Seriously.

We’ve all got stuff we hate to do, and we’ve all got stuff we’d rather not be doing. But for every single thing you do, there is some kind of incentive to do it, even if it’s just monetary. If you’re a CPA, then you have a job who’s artistry is somewhat limited compared to, say, a guy who sits around his house and thinks up new video games. But you still have a job to do and you can take satisfaction in the fact that 1) You’re getting PAID, 2) there is a deftness to the handling of numbers on any scale, even the personal finances of a regular couple and 3) the job you are doing can’t be done by the average person and still needs to be done for *every single person*, and there’s a lot of pride in that.

But, y’know what? Whatever the justification for the time you spend on your job, that’s really up to you. You figure it out. But for the sake of fuck, if you’re not gonna do your job, then GET A DIFFERENT JOB. If getting PAID isn’t enough incentive for you, then go do something else.

There are many things going on in my life right now. A pregnancy requires a lot of maintenance, and almost all of that has to be done by people who aren’t the father. I CAN’T DO ANY OF THE THINGS THAT HELP THIS BABY. I mean, I make dinner, sometimes, and I try to keep a roof over the mother’s head, but even these things can be worked around if I screw it up.

Here’s what I can’t do: GENETIC TESTING. Oh, and also I can’t BE A DOCTOR. See, I didn’t go to school and… Wait a minute, I don’t have to justify not being a doctor. I don’t want to be a doctor, that’s why I’m not. I became an actor instead.

Oh wait, WHOOPS. I’m not really an actor, right?

RIGHT! And you want to know WHY? I’m not an actor because whenever I was doing a play, there were things about the writing I disliked and things about the producers that I thought were handled badly, and this was a big chunk of what I thought about. So I quit acting and became a writer/producer.

Seriously. As an actor, I wanted to do things like suggest scheduling solutions and give script notes. But you know what? I DIDN’T DO IT. I *wanted* to, but I didn’t. And then when I realized I wanted to much more than I wanted to be in rehearsal, I fucking RETIRED.

(pant pant pant)

Y’see, it isn’t just “do your job”, it’s also “do your job and don’t worry about anyone else’s job”. If a CPA was doing your taxes, and he noticed that you didn’t have any expenses for, say, preschool, and then he started telling you how important it is to have your kid in preschool, and that it’s never too early to start, or something like that, then this asshole isn’t doing his job. He’s doing *your* job.

And the thing I’ve noticed about assholes who do other people’s jobs… they aren’t very good about doing their own job. I didn’t give notes and shit because I was in a MAD PANIC trying to do MY job as well as I could.

I’m currently producing a show that I’m not acting in, because one cannot do all the jobs that one has to if one is writing, producing and acting. Something will suffer. So, if you find yourself in a position where you really feel like you need to fix the scripts and scheduling problems for the shows you’re working on, and it occurs to you that you’re *not* the writer or the producer or the director, then become one of those things before you start doing that job. Just a suggestion. Do your job, completely, and don’t do other jobs unless you are *sure* you’ve done your job completely.

Including the mother fucking doctors. Seriously, you jaggoffs have about two hours to fix all of these problems before we switch doctors. I’m talking about two hours TODAY.

So, I finished up the lead sheets and the recordings that the singers will hopefully be able to use to learn the music with, and, for the moment, we are caught up on producerial duties, so I find myself in a bizarre position of being able to take a deep breath and reflect for a second.

Jordana got in a car accident which technically totalled our car, so we got a new car that Jordana named “Temerraire”. It is lovely and fuel efficient and big enough to fit three in the back, so we hope to still be able to give people rides to and from places. Jordana and I are so starved for our friends that when we get to be with them you can damn near hear child-like gulping noises as we relish every minute.

What I am going to say will make my sweet wife and her family pass out, but the show is in the best possible condition we could hope for. The director is marvelous, I hope to God his talent in the rehearsal room matches his talent outside of it (all indications of his past productions would indicate it does) because he has come to us with a thousand great ideas and I honestly feel, at this point, the show couldn’t be in better hands.

It isn’t often that we find ourselves at this point in the show with every single staff person hired, including assistants, and every single cast member hired and psyched. The auditions were incredible, for every role there were three fantastic people. It is a startling position to be in, all things considered. I was always really cautious as an actor, terrified of getting in with the wrong production, but this troupe of gypsies seem willing to jump in with both feet.

The music is much better, even just two weeks after sitting down with the music director. I don’t know if a director and a playwright have a similar relationship, but it stuns me how much I learn from just talking to a music director. I still treasure the relationship I had with the MD on Fleet Week, he was an ornery genius of the first order, and I completely trust the guy we have now.

The script is in great condition. Mac finally did the version that he’s been wanting to do for six months, and it’s always best to wait until Mac is happy with the draft. Unlike most playwrights, Mac isn’t happy until he’s dismantled the thing and put it back together eleven different ways. I’ve actually learned as much about writing music from Mac as I have from any one of my music teachers at school. You really have to write the thing, and then pull at it where it’s weakest and see if it rips. If it rips, you aren’t done.

All of this to say, last night Jordana was saying “I think I feel something, but I just don’t know”. I told her I could listen to her belly and see if I could hear anything. I mean, it’s crazy, I’m not supposed to feel anything for another three or four weeks, but feeling is totally different than hearing. I laid down with my shoulder in her crotch and my ear right over her womb and we sat like that for a few minutes. I thought I heard a little something, like a miniscule little bass drum, and Jordana said “I feel like I just felt something…”

I said I thought I heard it, but I didn’t get up. We sat there for another three minutes or so and then I distinctly hear a “thub thub”… quiet and deep. Like a kettle drum being tuned at the junior high school down the block. And right as I heard it, Jordana and I said in unison “there! there !”.

It was probably just, y’know, burrito or whatever. I definitely heard a shitload (pardon the pun) of noise in her belly, popping and bubbling and gurgling. I don’t know if those thumps were Esteban. But in my mind, we were lying down, the work was done and Esteban thought he’s stretch out and get comfortable. Maybe for tonight, we can all just hope, cautiously, that everything is gonna work out.

Late last night, five minutes after I thought Jordana had gone to sleep, she said, in a quiet voice “I think I might have felt something.” People have described it as popcorn popping, or a butterfly fluttering in your stomach, but the hardest part is that first time pregnancies have, as part of the process, feelings you’ve never felt before. If we do this again, and I hope we do, she’ll recognize better when the first time is, but last night very well may have been the quickening.

This is the most recent scan we have of what we are calling Esteban House MD Williams, or rather “BABY” which is what I shout into Jordana’s stomach. In the last week, Jordana has gone from looking cute and a little fat to looking adorable and actually pregnant. It’s almost like the bump moved up her body to locate on her actual stomach.

I know that this is supposed to be terrifying. Ian actually said to me, when Tessa was pregnant, that they were both approaching the whole thing with a healthy dose of ambiguity. I am incapable of such maturity. After Jordana said she might have felt the baby, I woke her up an hour and half later to ask her if she felt it again. She said “I don’t even *know* these people” and went back to sleep. Or rather, continued to sleep.

There was a surprise party and a pregnancy, neither of which I could discuss, and now that I can talk about both, I find I have little to say. Jordana had a horrible, horrible cold, made worse by the fact that she could take nothing to help with the symptoms, and for a while it was impossible to distinguish between nausea brought on by hormones and nausea brought on by post-nasal drip.

People are suggesting I take this time to get out and have some fun, but instead we’re taking this time to be deliberate and calm. I might be wrong, it could be that the day will present itself when I’ll need to get the fuck out and drink some scotch, but the great thing is that Jordana will probably try to make that possible if I need it. In 1998, I was trying to get Ian to come out drinking with us and he said, “I’m not going out. There’s nothing to celebrate.” and he was right. So, I figure I did a lot of celebrating then, now is the time I get to make the thing I’ve already celebrated. A cart in front of a horse is still a cart and a horse.

The strangest thing is that this latest step from the liminal to the actual coincides with auditions for Air Guitar. We’re currently cautiously optimistic about everything, the script, the music, the musicians, the director, the staff. Everything seems great now, and if we weren’t many-times-over burned we’d be jumping up and down crowing to the moon about how everything is awesome and seems to be falling in to place.

I’m personally excited about the music and the musicians. These are a group of guys that I would never get the chance to work with under normal circumstances. I don’t know yet if we have a mutual admiration society, an African King meeting a Hungarian Prince and marvelling at the differences culturally but still respecting the titles, or if we will have a hard time finding common ground. They are METAL and I am THEATER and the two don’t really meet. But if they did…

I also feel like we have options for almost every role at this point, just from the first day of auditions. Tonight we’re bringing in the guys who could play “Drew” the character that everyone will misunderstand as being “Sean”. What is strange, and in a way awful, is that this is basically a play that features, at its center, what a relationship would be like if one of my siblings was married to a person with the personality of another one of my siblings. I’m not saying who, but one of the characters is a hard-nosed workaholic who used to be a performer but now runs a non-profit, and the other one is a charming grouch who tackles his problems with a healthy dose of ambiguity.

In any case, Jordana’s pregnant, the baby looks like it has really long legs, so that’s a good start, and we both think it’s a boy, although we’ve still got no idea. We think it’ll be great, but we’re cautiously optimistic at this point.

What you should do, if you are living in New York, is go see Nosedive Productions latest show “The Adventures of Nervous Boy”. I say this knowing full well that the more good I say about it, the higher your expectations will be and, ultimately, the bigger chance there will be for you to be disappointed, but I think the play is so good that I’m not worried about that. Go in thinking the play is great, it will just be confirmed for you.

Drama is all about interaction and stimulus-response, so the very hardest thing to write about is alienation. The plays and movies that are mostly about how difficult it is to survive the unbearable loneliness of modern big city America usually fall into one of three categories. A) They suck, they’re just self-involved tripe about how misunderstood some closet genius is, or, even worse, how misunderstood some perfectly average person is, B) They don’t suck, but they chicken out by having the disenfranchised character discover validation by entering back into the world of nonsense that they had originally identified themselves by eschewing or C) Something magical happens.

Nervous Boy is a phenomenal piece of magical subtlety, despite the moments when you feel like the show is overdrawn. Yes, a bar scene degenerates into pool-cue swinging cavemen, and yes, it appears that some of the characters may seem to be zombies, and sure, you realize that what you’re watching may not be real, may actually just be in the main character’s head… but that’s the beauty. It *might* be.

Because you can’t push it too far. There are a bunch of specifics in this play, the desperate measures we will take to connect into a world that we find loathsome, the people we scratch and claw our way toward despite the fact that we will have to become dumber in order to socialize with them, the idea that even the undead in our city want to be killed to separate them from this liminal existence (I’ve used the word liminal twice in the past five posts, I expect a dollar from every reader), but overall the feeling, despite the theatricality we’ve just witnessed, is that you leave the theater having seen truth.

These things might be in Nervous Boy’s head… but, on the other hand, if you stayed at that bar until 3:15 instead of leaving at 2:45, maybe these people turn in to cavemen. It wouldn’t be that big a surprise.

There are moments of horror in this play in the old-fashioned sense. There is blood, there is murder, there are monsters, and you never know how bad each moment will be. But the real horror, the moments of real dread, occur when the main character is trying to connect with people that he actually hates. He desperately paws at people who don’t like him, and with whom he shares nothing, no sense of history, no sense of future, no respect for their lives. And that is the most horrible thing that happens. The only time I had to hide my face behind my hands is when the words “I love you” are spoken.

The acting is fantastic, particularly the women in the cast. Every one of them is pitch perfect, moment to moment. Many plays use double-casting as a tool to protect the budget, and I’m sure that was a thought here, but to have the same faces and same bodies repeating throughout the play in the guise of different characters only reinforced the sense of alienation. A woman dies, then she shows up at a party as a Upper East Side jackass, then she’s a downtown slut in a bar, and each of these characters is developed physically, vocally and emotionally, you know the actress (Anna Krul ) is sensationally talented, but you see the same face.

The double casting is also fantastic with the stripper, Tai Verley, who goes from being a hardened faux-soft yuppie to an undead pseudo-prostitute, both characters beautifully realized and fully developed, but the beauty is knowing that the same face is on both women. Not enough can be said about the talents of Rebecca Comtois , who creates a character out of what in the hands of a lesser actor would be a caricature. Particularly difficult is the idea of being a young actress playing the part of a young actress, with affection but still a grain of truth.

That’ the real beauty of this production. We don’t hate Rebecca’s character, but we also know why Nervous Boy hates her, even as he clings to her as his closest female friend. The absurdity of the relationships we find ourselves in, the absurdity not of the world, although that’s included, but of our OWN BEHAVIOR. WHY!? We do shit that we can’t at all understand, and Nervous Boy doesn’t try to explain it to us, because even though we don’t understand why… we *know* why.

I haven’t seen that in a play. Ever.

I won’t comment on the lead actor. I’ll try to get in touch with him myself.

The writing and the directing are fantastic, to the point where I’m not only excited about what these guys will do next, but I’m excited about the idea of working with them one day. There is a little prayer you say at the beginning of a play, a prayer that apparently gets joked about in “The Drowsy Chaperone”. You pray it will be good, that it will be short and that there’s no audience participation. For the first time in a long time, I found myself hoping the play would keep going, the opposite prayer of most audience members everywhere.

Go see this show. You’ll be glad you did.

My brother and I had a short but vocal conversation on the idea of having a “rap” on us. Lemme ‘splain.

A “rap” is sort of like a “rep”, except with the added conceit that it is both negative and slightly mythical. You can have a reputation for frugality, but your rap is that you’re cheap. That sort of thing. I may have as much fascination with the idea of a “rap” as anyone, but I do find myself in a foreign country when a complaint is lodged about how unfair someone’s reputation is, because it seems to me that a person’s internal life is infinitely more complex than a person’s social life, and to be upset about perception of the former based on jokes of the latter is to make an extended slippery-slope mistake in priorities.

My brother said that the rap on him is that he’s lost perspective ever since he ended up with money. In complete denial of this, his best friend made a joke about him some fifteen years ago, that he “is the kind of guy who walks around with his pants unzipped and blames the guy who made the pants”. My brother is also the kind of person who will kick a basketball on top of a school or throw a driver into the woods or break a tennis racquet every single time we play tennis regardless of being dirt poor… if anything his maturation has given him *more* perspective not less.

And that’s the problem with your perceived rap. I am always worried about money. I don’t actually know if that’s the rap on me or not, but every single thing that happens, I have to find a way to get a deal or to scrimp to get by. I’m also married to a Jewish girl. Now, I obsess about money because I’ve chosen to make art my business, and there isn’t a lot of money in art, but if I found out that my rap was that I had gotten cheap ever since I married a Jew… you can see that would be unsettling to say the least.

But, the truth is, our raps *are* our reps. Say what you want, but none of us has earned an unfair reputation. If someone says I’m an attention whore or a drama queen or, y’know, *fat* or whatever, it isn’t that I haven’t earned it. I have.

If your friends start joking that you get drunk and belligerent at parties, you need to know that you have a problem with getting drunk and belligerent. *Especially* if it’s your friends joking about it. If you don’t want the jokes any more, then quit drinking, and if you can’t quit drinking, then you’ve got a problem, and your friends will probably help you.

One’s social circle does not get together and compare notes and come up with a series of things to mock you with. The truth is, if your friends are making fun of you, you could look at it one of two ways- either they aren’t really your friends at all, or they adore you so much that otherwise distasteful behavior is not only dealt with but it’s celebrated in the only way it can be.

And that’s the thing. I don’t have a couple of friends who think I’m really reserved and a couple of other friends who think I’m a loudmouth. They all think the same thing, my family agrees with them and guys I barely know would agree with them. There very well may be friends that blanche at the idea of having me over to meet their new girlfriend, because I am totally willing to use the word “vagina” without much thought. I can’t get upset about it, they’re right to be cautious. I actually *don’t* know when certain things are off-limits, and if you try to hint that I may have gone over the line, I’ll go *nuts* over the line.

The rap on me? I would guess the rap on me is that I want people to like me too much, that I’m desperate for attention and that I’m an incomplete faux intellectual – that I think things through only to the point of an absurd conclusion and don’t complete some of my thoughts. I think the Rap on me is that I like to talk about how hard I’m working, and probably inflate it much more than I actually work, and that I find excuses for my failures in order to lead a noble failed life.

Now, where these things aren’t true isn’t really important, because it has all been true in the past. And, the most important thing, I know what is true and what isn’t, I know what demons I have to fight and which ones I can only hope to play dead around, and this battle, even for a loudmouth show-off, is a private one. If my friends think I’m not terribly smart, the fact is they don’t think this enough to not love me and want to be around me. We all have behavior that’s distasteful, and the fact that my friends put up with mine is extraordinary.

So, I’ve been hiding several facts from the world which is why I can’t write. I discovered a long time ago that the best way for me not to spoil a secret is to not talk about anything at all. Last week, I was at dinner at Otto with my three best friends and our rental whores, and I found I couldn’t say a word because I knew the first thing out of my mouth would be “THERE’S A SURPRISE PARTY TONIGHT!!!”

Which there was. Deb and I managed to pull a surprise on our spouses, who’s birthdays are just about one month apart. The levels of subterfuge were incredible, we had to pile lies on top of lies on top of sleight of hand bullshit, and still, if my wife weren’t so distracted by two or three things she’s been working night and day on, she would have figured it out.

I meant to take pictures. But I didn’t.

Here’s the set-up

Deb and Steve came to New York (that’s right, it was a surprise party for Steve in a town THAT HE DOESN’T LIVE IN) in order to surprise Mac in his play. Mac knew they were coming, and Deb knew that Mac knew, but Steve and Jordana didn’t know that Mac knew. I knew everything.

So, Jordana was trying to get Mac to give us tickets to his play, which we weren’t going to, and she was lying to him so that he would give us four tickets, which he knew we needed, but which he also knew we didn’t need because we weren’t going to use them.

Our friends said they wanted to meet up with us at 6:15 on Saturday before Mac’s play. They said this on an email list that both Mac and Jordana are on, so they had to pretend, on the list, that they didn’t know Steve and Deb would be there because, even though Mac knew they were coming, Jordana didn’t know that Mac knew, and the rest of the list had to cover. Plus, none of them were going to meet us for drinks. They were already at my house.

To meet them for drinks at 6:15 meant we had to eat dinner around 5. And Mac should have come to this, or Steve and Deb basically wouldn’t see them, so Jordana had to invite Mac to dinner for a surprise that Mac already knew about, before we all went to his show, that we weren’t going to, after we had drinks with our friends, who weren’t meeting us for drinks. Mac showed up and tried to pretend to be surprised that Steve and Deb were there, which he totally wasn’t, and his head came *this close* to exploding.

In the middle of the meal, I called Deb, pretending to be a group of our friends cancelling drinks, and then Deb pretended to call the other group to cancel just as I got back to the table and discovered that I didn’t have the tickets, which I never had. Jordana said “we should go home and grab them before the show” and I said, “but we’re supposed to meet our friends for drinks” and she said, “they just called and cancelled, we’ve got plenty of time”. So, Jordana was insisting that we go back to our house to grab non-tickets for a show we weren’t going to, in order to surprise Mac, who was sitting right in front of us. It was all going according to plan.

Meanwhile, at 4:30, just after we left the house, my mom, Jordana’s mom and sister and a couple of other brave souls, came into my house and set up decorations all over, cooked finger food and started serving drinks. At 6:30, I called and said we were on our way home to pick up the tickets.

This is why, when Jordana and Steve walked through the door of my house and some 40 people yelled “surprise”, Jordana’s first thought was “what the hell does Sean’s mom do when we’re not here” and her second thought was “I hope these people know I don’t have time to talk to them, I have to get to Mac’s show…”

Mac showed up at about 10, the party ended around 2. The fact that people drank from about 5:30 on is pretty extraordinary.

The best thing- we had a fountain of melted chocolate and fruit and pretzels to dip in it. The fountain was frickin’ awesome.

Also, it was nice for Deb and I to pull the wool over the eyes of two people who are generall smarter than we are. From now on, until the two of them do the same to us, we are officially smarter than they are. No matter who the doctor is.

Jordana got done recording a piece of music a week or so ago, just hours after I read Mac’s draft of the second act of our play. It was a strange evening for me in many ways, but I only have a moment or two to write right now so let me just say a couple of things.

I believe that the lyrics Jordana has written that are right, and the script that Mac has written where it works, are both far superior than the bulk of the stuff I’ve put together. But I also believe that when the planets align, we could have a wonderful piece on our hands.

The song that Jordana has written is breath taking. Finally, after months and months, I’ve heard the sound that will determine the possible greatness of this show. It is the right song for this show, a perfect song for this show, and I’m gonna have to work my ass off for the rest of the summer in order to keep up with the shadow that the possibilities of my co-creators cast on me.

I love these characters in a way much more than I loved the sailors in Fleet Week (although still not as much as I loved the *actors* in Fleet Week). I do think there is the possibility for a spectacular show here, and I look forward to seeing where we go.

However, I’m gonna have to ask your indulgence, those who read this and those I speak to or see on occassion. It isn’t that I’m inspired, it’s that I’m terrified. This show, on top of the three or four things I can’t talk about, are taking my time. So, if I don’t get a call back to you, please, PLEASE, forgive me.

I am in such a totally liminal state right now, and have been for the past several weeks, that it has been really difficult to keep the blog up. There are things I can’t talk about it, things I don’t want to talk about, and things I’d love to talk about except I can feel that I’m becoming the guy who tells the same stories over and over because I never know what I’ve said and I’m having very few original experiences.

This I can say with a good bit of sincerity; I don’t know how it is that some people can maintain the lifestyle of the mythical artist, with great deep draughts of life and nights of severe drinking, and still be capable of producing any kind of art at all. I understand that not everyone wants to produce the same volume of, y’know, stuff that I do, but I’m definitely of the opinion that if you produce quantity, then you can mine out a nugget or two of something palatable, and, seriously, I have wasted more hours in my life than most people have lived, so I feel like buckling down is the only option.

But, man… I have friends who have several jobs and still maintain their artistic lives. Of course, these are friends who simply don’t sleep enough, and who are really bad at keeping blogs. But these people are not, y’know, *drinking*. Ever. Unless they don’t sleep at all.

We have a big board, that I’ve taken pictures of before, and here it is now, blurred to protect the egos of those involved…

At the bottom are my assignments, and it looks like I’m still 5 song and 6 guitar solos shy of being done. The problem, of course, is that these pieces of music take time, and it’s more time than you might think. Because writing a song takes a while, and then, there is the real possibility that it will either suck or, it simply won’t work in this show. I wrote a really nice sweet tune for the A-Train Plays that the reviewers felt didn’t work with the script.

I mean, there wasn’t a script at all and we wrote the thing in 90 minutes on a train in rush hour, but yeah, I can see their point.

So, the liminality continues. Not yet done producing all that I need to produce, and only time and step after step will take me there. Please forgive if this is either boring or poorly updated.

We’re working on “Air Guitar” The Musical, which has prompted several of our friends to offer up their services. Air Theremin has been called. Air Poet has been claimed. Air Harmonica will be played. This has led to things like “Airemin Face” and “Airmonica”.

The problem is that the show isn’t written yet. So, what we really need are some Air Writers, and maybe an Air Director to help us along. In honor of Dan, this is what we really need… Air Dramaturg.

This is a bad idea, and the Air Dramaturg is trying to find out how to explain this.

This is actually a worse idea. Air Dramaturg is actually pissed.

Notice the books…

Actually, that’s not such a bad idea, come to think of it.

The tie really makes the dramaturg

How am I going to make it seem like this is my idea?

Aren’t you glad you’ve got me explainin the play to you?!

This is going to be the very best play ever.

Last night, I returned to the theater where Fleet Week went up for the second time since our show closed. It’s worth perusing the website of the Lucille Lortel, which has been a downtown theater since being a downtown theater meant something. Nowadays, people are performing in converted storefronts and basements, which is certainly really cool, but it isn’t quite the majesty of the plush seats and the proscenium.

I’ve always been really wary of the modern view of Christianity, this love of Jesus like he’s a boyfriend up in the sky. People’s rhapsodic odes where they declare their deep and passionate love of Christ make me feel queasy because there is so much *romance* in it, so much eye-brimming lust, so that people talk of their deity in the same way they describe their husbands or girlfriends. It makes me embarrassed.

So it becomes difficult for me to talk about waking up this morning with a sense of purpose and urgency, and with that faint unsettling feeling of having been made love to the night before by someone new. The show we saw isn’t the best show in the history of whatever, but every time you have sex it isn’t gonna be Cleopatra or a young Lauren Bacall or anything, sometimes it’s just a lovely partner who loves you and lets you sleep well for one night.

This is going to be much shorter than it should be, because I really do find it impossible to describe. I am a fan of theater in a way that I will never be a fan of music. I sit and become transported, my brain goes to a different place when I’m in the theater. I don’t get the same thing from a black box, and this could be the part of my personality that has been accused of only ever dating good looking girls, but there is something about the theatricality, the falseness and attention to detail… there is something about the *attempt* to make a show following the protocols of the theater that fills me with unexplained joy.

As a quick aside, the sprouting up of black box theaters all over the city, and all over the country, is wonderful. I have friends who work exclusively in theater spaces that are too small to handle a proscenium, and the work here can transport me because of the story and the craft. But there is a difference between wearing your own street clothes during a performance and being in costume, between having a set and props and miming the sets and props. I’m not saying it has to be Ibsen for me to get it, but a complete aesthetic, from the seats I’m in all the way to the backstage crew, is capable of transporting me despite the possible limitations of the script. I love being in the theater, and it is the simple love of a simple minded fan.