Happenings

Gotham Stage Company presents a staged reading of LUTHER, this Monday, May 9. 7pm at the Players Theatre in Greenwich Village.

look at me, Poster Mcpostersen. i’m sure it’s just a prelude to another six-month period in which i forget to post.

i propose a website that is comprised entirely of links to blogs that have stopped posting. unless, has someone already started one?

anyhoo, a reading of my play LUTHER next week! In Seattle! I love this play so much. It seems to have a great many appreciators, but no one with a budget has been willing to plunk down the dough on it yet. It’s funny and weird — it supposes a world in which people adopt abandoned veterans of war in the way that we now adopt abandoned animals — but it’s also dark and sad and a little complicated, and I fear that may not strike producers as box office gold. are they crazy?!

nevertheless, these nice folks at the New Century Theatre in Seattle (thanks, Stephanie!) are doing a reading of it on Monday , and I’m grateful for every chance the play gets to find an audience. check it out if you’re in the area.

The Barber and the Farmer is a play I wrote to be performed by a computer. It was previously presented at 3LD and Dixon Place in New York, as well as at the University of Texas. Michael Arthur, a great illustrator who collaborated on the Dixon Place and UT versions, will be doing an original live drawing of the play at Motherlodge on Friday March 25.

Motherlodge is an arts festival in Louisville that runs cocurrent to the Humana Theater Festival. It features lots of New York artists, many of them doing projects that are risky and weird and funny. I wish I could be there to check it out!

Dig it! The band is double-billing with the Les Chauds Pains to celebrate the release of their new CD. They’re French Swing, we’re us! That’s fun stuff!

Wednesday night was the first public presentation of The Barber & the Farmer, my play for computer.  It was held at 3LD Arts & Technology Center.  

About 80 folks came down to see it, and they were a warm and responsive and handsome crowd.  I never know what an audience is thinking, but I felt like some people definitely responded to it.  

The piece asks a lot of the audience.  They really have to invest, and all they have to look at is each other, so they have to navigate that dynamic too.  

I’m glad I got the chance to present the piece in the way I first imagined it.  It will be back someday, either in this form or another.  Maybe as a radio play or podcast. Maybe with some pictures.

A big thanks to Paul DiPietro at 3LD for helping to make it happen.   Thanks, Paul!

On July 8, you can bear witness to The Barber and The Farmer, my new play for computer, at 3LD Art & Technology Center in the Financial District.  The play is about a desperate couple who gets pushed to the limits by the mortgage crisis.  It’s 45 minutes 10 seconds long and is performed by a one-year-old MacBook Pro Computer.

Here’s a link to the invite.

I don’t know if this is the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever had for a project, but it’s right up there.  I don’t understand why it keeps pleasing me.  I’m a hair nervous that it will seem dumb to other human beings, or that what opens up a world of exciting questions and possibility for me will strike others as a snore, but I am psyched to have the piece presented in the way I originally imagined it.  3LD is a super cool space too.

Next week, the Public Theater will host an evening of play excerpts by its first ever Emerging Writers Group (class of ’08). I had the great pleasure of being one of 12 playwrights selected to be in the group (out of 700 applicants).  We met regularly throughout the year under the guidance of the Public’s Mandy Hacket, Liz Frankel and Lisa Kopitsky, to discuss one another’s work, eat free grub, hear from playwrights more accomplished than ourselves, and just generally encourage and inspire one another.

An excerpt from my play LUTHER, which I worked on during the year, will be performed on Wednesday the 11th.  I don’t love the idea of the excerpt nights in general, just because I don’t think you get a real sense of a play from a 10-minute snippet (and in fact, you might even get a misleading sense of it), but I think it’ll be a fun night and I’m proud to be doing it with this crew.

A full reading of LUTHER will be performed at the Public later this Spring, directed by Leigh Silverman.