showing up at a formal dance with my face covered in stitches, and I would say that moment was a turning point in my life…

BUT. Most of the time, transitions happen slowly, your life spinning like a wet mug on a potter’s wheel. You don’t know what you’ve become until you’re pretty close to becoming it, and that’s kinda what’s been happening to me.

My artistic and professional lives have fallen completely off the rails. My passions are the same as they were four years ago, but my capacity to rally both myself and the troops has evaporated. It’s an interesting moment for me artistically, just as my internal mechanism for knowing what I like has become more refined and articulate, I’ve lost the clear path to production that I once had.

This is a good thing, I think. I pushed really hard for a couple of ideas that I’m not sure, in retrospect, that I totally understood. Right now, I am going through a Great Pause, a sort of inhalation, and I’m pretty sure that’s good. I’ve talked a lot over the years, and I’ve made a fool out of myself roughly twice as often as I’ve been either entertaining or insightful, so my silence is more than just a welcome recess for my friends and colleagues. It has to have been good for me.

What I’ve decided to do with this blog is to focus on two aspects of my life, and leave the rest to better informed and more entertaining people. I’m gonna do what I can to talk about the theater, and I hope to see more and to be involved in production more so that I can put my money where my mouth is, so to speak.

The other thing I’m gonna embrace a little more is the Daddy-n-Me aspect of this blog. I’m a full-time dad, and I don’t know how much longer I’ll be that. So, I’m gonna focus on telling the story as it’s happening, and hopefully that’ll help me figure out what I’m doing.

I’m sure this particular post will fall on deaf ears for a number of reasons. Nobody likes reading a post about writing posts, and also, I haven’t written in forever and I’m pretty sure everyone’s forgotten. Which is probably good, it’s gonna take me a while to get back in the saddle.

I’m not gonna talk about politics, unless it relates to theater. I’m not gonna talk about anything unless it relates to parenthood or art.

I’ve spent a large part of the last year and a half measuring my pre-child expectations against my actual experiences of fatherhood, and obviously most of what I had imagined hasn’t come even close. However, there is one thing that hasn’t really changed at all.

Before I had a child, I hoped sincerely that I wouldn’t become one of those simpering whiners who felt the world had to clear a path for their special child. I had always believed that you can’t make the world safe for children, you have to prepare your child for the world… and nothing about having a child has changed that point of view one bit.

New York can be especially dangerous. Even the New York that we live in now, which is obviously far cleaner and safer than it was in the 70s and 80s. But just taking in to consideration the fact that we all live on top of each other, and that we all want to live our lives in pursuit of our own happiness, we tend to live somewhat shared lives with our neighbors and strangers, and all of that can lead to unsafe circumstances.

As such, my son has needed to learn things earlier than I had to, growing up in places like Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He has to know that the run off from storms on the street is full of stuff he shouldn’t put in his mouth, that even a short bike ride is a life-threatening situation, and that when he yells and laughs at the top of his lungs, it affects his neighbor’s homes.

I have raised him, so far, to understand that he’s a member of a culture for which he has to have respect. That culture exists on many levels, it starts with him and us and our immediate family, but it extends further into being a part of Astoria, a part of Queens, a part of New York and a part of America. He is being taught that the small things he does in defiance of that cultural responsibility effect the entire chain, all the way up.

Now, I point this out because I am becoming more and more aware of the fact that while he is holding up his end of the responsibility, there are many ways in which the cultural responsibilities he is owed are not being met. And what is absurd is that none of the ways that his life is being affected adversely are culturally accepted acts on the part of those doing them. The very things that are dangerous or frustrating to my 18 month old son, are also the things that are dangerous and annoying to every other member of our little society.

So, I’m asking not for special dispensation, I’m not asking that my lone son, one of ten million people, be given untoward consideration. I’m simply asking that the rules that are in effect be enforced.

The park, which is a playground for thousands of people every day, almost all of whom are on foot, has streets that lead to it. According to the law, people have to drive on the right side of the street, they have to stop at stop signs, and they have to give pedestrians the right of way. It may seem absurd to ask that people simply stop at stop signs, it’s the first thing one learns in kindergarten, but there are trucks barelling through stop signs with people *in the crosswalk* every single day.

The park is loaded with children, as it should be, the pool is packed with kids, which is only right. There are paths and lawns and a track and areas to play ball and run around… and there is also a very small playground for little children. All we’re asking is that the rules posted on the playground be followed, no smoking, no bikes, no adults without children.

Am I asking too much? Am I being too precious? Maybe, sure. But if my 14 month old get hit with a bike because I’m letting him walk where people are allowed to bike, then I have nobody but myself to blame. Whenever our little kids are walking around the park, I know it’s our responsibility to keep them safe. But in the tiny playground, built for kids under 4, with the rules specifically banning bikes… it’s one little place where a kid can get his ya-yas out.

The park closes at eleven, and there are laws against cruising. So, why is the park packed with people, going up and down the waterfront, at midnight? This used to be a place where drug deals happened every five minutes, then Astoria cleaned itself up and we agreed that this wasn’t where that happened. Now… the economy is going to shit and there are people milling around, bored, at midnight.

If the law needs to be changed to allow a place for bored teenagers and twenty-somethings to hang out at one in the morning, then, by all means, let’s introduce legislation making it legal to tool up and down the waterfront at five miles an hour, but as long as its illegal, is it too much to ask to enforce it?

Motorcycles are fun and awesome and girls with tattoos on their butts love them. But we have laws that dictate how loud the engines should be, and above a certain level, it’s against the law. That’s because we all live right up next to each other, and it’s just unfair to try to break the windows of my son’s bedroom at 11:30. I don’t care if you have a loud car or motorcycle, I just want it to be *legally* loud.

I don’t know. Maybe I have changed.

I just want the rest of our little corner to try as hard as my son is to be a good member of our society. If everyone agrees that these laws and rules are wrong, then I’ll go with the new rules, but as long as the rules are what they are, I just wish they would be enforced.

For most of my life, I reaped the benefits of being the new kid. It’s a bizarre way of to grow up, getting to re-invent yourself every year or two and never really being held accountable for your past. It might be one of the things that led me to be so comfortable as an actor and so good at creating a character.

I’m not saying I was dishonest as a kid, because dishonesty is much harder to do than you might think. Most people, even when they’re lying, end up being honest to some degree, it’s unavoidable. At the beginning of “Accidental Tourist”, Anne Tyler describes Macon Leary going through phases and his wife fell in love with him when he was a quiet poet, so he found himself unable to shake the veneer… But the truth is you can’t hide who you really are for very long. Macon Leary probably always was that quiet poet.

But I did shed personalities and cliques with complete ease. There were times when I had a rough patch, I pissed off the wrong people or my newest persona was a little offensive, and I survived these emotional and physical beatings by always keeping in mind that the thing I was going through and the people I currently held dear, would all pass, sooner rather than later.

But those first days were always hard. I had never done the summer reading, had never purchased the right brand of khakis. And the times when, by a stroke of luck, I did know what was going on, and did feel right at home right away… well, I always knew it wouldn’t last, that I was gonna change schools and lose all these people soon enough.

Now, I’ve been living in New York for eight years, which is longer than I have ever lived anywhere. I definitely feel like this is home, even when the pangs hit for Iowa, North Carolina or California, and although I’ve held on to my “new kid” training, I don’t really ever feel like I’m completely out to sea the way I did for most of my life.

Yesterday, Jordana left her old job behind after eight years, and started a completely new life. She has been looking at it as leaving one job and starting a new one, but it is a complete life change. Her old job was in real estate, working for a lawyer in private practice where she answered directly to clients and where her autonomy and responsibilities were like the wagon wheel grooves in the ancient Roman roads, created by countless hours of repetition and appeared to be the only comfortable way to move forward.

Her new job is in the non-profit world, where she will be the executive assistant to a person who will be working for the greater good of the company. She will no longer be dealing directly with the clients, she will no longer have autonomy, and she will be, for the first few weeks, utterly at sea in terms of what’s expected.

I make a big deal about my friends and loved ones, I really feel incredibly lucky to get to spend my time with the people who tolerate me, so please indulge me for just a minute. It’s simply awe-inspiring, in the same way that so much of what she does is, that she would decide to make this change purely because she wants a chance at something better than we currently have.

Jordana’s restless spirit is a defining aspect of our marriage, and as such is a defining aspect of my life. Like everything else, it has a flip side… it borders on ugly when it translates to dissatisfaction, when she can’t enjoy success on its own terms… but her relentless need to strive for something more and something better is really joyful to be a part of.

When I think back on being a kid, it was always Thanksgiving that was hardest, when the old friends had really moved on to their new relationships and the new friends were still too new to be intimate with. I don’t know why I always had close friends by Christmas break, but three weeks earlier was the loneliest time of the year.

I know Jordana’s going through a modified version of that right now, at her new job. A exciting as it is, and as right a decision as it was to make, there has to be a sense of terror that she is suddenly responsible for things she couldn’t possibly prepare for, and that the benefits of the old job are, in a flash, now gone. The fact that she has done this purposefully, and purely because she knows that it will lead to something better, is really audacious and beautiful.

These small decisions really do make one’s entire life. It isn’t the path less traveled necessarily, it’s the path of discomfort. Choosing a way that requires that you work harder, work more, because of your faith that such a decision will make your life and the lives of your family better… that to me is the very definition of bravery. It’s really exciting to be a part of it, even just from riding shotgun.

I know I’m not gonna get much feedback on this, and I’m hoping that I can just write out some of my thoughts here and then re-visit this once this blog has reasserted itself into the public conversation. I don’t blame those who aren’t reading this, I don’t write about theater enough for theater people to check it, and I don’t write enough PERIOD for anyone to check it.

Which, I guess, is my way of saying “Hi mom!”

I’ve seen some theater over the course of my life that I felt was irresponsible… I mean, I walked away from the theater feeling genuinely insulted, and I felt myself today wondering why. I mean, I know why, I felt like my time or my good intentions had been abused for one reason or another, but I started wondering if maybe that wasn’t the right reaction on my part.

When a theatrical event is happening, there are a lot of people involved in making it happen, and many of them are working at cross purposes. In a perfect scenario, a person’s time spent in the audience is as rewarded as the person’s time spent writing and the person’s time spent in rehearsal and the person’s time applying gaffer’s tape… but very often one group wants something quite different than what the other groups want, and someone ends up walking away without much reward.

So, who, as a PRODUCER, are we ultimately answering to? I’m framing this question in this context because I think the answers for a lot of the other roles are pretty easy to answer. I’m gonna kind of walk through this from the beginning to the end, as that’s the easiest way to delineate the jobs. If you don’t mind, I’m gonna chose a gender and stick with it to avoid the him/her crap.

THE WRITER
Personally, I wish more people would pay more attention to their responsibilities to the writer, more often than not she has created a road map that conforms very closely to what she wants to see on the stage. There are many ways of writing, and almost none of them involve letting someone else create the mood and characters that the writer is ultimately responsible for, so I have an inclination to feel that the writer’s work is sacrosanct.

But I’m wrong about that, in a way. You can almost always tell when you’re watching the first draft of something and, although edits and re-writes can lead to a loss of the individual voice, a critical eye early in the process will only help. If, as a producer, we challenge the writer to look again at a section we think is problematic, then she will either come up with something better, or she will learn why she doesn’t want to change it, and that explanation will make the rest of the piece clearer.

I’m not sure where the line is, I think we find it as we go, but we do want to give voice to A voice, a singular voice. Each production company should have a mission statement, the more theatrically specific the better, and if the play doesn’t match the statement, then the production isn’t gonna work. We owe the playwright a chance to see her work in its entirety, but we also owe her a critical eye that will push her to clarify and specify.

THE DIRECTOR
The director really does have to have as much latitude as possible to create his vision, and the producer does need to provide that atmosphere, but… I don’t know. Mac has said that a good director can’t save a bad play (or something to that effect, I can’t find his actual blog) and a bad director can’t be cajoled into being a good director. I agree with this, so I’m not sure why I’m about to say what I’m about to say…

It’s just that I’ve watched good shows sink with a terrible director, and have felt ever since that I, as a producer, should have stepped in and demanded more. The producers owe the director an air of authority in the rehearsal room, but I’m more and more of the opinion that a director’s job has been over-rated in our current theatrical culture. There needs to be a final artistic say, and the director has to have it, but in private, the producer needs to steer the director to make sure the goal of the production is met.

Our company’s mission statement makes it pretty clear what we’re trying to do. We take established genres and use theatrical shorthand to facilitate the stories we’re telling. It asks our audiences to be informed before coming in, and it demands that our directors understand the genres that we’re drawing from. In the end, although we are responsible for making an open and pleasant rehearsal process for the director to lead the show, we’re also responsible to our company to make sure the show fits in to our mission statement.

We have honored the director in every one of our plays, and sometimes that has been to a fault. If it is true that a bad director can’t be cajoled into doing a good job, then the director, in these cases, should have been replaced, even mid-way through the production.

THE ACTORS
If directors are afforded, in my opinion, too much respect in our theatrical culture, then actors surely aren’t respected enough. The myth about actors is that they are attention whores, unstable people who can’t exist without pretending to be other people and who live for applause. This is almost never true, and even when it’s partly true, it shouldn’t disqualify what each actor has to do in order to do their job well.

An actor’s life is horrible. Not only do they have no control over what shows they are doing (unless one counts turning down unsavory roles, a bit like beggars being choosers…) and once they are cast in a show, every moment of their performance is pushed and shaped and molded by the director, the costume designer, the tech designer, the stage manager and the other actors in rehearsal. They are expected to strip down, cry on command, execute choreography and stage combat, and match the pitch and tone of every other actor on stage, all of which can change and shift based on the mood and timbre of the audience that night… or even just the weather.

So what is the producer’s responsibility? First and foremost, the actor’s work must be honored, and it has to be honored with MONEY. Actor’s should be reimbursed for their time, and if you don’t do it then the actors have every right to ask why not. If tickets are being purchased and money is being spent, the actors should be paid. Secondly, rehearsals should be set up to be a safe and effective environment, and that means scheduling rehearsals in a time and place where the actors aren’t killing themselves just to make it there.

Most importantly, the actors have to be allowed to be a part of the storytelling. The actor you hired did something in the auditions that led you to believe they were the right person for the job, you have to let them do what they do in the role they’ve been given. You can’t hire a method actor to do broad comedy, you can’t hire an evangelical to play a rapist, and you can’t hire an opera singer to do improv comedy. The production has a responsibility to match the right artists with the right roles, and then allow them to feel like they are bringing their own training and skills to the roles they are doing.

THE INVESTORS
This is the tricky bit. Many people believe that a producer’s sole responsibility is to the investors. These people are called “investors”.

Look, we do owe our investors, but to say we owe them everything is a mistake. The shows would not exist without money, but they also wouldn’t exist without writers or actors or directors, etc., and they most CERTAINLY wouldn’t exist without the producers making all of the decisions.

One has to assume that the investors have put money into the producers hands because they feel that money will be used well, and the producers have a responsibility to use the money well. We have an ethos with our production company that basically boils down to “you can either spend a lot of money, or spend a lot of time”, and it translates t
o everything (an example in just a minute…)

The truth is, the investors are owed the cleanest and truest expression of theater possible, even if it initially feels fiscally cumbersome or unlikely to draw a crowd. It’s a cliche, but nobody would believe that a plot-free musical based on a book of poems by T.S. Eliot, which requires every cast member to both dance and sing brilliantly, would be a sure-fire way of making money. To this end, the producers owe no explanation to the investors when money isn’t made, no even apology. We owe our investors the greater possibility of money lost, it’s the only way that a new and inventive story can be told, and the only possibility, in this utterly shameful investment, that the money people have a chance to see a return.

SUMMATION
I just didn’t know how to delineate this section, it’s not exactly a summation. But let me give you an example of one step in the production process.

Let’s say you are setting up rehearsal space. It’s an easy fix to rehears in the cheapest possible place you can find, living rooms and garages fill this pretty easily. But if you do this, you’re shirking your responsibility to the writer, because every moment will feel like a reading in someone’s living room, to the director, because he won’t have a semblance of the actual space with marked entrances and exits, and to the actors, who will perform only enough for those six to eight feet in front of them to hear and read, instead of the forty to fifty feet they might be asked to fill.

So you call five places and find good quotes on rehearsal space. In order to save money, you can set up the initial book work in a living room or office, but once the actors get on their feet, you want them in a big enough space. However, you don’t want to shirk your financial responsibility to the actors, and you only have so much money, so what do you do? You call five more places. And then twelve more. And then fifteen more places. You find out when the basketball court at the grade school in midtown is available. You call seven more places…

I know this much. I know how it’s better if we go to people and hand them postcards than it is to hire a publicist. I know we can spend more time and less money on every step. But I don’t know who has the final say, who, ultimately, we have to answer to.

I suppose the one group I haven’t considered is THE AUDIENCE, and maybe, in the end, it is to them that we owe everything. And maybe that’s why, as insulted as I occasionally get when I’m asked for more and given less as an artist, I only every feel like a production has been irresponsible when I’m an audience member. If only there was an audience that wasn’t made up almost entirely of people from these other categories, maybe I could be convinced that they were worth investing in.

In light of this total invention of a holiday, let me do what I can to update the Barnaby.

At this point, the most difficult thing I have to deal with is the nagging sense that I didn’t really buy into fatherhood until quite late. There were months and months when I looked at Barnaby as the project I had to deal with In spite of the fact that I had no time to deal with him, and it took me a long time before waking up to the fact that Barno was the life I’d chosen, and the myriad other projects were the things I didn’t have time for.

It isn’t exactly a choice you can make consciously, it’s a situation that allows for no other choice, and when you finally change your mindset about the whole thing, it hits you like an adrenaline rush of relief. You can’t live your life for your own singular pursuits, and that actually removes a lot of pressure. I have become a Dad, and pretty much only a Dad, and committing to that has made me feel more centered than I have ever felt before.

In a way, it sucks. Because if I had been able to have this kind of focus for any of the other things I’ve tried to achieve, I probably would have been more successful. As a musician, I just couldn’t tolerate the amount of practice I had to put in to be a passable instrumentalist, and I look back on that now and GAPE. I mean, I could have practiced, say, an hour and a half a day, maybe two hours, and had the ENTIRE REST OF THE DAY… and I probably could have been a pretty good guitarist or violinist or pianist. Maybe not violinist…

And for acting? I mean, Jesus, had I spent two hours a day working on my career, reading scripts and learning music… honestly, I would have run out of things to do. It would have taken me a month of two hours a day, and then it would be an hour or a half hour a day of maintenance.

So why didn’t I do it? My sister Tessa has said (and I’ve quoted it here a number of times) that she doesn’t believe in laziness, she thinks it’s just a mask for fear, and I think, for me, that is pretty applicable. Like most other people who’ve alway been told they were smart and secretly knew they weren’t *all that* smart, I’ve been scared to death once I got in a position where I wasn’t sure what the next step was.

In music, I could have practiced and practiced, but then what? You’re never sure. You get a seat in the second violin section, you start to teach, and… I don’t know, I guess you start drinking. A lot. Every violinist I’ve ever known has had this life. As an actor, you fight like crazy for the honor of doing shows you think are total shit.

I just got scared and I froze up. It started as a sort of over-all ennui, a sense that I couldn’t control my eventual destination as an artist, and then it started to get smaller and smaller. Finally, a year or two before I quit, I was paralyzed about actually auditioning. I didn’t have stage fright, and I wasn’t scared of the folks behind the table, but I was terrified of what it all meant, and I just couldn’t get a handle on what it would eventually all mean.

As a Dad, that’s totally gone. I know as little, or as much, as I did about music and acting… I have a sense that I probably have as much talent as a Dad as I have in either of those arts… but I have a really firm understanding of what the end-game is, and every one of the smaller moments I’m absorbed in feels like it is heading somewhere really important.

I’m talking a lot about what it means for me to be Barnaby’s dad, and I should probably talk more about him, but I’ve found that these Blogs have a way of creating themselves, and I’ve tried not to edit myself too much. Suffice it to say, I’m really enjoying being a husband and a father now, to a degree that I almost feel indulgent by pursuing only these two things. As difficult as it is, I seem to be feeding the same part of me that used to be filled only with live performance, and my need for public affirmation is, honestly, becoming almost foreign to me. I love performing, and I’m still very comfortable being up in front of people, but this side of me actually feels like my best side, and I feel insanely comfortable in this role.

This is Barnaby’s professional couch shot, by which I mean, I took this picture on my mom’s couch when Barnaby thought it was funny to sit by his ridiculous bear.

For some reason, he thinks “sitting” is hilarious, maybe because he can’t understand why grownups do it when they could be running around all day like crazy people…

Barnaby has a pretty tightly scheduled day, and as such, is extremely into using the time he has to investigate everything he can get his hands on. He loves being in motion, moving from one room to the other, moving from one project to the other, and figuring out how far he can push something.

He really wants to up-end boxes, he really wants to take machines apart, and he REALLY wants to press every single button he can get his hands on. If there’s a vacuum or a fan or a flashlight or a remote, he wants to know how to turn it on, he wants to hear the sound and he wants to push the thing around the room. He is annoyed by stasis, he’s constantly itching to change his surroundings in any way he can.

But he’s not at all chaotic, and doesn’t appreciate mess or noise for its own sake. He likes the sound of the coffee grinder, but he doesn’t ask for it once the coffee is made, if that makes sense. He really loves singing, but he doesn’t like music to be on in the background. He dances to music, or he wants to move on. And when the room gets messy, he cleans up, if he’s upended his box of legos he will turn around and pick them up and put them back in the box.

I guess I should detail some of the developmental stuff. He’s walking and running really well and is extremely good with his hands. Other kids in the park will be kicking balls and Barnaby is willing to kick once or twice, but then he really wants to pick up the ball and run with it.

He also loves anything with wheels, and while that does include bikes and trucks and cars, his greatest love is his stroller. I tried to find one that wasn’t pink, and then I got annoyed at myself for caring, especially since he loves it so much.

His first two syllable word was “Stro… LER!” and he pushes this thing all over the house and all over the park when he gets a chance.

He talks all the time and has a decipherable vocabulary of around 40 or 50 words, with another hundred that we don’t understand at all. He’s starting to put sentences together, mostly requests. For instance, if he wants a cookie, he’ll say “Sna! Sna! Sna!” and I’ll say, “You want a snack? Do you want toast or a cookie?” and he’ll say, “TOOK! TOOK!” which actually means cookie (he’s still having trouble with the ‘K’ sound at the beginning of words) and later, if he wants more, he’ll say “Mo. Mo? Mo? Took! Mo Took! PU LEEEE!”

His invocation of “please” is just hilarious. He does say please, which comes out as the two syllable “pu lee”, but he says it like he’s calling you an asshole. So, he’ll say “Ju Ju Ju!” and if I have his juice, I’ll say, “What do you say, sweetie” and he hollers “pu LEEEEEEEE”, like it’s exhausting to have to go through this charade.

He is just about the most even-tempered kid I know, and as a stay-at-home dad, I know a lot of kids. When he
cries out, we know he’s actually hurt himself somehow, banged his head or caught his finger in something. When he falls down, he’ll give us a pouty face, but he’s basically already moving on to the next thing he wants to get done. He doesn’t cry very much, he really doesn’t, and he’s very amenable to having his plans changed as long as we provide a pretty good other option from the thing he wants to do.

If we don’t, though, then there is no swerving him from his plan. If he wants to play with the phone, let’s say, and your solution is to take the phone away from him and hide it, he’ll remember where it is and make a move for it even an hour later. If you put it out of his reach, he’ll start trying to figure out how he can drag some chairs together or push his truck over to get up and get it.

He’s crazy for his crazy ass mom. I suppose if I didn’t *know* that I spend every possible second with him I can, it might make me a little sorry for myself, him being obsessed with his mom, but… I mean, she’s amazing, she’s amazing with him, and she doesn’t get to spend nearly as much time with him as they both want. I find myself wishing she was here all the time, I can’t blame him for wanting the same

He sleeps every day for a couple of hours, usually from around 1 to around 3, and he sleeps all night, from around 8:30 until around 7, although sometimes earlier. It would be great if he slept more, but his brain is just exploding right now, and his curiosity and love of his family drives him to wake up as early as possible. It’s exciting, even if we wish we were all sleeping more, he doesn’t wake up miserable.

I think it’s a metaphor for his entire life, he’s simply too excited to take it easy. And, a fitting metaphor for my life, I’ve had so much to take care of that it has taken me the full complement of his nap just to write this blog, and right now he’s calling out to me from his crib. It makes sense that, on father’s day, I would have to stop talking about my kid before I’ve said all I want to, because I have to go get him and play with him, so I’ll just have to finish this later…

((Spoilers Throughout))

(I mean, I can’t do this without spoilers, and plus none of you are gonna see this show, right? It’s like, probably sixth on everyone’s list, or… If it’s even *third* on your list, do you know how much *MONEY* you need to get all the way to your third choice? What do you care if I spoil the show, right?)

I covered some of this earlier, but I want to have a full review, all in one place. So, here goes…

When the show starts, you’re looking at an empty stage with four sections for musicians. Downstage there is a keyboard and a guitar stand, stage left is the same thing, stage right is a bass and a music stand, and far upstage there’s a drum-kit. The program congratulated us for choosing this show, as it had, according to best estimates, the hardest rockingness on Broadway.

Sure enough, the band came on stage and waived to us, along with Stew, and we greeted them warmly. Stew asked us how our Wednesday was, mentioned that “everyone has their own idea of what Wednesday means”, asked the drummer what time it was and said, “let’s start the show…” and kicked into the opening song called, I think, “We Might Play All Night”.

I didn’t know anything about the play going in, except that the bitches on All That Chat has said the show would have to go dark if Stew took a night off, so when he said he was the narrator and five other actors came on stage, I figured this was gonna be super fun. And it was, the opening number was a sort of Bar Wank tune, and the first real chunk of music took place in a black church, with an exactly appropriate black church number that blew the lid off the place, complete with one of the actors slapping a backbeat on a tambourine. The music stayed that way, it really did, for the most part, rock.

The story follows a young boy growing up in relative affluence in a corner of South Central. Weirdly, it was very much like the neighborhood I lived in, El Monte, where it was close to the rough neighborhood but wasn’t, itself, all that rough. And though the characters were all black, they were all affluent Los Angeles blacks, and the point is driven home throughout the play.

The title relates directly to this experience. The idea of “passing” in American black culture is a pretty divisive one, where blacks who can play in the white world will accuse one another of not being black *enough*. And, at one point late in the play, Stew accuses the boy of having no idea of what it’s like to grow up on the mean streets of South Central, and then looks at the actors and says, “Nobody on this *stage* know what it’s like to grow up on the mean streets of South Central”, much to the enjoyment of the 900 largely white New York Broadway audience members.

But before I get into too much deconstruction, let me just detail the plot. The youth, referred to often by Stew as a “pilgrim” thinks he has found God in music, and his mother slaps him for blaspheming. He joins the choir to get the attentions of a hot girl who wants him to go to Howard, get a Job, but also to blacken up a little. “Not so much that you’re unemployable, of course…”. He befriends the closeted Son of the Preacher, who regales him with stories of Europe.

The youth starts a punk band in his garage, which his mom thinks is adorable, he drops acid with his friends and discusses philosophy… all of the typical teenage rebellion stuff, until he realizes that nothing is gonna happen unless he leaves LA. He moves to Amsterdam, where his mind is blown by the kindness and artistic freedom available in Europe, and he joins a squatter commune where free-love and free-expression runs hot out of every tap.

He starts to feel like he won’t be able to find his true artistic calling in the paradise of Amsterdam, so he moves to Berlin, where his life is thrown into utter chaos, bombs and rebellion dripping all around him, and he joins a different sort of commune, full of anarchists and nihilists. When he is called out for his soft pop-music art, he suddenly takes on the persona of the angry black American, persecuted by his former country (leading to the mockery from the narrator from above…) His mother has been trying to get him to come home ever since he left, and we are privy to one last call from her, almost begging him to return for Christmas. Naturally, she’s dying, and he doesn’t make it home in time.

Now, there are another, maybe, eight minutes to the play, but I can’t even *explain* what happens without talking about what was good, and what didn’t work.

I’m embarrassed to admit, it took me about 20 or 30 minutes in to the play to realize that the youth and Stew were wearing the same color shirt and the same shoes. In my defense, everyone was wearing black, basically, so the red t-shirt and Chuck Taylors weren’t all that obvious, but it becomes clear right away that the narrator is actually the older version of the youth, telling his story.

And, though it is a musical in the old sense (people do break into song and sing to one another) there is also music in the way that, say, “Once” is a musical. Many of the performances in the show are also performances *in* the show. The youth starts a punk band, and they actually do one of their songs, one of the highlights of the
evening was a piece of performance art where a guy bound himself with a mic-cable and chanted “What’s inside is just a lie/ What’s inside is just a lie” over and over again.

But each of these is presented to us with utter mockery. A punk band? Right. Like this kid, in his two bedroom spacious house has anything real to be pissed about. The girl in Amsterdam is terrified that she is disturbing “the writing process” which gets a big laugh out of the audience. Even the youth’s performance piece about being black in
America is shown to us as an overture in self-indulgent delusion. The narrator spends the show telling us this story about ridiculous, embarrassing, wasted youth, about his own path of dishonest self-destruction, even as he pursues what he calls “the real”.

Now my problem with this is two fold, and I’m not sure which bothers me more. First of all, fuck you, Narrator. Now that you’re all grown up, you can look back on those moments of white-hot inspiration, the kind of creativity that we have as artists the occurs only *before* we begin to be consumed with self-doubt and culturally-acceptable
editing. You’re embarrassed that you were in a punk band, you *regret* moving to Amsterdam in 1982? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Can I just say, as someone who didn’t get to go to Amsterdam in 1982, that you suck for mocking it. You became a performer because you found a voice as an angry black man, (even though you don’t really *deserve* to be an
angry black man because you grew up on Crenshaw *north* of the 10 instead of *south*) and you *deride* that?

The second part of that is… Stew wrote the show. It’s not just that the character of the Narrator is mocking his younger self, it’s that this is *Stew* mocking young Stew. And so… I mean, we’re watching him accuse himself of missing his mother’s death because of his pursuit of an artist’s life and it isn’t *storytelling*, it’s *RIGHT
THERE*. We aren’t talking about a construct, we’re not talking about the investigation of an idea. The guy? THAT’S HIM. THAT’S THE GUY.

So, when Stew turns to the audience and says, “Do you ever step back and realize that the grown up you are… is based on the decisions of an 18 year old kid… and 18 year old kid who is high?” and yeah, that’s a great line, it really is. But… You’re right there, dude. You’re the guy that you’re talking about, and you’re standing in the middle of a Broadway stage telling this story so… yeah, you’re life is *affected* by that kid’s decisions, but *obviously* you did, y’know, A COUPLE OF OTHER THINGS TOO, because you’re standing in the middle of the stage in front of us.

This is probably a lot more palatable to people who watch a lot
of reality TV, but for me, it really takes me out of the show. I have a circuit breaker that goes off in my heart, I can’t help it. At the end of the show, Dan said, “it’s a shame there’s nothing in this play for you to relate to…” and it was only then that I realized, a guy grows up in LA, has complicated family-issues, is fighting between being a good person to his loved ones and an artist, lives with massive regret… but during the show, I never got hooked in. And y’all know me, I cry at cooking shows and I always think everything is about me.

So, the end of the play, the actress who plays the mother comes back on stage, dressed in an outrageous and gorgeous dress, and the youth turns it around on the narrator, becoming the one who tells the story. And the mother tells Stew that it’s all right, that it’s all gonna be all right. It’s a beautiful moment in theory and in practice, but because of my own misgivings, I just wasn’t all the way on board.

The band was amazing, and many of the songs were excellent, but I had a little problem there as well. Rock songs are not musical theater songs, and it doesn’t work the other way either. When you are singing a rock song, you are providing a narrative, but the song itself doesn’t have to be a part of moving that narrative forward. Think “Glory Days” by Bruce Springsteen. The song tells a really pithy story, with a nice reversal at the end even, but you also get a whole lot of “bring it on home! YEAH Heh!” and everyone just keeps air-guitaring and drinking beer or whatever one does to Bruce
Springsteen.

But in a musical, even when you are Beer Hall Rock-ing, you have to keep moving the story. You can get away with a refrain that has some repeating in it (“Six inches forward, five inches back” from Hedwig, for example) but if you’re gonna try it, you better have the story blowing people’s minds at the same time (a botched sex change takes a while for an audience to digest, to complete the above example).

In Passing Strange, the youth goes to Amsterdam, wanders into a hash bar, gets high, starts talking to some people, and a beautiful woman asks him to move in to her apartment and hands him her keys. It’s a shocking moment, and a gorgeous moment… he even looks back on the fact that in America, if he walks down the street, most women lock their car doors, and here a woman he’s known for an hour just gives him the keys to her home. It’s an astonishing moment.

But the song, which, if it’s not called “Her Keys” it should be, is several minutes long. Yes, it’s an amazing thing, but… you just can’t do that. You can in pop music, you can start a song by just singing “You’re Beautiful” 27 times in a row, but in the theater, the action moves forward. When the song ended, I shifted uncomfortably, but when they reprised it twenty minutes later into the show, I was shocked.

It’s a small quibble, but it grinds my gears a little bit. Also, yes… it would be impossible to do the show without Stew. It wouldn’t make sense to have a guy up there who *didn’t* write the show. It’s a conceit of the show, the narrator wrote it. I don’t know how they finish the play without him.

All that being said, the set, which was just rows of florescent lights on the back wall and a couple of chairs, was perfect and chilling and hilarious. It was exactly right, and I *really* wish the Universal Robots people had seen it because it would be a great inspiration for that show. And the cast… Oh, good lord. This was the best looking group of people I’ve ever seen in a play.

The women in this play personify beauty. Unless you were blinded by a sort of backwater 1920s Arkansas racism, I think at least one of the three women in this play would personify beauty for you. And all of them did for me, in their own way. Not hot, not overtly sexy, nothing like that… just actual *beauty* oozing off the stage.

All in all, it was fantastic to get out and see the show, and I really enjoyed being in the theater and bouncing along with the music. In the time since seeing the show, it has, if you’ll pardon the expression, grown *off* me in a lot of ways, but I still really, really enjoyed it.