Why do you have to bring [oppression] into it?

CultureBot's Jeremy M. Barker has this to say about politics and playwriting (h/t Parabasis):

Most contemporary plays are very essayistic like this; given the homogeneity of the typical theater artist and audience, we know that a play that starts off about war will have something bad to say about it, that a play that engages with gay issues will be pro-gay. (Someone please name me the last big pro-war or anti-gay play you saw professionally produced.) In this typology, the “narrative,” which is essentially the entire play being produced, exists to narrate a series of points that makes the predictable ending impactful, which we charitably still refer to as catharsis.

I'm getting the weirdest sense of deja vu.

I'm having a bit of trouble understanding what is meant by political. I can't really separate politics from aesthetics because politics has a huge influence on aesthetics. How we define good, beautiful, and true has a lot to do with who holds systemic power.

I can agree that sometimes what we call political theatre can be simplistic and preachy, but that has more to do with the fact that it's simplistic and preachy and not that it's overtly political. It's one reason why I can no longer stomach Tyler Perry's work.

I can understand the limitations of constructing a fictional reality around a specific point of view. But what I'm finding it hard to understand is why it's a problem for artists to claim their own subjectivity, such as Josh does for MilkMilkLemonade or what I do for Tulpa, or Anne&Me.

But Joshua Conkel makes a good point when he responds:

I see his point, but I also resent it a little. I might have written a pro-gay play in MilkMilkLemonade, for example, and I'm sure people know straight away that it's a pro-gay play. That said, I don't think anybody knows from the start of the play exactly WHAT I'm going to say about gayness or HOW exactly I'm going to get there. Just because you know a play will be pro gay before you watch it, doesn't mean that it's pro gayness is a spoiler alert. You still have no idea specifically what the playwright is going to say on the subject or how he/she will take you there.

What I see happening in the Barker quote seems to minimize and devalue such work as being "merely" about issues. It's a very insidious form of erasure. Like Josh, I do find it a tad insulting because it positions the struggles that affect our lives as something inconsequential (or rather, inconsequential compared to its entertainment or aesthetic value). Just as the personal is political, the political is also personal. And since art is, at least initially, very personal, I cannot separate my personal self from my political self from my artistic self. I simply don't have the luxury.

The irony of this sentiment, of course, is that the very people who see themselves as separate from and immune to certain kinds of narratives (and political ones at that - ie, who deserves to be in power) are the ones who consume, benefit from, and perpetuate limited narratives themselves. When a story comes from one's experiences as a woman, a person of color, and/or a queer person (to name but a few things), it's pushing an agenda; it's too political; it's not something people can relate to. Yet somehow, I'm supposed to understand the trials and struggles of the King of England or the founder of Facebook as a universal human experience.

Um, OK. If you say so.

ETA: Barker responded while I was posting this.

Why should you give a shit about what queer black women have to say?

This is my first conscious effort and establishing a queer Black womanist liberation poesis (as I've described here). Like I mentioned before, this is probably a lifelong work, and one that will probably change over time, so don't hold me to dissertation-level consistency and rigor because it probably won't be there.

Naturally, when it comes to creating a queer Black womanist liberation poesis, the first thing that comes to mind is: Why?

It's a legitimate question. Why should anyone give a shit what queer Black women have to say? At the moment, queer Black women can offer neither the promise of prosperity nor the threat of destruction. If I can't kill you or make you rich, what difference does listening to me make?

I admit that this line of inquiry can veer existentialist. I may as well be asking what the value of human life is outside of what people can do to or for each other. However, I believe that the question itself deserves better than for us to render it pointless through abstraction. So let's not do that, OK?

While the answer I'm probably supposed to give will say something along the lines of "diversity is good for you" ("Read stuff by Black women and eat your spinach!"), that feels more like regurgitating a slogan than an actual engagement with the question of why our voices are not just beneficial, but critical, to our plays, films, TV shows, and so on?

I think Toni Morrison says it best (emphasis mine).

Almost all of the African-American writers that I know were very much uninterested in one particular area of the world, which is white men. That frees up a lot. It frees up the imagination, because you don't have that gaze. And when I say white men, I don't mean just the character, I mean the establishment, the reviewers, the publishers, the people who are in control. So once you erase that from your canvas, you can really play.

As a creator, that ability to play is vital. I mean that quite literally. We've all come across various works that have been watered down for popular consumption, and in catering to our assumed ignorance and egocentricity, it has sacrificed no small part of its vitality. Now, instead of being a doorway into new ways of expressing and knowing and being, we are constantly faced with mirrors of the same old bullshit. The same old values, the same old ways of interacting, the same old ways of understanding. This makes our collective understanding of our art and audience stagnant, inert, decaying, dead.

When "you can really play," you can imagine - and therefore create - new possibilities. But all those possibilities cannot come from only one source of experience. Seriously, how many ways can you talk about how unique, special, and wonderful straight White dudes are (and how fortunate we are that they rule the world)? Even when there is not a single straight White man present in a particular work, that is overwhelmingly the perspective through which people must experience and interpret it. Without that pressure, without that weight, our plays, films, TV shows, and so on are able to exist with greater breadth, depth, and richness.

But as I mentioned earlier, we cannot express the value of our voices solely in terms of what we, the marginalized and oppressed, can do for everyone else. It must first and foremost have value for us. We've already had the experience where our worth as human beings rested upon our ability to play the roles the dominant classes prescribe for us. Yet rare is the case where we are affirmed as we are in our fullest humanity - pure, rough, messy, and beautiful.

For those of us who are silenced every day because the world we live in devalues and dehumanizes us for our gender, our color, and/or sexuality, to speak for ourselves as ourselves is an act of reclaiming what is often taken from us. Asserting our truth is radical. It is a transformative act and therefore a revolutionary act. This is not the way society tells us we're supposed to be like. We're supposed to be silent and invisible, content in our silence and invisibility, and/or afraid of what would happen were we to see or be seen as we are. Putting ourselves at the center of our lives threatens the status quo because it exposes it for the lie that it is. That there is only one truth worth knowing, one beauty worth having, one goodness worth becoming.

It's incredibly liberating to realize that our goodness, truth, and beauty comes because of who we are rather than despite it.

What about you? Questions? Reflections?

Thinking about talkbacks

I don't usually enjoy talkbacks. There, I said it. It's not about hating my audience or anything like that, but I generally don't get much out of them. I don't get much out of it artistically because I don't rewrite according to what people like or don't like, particularly with regards to content or subject matter. I don't get much out of it personally because being the center of attention for that long, and for a work that is still in progress, it's unrealistic for anyone (including me) to expect me to be "sufficiently detached" from my work to expect me to be receptive to criticism without being discouraged by it. So I'm in this weird position of having to decide between accepting everything or ignoring everything - and if I ignore everything, what's the point of wasting anybody's time with a talkback?

Frankly, most talkbacks feel like something that artists do because they want to say that they care what the audience thinks. A connection between people or a deeper engagement with the work is pretty rare. For the most part, they just come, leave their $0.02, and leave. It's the rare audience member who uses talkbacks as an opportunity to get better acquainted with a particular piece or a company (like I did for The Cell Theatre through Blackboard Plays).

I do believe that most artists genuinely want to hear from the audience about what their work does for them. It's just that they see talkback as part of the play development process when it seems much better suited as a tool for audience development.

Think about it. In what other part of a play's process is the audience so intimately involved? In what other part of a play's process can the audience make so direct a connection not only with us artists, but with each other? Even during opening night, the most you'll get from an audience is that they come in, watch the show, then leave without talking to anyone for longer than about 5 minutes. And after that they might write an article or a blog post reviewing the performance.

What a waste!

There's so much more you can do than the typical talkback format. How about instead of taking 20 minutes or half an hour to tell the artists how to make their art, transform the generic talkback into a roundtable - complete with snacks and refreshments? How would that change the dynamic of audience members giving their reactions to a work?

That's sort of what I'm planning for the birthday party after the staged reading of Tulpa, or Anne&Me. I'd much rather watch a discussion amongst audience members about the things the play brings up and what that means for the audience as opposed to them asking me a bunch of questions. As much as I love writer crack, talking about myself does get boring. I'm far more interested in watching the audience wrestle with the work and bring that struggle out to each other - not in a combative or aggressive way, but with a frankness that the work hopes to encourage. What good is it for a piece to say, "We need to have these conversations" and follow up by not having them?

Go read: Theatre for social change (h/t: Mariah MacCarthy)

Check it out over here.

Can your art be your living? Should it?

Don Hall says you can't make a living off your art. Guy asks whether we should. What do you think?

Frankly, I'm veering toward Don's POV. And it's not because of little things like reality, probability and so on. It's because not making a living off theater makes my work better - because real people live in the real world and as a theater artist, that's where my focus needs to be. Even if I do something completely surreal and fantastical, the core will be about life as it is lived today. I can't get that if I'm a sort of secular monk who can't be bothered with the lives and concerns of laypeople.

Oldie but goodie (7 Reasons Why Indie Theatre Rocks)

Just in time for the New York International Fringe Festival, I'm linking to this gem I came up with a while back. I can't believe I wrote this 2 years ago. I was testing out some stuff I learned about SEO and keywords, which I applied to this article I wrote just for the hell of it. Even to this day, when you Google "indie theatre," this shows up on the first page. So check out 7 Reasons Why Indie Theatre Rocks.

Black Girl Ugly: June 10-26

If you're interested in Tulpa, or Anne&Me, you really need to check out Ashley Brockington's Black Girl Ugly (and buy the t-shirt!).

on diversity and "quality"

Found this post on Racialicioius about how to read and respond to literature of color.

Especially in light of recent discussion about quality when it comes to diversity, I thought it relevant.

Viva le revolution! Travis sez, "Fuggedabout 'em!"

Travis Bedard says something at 2am Theatre ("Revolution") that I've been thinking for a while, but more politely than I would.

 . . . a modest proposal: Forget about them.

I don’t mean the Arena Stages and David Dowers, or the A.C.T. and Portland Center Stages… Every Theatre Bay Area, League of Chicago Theatres, and Austin Creative Alliance that buys in to the conversation is better for us|them|we.  But if the big boys and girls don’t want to play? Forget about them.

We can’t make revolution simply about resources. Most of the folks taking part in the conversation have few. It has to be about ideas. It has to be about creation. We have to eliminate the culture of ownership that drives business and foster a culture of shared ideas.

. . . . . . . . . .

Give it away. Publish your thoughts. Your ideas. Hell, even your scripts if you don’t intend to publish them traditionally. Look into Creative Commons and what it means (Lucas Krech has a great post here to get you started).

See, I'm all for this shit. I must be crazy since I look at an empty space and get paralyzed by the possibilities. I look at what can happen and wonder, "What's stopping it?"

Part of me believes it's the Somebody Oughta Do Something Syndrome. You know - where people know good and goddamned well something that could work, something they could actually do, and then they don't because . . . who knows?

SOMEBODY: I can't stand the way things are going on today! Somebody oughta do something!
ME: Like what?
SOMEBODY: What if XYZ happened? That would change things so much, and it doesn't cost anything! Anybody could do it!
ME: What's stopping you?
SOMEBODY: (Blank stare)

Or perhaps another scenario . . .

SOMEBODY: There's gotta be a way to make this more interesting, more interactive, more . . . something.
ME: Why don't you do something simple yet effective that helps you and others?
SOMEBODY: Yeah, that could work!
ME: Can I try it out with you?
SOMEBODY: (Blank stare)

Or this one that gets kicked around all the time . . .

SOMEBODY: We need more diversity in theatre! Where are all the women and people of color?
ME: (Raises hand)
SOMEBODY: How can we get more women and people of color actor on the theatre blogosphere?
ME: (Points to my blog)
SOMEBODY: Where are all the women and people of color?
ME: (Blank stare)

(Six months later . . .)

SOMEBODY: Where's all the diversity in theatre? All I see are a bunch of White guys!
ME: (Makes a sign that reads, "Woman of Color over here" with an arrow pointing to myself and a link to my blog)
SOMEBODY: Why don't we hear more from women and people of color?
ME: (Showing somebody the sign)
SOMEBODY: What do we do? What do we do?
ME: (Blank stare)

(Six months later . . . )

SOMEBODY: Why don't we hear more about works by women and people of color?
ME: (Sets off fireworks that reads, "RVCBard [arrow pointing at me] is a woman of color. You can reach her at [url, e-mail, address, phone number])
SOMEBODY: Seriously, that's fucked up. We really should be more inclusive of women and people of color.
ME: (Has aneurysm and dies)

(Six months later . . .)

SOMEBODY: RVCBard's been quiet lately.
SOMEBODY ELSE: Who?
SOMEBODY: You know, that one with the No Face icon.
SOMEBODY ELSE: Oh, yeah. I thought maybe she quit. Couldn't hack it, y'know?
SOMEBODY: Yeah, she was pretty hypersensitive about the racial shit.
SOMEBODY ELSE: Mm-hm. Gotta be tough to play with the big boys.
SOMEBODY: Yup.
SOMEBODY ELSE: . . .
SOMEBODY: . . .
SOMEBODY ELSE: I've been thinking. We could use more diversity in theatre. Especially with writers.
SOMEBODY: Yeah, but where are all the women and people of color?

Reading for Anne&Me tonight!

And my pimp - er, pal James Comtois gives you some info over here.

(See me giving hits up to people's stuff?)

Of course, I guess it would be pretty smart if I gave you something extra for you to get a more complete picture of the process. Honestly, reading just about anything under the race, gender, or sexuality tags here is a good start. But you can also head over to my LiveJournal (shutupshutupshutupshutup) and look at a few scenes and ruminations from previous incarnations of Anne&Me.

You may also want to get your bell hooks on (especially Ain't I a Woman, Black Looks, and Sisters of the Yam).

Then smoke some weed or do some mushrooms and learn about the tulpa.

And watch Paranormal Activity at home by yourself at night with the lights cut out.

And maybe read Michael Ende's The Neverending Story (nothing like those movies - although the first one is the shit because I love me some Gmork).

The personal is radical - reflections on my current piece

There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own 

experiences and images are important enough 

to speak about, much less to write about and to perform.

--Deb Margolin, A Perfect Theater for One, 1997

Recently I've been thinking about how Anne&Me is, at its core, an act of radical subjectivity. For marginalized groups, it has always been a struggle to express the wholeness of who we are. Claiming the "I" - embracing one's own self as intrinsically valuable simply because it exists - is a radical political statement.

It is radical because affirming ourselves by telling our own stories and speaking our own truths, without an attempt at justification, is a transgressive and transformative act, a direct challenge to hegemonic power (the ultimate expression of which is the power to define what is true and worthy) and a catalyst for healing the internal wounds inflicted upon us by an environment that says that who we are doesn't matter. It undermines hegemonic power by revealing its own subjectivity, effectively neutralizing its power to define and determine truth and value for all people by exposing it as merely one truth among many.

This is not just a long-winded way of saying everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I'm talking about something far more nuanced and powerful: how we exist in this world. For someone with limited experience with marginalization (and I mean experience, not just entertaining the idea), it's easy to overlook or dismiss its importance. But those of us who live with marginalized identities know the power of finally realizing that we do not have to apologize for being ourselves or prove we are worthy of existing or endorse behaviors and attitudes that make us less whole.

Getting back to theatre and my current piece, Anne&Me is radical not only because it comes from me but because it's also about me - and as a piece of theatre, people literally have to see it. There's no filter named Narrator or Camera to distance people from it. It's right in their faces. In an earlier draft of the play, someone commented that it feels like someone's diary, so they were reluctant to critique it. At the time I was a bit annoyed by that, but now I'm in a position where I can say, "Good."

"Slasherland" review

Check out my Alice in Slasherland review over at Stage and Cinema.

If you feed them, they will come

99Seats has a post that started out being about the Digital Age but wound up talking about food. There's also mention of orgies.

This conversation, although currently seeming to wrestle with the purpose of theatre in the age of Twitter and iPhone, reminds me of some ideas I offered up a while back about how to get more butts in seats. Nevertheless, I find it's still relevant because what I hinted at (without really knowing it) was putting the liveness of theatre front and center instead of merely making it TV or film with four walls.

For me, debating whether our wired world is friend or foe to theater is sort of moot. We are in a wired world. That's it. There's nothing anyone can say to really change that (unless what you're going to say is, "I've invented a time machine, and it works.").

I'm more interested in figuring out how to take the world as it is to create new possibilities - which is what theatre does anyway. Like cgeye, I'm inclined to believe that "we have to start renegotiating the tacit contracts we've made with our audiences, and I don't know if we want to do that."

What are the "rules" we've set up for the actual act of going to see a play (no tardiness, no food, no walking around, no talking, no cell phones, no cameras - funny how these rules are all things you're not supposed to do)? What happens if we break them? What other live art forms can we take inspiration from (concerts, perhaps)? What other communal activities can we learn from (for example, church)?

I'll let you in on a little secret. I love going to the movies with a predominantly non-White audience - especially horror movies*. Know why? Because it's not just a movie. It's an event. If I just want to see the images on the screen, I'd be better served by watching it on DVD at home. But I want the full experience, and that experience includes popcorn, soda, candy - and people talking to the screen. To be very honest, sometimes the audience makes a shitty movie good just by their reaction. And sometimes a great movie becomes phenomenal when you get an "Oooooh, shit!" or a "Daaaaaaamn!" tossed in there. The third (fourth?) time I saw Return of the King was by far my favorite because of how people were reacting to it. The jokes some audience members were cracking had me laughing so hard, you would've thought I was watching Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail.

(* This is why MST3K never caught on with me - I did that shit anyway, although without the robots. Although I had toys. Did that count?)

But it's not just the audience either - it's the popcorn too! Things just don't feel complete without a little bag of corn-flavored air and grease to stuff into my mouth, followed by chocolate, Twizzlers, "fruit" candy, or some other high-calorie, low-nutrition substance. It doesn't have to be junk food per se - just something to eat. For some reason, perhaps because I'm a closet foodie or something, being without food and drink at a movie just feels wrong, so wrong that it's hard for me to focus on the movie because I keep thinking about how nice a bag or tub of buttery goodness followed by high fructose corn syrup with water in it. I can't figure out why that is, but I think it might be worth rooting it out.

New Media Investment - read now

Read this shit right now. Then do it.

Is a playwright's work ever done?

Matt Freeman asks some pretty interesting questions to us playwrights over at his blog. A few things to mull over:

Finished.

That's not a phrase I hear very often, in the collaboration heavy/development happy world of theater. A playscript can often feel, unless it is published, in a constant state of flux. During any production of a play of mine (I don't mean workshop, I mean production) I will receive unsolicited advice quite often on what the next draft of the play should look like, what could or should be changed. The assumption is, I believe, that a play is a moving target, and is never truly finished. I think playwrights have, more often than not, accepted that view of their work.

I'd love to see the term "finished" used more by writers and by those who work in development. There is no piece of work that can satisfy all eyes, all audiences, all metrics. But a writer, and those that he or she trusts, can find a point where they say...not "this is good" but "this is finished."

I also think it's healthy for playwrights to say "this is a finished work." Then, the discussion can evolve. The lectures and lessons from laypersons and professionals alike can end, and a discussion of each play as a fully formed piece of art can emerge.

Yoink! Playwrights and artistic power

Isaac tries (and fails -hahahahaha!) to raise hell by suggesting that the way we think about plays focuses too much on the text/writer. Isaac, perhaps you should try referencing the spontaneous growth of genitalia. At the very least you can insist that not agreeing with you make you un-American - which means you are a terrorist.

Anyway, part of what I like about theatre (as opposed to film) is that it's more democratic than other art forms. There isn't (or rather, doesn't have to be) a central authority figure who makes all the "important" decisions about the play. I like not having complete control over the process. I like the unpredictability of it, how the story and characters in my head can be given a life I never imagined while still using the same base ingredients (my words on the page - whether dialogue or stage directions).

When I write, I deliberately leave space there for an actor, director, or designer to play with. Sure, the story and the words are mine but the performance, the play? Not so much.

I'm inclined to imagine that this sort of "demand" for knowing who's boss at all times comes from the fact that for most of us born in the latter half of the 20th century, film (including television) has been our default dramatic medium. That world is extremely hierarchal and authoritarian, with the director wielding the most power over a performance. I'm certainly not making any sort of value judgment whatsoever about that since film is what it is - a completely different medium that demands different things from its creators and audiences. But the fact remains that, in film at least, it's a medium that puts directors on top of the creative process.

So, I see Isaac's point, which I want to refine a bit. It's not that there's too much focus on the script. It's that people expect the script to do too much. Several comments in response to Isaac's post hint at that, particularly J. Holtham (99 Seats):

I never really understand why we need to parse it out so much, to what end. I was just talking to Matt Freeman about this the other day and he quoted the old saw about being a playwright and how, if everyone loves the play, they'll credit you, but if no one loves the play, they'll blame you. Every play changes in rehearsal, in performance, has limitations that are fixed by the actors or directors, sometimes in the actual words on the page, sometimes in the performing. We all know this, we've all gone through production, but the attitude is still it's all about the playwright. Which, I think, puts undue pressure on playwrights and adds to the frenzy for The Right Play.

As a writer, I've never understood the "need" to create "actor-proof" or "director-immune" scripts. As far as I'm concerned, I'm just there to get the damn story on paper. My duties are pretty simple. Let my collaborators know who is doing what onstage. That's it. Whether that takes the form of a coherent narrative with more-or-less natural dialogue or is a shifting series of images and/or sounds is anybody's guess. But as far as I'm concerned, that's all I'm there to do.

Blackboard Reading Series and Agent 99

Went to the Blackboard Reading Series last night. Had a blast, met some great actors, came away feeling vindicated about the opening scene of Anne&Me (still hoping for death threats).

And 99 Seats does not turn a discussion about theatre into a chest-thumping roar about how Scott doesn't know what he's talking about. To which I ask: Where's the fun in that?

Not-Scott keeps making sense. He needs to stop.

Scott says something at Guy's blog that I found particularly apt for my current script. (bold mine)

the point I was trying to make was not about telling people what to do as much as telling them to imagine work from the viewpoint of a non-specialist. Your Hamlet example is a good one -- you mention theatre people look at you like you're nuts if you do Hamlet without an experimental hook, but if they take of their specialist glasses they will remember that there are a LOT of people -- a LOT of people -- who have never seen Hamlet before. For them, it is a new story. And if we overlay some weird interp because we think just doing the play isn't enough, then they come away confused. It is one thing to do plays with artist-specialists in mind, and another to do plays for the regular audience. Theatre people have a tendency to try to wow their friends, rather than reach an audience of non-specialists, and I think that is a shame.

Perhaps this is where my lack of a theatre gene is a blessing in disguise. So much as I'd enjoy having the respect of Important Theatre People, I don't write for them. So all this talk about holding the audience in contempt and all that? Not about me. In fact, it's often been non-specialists who've shared the most insightful opinions about my work. There is an openness to their approach that is too often lacking in Theatre People and other experts.

Funny that.

Making like a pair of Nike's (aka pimping the Black Ice project)

The project I'm working on is making steady progress, for which I'm grateful. While the scope is smaller than I initially anticipated (3 writers putting up 2 one-acts and a full-length), I think that's just right to get things off the ground. Not to mention, we've remained committed to the initial idea, and that's always most important for getting shit done.

The vision of the group is nearly identical to 13P, but with the emphasis on producing works by new playwrights of color. The idea is to use our shared passion for theater and our status as Othered to empower us when it comes to gathering resources and reaching out to potential audiences and creative partners. We're committed to giving people theatre by and about us that challenges what people assume we stand for and/or are interested in.

This is not just another reading group. We want performances of our work. Rather than sitting around submitting our plays to all these places and waiting for other people to decide our work is worth doing, we're doing it ourselves. We definitely read each other's work. However, our feedback process is geared less towards reviewing our pieces and more towards uncovering the performance possibilities of the scripts and giving the each other a better understanding of how our works . . . work. In other words, instead of trying to rewrite the plays, the group is there to help writers figure out what their plays are capable of and finding the way to make sure that happens - as inspired by the Liz Lerman method of critical response.
Since we're geared toward development and production, we don't do the typical writers' group thing of reading a snippet of a play out loud during a meeting then giving 15 to 30 minutes of instant feedback.

So far we've built a great rapport around digging into and understanding each other's works. Our next meeting is on March 17, and by then we should have completed drafts of our scripts. From there, we can shift to a more pragmatic angle of understanding our works (ie, staging, casting, etc.) Yes, we churned it out very quickly. It's not about quality right now. It's about just doing the damn thing - which is apparently the hardest thing to do.

At the moment, we're going for an early summer show, although that could be pushed to mid- or late summer depending on what we have to work with. Fall might be pushing it too late, considering school and work commitments. We're shooting for a bare bones production (which I'm calling a naked production because that sounds cooler and might get people to come hoping to see nudity). No design or technical elements whatsoever, just actors off-book. I should probably write more about it in a bit since I think that offers something really valuable to performers in particular.

Right now we are looking for venues, organizations, and individuals interested in being a part of our project. If you know of directors, actors, designers, producers, or even marketing and PR people who would be interested in our "naked" production, please feel free to send them our way. We'd love to work with them!

RIP Scott (The truth is out there)

Scott admits he's wrong about something. Like, twice.

I think it's now time to mount a full investigation to alien abductions, for it is clear that Scott Walters has been replaced by one of the pod people. To what purpose the aliens have made off with our favorite cantankerous professor out there in the boonies, I do not know. But I am certain that it must indeed be a nefarious plot by the NYLACHI powers that be.