Houses, Openings and Closings

Vocabularian Car Crash…

My house in Brooklyn has been sold and the sale is closing this coming Monday. At the same time I’m obsessed with houses and openings with Sanctuary. And of course two shows are closing in the coming weeks. It’s all just conflated.

Talked to old friend – not that either of us is old mind you – Jane Scarpantoni, rock and roll and newjazz cellist. We talked about the tension between the public parts of our careers, in both cases we enable others but less so ourselves – she doing string arrangements for other musicians’ albums, in mine productions of other playwrights’ plays – and our inner desires to see our own work done and promulgated.

One wishes all could happen for all… but at some point one must push all others away and begin to realize the work that breathes within our own souls.

On the train I wrote, finally, a page of pretty good dialogue and realized… I can still do this.

This year I’m going to get an entry out to New Dramatists. And to see some more of my work produced both by me and by others. That’s got to remain a promise and be realized as one kept. Otherwise I’m just cheating.

There’s a safety in enabling others to get their work up… then I don’t have to deal with the possibility of failure in my own work… of mistakes made, or proving I’m a fool making bad choices. I can work with Sanctuary and pick great plays and make them happen in front of audiences, and the Times can come out and love them, as they did with Adam’s play. But if I’m not taking the chances with my own work, investing the time to write them, and the heartbreak that inevitably falls from actual productions of the work, then what sort of playwright can I call myself? Love others, yes, but love onesself too. And self-love means seeing work completed, and produced.

So what’s there to complete? Well, since The New Life, and the short Flick See Gears in the Sparklight, I’ve laid back in the safe zone of creating snippets of work, a character drawing there, a page of dialogue here, and not completed anything of substance. This cheat must stop. I must dedicate real time in each day to completing writing and real additional time in communicating that writing to real theaters who might produce it, and to garnering support and resources around myself as a playwright. To do these things will give me the ability to once again call myself a playwright.