Love Letter to a Love Letter

Posted 11:50 AM by sean
Anil Dash has been sorta flying around the internet for a long time, and so posting a direct link to his blog is gonna seem silly to a lot of you who already know who he is, but the idea of moving west has been hanging over me for the last year or so, and he's written a gorgeous blog about leaving New York and going to San Francisco.

I love his blog because I first found it a year or so ago when the title was "New York Invented Christmas". This guy is just gorgeous.

Blog to Mortify Mac

Posted 11:42 AM by sean
The modern theater world is in turmoil for several reasons, and, seemingly for my personal enormous amusement, everyone seems to be writing blogs about it. Go here to start, (that's Mac, my indentured servant playwright) and see also my brother Ian for the weenie rant on his butt hurting during plays.

I'm gonna talk about the butt hurting bullshit as soon as I calm down, which I haven't and may never. The "theater is boring" whine is actually charming when Ian writes it, but it won't stop me from gently applying my size 12s to his ballsac next time I see him.

No, I want to point out that I have been jumping from blog to blog, giggling about the fight between the playwright and the director, knowing the whole time that The Actor has about 87% of the show in his disgusting, vain, egomaniacal, functionally retarded hands. You can talk all you want about shaping a show, but when the audience holds their breath and the lights come up, aint a DAMN THING you can do about it. He's got your taint hairs in his hand, he's gonna tug hard, and you're just wondering when.

Full disclosure, I just finished a show that was an all time low for me in terms of knowing my lines. I think I really got under the skin of the girl playing opposite me because not only was I completely inconsistent with the written dialogue, I also stole the show. If I were her, I'd be furious. I fucking hate being in shows with people who aren't trying very hard and who somehow manage to still get raves not just from the audience, but from the *WRITERS*. The guys who wrote this show loved what I did, and I didn't say half of what they wrote.

(Mac just leaned his forehead into his hand and tried not to barf. He still owes me a play, written for *ME*. And he knows I'm gonna screw up the lines in that play too. AHAHAHAHAHAHA.)

The presence of the actor is what makes live theater so thrilling. Every play you've written could also be a movie, and if it was it could certainly be shaped and made more interesting by a good director. The reason you go see live theater is because you are in the same room with the guy who's making the play *as you watch*. A director spends weeks of rehearsal trying to get the actor to be the guy that the play calls for, only after the playwright has spent years trying to create, out of whole cloth, the guy that the play calls for.

And that guy who exists in the play? He's there in the mind of the actor, if that's not too much of an oxymoron, but sometimes he slips out. It's not just lines. He'll play a scene for laughs. He'll decide that he wants to cross downstage for something. The audience is horrified and he just can't commit to the scene anymore, he starts hedging his bets. Seriously, it isn't just that someone forgets to say "clear as a bell" and instead says "crystal clear", I mean, that shit's gonna happen. I'm saying, this dude will just *do* stuff for reasons you, as the playwright or director, will never understand.

(Mac will joke in rehearsal when I mess up, he'll say "My WORDS! My precious WORDS!" and it's become a joke. But one time, (and to be fair the only time I can remember, and it was years ago) Mac said a piece of dialogue he had written and the audible shock from the audience made his face change. He kept in character, but I looked in his face and it wasn't the character looking at me, it was the guy saying "Oh shit, what did I just say?" We ran for a month afterwards, and he played it to the hilt always afterwards, but I doubt he's forgotten that gasp. It was awesome.)

I don't know how to break it to you, but unless you're working with actors who know how to deliver lines and take direction, you're building statues out of meringue.

And you know what? You get what you deserve. If you hold auditions and you're casting people based on how calm and collected they are during a two minute monologue, then you get what you're asking for. Auditions are ridiculous. They reveal who is the coolest, best looking cat in the room, that's it. Some of these guys who audition well are probably good too, but you can't count on it.

It's hilarious, my profession. How many schools of playwriting are there? How many methods of directing? I mean, sure, you can say "He writes like Mamet" of a playwright or "he likes to work outside-in" of a director, but for acting, we have about 16 different bullshit schools. "I'm very Uta" or "we should do Method for this" or "this is all so Meisner" and you need a snorkle just to breathe. Why does an art that is 90% intuitive have to have these fucking *master's degrees*? My dad's a conductor, my mom writes symphonies, that shit requires learnin'. My peers are liars, right to their socks.

Actors are, for the most part, handsome people who are desperate to prove they are smart, directors are, for the most part, handsome people who know they are smart but want to prove they are busy and playwrights are, for the most part, less handsome people who want to prove that you don't have to be handsome to be awesome. So here's what happens

Playwright writes a play about real people doing real things with an unfortunate amount of verbal dexterity and situations that are either painful to watch or full of hairpin turns that are designed to alarm what the playwright assumes will be a complacent, dull and simple minded audience.

Director takes the play, overanalyzes it, overdevelops it, asks for re-writes on a microscopic level, auditions a billion actors and actresses to find that *perfect* one, creates lighting plots, sounds plots, set designs, rehearsal schedules, costume suggestions (with shoes, hair, make-up, etc.), backstories for the actors, call sheets for the SM, and spends 21 hours a day for weeks and weeks sweating details just so he can have sweat those details when all is said and done.

The actor gets the play, highlights all of his lines, rips out the pages he isn't in, spends two weeks getting off-book by reciting the lines into the mirror while he plays with different hair designs and hits the treadmill for a five pound weight loss that he doesn't need and then the lights go up and he says most of his lines. While he isn't delivering his lines, he's making a lot of those "I'm listening to every word you say" faces while other people are talking and during scenes where he's off stage, he's backstage talking about the fact that Bush is Hitler reincarnate and that there should be a flat tax.

I don't know, maybe that's why you hate theater. It is chock full of assholes.

By the way, the above in no way describes any of my friends. Seriously, you guys are awesome.

Sleepless

Posted 1:51 PM by sean
So I have a response to this goddam article. Yeah, surprise, I have something to say.

Last night was dress rehearsal for my show "The Lady and the Ladle" a children's musical about a town that becomes hopelessly obsessed with commercialism. I've been on edge lately for several reasons, but one of them has been our inability to fit in enough rehearsal for this show. The cast are about as lovely as people get, but it isn't the strongest group I've ever worked with.

As an aside, these are perhaps the loveliest group of people I've ever done a show with, taken as a whole. Everyone is just so damn nice. Even the musical theater people are more or less kind people, and musical theater people are the dregs of humanity usually.

Anyway, we had our final dress last night, and it was really ragged. Some people in the cast are not going to get any better on their lines or their parts, but three or four more rehearsals would have been great for all of us. It's not even character development kind of stuff, it just would have been great.

It's hard to sleep any night between dress and opening, but particularly hard if dress ends at ten and call time is the following morning at 8. In fact, if this blog is a mess, I hope you'll understand that I am operating under Jimmy Stewart in Spirit of St. Louis levels of sleep. I woke up every twenty minutes or so, afraid that I had overslept, and I finally just got up at about 6:15 and left for the show.

Make-up, hair, costumes, pre-show conversation, some girl talking about peacock feathers being bad luck, some guy talking about how touring isn't for him. I don't romanticize these things, but I think I might look back on them fondly if I were ever unable to move from my bed or something. It's lovely, people doing what they can to show off for one another. I dressed by myself but eventually found my way over to the rest of the cast.

The director came in and gave us our five minute call and we got ourselves together and went to the wings.

I called Jordana after the show and I tried to tell her what happened, but I couldn't really, and hours later now, I still can't really describe it. I just know that I don't usually feel okay, I don't usually feel like I'm making the grade or matching up to the people around me. Everyone's got more money than me, everyone's smarter than me, everyone's thinner and more successful and whatever, and I walk around like a coked up clown at a children's party, making balloons and funny faces, desperate to make sure that the people I see either think I'm awesome or, failing that, at least make them understand that I know I'm as much an ass as they think I am.

But waiting in the wings, I feel okay, in the right place. I don't feel like that, I feel like this other thing, that I can't explain. For many people in the audience, this is the first time they have ever seen a live show, people singing and dancing and making them laugh. I remember my first show, I bet you do too. And these kids will remember what I did today for the rest of their lives. They won't remember Paris Hilton.

You know what? I've got something to say about that piece I linked to, but it's gonna have to wait. I just can't do it today.

I'll say this much today. You are a snotty little fuck. I know it's a sin to covet, it's bad to kick dogs, and we should all get more exercise, but, for the record, every time someone celebrates anti-intellectualism, every time someone celebrates the easy answer, every time someone opts for celebrity and kitsch over innovation and work, the steady march of human progress trips a step and, to me, that is the greatest sin of all. You're definitely cool, I'll give you that, but mocking live theater is like laughing at Sally Struthers. It's easy, it's ignorant, it's destructive and it's cruel.

Political Aspirations

Posted 2:05 PM by sean
It may seem fairly obvious to all of you that I am using this blog as a springboard to a life in politics, but I *swear* that's not what I'm trying to do *at all*. Seriously.

So, I would like to take a moment to put my considerable weight behind an idea that might make even those near and dear to me uncomfortable, and surely will guarantee that I won't be electable. Yes, my sister and I were once so high we tried to smoke breakfast cereal through a bong, yes I don't technically have a high school diploma and yes, I have had, in the past, a rather pronounced problem with Athlete's Foot, but in this day and age I think all of these thing would be forgiven. Even the sexual escapades would be, perhaps, giggled over, but I don't think they would change my status as a viable candidate.

No, what I want to put my support behind is actually and idea that is as ancient as the bible. I think we should legalize plural marriage, or polygamy.

I'm pretty sure one of two ideas just jumped into your head. Either "I thought you said you weren't Mormon" or "Kinky! This guy wants two wives!", so let me state for the record, I am not Mormon and God help the man who has more than one wife.

Complete disclosure here, and mom, if you're still reading, plug your ears for a second, but I've been in several multiple partner situations. There have been five times in my life that two fly honeys wanted to trip the light fandango with me. When I think of being in Hawaii at a bar with two 21 year old dancers who both wanted to sleep with me and were willing to do it together so I wouldn't have to chose, it brings a tear to my eye.

And it brings a tear to my eye because I said "No! What? NOOO!" And here's my problem. I'm not old fashioned, that's not it. It's just that being with one woman is damn near impossible. It's like flying a 747, but with all the controls blacked out and no windshield. You've got about twenty things you are supposed to be doing at any one time, but you have only the tiniest physical shudders or aural clues to let you know when you've screwed up. How the hell can you be with more than one woman?

It takes me about two years to figure out what someone wants, how the hell am I supposed to figure out several women at the same time? You try the same shit on more than one woman, you will eventually get slapped. Or worse, laughed at. There is nothing worse than showing up with salad makings and cowboy boots only to get Prufrocked. "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all."

And I'm not Mormon. Those crazy bastards. But seriously, what the hell is any better about being one of those crazy bastards than being any other crazy religious bastard. I know Jews who won't say "Yahweh" because you aren't supposed to say the true name of God. That's fucking crazy. I know Catholics who believe in transubstantiation. That's just nuts.

Also, the Mormons excommunicate anyone who practices plural marriage, and they have done that for the last century. But, there are people living in Utah and Colorado who practice plural marriage and they're having a ball doing it. Or not, maybe they're as miserable as I would be.

But gays should have the right to marry, to have the same rights as non-gays, and if that extends to nutjob religious freaks in the desert, than let 'em. Expose it, honor the marriages, and quit giving these jackholes tax money. There is a legitimate argument that if marriage is extended beyond a relationship between a man and a woman, that people will start arguing that it should extend to plural marriage. Of course, it isn't the plural marriage people who are arguing that, because they sorta like it being illegal.

Y'see, if you have six wives, only the first one is legal. The rest are technically single mothers living with no income, and most of these women have five or six kids each. So the other five are collecting vast sums of money from the government while paying almost no tax themselves. Over 50% of people living in these plural marraige societies collect welfare, and 30% of all babies born in these same towns are paid for by medicaid. That's your tax dollars at work.

Look, I'm married, and I don't need my marriage defended against either homsexuals or crazy Christians. Our marriage is wholly our own. And what if three women who really like each other marry the same man and they live ridiculous fat American lives in a border town in Colorado, why do we think we have to stop that? How is making that illegal American? Let the stupid fat bastards live their lives any way they want to, and quit making me pay for it.

Or, what if these women are abused, disrespected, whatever? If something illegal happens, arrest the fuckers for the illegal thing. If they are selling their 14 year old daughters, then make that illegal. If they are beating their wives, send 'em to jail. Make all the bad stuff illegal, but legalize the marriages. They are, like gay couples, living out their lives and if there is even one family that is doing this happily, it is wrong for it to be illegal. Don't defend my marriage, I don't need it.