Rising from fitful sleep last Friday morning to embrace a brave new chapter in my life, the words erupted like an epiphany of Solomonic proportions, mounted on a massive signpost in my brain, letters vibrating in bold, brilliant blue neon:
What the F--k Did I Do?
This, I am told, is not uncommon.
As a writer, journalistically speaking, I've enjoyed my share of wrenching doubt and exquisite self-loathing, mentally flagellating myself for every misplaced comma, hackneyed sentence, rat's nest of gnarled syntax, train wreck of faulty logic, and flat-out dead-end approach to tons of newspaper and magazine stories/birdcage liner.
Rampant insecurity. The price of massive ego. The ego that dares believe it has something worthwhile to say, something creative to offer, and will hijack a public forum from which to preach it—until last Friday, the printed page.
But this was a foreign and frightening new pulpit for me: the theatrical stage.
That evening, my 10-minute, wham-bam-what-a-ham play, Welcome, Putz, would debut in front of an audience, launching the series of five comic one-acts comprising Midnight Oil, the latest Insomniac Project at Las Vegas Little Theatre. (Concluding this weekend, the bill is filled out by E.G. Stoddard's The Family, Richard Timothy's Hank, Frank Shaw's Chilli and Shawn Overton's Cinnamon Rose.)
Back story: Recently, I ended a series of stories in the Weekly about moving into a new home, with a one-act play called Welcome, Putz. Written to be published, not necessarily performed, it was a comic exaggeration of the aggravations of settling into a new home, including a pull-and-tug with Sprint over much-delayed phone service, and the intrusions of door-to-door solicitors who leap on new homeowners, peddling security systems, window treatments and landscaping.
Essentially, an average schlub doing a slow burn toward meltdown.
It was a lark. An alternative approach to a topic traditionally dispatched in an essay—and a way to entertain myself as a writer. That simple.
Who am I kidding? I always yearned to be a playwright. So I became a critic. Is it not the opinion of most theater professionals who've been the target of a critic's disdain that we're nothing but frustrated playwrights? This is a fallacy. We are not frustrated playwrights. We are overlooked geniuses fueled by righteous indignation over the infuriating fact that those less blessed with breathtaking talent are more blessed with opportunity to exhibit it.
Just joshing. Mostly. But there's a level of truth scattered among this fraternity—more than some critics are willing to acknowledge, less than the people we write about insist is our envy-loaded motivation.
But I was afforded the opportunity to straddle that line when LVLT's Paul Thornton kindly praised the piece and requested permission to perform it. So began an intriguing odyssey.
Theater's collaborative process is a wake-up call to writers whose craft is mostly a solitary pursuit over which, with an assist from editors, we exercise near total control. Once a story is sculpted to our liking, our byline is hoisted atop and it's published—concretized in perpetuity.
But a play sets its own momentum and barrels right past the writer's grasp, reliant on the abilities of others and subject to relentless reinterpretation and reinvention. Unlike print, even the audience affects the presentation and impact of the writer's words, their reactions chemically mixing with the actors' efforts to produce new twists, from subtle to seismic, from performance to performance. The director's vision, the actors' styles, even light and sound cues layer it with depth, dimension and color you never dreamed of while typing your words in simple black and white.
Though I was welcome to offer suggestions and rewrite passages—and did—I couldn't simply hit "delete" and snatch the words, the actions, the gestures, the expressions from those on stage. My own creation, and I was no longer in command of its effect on an audience. They were. It was a humbling, and instructive, experience.
And while a published story is widely disseminated, to a writer it largely vanishes into some massive void—the readership. We know you're there, but aside from occasional comments or letters to the editor, we aren't exposed to your reactions, favorable or otherwise. However, standing in the back of the Little Theatre during last weekend's performances, heart on the brink of collapse, I grinned and cringed with every laughed-at line or gag gone bust. Immediately. Unpredictably. Repeatedly.
A friend has challenged me to author a new play in two months' time and I've accepted the dare. I want to rise once again from the fitful sleep of the playwright, utter those six fretful words, face that fateful opening night. I want my ass where it belongs, where any writer with something to say and the gall to believe anyone wants to hear it, knows it should be.
On the line. And on the stage.
ACT II
Some shows have brief engagements. Others, limited runs. Still others, extended stays.
But only one show has reached what can only be described as the full-holbrook, given that Hal Holbrook has been climbing into Mark Twain's folksy persona for half a century now. And he'll hit the Mark again, when his iconic one-man show, Mark Twain Tonight!, stops off Saturday at UNLV to close out the campus theater season.
"We don't have truth delivered to us very often, especially in this very commercialized world we live in," Holbrook once told Bill Moyers. "Mark Twain cuts right straight through that with a knife."
If you're not too obsessed wondering whether you've Got Milk, or if What Happens Here, Stays Here, or If It's Not Miracle-Gro, It's Just Dirt, give it a look-see.
CURTAIN CALL
We go bilingual next week when Tayrona Theater Co. offers up Colombian writer Nelson Luna's Se Vende una Burra, 7 p.m., May 27-28, at the Winchester Center Theatre. Tickets are only $4 for adults and $2 for kids 12 and younger … The Rainbow Company tackles The Diary of Anne Frank May 28-June 6 at the Charleston Heights Arts Center ... You'll have a Gaius ol' time—as in that demented debaucher in a toga, Gaius Caligula—when the creepy-crawlies of Cockroach Theatre go all Roman on yer ass in Albert Camus' Caligula. It's set for May 28-June 6 at the Arts Factory's SEAT venue, normally reserved for Test Market productions. In its promotional blurb, SEAT informs us that the immoral ol' emperor "corrupts the hearts and minds of all those around him, pushing the limits of what any decent Roman can endure."
As they said in Caesar's salad days: No shiticus, Sherlockius.