Just Wrought

Recovering playwright, once won a STRANGER Genius Award for theater. Now writing a bloated novel about… G-d help me! Theatre.

Tag: Tuesday

  • Experimental Results

    Experimental Results

    I made a promise to myself a while back that if I was going to use the word “experiment” in association with my work as a theatre artist, I had to do so more like a scientist and less like some avant garde poser.  As I said in my earlier post “Putting the Fail back in “Experimental”: 

    Any actual scientist understands that true experiments have rules and consequences. Experiments are tests of hypotheses hoping to become theories; and theories, in order to prove useful, must be falsifiable.  In other words, true experiments by definition contain the possibility of failure.

    I would add that good scientists publish their results whether or not they find them gratifying.  And that’s exactly what I intend to do here and now regarding the experiment of publishing my play Ballard House Duet simultaneously with its recent world premiere.  (I enthusiastically explained my reasons for initiating this experiment here.)

    So as of this posting, here is how my sales break down by channel:

    Not a data/chart nerd like me?  Okay, here are my plain English conclusions:

    1. I have too much unsold inventory.  If I had listened to my publisher and ordered the number of books he recommended I’d be sitting on a mere 3% overhang now, which would have been right in the estimator’s sweet spot.
    2. “Show sales” was my strongest channel, which is gratifying, since offering the script simultaneously with performances was the main point of this effort.  If I did this again I would lean even more heavily into this channel: maybe invest in a more visually pleasing display than the cardboard box with the words “Scripts for Sale – $10” scrawled on the front of it in ballpoint pen.

    The bottom line is I turned a profit about three eBay sales ago.  I am now $19.59 richer for this experience; but based solely on the data, I would have to give myself a C +, since I moved only 78 % of my product. 

    Of course, it is much harder to quantify all the things I have learned from the experience, not to mention all the nerdy fun I have had.  Here’s a quick list:

    • People will buy scripts at a show, but they have to be reminded, in the pre-show speech and then again at intermission and after the show.  The display of scripts has to be prominent.  You have to make buying them easy and fun.
    • eBay is not the best means of selling a script on line.  It wound up costing me $2.31 out of every $10 script I sold on-line.  Given the cost of printing, that left me with very little margin to take any profit.  If it hadn’t been for show sales, with their much wider margin, I would still be bleeding red ink at this point.

    The best outcome of this experiment was, of course, the chance to talk about the experiment itself: to revisit the question of whether it makes sense to publish play scripts simultaneously with world premiere productions, and more specifically, whether it makes sense for a playwright to put up his own capital to do so. I would say the short answers to these questions are, “Yes, with some improvements in the process.” And “No, a playwright already banks enough when he or she antes up their play for staging.”

    Fellow playwright Joshua Conkel chimed in on Facebook to point out, “…In the U.K. it’s common to get the script at the show. It costs a few pounds and it also serves as the program…. Oberon Books does it. And then of course the script goes out to bookstores and all that. It’s great!”  Perhaps as Seattle grows as one of the nation’s hothouses for locally grown new theatre, it might behoove us as to explore a script sales model like the UK’s, though it should also be noted that the simultaneous publishing experiment has been run quite extensively here in decades past. Bret Fetzer explained in comments posted on my earlier blog:

    The experience of Rain City Projects — which published plays in conjunction with productions for over ten years… was that when the theater promoted selling the script, it succeeded, and when they didn’t, it didn’t. The single most significant factor, by an order of magnitude, was having someone hold up the script in a preshow speech and say “This is for sale in the lobby; if you enjoyed the show, we encourage you to buy the script.” Other approaches — such as plugging the script for sale in a program ad — had a fraction of the impact of a live preshow plug.

    Over time, theaters became less invested in promoting scripts. There was a trend away from preshow speeches, and even the theaters that still did them just wanted the speaker to say the essentials and get off the stage. Most of the theaters producing new plays were small, volunteer-run organizations, so there was no one to consistently make a plug for the script, and trying to educate a rotating crew of house managers about this was too much to accomplish on top of all the other stuff that had to get done. Everyone supported the idea of selling the scripts in the abstract, but in practice it fell by the wayside.

    But the main reason Rain City Projects stopped publishing individual scripts was that, as these were brand new plays getting their first production, a majority of playwrights learned a lot of new things and did significant rewrites after the production. Immediately the scripts were obsolete and the playwrights didn’t want them sold or distributed….

    My experience working with Original Works Publishing, eBay and Amazon Direct Publishing leads me to believe that new technologies and processes might allow theatres and playwrights to keep their inventory small and flexible enough to offer scripts, either in hard copy or electronically, such that some of the challenges Rain City Projects faced might now be mitigated. 

    One conclusion seems certain: folks who bought my script seem very pleased indeed to be able to own a permanent document  of an otherwise inherently ephemeral experience.  Theatre is fleeting, but perhaps we theatre artists could work a bit harder to bottle some of our volatile moonshine for future times.

    (more…)

    Posted at 1:52 PM in An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, Ballard House Duet, Books, Louis Slotin Sonata, Scripts, The Good Ship Manhattan, Theatre | Comments (4)

    Tags: An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, Ballard House Duet, experimentation in art, Louis Slotin Sonata, Original Works Publishing, Paul Mullin, simultaneous publication, The Don Juan Cult Concerto, The Good Ship Manhattan, The Ten Thousand Things, Tuesday

  • My Friend Goes to LA, Becomes Famous Raccoon, Returns to Seattle to Kill Philosophical Zombies

    My Friend Goes to LA, Becomes Famous Raccoon, Returns to Seattle to Kill Philosophical Zombies

    William Salyers and I met during Seattle’s fervent 90’s: a now hazy golden age when you could beg an actor like Paul Giamatti to be in your play workshop, or witness a writer like Karl Gajdusek premiere his deeply surreal, nearly inaccessible Dr.s F.s in the Terminal Ward twenty years before he would premiere his eminently accessible action series, The Last Resort, on national network television. So Bill Salyers and I already sort of knew each other from the scene when were forced by the exigencies of corporate temping into the close proximity of the licensing department of Northern Life Insurance. The two of us would blunt the boredom when we could by improvising various scenarios. I would open with something like:

    PAUL (best British Colonial Officer voice): Do you remember that time in the Congo when the battalion lost its way and we were forced to eat grubs?

    BILL (way better British Colonial Officer voice): Oh, yes. Sergeant Major Grubbs. Terribly good man. Such a pity.

    No one can match Bill for voices and improv.

    When I began writing my play Tuesday— a piece which I now, in retrospect, recognize as my first post-journeyman work— I could only manage to finish it by assuring myself that Bill would play the main character, Audie McCall. That development process, and culminating first production at AHA! Theatre, began a collaboration that lasted over the following 17 years, with Bill premiering the title role of my Louis Slotin Sonata at Circle X Theatre in LA and then playing it off-Broadway, then playing Walt Whitman among several other rolls in An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, and then inhabiting the skin of the now real-life head of NIH, Francis Collins, in my play about the race to decode the human genome, The Sequence. And it’s not just my plays that Bill has helped to mid-wife. Having run the math, I am now convinced that William Salyers has participated in the world premieres of more plays than any other person currently on the planet. I am still waiting for someone to prove me wrong.

    While the size of the houses my plays premiere in has stayed, well, let’s say “cozy”, Bill has happily gone on to much wider success as a stage actor. For instance, he’s currently premiering Dan O’Brien’s The Body of An American at Portland Center Stage. Beyond the boards, Bill has achieved exponentially greater fame —the kind only Hollywood can offer— for work he’s done as a voice actor. I finally managed to impress my nephews with my show business connections when I told them that the guy who voiced Rigby the Raccoon on The Regular Show was my good friend. (Congratulations to Bill and everyone on TRS for their freshly won Emmy!)

    All this history is just my a long winded wind-up to telling you that Bill will once again be helping me bring a new play to life by playing the role of Simon in a very raw reading of my latest stab, Philosophical Zombie Killers, along with Susanna Burney, John Q. Smith and Amy Love.

    Here’s a sort of synopsis of the play:

    The graduate level seminar is about human consciousness. Or at least that’s what you thought when you signed up for it. Now someone’s telling you that you’re 45 years old and you’re dying. You certainly didn’t sign up for that. Now this alcoholic professor is asking you to explain consciousness to him. And this depressed ex-cop from Missouri is telling you about the epidemic of decapitations in Seattle. And this weird lady from Omnisoft just wants you to admit that there’s no such thing as consciousness and no such thing as you for that matter. Could she possibly be right? Might make dying easier. Who said you were dying?

    And here are the details:

    Who:       Susanna Burney, Amy Love, William Salyers and John Q. Smith

    What:     Philosophical Zombie Killers by Paul Mullin

    Where:   The Bathhouse Theater in Green Lake

    When:    October 15, 2012, 7pm

    How:      Pay what-you-will, including nothing at all. You’re doing us a favor by giving it a listen.

    Reserve seats at Brown Paper Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/278468

    Zombie Bill

    Posted at 1:52 PM in An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, Ballard House Duet, Books, Louis Slotin Sonata, Scripts, The Good Ship Manhattan, Theatre | Comments (4)

    Tags: An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, Ballard House Duet, experimentation in art, Louis Slotin Sonata, Original Works Publishing, Paul Mullin, simultaneous publication, The Don Juan Cult Concerto, The Good Ship Manhattan, The Ten Thousand Things, Tuesday

  • Louis Slotin Sonata is #1!

    Funny story: I mentioned on Google+ this morning that sales of the Kindle version of my play Louis Slotin Sonata seemed to have gone through the roof (though in the interest of perfect honestly, I must now instruct you to picture a roof approximately six inches off the ground.)  Shortly thereafter, my friend and colleague Wes Andrews chimed in to point out that the play is the bestselling e-book in the playwriting category.  (See the rankings here. ) 

    Shocking!

    At this point I began mentally listing reasons this might be so:

    1. In November, Louis Slotin Sonata will be receiving a production on the retired ocean liner, The Queen Mary, produced by California Repertory Company, or Cal Rep for short, the resident theatre company at California State University – Long Beach.  Now, a staging of the play does not necessarily translate into a significant boost in Kindle sales.  I only saw a small uptick when A Red Orchid produced Slotin in Chicago last year; but I wonder if, since the play is being done under the auspices of a university, perhaps certain professors are assigning the text as course reading.  If so, that would be sweet.  I’d like nothing better than to start feeding at the trough of mandatory academic assignment, especially in light of how often and eagerly I rail against the dangers of academia infecting American Theatre with the debilitating disease of elitist inaccessibility.
    2. It ain’t exactly hard to top a list of books about playwriting.  It’s a bit like being the best ice-hockey player in Chad: an achievement, undeniably, but one that needs to be placed in context.  Adding to the irony is the fact that that Louis Slotin Sonata isn’t about playwriting, it is playwriting.  When I first published the script “playwriting” was the closest category Kindle offered.  (A further irony is implied here: Amazon recognized that books about playwriting were more likely to sell than plays themselves.)  All that said, I flatter myself to think that reading Louis Slotin Sonata might teach you things that you won’t learn from Playwriting for Dummies (number two on the list).
    3. You can only get Louis Slotin Sonata on Amazon.  While Slotin is probably my best known play, it is not necessarily the most successful by all standards.  Tuesday has had more productions and The Sequence has netted me more money.  A while ago I decided that I would hold Slotin back from hard-copy publication, if only to see how well it might do if solely offered electronically.  It was an experiment. I like to think Louie would approve.

    Regardless of how I might try to explain it, the situation remains absurd.  And thus, it is my sworn duty as a theatre artist to do everything possible to perpetuate it.  You can help.  You can order the play for your Kindle of course, but if that does not work for you either because…

    • you do not have a Kindle (I sure don’t)
    • or you already have a copy of the play
    • or don’t have the $7.99 to spend

    … you can still help by going to Amazon and supplying a review of the play.  Reviews and good ratings help raise the profile of an electronic title. 

    So think back.  Did you see Slotin in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle or Chicago?  What did you think?  Type those thoughts out and post them to Amazon.  Maybe give the play some stars.  Then sit back with me and see how long we can keep this absurdity going.

    Posted at 1:52 PM in An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, Ballard House Duet, Books, Louis Slotin Sonata, Scripts, The Good Ship Manhattan, Theatre | Comments (4)

    Tags: An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, Ballard House Duet, experimentation in art, Louis Slotin Sonata, Original Works Publishing, Paul Mullin, simultaneous publication, The Don Juan Cult Concerto, The Good Ship Manhattan, The Ten Thousand Things, Tuesday

  • Seattle Artists Lose an Unsung Support

    Seattle Artists Lose an Unsung Support

    When I first came to Seattle in 1990 I had only one decent paying trade to my name: I knew how to clean glass. The problem was I was spoiled. In New York I had worked mostly high-rise residential units and got paid three dollars a window by my boss/friend Patrick Shields who worked next to me and also happened to be an actor/writer himself. In Seattle the only window work I could find was with a large outfit that did commercial properties and offered a flat ten dollars an hour. Instead of a bon vivant, polymath, small business-owner working next to me, I had ex-cons, two-bit bigots and pot-smoking thugs tying my ropes. (Literally.  One guy told me getting high beforehand made him concentrate harder on the knots.) I quit after a week and took a job dishing at a breakfast cafe in Green Lake, but the money from that, barely above minimum wage, just wasn’t enough.

    The advice I got at the 1911, the dive-bar de facto headquarters of 90’s Seattle fringe theatre, situated directly across Fourth Avenue from Annex Theatre, was simple: “go to Woods.” Woods and Associates was a small, locally owned temporary and permanent placement service located in the Galland Building downtown. I protested that I had zero office experience. The advice was reiterated: “Go to Woods. They’ll take care of you.  You can even tell them you’re an actor. They like actors.”

    “They like actors!?”  What kind of outfit was this?

    An outfit, as it turns out, that I would have an ongoing professional relationship with for the next two decades. My fellow Annexers were right.  After my initial interview I was paraded around the office to meet owner Sarah Woods, Sarah’s brother Will, Sarah’s business partner Sam Hunter, plus all the rest of the folks in the placement bullpen.  It didn’t matter that I was an actor or that I had never worked in an office.  I would start out slow and simple, they told me.  First gig: the microfilm department of Northern Life Insurance, where I captured images of old annuities documents on their way to the shredder. To tame the boredom I listened to Rush Limbaugh and KPLU jazz on my Sony Walkman. Aldrich Allen, another Annexer, now dead, worked beside me.  A few years later, when I came back from shooting a movie in Maryland to find my first marriage disintegrating, I needed a job desperately. So Woods put me back at “No Life”, this time in the licensing department. It’s where I got to know William Salyers and began to hatch my plan to write a role that only an actor of his talents could pull off.  A few years later we premiered Tuesday at AHA! Theatre.

    As time went on, I even found myself temping  in the Woods office itself. I called these gigs “meta-temping”. I used to love Fridays, not only because Sarah ordered in lunch and a masseuse every week, but also because Woods, unlike any other temp service I knew, paid every week,  on the week.  Many temps came into to pick up their checks personally, giving me a chance to do a quick gossip swap with my fellow show folk, like Chris Jeffries or Josh List.

    It is not an exaggeration to say Woods was a big part of why my wife and I came back to Seattle from New York City after 9/11.  Temp work in Manhattan had completely dried up.  My unemployment was running out and I had literally no idea how I was going to support our new-born baby boy.  I was certain, however, that if we went back to Seattle, Woods would find work for either Heather or me, so that the other could stay home with the baby.  As it turned out, Heather landed the more lucrative gig—she always could stand working for lawyers more than me.  On nice days I would roll my son in his stroller downtown from Capitol Hill and often visit the folks at Woods after having lunch with Heather.  Bottom line:  after a very tough year, Woods gave us options in another city where theatre thrived.

    Woods and Associates will be closing their offices for good today.  When I spoke with Sarah yesterday she sounded upbeat: “I don’t regret the decision at all, but it I’m the one making it so I understand it’s hard for others.”  I nearly choked up when I told her what Woods had meant to me and my family over the years.  “That’s the sad part,” she replied.  “We’ve all been there for each other: the folks that work for us, the client companies.”  Certainly Woods has always been there for me.  No matter how bad a particular day gig might get, I could always think to myself, “Well, I can quit and Woods’ll take care of me: find me something.”  Now, I guess I’m on my own.  My only solace is that I’m not alone in feeling that way.

    * * *

    So here’s my request.  If you are an artist, theatre or otherwise, and Woods has helped you at some point, please chime in down in the comments section below.  Share a story if you’d like, but chime in, regardless, even with just your name.  I’d love to share a sense of how many creative folks Woods and Associates has helped over the years.

    Posted at 1:52 PM in An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, Ballard House Duet, Books, Louis Slotin Sonata, Scripts, The Good Ship Manhattan, Theatre | Comments (4)

    Tags: An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, Ballard House Duet, experimentation in art, Louis Slotin Sonata, Original Works Publishing, Paul Mullin, simultaneous publication, The Don Juan Cult Concerto, The Good Ship Manhattan, The Ten Thousand Things, Tuesday

  • Joining Averroës’ Search

    Joining Averroës’ Search

    One of my favorite stories by Jorge Luis Borges is “Averroës’ Search”.  It’s not a very good story— Borges himself admits as much in a rather tortured apology that he tacks on at the end—but it’s a story about theatre—at least in part—and since it’s one of the only times Borges, a favorite of mine, touches on the art form that I have sunk so much of myself into, the short piece has become special to me.  I can approximate how many times I have read it by counting the different colors of pencils I have used to mark it up: dark blue, light blue, purple, green.

    The story opens with the great Islamic annotator of Aristotle lamenting the frequent appearance in the Poetics of two words  that, to a devout Muslim of the 12th Century, seem to have no meaning at all: “tragedy” and “comedy”. 

    He had come across them years earlier in the third book of the Rhetoric; no one in all of Islam could guess as to their meaning….  Yet the two arcane words were everywhere in the text of the Poetics—it was impossible to avoid them.

    In the very next paragraph Averroës takes a break from his work and looks down from his balcony. 

    …  There below, in the narrow earthen courtyard, half-naked children were at play.  One of them standing on the shoulders of another, was clearly playing at being a muezzin: his eyes tightly closed, he was chanting the muezzin’s monotonous cry,  There is no God but Allah.  The boy standing motionless and holding him on his shoulders was the turret from which he sang; another kneeling, bowing low in the dirt, was the congregation of the faithful.  The game did not last long— they all wanted to be the muezzin, no one wanted to be the worshippers or the minaret.

    For me, this is Borges at his best and most loveable: a great thinker imagining a great thinker struggling to imagine a concept that, in fact, palpably surrounds him.  As many of my friends who like to argue with me point out, theatre will always survive.  You literally cannot not have theatre.  But as Borges might counter, you can certainly have it without knowing you have it.  Perhaps that’s where we are heading.  The great Argentine did foretell the internet after all.

    Recently, in a fit of frustration that so many people seemed to miss the point of my recent post about playwrights not making a living from their plays while plenty of folks make one making theatre, I recently wrote the following self-pitying status on Face Book. 

    I somehow need to find a way to harness the average Seattle theatre artist’s endless enthusiasm for arguing into an actual force for change.

    Yes, we’re all smart. We’re all well read. We all know how to attack a straw man and cleverly defend the indefensible, but at what point do we decide we can do better and then take steps to do it?

    It’s a cliché, but it always applies: if not us, who? If not now, when?

    Maybe self pitying isn’t the right description.  Maudlin?  Mawkish?  In any case, a good friend and theatre colleague blithely chimed in: “Shut up and do a show.”  It’s good advice.  Well, again, advice isn’t really the right word.  No one telling you to shut up is giving you advice so much as dictating a directive, and a rather ironic one at that, since it’s impossible to tell someone to shut up without opening your mouth.  Still though, the person who said this has a largely gentle heart, and I know he would not want me to do anything I did not really want to do. 

    With the understanding that I did not have a lot of room to talk about Seattle theatre unless I was actually making Seattle theatre, I have been pushing pretty hard on producing over the last few years.  This spring I wrote and served as executive producer for The New New News: A Living Newspaper; a little over a year before that I served in the same capacities for It’s Not the the P-I: A Living Newspaper About a Dying Newspaper.  And before that there was The Ten Thousand Things at Washington Ensemble Theatre, The Don Juan Cult Concerto at NSCC, Tuesday and An American Book of the Dead- The Game Show at Annex Theatre.  Just listing those shows makes me smile and feel tired at the same time.  Boy, have I done some shows since coming back to Seattle in 2002!

    Now it’s 2011 and I have foundered on a fact that frightens me a bit and that I need to share with you.  I don’t want to put on another show.  Even if I did, I don’t have one.  It’s just not in me at the moment.  And I don’t know if it ever will be again.  (It feels like a long moment, frankly.)  I believe this is something that every theatre artist has to face at some point.  A future with no shows.  But just like Averroës, I will be surrounded by theatre whether I know it or not, whether I want it or not.  After all, isn’t the Intiman’s colossal failure a tragedy in the truest sense?

    So, with the understanding that one earns one’s right to speak about Seattle theatre by making Seattle theatre, I need to cash in for a while and keep my mouth shut.  I will still keep Just Wrought active, and still post here, but my advocacy for Seattle becoming a World Class theatre town, and all the kvetching and posturing that goes with it, is hereby retired indefinitely.

    It is time for me to shut up, sit back, and watch the show… as produced by others.

    Posted at 1:52 PM in An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, Ballard House Duet, Books, Louis Slotin Sonata, Scripts, The Good Ship Manhattan, Theatre | Comments (4)

    Tags: An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, Ballard House Duet, experimentation in art, Louis Slotin Sonata, Original Works Publishing, Paul Mullin, simultaneous publication, The Don Juan Cult Concerto, The Good Ship Manhattan, The Ten Thousand Things, Tuesday

  • Chicago Posts: My Shameful Little Secret

    Chicago Posts: My Shameful Little Secret

    In the days of development ramping up to the world premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata in Los Angeles, I once spent a week in a Hollywood apartment in which the same three inches of scummy water never drained from the bottom of the bathtub. As for the New York premiere of my play Tuesday, even though I had attended early rehearsals and had high hopes, I wound up falling asleep during an actual performance, thereby poisoning forever my relationship with that theatre company and its artistic director. I once sent my most obscure and arcane play The Septarchy to an even more obscure little company in Louisville, Kentucky on the recommendation of a gorgeous stage manager running a Twilight Zone I was acting in at Theater Schmeater. Unaccountably, they produced the play and staged one of the best versions of “The New You Boat”—the quantum particle-crewed, Schrödinger’s Box-based mini-submarine play-within-the-play— that I have ever seen.  And I’ve seen them all.  That is my shameful little secret.  I have seen every full production of every full-length play I have ever written.

    If you don’t know already, I am obliged to inform you that, among my fellow American dramatists, this fact identifies me as an abject amateur. Playwrights of a certain caliber simply do not attend every production of their plays.  Worse than being impossible it would be unthinkable.  It would be tacky, pedestrian.  One’s ideal play distribution process goes like this: workshop in Manhattan, and ideally premiere there.  Less preferably, emulate that sequence at one of the regional big houses scattered throughout the nation. After a respectable world premiere production (thought don’t even get me started on the esoterica of what constitutes a “world premiere” and how many times an unprincipled playwright can apply that term to the very same play). Finally, trickle the play down through the theatrical food chain, to smaller and smaller houses, not unlike a wholesale supply network.

    Needless to say, I don’t do it that way.

    While I make more money in a year from theatre than most union card-carrying actors, I will not shrink from being called an amateur, if that is the appellation that seeing every one of my plays earns me. For one, it’s just way too much fun. Even if the production is less than inspiring, going to some new town and partying with perfect strangers who treat me like a cast-mate merely because I wrote the show is arguably the best thing about being a living playwright. (The very best perks, of course, are reserved for the dead.)  How else would I know that Louisville has one of the most beautiful graveyards in the nation? Or that Los Angeles, surprisingly, has some of the best breakfast spots. (I wouldn’t have guessed they even ate breakfast in LA.)

    (Let’s take a break for a moment and enjoy Gary’ Smoot’s 15 minute mash-up illustration for this installation.) (As Gary happily pointed out when he sent this to me, the above crowd would actually represent a pretty good selling night for a lot of my plays.)

    I part ways with my colleagues who seek to distribute their plays like wholesale book-sellers. It’s boring. It’s corporate. And, heck, let’s face it: our dying art form, absurdly or not, is starting to look like a lot better bet than the book business. Besides, our nation’s best work has come from amateurs. Our Founding Fathers, for instance, found the notion of professional politicians anathematic. Our best soldiers have always been citizen-soldiers. And give me any day the amateurs Thoreau and Whitman over the professional philosopher Rand and pro poet Pound. Plus, despite all I’ve said, who says a professional playwright can’t see every production of his plays? I suspect Shakespeare saw every one of his before finally leaving London for good.

    The day may come when I will not be able to attend a particular production of one of my plays. The coming of that day may mean I have finally become a fully professional playwright.

    You know what?

    I can wait.

    "the end" by Gary Smoot

    Posted at 1:52 PM in An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, Ballard House Duet, Books, Louis Slotin Sonata, Scripts, The Good Ship Manhattan, Theatre | Comments (4)

    Tags: An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, Ballard House Duet, experimentation in art, Louis Slotin Sonata, Original Works Publishing, Paul Mullin, simultaneous publication, The Don Juan Cult Concerto, The Good Ship Manhattan, The Ten Thousand Things, Tuesday

  • TUESDAY now for sale

    After dickering with Amazon to prove that I actually owned the rights to my play Tuesday, it’s now for sale for Kindle.

    http://tinyurl.com/yf36fgz

    Posted at 1:52 PM in An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, Ballard House Duet, Books, Louis Slotin Sonata, Scripts, The Good Ship Manhattan, Theatre | Comments (4)

    Tags: An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, Ballard House Duet, experimentation in art, Louis Slotin Sonata, Original Works Publishing, Paul Mullin, simultaneous publication, The Don Juan Cult Concerto, The Good Ship Manhattan, The Ten Thousand Things, Tuesday