Well, as with everything I write, lemme smuggle my way into it via theater history.

In 1939, Tennessee Williams won a $100 playwriting prize for some one-acts he wrote called American Blues. The pages got to a newly established agent named Audrey Wood. Even though Tennessee didn’t really have anything else on his resume, Audrey signed him.

In January 2023, I took my dog out to her favorite spot—this vast, unused soccer field behind an abandoned dry cleaners. I chucked a tennis ball out as far as I could and off she bolted to retrieve it. This is her passion. She would chase and deliver tennis balls until her heart exploded if I didn’t eventually stop her.

In 1940, Tennessee writes the play Battle of Angels. He’s really excited about it and tells Audrey that this—-this— is his big commercial hit. What he actually told her was, and I quote: “I do think this play is Commercial! – Capital ‘C’ as in CASH!” Audrey agreed.

For some reason, watching my dog’s subservient canine behavior (see ball, chase ball, return ball, see ball, chase ball, return ball), made me realize something: I haven’t heard from my agent in three years.

Tennessee and Audrey believed in Battle of Angels so much that Audrey foisted it upon The Theatre Guild. In case you don’t know (and I didn’t), The Theatre Guild was perhaps the most powerful theater producing entity in America then, producing premieres and openings of O’Neill, Shaw, Inge, Wilder, Elmer Rice and many, many more man-playwrights. Founded in 1919, it focused on producing serious, artistically meaningful plays on Broadway, instead of just Michael Jackson, like now. And the Guild could take risks on serious plays because they operated on the subscription model. Essentially, like Netflix, the audience paid for the curator, not the show. They’d buy the whole year in advance, so it was harder for a show to fail due to ticket sales. (I pitched my own version of this idea here).

I’d been with this agent for eleven years. I signed with them after a particularly successful play of mine happened and they liked it. Weird to not have heard from them in so long— not an email, text, holiday card, nothing. But their silence didn’t really ping on my radar because of Covid, which was technically over by then, but only just. I decided to shoot them an email just saying hey.

Audrey Wood does the impossible: she took a risk on pitching her 27-year-old unknown client to this gigantic producing entity and they went for it. The Theatre Guild’s production of Battle of Angels would open in Boston first, then on Broadway. That’s when the trouble starts. Everyone has notes for Tennessee— producers, director, actors. His beautiful script becomes a Frankenstein. Audrey, however, was his support system. Young Tennessee vented his frustrations to her constantly. She was there for him, maintaining that the play was “far ahead of its time.”

I pulled out my phone and emailed. “Hey REDACTED! Just wanted to give a quick hello since it’s been a minute. Hope you had a relaxing holiday. Talk soon!” Within seconds, I got a response: “Address not found: Your message wasn’t delivered to [email address] because the address couldn’t be found, or is unable to receive mail.” That’s weird, I thought.

Battle of Angels is about to open in Boston— despite what Tennessee viewed as the bastardization of his script. But casting is a nightmare. Miriam Hopkins, who played the female lead, refused to perform with any actor she wasn’t sexually attracted to. So the male lead, Val, who was originally played by Larry Sothern, was replaced by Robert Allen, which was ok for a while until Miriam decided he was ugly. Finally, and at the last minute, they settled on an actor named Wesley Addy. Although I have no evidence to prove this, I’m sure Audrey managed Tennessee’s sanity during this time.

So I went to my agent’s website. But instead, a white page read, 404 NOT FOUND. That’s also weird, I thought. I Googled them. From what I could piece together, they closed up their own agency and started a new one. I checked the list of playwright clients on the new website. I was not on it. I felt my heart physically drop into my snow boots.

Battle of Angels opened at The Wilbur Theater on December 30th, 1940. The audience hated it, They booed and hissed. Some made a big show of storming out. The reviews were horrendous. One night, a stagehand fucked up the scene where a store catches on fire and added too much smoke-juice to the smoke machine and smoke filled the theater. People were struggling to breathe. Tennessee described it thusly: “Great sulphurous billows rolled chokingly onto the stage and coiled over the foot-lights. Voices were lost in the banging up of seats as the front rows were evacuated.” For some reason, they didn’t stop the performance that night.

I messaged some friends, asking if they had more intel. It was pretty straightforward: the agent kept their moneymaking-est playwrights—-I know, oxymoron of oxymorons— and seemingly axed the rest. I never got an email from them about it and if it made the news, I missed it. I was able to procure their new email address and considered sending a friendly hello, but then decided not to. I stood in that frozen abandoned soccer field for a few more minutes. Then I gathered up my dog and went home.

Battle of Angels ran a few nights, but after audience complaints of indecency, the Boston City Council sent a team of censorship deputies over to the Wilbur and concluded that yes, Battle of Angels is in fact indecent, especially its treatment of religion. So the production team agrees to cannibalize Tennessee’s script yet again. They removed all “indecent” material from it. Director Margaret Webster said it left the play, “castrated and largely incomprehensible.” It closed in two weeks, never making it to Broadway.

It took me a long time to get over being disappeared like that. But eventually I did. And, with the exception of one terse email exchange, I never really heard from that agent again. I’ve since invented— I mean, signed with— a new agent, Vivian Shapiro of Vivian Shapiro & Associates.

Audrey Wood’s response to the Battle of Angles mess can be summed up in one word: Next. She kept pushing and advocating for Tennessee. She got him odd jobs, a freelancing thing at MGM, even continued hustling Battle of Angels to a few celebrities. But nothing really happened for him for five years. It’s important to remember that during those five years, Audrey didn’t drop Tennessee Williams as a client.

My new agent Vivian is about 65 years old, sinewy and corded, a heavy smoker. She wears only black and is usually draped in expensive scarves. Her dark hair has a shock of white flashing through it and her skills at a smokey-eye are enviable. When I see Vivian at a party or in a theater lobby, she stands stock still, as if her feet have roots ripping through her shoes down to the center of the earth. But the coolest thing about Vivian Shapiro is this: She has my back. And Vivian has told me she feels good about this.

When The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway in March of 1945, I can only assume Audrey Wood also felt good about having her client’s back, too.

Ok. I’m done and hopefully I didn’t just commit professional suicide. Believe me, I’m fine now. Vivian is amazing and I’m so glad I invented— I mean, signed with— her. If you want to get in touch with Vivian about me, please email vivian@theaterishard.com (for real).

Theater is hard. Have our backs.

I read a lot lately that people are worried about A.I. replacing them— at their job, as an generative artist, as an actor, everywhere.

It’s a valid worry. We creative types have the imagination to envision where this A.I. journey ends.

But I’ll be honest: I genuinely never worry about A.I. replacing me. At least in one major part of my life.

Here’s why.

My side-hustle is that I’m a professional voice actor. I’ve been doing it my entire adult life, but I should be much further along in my career. I took a 14 year self-imposed hiatus after my voice coach locked me in his sound proof office and jerked himself off to me reading sample copy for chocolate pudding. I wrote my entire #MeToo narrative here, definitely read it or listen to me read it. Or you can just read about it on CNN.

Long story short, I came back. I now have a lovely commercial voice agent here in NYC who sends me auditions daily which I record and submit from my home studio— a closet my brilliant techie husband Reid converted into a professional grade recording booth.

You probably already know this but a voice over spot for radio, TV, corporate, etc can pay really well.

But any voice actor will tell you: booking commercial work regularly is really hard. It’s a market oversaturated with talent, but worse, a handful of celebrities have straight-up ruined it for the rest of us (John Krasinski, Viola Davis, Jeff Bridges, thanks guys!).

I’ll be honest, it’s been a while since I booked a commercial, despite auditioning daily. The last time I booked something was a Rinvoq TV spot about 8 months ago (probably because I pronounced “Upadacitinib” like a goddamn champ) but at the last minute, the marketing team decided the copy wasn’t right, shelved the project and released me the day before I was scheduled to appear in the studio.

This did not hurt my feelings at all.

Voice casting has very little to do with talent and everything to do with what the marketing people think they want to hear.

So because commercials are so fickle, I more often narrate audiobooks. I’ve done a lot for Recorded Books and as a freelancer for different authors who reach out to me directly through various channels.

But most of my paid voice work, by far, comes from a little known government funded program called the National Library Service for The Blind and Print Disabled (NLS) at The Library of Congress.

The NLS is a free national library program that provides professionally narrated audiobooks to people who are blind, have low vision or a physical disability that prevents them from reading print in English. Through an NLS-collaborating studio here in NYC, I’ve been cast in countless audiobooks for the blind through this valuable program. God help us all if Trump finds out about it.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Why would the United States government use tax-payer dollars to pay human voice actors to narrate audiobooks for the blind when they could easily get an AI voice to do it for free? Everyone’s doing that. The New York Fucking Times does it. Aren’t you afraid of losing your side-hustle to a robot?

No.

Not at all.

And I’ll tell you why in one word: pornography.

You see, 95% of what I’ve ever recorded for the NLS falls into a genre called—-

Uh oh.

I shouldn’t be talking about this so openly.

Because so many of these books are so sexually graphic, often offensively so, I read most of them under a pseudonym. Maybe it would be better if my pseudonym explained all this to you. My pseudonym’s name is—

Uh oh.

If I tell you my pseudonym’s name and you see it listed on an audiobook credit one day, you’ll know it’s me.

Ok then, for the purposes of this Substack, I’ll give my pseudonym a pseudonym.

Everyone, allow me to introduce Sylvia Rosenberg! Sylvia, come on out!

(Enter “Sylvia Rosenberg,” clearly pissed off.)

SYLVIA ROSENBERG: Jesus fucking Christ, Sara you didn’t use my real name did you?!

SARA FARRINGTON: No no no I gave you the pseudonym “Sylvia Rosenberg”—- not your actual name, which is my pseudonym.

SYLVIA: Oh thank god.

SARA: So I brought you here to talk about why human voice actors won’t be replaced by A.I. voices. At least not at the NLS @ The L of C.

SYLVIA: Happy to chat about it. But first can I talk a little bit about what I do?

SARA: Well, I already know, but do share with my readers.

SYLVIA: Great! But before I get into it, I want to make sure I preface this interview by saying that I believe everyone deserves stuff to jerk-off to. Everyone of every race, gender, orientation, ability and religion deserves to watch, listen or think about stuff that gets the poison out. It’s really, really important if we want to maintain a civilization. I’m a huge supporter of pornography and I will defend it to the death. Countries that ban porn have problems, to say the least. And there’s no one more deserving of porn than the blind community. Without the visuals, think about how shitty pornography is. Like, just the audio? Adult performers are bold and should be respected in society, but very few of them do Meisner. Am I making sense?

SARA: Total.

SYLVIA: And I also want to say that I think every member of the human race should be free to write anything they want. No matter how graphic, explicit, disgusting or wrong, I’d rather see people put it in a book than enact it in real life. Am I clear on that?

SARA: Crystal. Now, tell us about the books you narrate.

SYLVIA: Here we go: These books all fall into a genre often called “high-spice romance.” If you’ve never read a high-spice romance novel before, they are always very long, between 350 and 600 pages. For a while, they read like regular romance novels—- meet-cute innocent heteronormative Hallmark channel shite.

SARA: But then?

SYLVIA: But then—and always around page 140— you are ambushed with one of the most graphic sexual narratives you will ever read. This literary assault will go on for maybe 20 or 30 pages. Then, it’s back to sugary-sweet Hallmark cliche for about 40 to 60 pages as if a rigorous titty-fucking at her office didn’t just happen. But soon, you’re ambushed again. Then Hallmark. Then ambush. Then Hallmark. Then ambush. Then the epilogue where these two always get married. Then Slyvia Rosenberg takes a shower and, believe me, it’s to get clean.

SARA: Question.

SYLVIA: Shoot.

SARA: If these “high-spice romances” are purely jerk-off material, then why don’t the sex scenes start till page 140? Why doesn’t the author simply give the people what they want and write page after page after page of sex scenes? Why do the whole Hallmark-esque storyline in-between?

SYLVIA: Well, I could give you a speculative rap about how these awful books are written for women and “women like a story with their sex,” but I actually think that’s a myth. Women like to cut right to the chase too, often faster than men. So I honestly don’t know what the motivation to talk so much is. For me, the “story” parts of high-spices are the hardest stretches to narrate— these books accomplish feats of bad writing I didn’t think possible. Truly literary cesspool run-off. Give me the sex scenes any day. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Can I tell your readers about the characters?

SARA: Please.

SYLVIA: The characters are all exactly the same. First, they are straight. Now, I’ve been narrating high-spice for many years and I’ve never narrated one that wasn’t heteronormative. Although I’m sure gay high-spices exist— Heated Rivalry started as a romance novel, after all—-I’ve yet to encounter one. Do you want the women characters first or the men?

SARA: Let’s do the women.

SYLVIA: Great. The female protagonist is always described as a “strong woman,” but that is always a facade. She is more unstable than a house of cards in traffic. It doesn’t matter who she is or what she does. She might be the CEO of a major corporation, the manager of a football team, small business owner, seasoned EMT, real estate agent, successful entrepreneur—- the more high-stakes the job, the weaker-willed she is. And she’s always “klutzy.” I’ve read some novels where the female protagonist is so klutzy that I become concerned for her neurologically. She drops everything and trips constantly. But there’s a reason, of course: this sets up the entire narrative: She may appear ambitious and independent, but scratch the surface and all she really wants is a man to “protect” her— both from the scary outside world and from herself.

SARA: All the books are like this?

SYLVIA: All the books are like this.

SARA: I find that politically, sociologically, historically and emotionally offensive. Don’t you?

SYLVIA: As your late father would say, does the pope shit in the woods?

SARA: Surely, with those anti-feminist values, these books were written by men in the 1970s and 80s, right?

SYLVIA: Wrong. They are all new releases and I’ve never narrated one that wasn’t written by a woman.

SARA: God helps us all.

SYLVIA: Back to the female lead. She is always single and hasn’t had sex in many years. She’s too busy being a “strong woman” to bother with dating. In fact, it’s been so long since she’s had sex, she’s given up on men and resigned herself to her lonely, workaholic, klutzy life.

SARA: Gosh Sylvia, that sounds like it could open up some interesting and nuanced character psychology— Lily Bart from The House of Mirth comes to mind!

SYLVIA: Oh no no no no “interesting” and “nuanced” and “psychology” are foreign concepts to high-spice authors. These women characters don’t have psychological attributes, only physical ones. These authors only ever describe their female leads as “petite” and with a “button nose.”

SARA: Example?

SYLVIA: “She had a button nose” or “She scrunched up her button nose” or “I couldn’t get enough of her cute little button nose.”

SARA: In every single high-spice I’ve— I mean, you’ve— ever narrated the female protagonist has a “button nose?” Like a child?

SYLVIA: Yep.

SARA: Would you say these female characters are rooted in the aesthetic of pedophilia?

SYLVIA: Ding! Ding! Ding! Tell her what she’s won, Bob! It always starts with a “button nose,” but then she’s always “short,” “giggling,” “perky,” “butterfly-lipped,” “fragile,” “delicate,” etc…

SARA: And how old would you say the average female high-spice protagonist is?

SYLVIA: Well, she always has “long, thick, flowing hair” that she “simply can’t control” and it’s only ever blonde—

SARA: —occasionally red.

SYLVIA: Right. And since very few peri-menopausal women have “long, thick, flowing hair” of any color, button nose or not, I think her age is implied. Also, although the high-spice authors very intentionally do not mention anyone’s race in particular, the whole “blonde” thing makes it pretty obvious.

SARA: So no Black or brown characters?

SYLVIA: I’m sure Black and brown characters exist in other kinds of novels, but the high-spices I’ve encountered are pretty much a white person’s game. Occasionally, a female is described as “curvy,” but even then the author is quick to amend that with, “but petite,” and even quicker to amend that with a heightened body-insecurity. She hates how she looks and always has. Self-hate is an important set up for the high-spice narrative. Because, you see, not only does she need a man to “protect” her, she needs him to convince her she’s pretty as well.

SARA: Now let’s review: The female protagonist in a high-spice romance is a straight, petite white woman with a button nose, who giggles constantly, suffers from body-dysmorphia, has given up on sex and men and is the CEO of a major corporation. Got it?

SYLVIA: Got it.

SARA: Now, will you share a few of the major traits of the male characters in high-spices?

SYLVIA: Gladly. First and most importantly, they are always affiliated with some branch of the United States military. Always. There has never been a male character in a high-spice who isn’t currently serving his country or a recent vet. That means, sure, you get the army guy, navy guy, air force pilot, your errant Green Beret—- but most of the time he’s a SEAL.

SARA: A Navy SEAL?

SYLVIA: Yeah, a Navy SEAL. And he’s always incredibly nervous around women.

SARA: Nervous around women? Are you telling me that this is a member of the elite U.S. Navy special-operations soldiers selected through famously difficult and violent training whose life-threatening missions include international raids, reconnaissance, hostage search and rescue, counterterrorism, and boots-on-the-ground, hand-to-hand combat in active war-zones who can crash-land his chopper inside Osama Bin Laden’s Abottobad compound in the middle of the night, storm it, kill him, destroy the chopper, jump into another chopper and then drop that fucker’s body into the North Arabian Sea, but chatting up woman in a coffee shop eludes him?

SYLVIA: You forgot gorgeous.

SARA: Right.

SYLVIA: I mean, really gorgeous. A towering vision of Olympian manhood— eight, nine feet tall, a mane of dark hair, jacked-up muscles that always “stretch his Henley.”

SARA: His Henley? I thought he was a Navy SEAL.

SYLVIA: He is, but he’s between counterterrorism gigs right now so the US Navy requires him to wear only tight-fighting Henleys on his civilian visits to Indiana or Montana. Which, coincidentally, is where our body-dysmorphic CEO lives her lonely, sexless life. Let’s call her Callie. And him… Pyro.

SARA: Tell my readers more about the character’s names in high-spices.

SYLVIA: Sure. She will always have a pedophilic little girl’s name—Caylee or Kyleigh or Ryleigh or Maisey or Daisy or Poppy or Posey— and he will always have the name equivalent of a throbbing dick-vein— Flint or Knox or Gunner or Blade or Axel or Rip or Grip or Havoc. Now, remember: this may or may not be the name his mother gave him. But because he is in the US military, he must now live the rest of his life with the sobriquet his commanding officer assigned to him upon day one of SEAL training.

SARA: Is this standard operating procedure for the US Navy?

SYLVIA: Apparently yes. Anyway, what follows is standard meet-cute as Callie meets Pyro. Usually, it’s at her place of work which for our purposes, let’s say she… runs an… interior design firm! And he… needs to… redecorate his new house!

SARA: In Indiana or Montana?

SYLVIA: Duh.

SARA: But as a SEAL, wouldn’t Pyro live near a Naval base like in Quantico, Virginia or San Diego?

SYLVIA: No! He can only live in Indiana or Montana! Oh and all his Navy SEAL friends live there, too and are all home at the same time.

SARA: What?

SYLVIA: Don’t ask questions. So for a really, really long time Callie and Pyro non-sexually flirt. Hands touch, thigh brushes thigh, coffee is bought and sipped, ice cream is licked— usually with an internal monologue about how each is secretly wishing they were the ice cream the other is currently licking. And soon backstories are shared.

SARA: Backstories?

SYLVIA: Welcome everyone to “The Demon or Dead Woman Game!” I’ll give you a character and you tell me if their mother or wife is a monstrous, amoral demon or dead! Ready?

SARA: Ready!

SYLVIA: Pyro’s mother? Demon or dead?

SARA: Um, dead?

SYLVIA: Correct! She’s always dead from cancer! Next up, Callie’s mother?

SARA: Hmmm, demon?

SYLVIA: Right again! She cheated on Callie’s dad with her tennis instructor! So Callie’s dad had to raise her all alone. Which is true of all female protagonists in high-spices: The dads always raise the daughters!

SARA: What fuckin’ hero.

SYLVIA: And that’s it for the “Demon or Dead Woman Game!” I’m your host Sylvia Rosenberg and we’ll see ya next time!

SARA: Hang on, Sylvia. Surely now is where the reason why an Adonis like Pyro is inexplicably single is revealed right?

SYLVIA: Right you are! In high-spices, the male protagonist has typically lost his entire family in a horrific accident. Wife and kid struck head on by a semi-tractor-trailer, wife and kid perished in a house fire while he was on a SEAL mission, or of course the old standby, wife died of cancer. (She is never a demon. Demon-status in high-spices is reserved for middle-aged mothers only.)

SARA: Why do they always kill the male character’s wife?

SYLVIA: So he can be vulnerable, doy! Because whoopsie! Look what page we’re on! 139! What’s gonna happen on the next page?

SARA: Lemme guess.

SYLVIA: 30 pages of fuck time!

SARA: Now, stop, Sylvia one sec— this is where I come to my point about A.I., you see I think—

SYLVIA: (interrupting) Oooooh lemme just get into the sex stuff first—

SARA: But this was supposed to have an important point about replacing artists with A.I.!

SYLVIA: But we’ve come this far! And your readers are definitely not high-spicers, this is probably new to them! We’ll get to your thesis about A.I., I promise!

SARA: Go ahead.

SYLVIA: So: Whenever I describe my part time job to people, I like to first say that it does seem to me that one of two things is going on with the authors of these books: 1) This person has never actually had sex, or 2) They are from Mars.

SARA: I’d lean toward the latter.

SYLVIA: Same. Sex in high-spices reads very much the way I imagine a Martian would assume Earthling sex happens. The first Martian indicator is that the word penis is never, ever used. There is only one word for penis and that is the word “length.” We do not say dick, cock, hog, John Thomas, meat, schlong, oh no— only “length.” “Length” is no longer a unit of measurement at IKEA, it is the primary noun for the male reproductive organ.

SARA: Can you use it in a high-spice sentence?

SYLVIA: “Give me your length,” or “I need your length inside me” or “my length twitched.”

SARA: Twitched?

SYLVIA: Yes. Penises do not grow or stiffen in high-spice, they twitch. Constantly. And they start twitching well before the first sexual ambush on page 140.

SARA: Example?

SYLVIA: “Paisley handed Gunner his cup of coffee and when their hands touched, Gunner felt his length twitch.” Penises twitch at the slightest provocation— in jeans, sweats, shorts, at dinner, in early morning SEAL training, in the coffee shop.

SARA: Now, I personally have never seen a man’s penis twitch, but as a cis-female, it’s not my place to tell someone else’s truth. Maybe penises are twitching all around me all the time— during Zoom meetings, at the dry cleaners, at Stop & Shop— and I am just not aware of it.

SYLVIA: We female Earthlings can never know. Further evidence for Martians writing these books is the importance and abundance of semen. It’s everywhere. Buckets of “pre-cum” are enjoyed and ingested. Rivers of semen are spatter-patterned on walls and shower tiles and office windows. Semen is expelled with tremendous force and torque into a female, and, in every book I’ve ever narrated, it always drips down her legs—-

SARA: —tick one for the Martians, they understand gravity.

SYLVIA: But then the Martians seem to think this is a bad thing because the man always always crams the semen back into her vagina manually with his disgusting Navy SEAL fingers. This is where Martians are deeply confused. Martians being Martians, I suppose they think reproduction is as important to us as it is to them?

SARA: Hang on, hang on— no condoms?

SYLVIA: Never.

SARA: But what about birth control or disease?

SYLVIA: I’m glad you asked. This is the pre-coital dialogue exchange in every single high-spice I’ve ever read: “Wait!” Blade shouted, his length in hand. “What is it, Blade?” Posey giggled. “I forgot a condom!” “Don’t worry, Blade,” Posey reassured him. “I’m on birth control.”

SARA: Every single book has this conversation right before sex?

SYLVIA: Every book has this conversation right before sex.

SARA: So you’re telling me that even though Posey hasn’t had sex with anyone in years she has rigorously kept up her pill regimen? And that even though Blade is a ten foot tall Greek God of a Navy SEAL in a taut Henley he doesn’t regularly carry a condom in his wallet?

SYLVIA: Correct. Now I’ve told you about lengths, but I haven’t shared with you the female equivalent.

SARA: My favorite.

SYLVIA: You will never, ever hear the words “vagina” or “pussy” in high-spice. Only “folds.”

SARA: Example?

SYLVIA: “My folds accepted his length,” or “My folds fluttered.” Oh I forgot to mention this: Where men’s penises always twitch, women’s vaginas always “flutter.”

SARA: Flutter? Like a…moth?

SYLVIA: Precisely. Some other commonalities in every single high-spice romance I’ve ever narrated: When women are sexually aroused, all are instantly rendered “sopping wet” or “soaked” or “sitting in a pool.” These Martian authors mistakenly view it as not just a little bit of vaginal slickness— the bedsheets become completely ruined and must be wrung out. Where men plaster the walls in precious Earthling reproductive serum, women ruin bedsheets discharging wave after wave of a mysterious Earth liquid.

SARA: Ok pause: Sylvia, this was supposed to be about how A.I. will never replace voice actors.

SYLVIA: (ignoring this) Martian novelists also believe that men have to jack off every time they shower—

SARA: Ok Sylvia stop—

SYLVIA: Then of course there are the kink books—praise kink, rope play, spank kink, daddy-daughter kink play—

SARA: SYLVIA!

SYLVIA: Sorry. (Beat, Sylvia composes herself) What did you want to say about A.I?

SARA: Only this: I believe that the reason why the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled will never, ever replace its human voice actors with fake A.I. is because of the abundance of porn.

SYLVIA: Preach.

SARA: There is no way a fake A.I. voice can replicate what I— I mean, you, Sylvia Rosenberg— can do with that awful, awful writing. Yes, an A.I. voice can replicate some semblance of the human sound and cadence. It can do non-fiction ok, NYT articles, instruction manuals, textbooks. But 30 page poorly-written sex scenes? It won’t ever be able to make that sound good. Only a human can do that. I’m a classically trained actor with an MFA and I can hardly sell it.

SYLVIA: And the NLS knows this. They know there is no visual layer for an NLS listener, so they are not about to replace the aural layer.

SARA: The NLS’s own Art and Science of Audiobook Production says the narrator’s job is to preserve the author’s “intent,” including “artistic, emotional, and intellectual range.”

SYLVIA: “Intellectual?”

SARA: Go with me here. Do you think Robbie The Robot can convincingly perform the line: “Havoc’s length pulsated as he gulped the juice dripping from Maisley’s sopping folds while simultaneously twisting her left nipple like the dial on his chopper’s CB radio. That’s when Maisley’s orgasm slammed into her— she shrieked, was thrown against the headboard from its sheer force, saw stars and blacked out. When Maisley finally came to, Havoc’s length, oozing precious pre-cum, was ready to go.”

SYLVIA: I think I’m gonna be sick.

SARA: Then I’ve done my job.

(Voice acting is hard, way too hard for A.I.)

POSTSCRIPT: For samples and demos, swing on over to www.ladyfarrington.com

POST-POSTSCRIPT: I want to disclose that yes, those 2 cartoon Martians falling in love in the image for this piece were defintely generated using A.I. Sorry. I was running around this weekend.

a) he quoted Karl Marx and, being a millionaire at the helm of a charity, didn’t feel weird about that at all.

b) he said: “Nobody gives a [expletive] if you fly values and you go bankrupt; you’re not an example of anything but failure. You’ve got to show that you can succeed with values.”

Sure.

Then let’s talk about values.

As mentioned in my last piece, the Public’s only female AD, JoAnne Akalaitis, tried to “succeed with values” by paying artists and offering child care. She was fired for it. (Read the full interview in my 2022 book The Lost Conversation: Interviews With An Enduring Avant-Garde, published by 53rd State Press, or the referenced excerpt here.)

I don’t know.

Paying people and taking care of their kids feel like pretty good values to me. They almost feel like rights.

Sorry.

My sarcasm and bitterness is getting the better of me, as it often does.

So, let me hand this conversation over to some women far more articulate than me about the values Akalaitis was pushing for: Kate Kremer, Lisa Clair and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff.

This week I interviewed these three playwrights and original founders of kUnST fEsT 2026, running September 14th-20th at The Collapsible Hole.

kUnST fEsT is, in their words:

—-brought into being by 3 playwrights in the child-rearing vortex of awe, exhaustion, interruption, grief, extreme mundanity, and inspiration. Lisa Clair, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff and Kate Kremer stole time—between caring, peeing, and teaching—to create experimental plays.

With the festival, these women are living their values: Each is producing the other’s play in the festival, all artists are paid and all children cared for. And, most excitingly for me, their plays live in that beautiful avant-garde stratosphere that is so rare these days.

Please enjoy our convo & defintely grab tix to kUnST fEsT 2026!

SARA FARRINGTON: So kUnST fEsT 2026— on your fundraising page, you wrote this faux-origin story imagining a world where arts funding is prioritized! And the people have an epiphany that theater is essential to our souls! And millions and billions of dollars pour in! And all wars stop!

(Laughter)

SF: And then you write: “just kidding, this is actually just three playwrights producing each other’s work.” Is that how kUnST fEsT came about?

KATE KREMER: Well, we all went to Brooklyn College at the same time.

SF: Ah I didn’t realize that! You had Mac [Wellman] and Erin [Courtney]?

KK: Yeah!

LISA CLAIR: I think we were the last class to have them?

KK: And our plays were very much in conversation. We’d all recently-ish had babies. The chaos and the maelstrom of having kids was present in the plays we shared. That experience of isolation— but also radical togetherness. Our work was also grappling with the political moment and the current state of the theater ecosystem. And so we tried to build a structure to support one another, to make something happen.

SF: It’s much easier to produce together as a collective. So because you trained with Mac—as did I— so I’m guessing the general aesthetic is gonna be in “MacWorld,” as in, more avant-garde. Which I just don’t see anymore. I haven’t seen anything weird in ages.

LC: I think for people who dub themselves “theater artists” it’s more rare. There’s always the niche performance art, the interventionist pop up, there are some like clowns out there causing trouble. But I think an avant-garde piece of theater theater is more rare.

RACHEL KAUDER NALEBUFF: And to linger on that earlier point, Sara for a moment— this opportunity to create kUnST fEsT came about because Lisa is a member of Immediate Medium, which allowed us to just make our work happen. Which means we can discover what our plays are. We can play in the process—the production process and rehearsal process. As opposed to having this polished thing that’s made it through a hundred different submission processes and vetted by a hundred different people, been written by committees—

SF: I know.

RKN: —and marketed.

SF: Ugh I know.

RKN: But because we could build in process, our play descriptions keep changing.

SF: But that’s good though! If you can describe your play, why write the play?

RKN: I agree! I love that!

LC: Another thing about the aesthetic is related to us being moms: we are building around the idea of capacity and care. We have this aesthetic where you see all of the seams, the debris of each of our shows is going to be visible. We’re sharing a scaffold of a set and then moving in and moving out of that scaffold really fast, ideally. Fast in, fast out, taking care of each other, making sure that the humans are coming first. It’s our main aesthetic rule.

KK: And I’d also say our shows share an aesthetic because we’ve all been playing with kids like… a lot. That energy is really alive in all three of the plays. There are these baby games that have inflected the writing. Lisa, I think about that blanket cave moment in yours? It seems like a game you could have played with Rafaela.

LC: Oh yeah.

KK: And whole tracts of my play are things that Imogen said that I transcribed because I was like… she’s bananas.

(Laughter)

KK: So I rearranged it and put it into other people’s mouths.

RKN: And all of our plays are short. You can do so much in an hour. Just like with a kid— in five minutes with a kid you can have a transformative, profound, hilarious experience. I keep trying to make my play longer, but then I cut it. It keeps coming back to an hour. I know Lisa’s is an hour and eight minutes. Being a parent, it’s like…time is limited. This is all we have. And my play for the festival, The Cycles, is built for a pregnant cast.

SF: Is it?

RKN: Yeah.

SF: I’m so curious about that.

KK: Rachel’s play was ten years in the making!

RKN: I started The Cycles from a conceptual place— thinking about theater and labor and working conditions. About ten years ago, I was living in LA surrounded by these glamorous but completely unemployed pregnant actors in the TV and film industry. And I was like oh my god all these people are being blatantly discriminated against! Out of work. And I was like…can I work with them? Can I make a play for them? I had been pregnant and had an abortion, so I hadn’t gone through the full experience of carrying a child. So again, it was much more conceptual for me. The actors I met who were so inspiring and really taught me, busted so many myths for me around pregnant characters you see on stage. So the play happened in LA and I then put it aside. But then after I had my daughter almost two years ago, I was like, oh my god, I need to do this play again— I have so much that I want to change! And strip away! Having a child for me also taught me how little language you need. So there’s a lot less language— the script is like 40 pages.

SF: I love that. Sounds very lean.

RKN: Yeah, I’m like, why did I need monologues? Having a toddler is like being in Meisner world. You’re just saying a word back and forth.

SF: That’s a good point. It’s like an exercise.

RKN: Like, there’s a whole scene in my play where the main word is “work.” People say, “are you working?” “Work?” “What do you mean, work?” “Work, work, work.” I think that’s enough. It becomes like Beckett or Churchill—toddler, Beckett, Churchill. They converge somewhere for me.

SF: I find that to be so refreshing. I haven’t seen a play like that—-unless it is Beckett or it is Churchill— in years. To speak to the pregnancy thing— pregnancy in plays is usually just a plot device. No matter what the story is— pregnancy is a complication, a big reveal. “I’m pregnant.” “Oh god I’m pregnant!” “I’ve got to tell you something…I’m pregnant.” But you never see anybody pregnant, like actually pregnant.

KK: That character always enters in a big coat.

(Laughter)

KK: That’s my favorite— whenever somebody comes onstage in a big coat, I’m like, oh boy!

SF: (Eyeroll) Here comes the plot twist.

KK: And they don’t take the coat off inside. That’s crucial.

SF: And whoever wrote that play obviously doesn’t know that you don’t need to wear a giant coat when you’re first announcing, “I’m pregnant,” because nobody can tell anyway.

(Laughter)

RKN: But back to our initial questions of infrastructure as connected to aesthetic— we want to make the shows accessible for audience members who are parents. I’ve never seen a show at 11AM. Will it work? I don’t know! But maybe it means people can come who wouldn’t otherwise come.

SF: And how about the childcare thing? Can you talk about that?

PAAL is a miracle— for any reader who might not know it’s an advocacy org whose goal is to make being an artist compatible with being a parent.

RKN: Yes, they are amazing. So they’re doing a couple things in partnership with us: they’re providing childcare vouchers for audience members. So anyone who buys a ticket can apply for a voucher and have a licensed babysitter come to your home. We’ll probably have three vouchers available (each for five hours of care).

SF: Wow.

RKN: And the care is provided by through Broadway Babysitters. PAAL is also helping us create honorariums for care (meaning anything related to access needs, eg transportation during a heatwave) for our own festival company. All so we can also create a tiny, slightly more caring world in a violent fucking nation.

SF: My kids are old enough not to need a babysitter now—which is also a miracle— but when they were younger I sometimes brought them to rehearsal. I’d occasionally get a lot of negativity for that, sometimes pushback from people. I once had a performer request, “no more kids at rehearsal.” That hurt me. They weren’t causing problems, they were just in the dressing room for stretches of time. But it was distracting to her, she had sort of an issue. But for years after that I always felt skittish about bringing them. Like this is my problem, not theirs. I don’t want to upset anyone. What’s been your experience there?

LC: It’s an impossible situation. Aside from the festival I also have a barn in the Catskills that we’re starting to make work in. My daughter’s four. So it’s a negotiation—like, do we bring Rafaela to the thing? Do I give her a job? Have her hand out lollipops to everyone? Then will it be okay? Because she feels a sense of ownership over the thing? Are people going to be upset by it? But it comes down to us cultivating an inclusive space— one that includes our children. Essentially, at its core, it has to include our children.

SF: I mean, if it doesn’t include children… what does that say? To me it says: “hey lady you need to coordinate a babysitter, so no one has to see your children.” Like, what? That’s not inclusiveness.

KK: The pragmatics of it are really difficult. PAAL is doing such amazing work, and yet the problem remains really gnarly. It’s so expensive to pay a sitter. And you’re gone for so long. If you add up the show, the travel time, the tech, it’s just… you’re gone for so long. My parents are gonna come and stay with Imogen during the festival, which is gonna be great, but it’s requiring them to fly across the country. It’s these expenses— it would probably be cheaper to have a babysitter during that time, or even to have her with us. But then it’s hard on the kids, too. Carting them on the train to rehearsal.

SF: And then you’re distracted in rehearsal, too. Even just mentally. When my kids were there, I was always half with them. Because I’m their mom and I carry that mom-guilt.

KK: However good they are at entertaining themselves you still pay for it eventually.

SF: And if you pop them on iPads, then I feel bad about that. But if they’re in the room, I feel bad about that. It’s sadly a female problem. I don’t know that men feel a dad-guilt.

KK: That problem of “feeling bad”—- I don’t know what you do about that. That’s one of the banes of motherhood for me. I can feel bad about anything, you know?

SF: Talk more about that.

RKN: You cannot win. You cannot not be judged for whatever choice you make.

KK: Exactly. Any choice. It’s a problem of freedom, like it emerges from my privilege.. I have a choice about how my child is going to be cared for and whether I’m going to take her to my work. I have that panicky feeling that I could/should maximize her experience and make life as good as possible for her. But that pressure to maximize, to make things as good as possible, is actually detrimental to all of our happiness.

SF: Yes.

KK: You have to figure out a way to just be present. My partner is better at that than I am. He’ll be like, “well, this is a time when Imogen just has to… draw for a while.” And I’m like, oh, but is she getting exercise today?

SF: But it goes deeper for me. When I’m making a play, I’m the one who’s fulfilled, the self-actualized artist. Not the kids. Why should my two kids suffer for my self-actualization?! That’s how that mom-guilt manifests in my head.

LC: I often feel guilty too, but then I remember: I’ll be a better mom if I do this.

SF: That’s very true.

LC: I have to do this so I can be a better mom. Even though Rafaela might burst in here now, like “you rehearsed two days this week and now you have a meeting? What do you mean you have a meeting?! I don’t think so! It’s mommy-time!”

(Laughter)

SF: My parents were not artists. And so as a kid going to see a Broadway show or community theater or being in a school play was incredibly novel for me. It was so rare. Like, a religious experience. I felt so lucky. I almost fetishized theater because it was such a rare treat. But for my kids, theater is totally normal. They see me and my husband back and forth in rehearsal and it’s part of their lives. I’m very grateful for that.

KK: I’m right now stitching the binding on one of the books Imogen wrote during yesterday’s rehearsal.

(Kate presents a kid-made handwritten book with red stitching holding the pages together.)

KK: It’s called Little Maids. It’s genius, man.

LC: That is really great.

KK: I’m sewing the binding so that she can have it all stitched together.

SF: I mean, look at that. You should never feel mom-guilt.

KK: I need to invest in a thimble. But yeah, the artistic process is also very normal for her. She just said, “when I finish this book, could you send it out to some people who I don’t know? As long as they’re young?”

(Laughter)

SF: So tell me about the logistics of kUnST fEsT 2026 here. Is it the three of you playwrights lifting the cathedral here or do you have help?

KK: We have so much help. As we mentioned, it started out just the three of us but then we brought in some amazing people. Like, Caitlin Ryan O’Connell— who’s directing Rachel’s play. And Blaze Ferrer who’s doing amazing work as a creative producer. Now we have like a whole world of designers around us.

LC: So there’s PAAL, Broadway Babysitters, a fiscal infrastructure through Immediate Medium— that’s who’s gonna payroll, manage spending, credit cards, all of that backend stuff. They are part of the core group of artists who rent The Collapsible Hole. So Kate, Rachel and I were like, we want to do this festival and we’re looking at venues and do you want to do it with us? And they were like, yes! Let’s do it at The Hole! Let’s see when it’s free! And it was free in six months. And here it is six months later and we’re doing it.

SF: So you simply planned the festival around when Collapsible Hole was free?

KK: The level of planning and prep— it’s kind of like… that question whether to have a second baby, you know?

SF: Yes! I attribute art making to that baby feeling. Like, you guys have made a theater festival— something that wasn’t there before.

LC: And that level of exhaustion around tech week is just a constant hum.

RKN: And I’m already anticipating post-partum depression. I know I’m going to have a huge crash when this is over because it’s given me so much momentum and energy, while also I…kind of can’t imagine doing it again.

(Laughter)

RKN: But to connect back to the lessons of parenthood. I’ve been learning that it’s okay to not generate new work all the time.

SF: Yes.

RKN: Mac [Wellman] really taught us that. One of the things I will never forget Mac saying in our class was, “if you write a play once, you’re a playwright.” You don’t need to write a play every two years, you don’t need to churn it out. So I really love how we’re freed from any expectation.

SF: When I was Mac’s student, he also said, “why are you finishing a play? Unless you have a production, why panic about finishing it?” He was like, just write something weird and work on it, as he said, “like a cat playing with a ball of yarn.” And obviously the implication is if and when you do have a show, then keep fucking with your play until the end. To me this normalizes theatermaking yet again. Makes it part of the fabric of everyday life. Un-fetishizes it.

KK: It’s true, but hard to take that lesson.

SF: Oh I mean, yeah. It’s particularly hard for me because, you know… I’m a workaholic. But Mac was never like that. His life was his art and his art was his life. And he had a beautiful career, you know?

LC: Yeah. Relationships to time have shifted since becoming a mom. Also relationships to a practice. Writing my play for the festival, Notes From a Cottage, I was like: I am going to spend ten minutes a day and just write and simply be in practice and see what happens. That’s all I have. So I set a timer. Whatever happens is what happens.

SF: You set a timer?

LC: Yeah for Notes From The Cottage I was frustrated with my life in general and staring into the void of making a play. So I was like, okay, I’m going to write by hand. And I only have a short amount of time. I’m going to go till the timer runs out or until I fill this page. It’s aesthetically pleasing to have a full page of handwritten work. Just the practice and rhythm of that. And now here we are making a festival of that play.

SF: And Rachel your play is–?

RKN: My play is called The Cycles.

KK: Mine is The Intimacy. Actually, Lisa, I had a similar process. The Intimacy is part of a larger sequence of plays that I’m doing that are all interwoven. I’ve done earlier iterations at The Flow Chart Foundation in Hudson, New York and in Cleveland, and there’s another future iteration, too. The sentences are all in this shifting first person plural– which I started writing in after Imogen was born. I would have a notebook next to me and I would write these sentences that didn’t connect. One of the tenets of the play is that it’s made of non-sequiturs. So one thing doesn’t necessarily follow from another.

SF: Love that.

KK: And then this year I’ve sort of been working it at the level of paragraph. I’m in this writing group– there are seven people, one for each day of the week. Each person is responsible for writing 200 words on your particular day. So, like, I’m Saturday, so on Saturdays, like, I write 200 words. Then the next person writes 200 words that are in response. You can jump off in anyway— maybe it’s an image, maybe it’s a phrase. It’s been a delight. It’s the one writing group I’ve been able to sort of sustain because nobody’s commenting, nothing’s being evaluated. You just write your 200 words and throw it into the world. So some combination of my first person plural post-birth sentences and then my 200 paragraphs— I’m expanding the frame of thought. SF: So did you start your kUnST fEsT play in a postpartum reality?

KK: Yeah, the whole project started back then, but most of the language in this version was written in the past year. It will eventually all be in one world, but not yet.

RKN: What’s the future version, Kate?

KK: The next version is… well. The story is totally broken, but there’s one piece of it from an anecdote about Ray Johnson painting a mural in The Living Theatre’s hallway in the entrance to their new building. The mural was gonna be these handprints of this child. He was gonna trace around the child’s hand, then paint inside of them. And then the child died in a fire.

LC: Oh!

SF: What?

KK: And so he didn’t feel that he could continue with that plan. So he painted over that. But then he came back one night with two crayons in his hands and he walked up and down the stairwell for seven hours. Just tracing these crayons over and over and over into this thickly layered beautiful wax mural sculpture. But then Judith Molina and Julian Beck painted over it.

SF: Painted over the mural?

KK: Yeah.

SF: Why did they do that?

KK: Great question. In retrospect they were like, we made a mistake. They’ve gone on record as saying they didn’t understand it at the time. So the third iteration of my play is a set of text that exists in the same world— but then I’m gonna have Jonathan walk back and forth for seven hours.

SF: Are you really?

KK: Yeah. So that’s the future of it.

SF: I think we need to platform playwriting more this way. Like, writing can be jazz--- the playwriting version of jazz. I see people on social media being weird and performative and non-sequitorial and symbolic all the time, but for whatever reason, theater producers want everything to make sense now. So boring. Everything has to be narrative now, everything has to make sense. So your plays in KunstFest diving deeper into the psyche is a refreshing thing. Mac would be very proud.

KK: I don’t think our plays make very much sense. Sense is not our priority.

SF: Having kids pushes you there, you know? I mean, I have a teenager.

LC: Probably similar to having a two or three year old in the brain shifts.

SF: Oh yeah. He’s like… all over the place with narrative and non-sequitor. He’s like an art piece.

(Laughter)

SF: So how can people get to KunstFest? Tell us what we need to know.

LC: It’s all happening September 15-20, 2026. We have two marathon days on Friday and Saturday, three show days, which is a “full frontal KunstPass.” And in between the shows are snacks and chances to commune with people. Each play’s an hour.

KK: Thematically, they end up really interwoven with cycles and loops and really in conversation, which makes those three show days fun. But we also have two-show days and one-show days for people who can’t commit to the full pass.

RKN: We think that playwrights should produce each other’s work, just like musicians produce each other’s work. And that we playwrights can do things on a more DIY scale. We know it’s already happening; we’re a part of that culture of mutual support.

SF: And it doesn’t have to be a $100,000 production budget on each of you. I have a friend and collaborator in Edinburgh now– she goes every year– and although I’ve never been, I always wonder why New York can’t do that? Why can’t we re-inherit that scrappiness here? A communal thing, like a religious thing, a thing that’s made exclusively by artists. Which kUnST fEsT is.

LC: And partnering with PAAL has made it that, plus the added bonus of the mission being care-based.

SF: Yes! There is nothing worse than being in a process where you aren’t taken care of. Taking care of your people has to be the biggest priority.

RKN: You know, all our plays are basically asking the same thing: how do we remake the world? We’ve inherited this… trash. So how can our process enact those values? It’s imperfect, of course. But just the idea of a “care honorarium?” It almost confuses people, it’s such a foreign concept. I mean… I wish I could have universal healthcare, right? But I do have a hundred dollars toward childcare and that’s better than nothing.

KK: It draws attention to how insufficient the current infrastructure is. What we’re doing is building a roadmap or prototype that we want to show other institutions. To say it is possible to provide care stipends. And yes, it may not be enough, but it’s aspirational. It’s possible.

ticket link for kUnST fEsT: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/immediatemedium/2296541

PAAL donation portal (everything from now through Sept 21 will go towards kUnST fEsT!): https://www.paaltheatre.com/donate

The New York Times interviewed him about it here.

Early in the interview, Eustis says:

“We make history, but we do not make it in the conditions of our own choosing, as Karl Marx once said.”

When a man who makes $1.12 million a year quotes Karl Marx, I have to take a few deep, cleansing breaths.

I’ll admit, there were some hours today when I wanted to dismantle everything in that interview line by line.

But if years of therapy and Al-Anon have taught me anything it’s the phrase: “Stop. Think.”

So I decided instead to share a section from my 2022 book The Lost Conversation: Interviews With An Enduring Avant-Garde, specifically, my interview with JoAnne Akalaitis, who generously let me interview her in 2021. It was an honor, she is a great hero of mine.

JoAnne Akalaitis is a brilliant theater director, an original founder of Mabou Mines, and The Public Theater’s first and only female artistic director since its founding in 1954. She was AD there from 1991-1993.

During her sadly brief tenure, Akalaitis proposed a childcare center at the theater, cutting admin pay by 10% so artists could get paid too and having a reading room/hangout space for any and all artists—- a kind of “third space” where we could have gathered and fostered community.

For these radical ideas, she was promptly fired by the board.

I hope that you take a few minutes to read this quick excerpt about that from my interview with JoAnne Akalaitis. Because when Eustis tells the NYT, “I think the American nonprofit theater movement is over,” let this be a reminder: a woman could have fixed this for you.

***EXCERPT FROM THE LOST CONVERSATION: INTERVIEWS WITH AN ENDURING AVANT-GARDE, PUBLISHED BY 53RD STATE PRESS, 2022***

***END EXCERPT***

To read the whole interview—- it’s enlightening, highly recommend—- please grab a copy of The Lost Conversation from the publisher, 53rd State Press, or anywhere theater books can be procured. Or if money’s an issue, give a shout, seriously.

And thank you JoAnne.

In the book, I interviewed 26 other avant-garde NYC theater makers who started in the 1960s and were still making work at the time of publication.

For more from me on new models and solutions:

Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes

New Democratic Artistic Regime of NYC

In closing, Theater is hard. Just keep going.

“Would you rather live forever or die right now?”

He asks me this all the time. (So much so in fact, I used it in as a scene in my play Look Out.)

My answer is always the same:

“Live forever.”

“Mom,” Levi always says. “This is forever we’re talking about. Forever forever.”

“So?” I bait him.

“So you’d see the sun explode and the universe contract and pretty soon you’d be the only carbon-based life form left in an infinite vacuum of darkness.”

“I know,” I tell him. “But think of the free time…”

I’d be a time-trillionaire. As opposed to what I’m looking at now: Time-poverty.

“Time-poverty” is defined as having so little free time that your entire reality changes. Your thinking and behavior becomes desperate. You’re no longer concerned with what matters to you, only what you can squeeze in before you drop dead.

Which brings me to my latest diary entry breakdown.

In case you’re a newer T.i.H. subscriber (and please skip this part if you’re not), this year I began a personal archeological-paleographical dig to extract and analyze all the entries about the theater I wrote in my countless journals, starting in 1991, when I was 11. I break down each theater-related entry psychologically, emotionally, societally, etc…Then, I further challenge myself to adapt each entry for the stage as a very quick scene. Hopefully, whenever this archeological dig ends, I’ll have accidently written an interesting play.

You can catch up on my previous two excavations here and here.

My last excavation, I am Pinky and The Brain, was me, at 12, finally landing a leading role in the elementary school play: Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. In this entry, my hubris knows no bounds. I thumb my nose at the gods, I smote my enemies, I laugh at those who doubted me. I sound a lot The Brain from Animaniacs.

But strangely, after that entry, I didn’t write a word about actually performing Dorothy. But that’s ok. I was a child who just won something and that’s all that mattered. (But you don’t have to be a 12-year old to mistake getting the role for doing the role. I’ve cast many an adult actor over the years, who joyfully accepted the role, who I then never heard from again. It feels good to win the lottery, but for theater making at least, obviously, that’s just step one.)

SIDE QUEST #1: What followed my Dorothy diary entry was page after page after page of boys. Months and months and months of boys. I was disturbingly preoccupied with boys. I brought this up with my shrink recently.

“Most of what I wrote in my diaries was about boys.” I lamented.

“Normal,” my shrink said.

“No, you don’t understand,” I said. “I’d become so fixated on some boy that my entire reality was altered. My first real love in high school, this guy Ryan, I have almost three full journals just about him! So what’s my new plan of care? Ketamine? Voluntary commitment?”

“Again, normal.” (My shrink’s “you’re ok” philosophy is my north star.)

All this to say, I had to skip over a lot of boy-heavy diary entries to get from Dorothy in 1992 to my next theater mention in 1994, which I’ll break down now.

Here’s the entry, I wrote it 32 years of precious time ago, in June, 1994, when I was 13 in 8th grade.

A youthful awareness of time-poverty is everywhere here. Time is a thing, an Albee-esque physical object to hold—- evidenced first by “this has been the best year of my life by far” and of course the next line—-

I just can’t believe I’m in high school already. Soon I’m going to have to think about what I’m going to do with my life.

I seemed to know that I was time-rich in 8th grade, time was a Platinum card with a massive credit limit and 0% interest. But I knew it wouldn’t last because I immediately I remind myself in the next line that I already know how I will spend my riches:

I’ve already made up my mind though. I can’t picture myself doing anything else but being on stage.

Digging my heels in about how I intended to invest and budget my time-wealth was the greatest gift my 13-year-old self could have given my 45-year-old self. I can’t believe I had the instinct to do this. It was a form of existential life-insurance, but also self-preservation. Because in the years that followed this entry, I grew very confused, reckless, sad, mad, misguided, led astray. But a fear of time-wasting was ever-present in my consciousness. It warned me that if I went too far in the wrong direction, did too much of a bad thing, I’d risk losing all my time. And if I lost all my time, one day, many decades later, maybe I’d get my act together and wake up to financial wealth but existential destitution.

That’s my place! I want to get started now.

Whereas in my previous two entries, I immaturely viewed myself as a raw talent unjustly ignored, awaiting discovery at Schwab’s Pharmacy, this “I want to get started now” line implies an acknowledgement of work and an awareness of time circling the drain. “The stage” was a far away Valhalla I had to reach and I seem to be waking up to how long it would take. Not doing it, languishing inside my Long Island childhood, was like setting my time-dollars on fire.

But whenever you tell someone you want to be an actress, they automatically think movie star. Well, not me. I want to be on stage!!! No one can understand that. No one understands!!!

SIDE QUEST #2: Although this section is not really about time-poverty, I thought I’d go a little off track to break down the importance of this feeling of being misunderstood by society.

In my 20s and 30s, when I told a civilian I was a playwright, their standard response was (all together now):

“What of yours have I seen?”

I used to panic at this question. Nothing I did or said could ever rise to the occasion of what the civilian was asking here. What of mine would she have seen? Uh… In a flash, I’d mentally blast through my resume. What’s the most mainstream thing I’ve ever done? Which thing sold the most tickets? Which thing got the best review? When I came up empty-handed, which I always did, I’d curse myself for the massive failure I am, before smiling politely and saying:

“You probably haven’t seen any of my work.”

And, undaunted, the civilian then would say:

“Have any of your plays been on Broadway?”

And after my the elevator of my soul free-fell to the groundfloor, killing any hope of redemption and self-respect, I’d pretentiously say:

“Oh no. I’m a bit too avant-garde for Broadway.”

But now, at 45, that question doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I understand that they don’t understand and I don’t feel the shame I used to, only a pang of “they just don’t get it” and the echo of my shrink’s, “you’re ok.”

Anyway, side-quest over.

The next bit:

Oh! Why couldn’t I have been born in 1900? That would have made me in the prime of my life during the Roaring ‘20s. I could have done so much. I’d have married George Gershwin and have been famous in the Broadway scene. But no! I had to be born in the stupid 1980s. The worst decade is the ‘90s. You have no idea. I wouldn’t mind being old today if I only could have been there. Everything was so much more romantic and everyone had a chance to make it big.

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: I no longer feel this way.

Judging by my ongoing parasocial kinship with “mad” women-artists from the 1920s (Zelda Fitzgerald, Dora Maar, etc…) I am pretty sure, like them, I would not have done well in their time.

And I’ll be honest: I don’t think George Gershwin would have married me.

Gershwin was a lifelong bachelor with an almost religious devotion to his work, working constantly, day and night. Because somewhere in him he knew that despite his enormous success, fame, wealth, boundless musical experimentation and almost superhuman creativity, he was time-poor. In February of 1937, while performing his breathtaking Concerto In F, he became disoriented and lost his place in the music. But he kept working in the weeks after, even harder than before, despite his worsening headaches. On July 9th, Gershwin collapsed and died from a glioblastoma, an incurable brain tumor. He was 38.

So he wouldn’t have had time for me.

But because he was a genius and because he was a beautiful, lithe, elegant man consumed by his artistic calling, I would definitely have tried to hit that.

“Hiya George,” I’d say at the cast party at the bar, amorous on gin.

“Hello,” he’d say, not looking up from the piano. “Any requests?”

“Just a question,” I’d say.

“Shoot.”

“Well,” I’d lean in. “Would you rather live forever or die right now?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” George would silkily say. “Live forever.”

I want to rehearse in an empty, spacious theater which would be filled that very night with people who just paid $60 to see me. I want them to clap for me and I want to feel the sweat of the spotlights. I want that so bad I’d kill for it.

I’ll forgive myself the icky, childish fame-hunger in this entry (the $60 ticket price? The crowd clapping for just me specifically?) but 32 years of time has not eroded the primary want here, rather brought it into deep relief.

When I was a student at the National Theater Institute at The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in 2001, a teacher asked us to visualize ourselves in 20 years— to actually see, hear, even smell where we were. It’s a common self-actualization exercise and always easy for me. As evidenced in my journal, I’d been doing it since I was a kid: “rehearsing in an empty, spacious theater, under the sweat of the spotlights.” I’m unsure if the lights are sweating or I am, but both visuals are nice.

Anyway, to sum up:

As a playwright, I feel time-poverty on a micro-scale every day. Like when I waste my precious time-dollars applying to things I’ll never get. Or when I put thought and effort into a relationship or institution only to be abruptly ghosted. It’s petty time-theft, all of it.

But on a macro-scale, time-poverty is much worse for me to think about, for us as a society to face, especially for the American Theater as a whole.

Because I will be dead soon, we all will be. Every day that passes brings me and you one day closer to the grave. That mission statement about love and trees and championing new work? Ashes. Your “I didn’t do it” musical celebrating Michael Jackson? Space dust. Such hubris to think we have the time to afford making shite theater. I, we, must make innovative, dangerous, charged and experimental new American plays, plays that will remind us that forever forever is coming and we won’t be here for it. It’s just a fact.

So, like Gershwin, who I have outlived by seven years, I try to work as hard and fast as I can.

Theater is hard. And gone in a minute.

POSTSCRIPT

Here’s my quick and dirty adaptation of the entry, which is the artistic purpose of my archeology-paleography playwriting project. (This one is more a synthesis of the time musings above.)

CHARACTERS:.

SARA, me.

LEVI, my kid, 10.

GEORGE GERSHWIN, George Gershwin.

July 2026.

LEVI: Would you rather live forever or die right now?

July 1937.

SARA: Hiya George.

July 2026.

SARA: Live forever.

LEVI: This is forever we’re talking about. Forever forever.

SARA: So?

July 1937.

GERSHWIN: Any requests?

SARA: Just a question.

GERSHWIN: Shoot.

July 2026.

SARA: So?

LEVI: So you’d see the sun explode and the universe contract and pretty soon you’d be the only carbon-based life form left in an infinite vacuum of darkness.

July 1937.

SARA: Would you rather live forever or die right now?

GERSHWIN: Isn’t it obvious?

July 2026.

SARA: I know.

July 1937.

SARA: Well?

GERSHWIN: Live forever.

SARA: This is forever we’re talking about. Forever forever.

GERSHWIN: I know. Think of the free time.

July 2026.

SARA: But think of the free time…

END OF SCENE.

The other day, I dropped my kid and his friend off at the movie theater to see Toy Story 5. Because they like to feel independent and because I don’t want to watch Toy Story 5, I gave them my credit card and sat outside in my car in the parking lot.

I know that sounds like a strange way to spend two hours, but as an introvert with photosensitivity, sensory issues and very limited ability to suffer fools gladly, sitting alone inside a quiet locked car is my idea of heaven.

Soon, my playwright friend called.

She wanted to chat about how to balance playwriting while working a full time 9-5 office job, something she knows I do and something she was about to start doing.

“I just… I can’t be an office worker,” she said dismayed.

“But you won’t be an office worker.” I said. “You’d still be a playwright.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

I thought for a second and said, “I had this theater professor in college who once, inconceivably, said to my small class of aspiring actors:

‘What you do for money— that is what you are.’

He said it with a tone of inevitability, with a casual smile and a shrug. As in, sorry kid, you can scream ‘artist’ till your larynx blows out, but if your W2 says hostess, you’re a hostess. Capesh? Now everyone turn to Act II Scene I of Vanya.

I remember at the time being 90% sure this was bullshit. I was training to be an actor then and because it would obviously take a minute for me to become Ethel Merman Jr. I’d need a day-hustle as a waiter or hostess or dog sitter or whatever. But would that then negate my aspiring actor status? Of course not. That’s not even a question worth asking.

But 10% of me was like… maybe? He’s the professor, after all. Maybe I hostess, therefore I am. Maybe whatever pays the bills is in fact reality and everything else is delusion. Maybe it really is that that grotesquely capitalistic, that… feudal. Like: you’re a farmer and you’re a blacksmith and you’re a prostitute and we all work in service to the lord of the manor and if you don’t like it there’s an ice floe with your name on it.

What a horrible, false concept.

Real life example: the other night I went to see my friend and brilliant playwright Jonathan Spector’s new play Birthright. Afterwards, I walked from MCC down to Penn Station to go home. It was around midnight so the Penn Station late night crowd was in full force— drunks, homeless, drunks, fanatical sports fans, second shifters, more drunks, New York’s shadiest and sleaziest. I zipped into the women’s bathroom. Waiting in a long line of girl-drunks, I spotted a young woman sweeping the floor of the stalls.

I covertly watched her, just for a second.

She wasn’t angry about it, she was just doing it, dare I say, contentedly. She had something else on her mind, something mentally transporting her.

So? Is sweeping the stall floors at Penn Station all this woman is?”

“Of course not,” my friend said.

“Not according Professor Fiefdom of Richard Scarry Manor. The same would apply to you at your potential full time 9-5. I say: take the job, make the evil (but stupid) capitalistic system your bitch and keep yourself housed, fed and pap-smear’d so that you are then completely free to be what you actually are: a playwright.”

“But when?” My friend asked.

“What do you mean, when?” I asked.

“When are you a playwright? Do you just… use your vacation days?”

I rolled up the windows of my car. This was gonna get ugly.

“Listen:” I said. “The American workforce gets a real hard-on when you give up your dreams. Pam Bondi loves to hear you dropped playwriting. JD Vance? He gets aroused at the mere thought of you knowing your place. But it is a lie, a terrible lie.

As long as you are practicing, you are a playwright 100% of the time. Dropping art because you have a full time day job is as absurd as dropping, I don’t know… Judaism or Buddhism because you have a full time day job or-or-or dropping being a woman or dropping your favorite band or dropping liking turquoise or cilantro. Theater is in you. It is you. So you must find a way to make being a playwright work while also surviving Trump’s idiocratic America simultaneously— not just on a two week vacation allotment, but all the time.”

“How do you do it?” She asked.

“Well, I’m sneaky,” I said.

“Sneaky?”

“Yeah. Sneaky means write and eat. Sneaky means decline that happy hour. Sneaky means no more binge-watching shite TV. Or good TV, for that matter. Sneaky means declining that wedding or baby shower invite. Sneaky means printing things out in places that have printers. Sneaky means reading the room and, if it’s safe, writing inside it. Sneaky means buying a privacy screen protector. Remember what George Costanza said about work? “Always look annoyed. When you look annoyed, people think you’re busy.” Sneaky means developing a two-track mind 100% of the time. Sneaky is harmonizing— work sings Anita, playwriting sings Maria.

And this is the most important thing: when the job yanks your attention away, be ok with that. Perfectly ok. Evolve a metal agility that continues to function inside the yank. Sarah Ruhl aptly labeled this process in her book, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, as “working within the interruptions.” Don’t get mad, just practice Radical Interruption Acceptance (or R.I.A). Have your way with capitalism the same way it has its way with you— has been having its way with you your entire life! I mean, doesn’t that piss you off?”

“Yeah,” my friend said. “It does.”

“Then seek your revenge by maintaining a job and an artistic practice in equal measures. There is room enough in life for both. Now don’t get it twisted: I don’t like that it’s this way. Do I wish I were independently wealthy and didn’t have to work at all? You can bet your last plug red wooden nickel I do. But I cannot control society, nor should I waste my time wishing and praying for things. It’s like wishing the alcoholic would stop drinking or that The NPC at The O’Neill would think about different ways to consider my play beyond one read.”

“Hm.” My friend sounded skeptical.

“I know, I know,” I conceded. “There are about a million arguments against my position here. Kids, caregiving, class, privilege, time constraints, fatigue, working multiple jobs, working no jobs at all, the consuming act of job-hunting, not to mention vast degrees of ableism and one’s own physical and mental health limitations. But I still maintain, in general, as a society, if someone really wants to also be an artist— has to be an artist— then they must find a way, regardless of what their weak-ass W2 says. I will die on this hill.”

“Well,” my friend said. “Thanks so much for taking the time to—”

“What you’re considering is actually dangerous to you personally,” I continued undeterred.

“Dangerous?” She asked. “Why?”

“If playwriting can be viewed as something so capricious that it can be easily dropped because now you’re an office worker— the flip side of that is that playwriting is really only worth holding onto if it serves the same purpose as the day job, ie money. But I ask you: do you know any playwrights who make a living solely from writing plays?”

“Uh…”

“Bearing in mind, I don’t mean playwriting and teaching or working in TV or acting, etc... I mean a playwright who, with only income from writing their plays, can feed, clothe and house themselves and their children, get an annual pap and mammogram (or whatever the penis equivalent of that is) and not live in sheer terror that tomorrow they will teeter over the financial abyss. Do you know any playwrights like that?”

“Um…Tom Stoppard?”

“Good choice, but he also wrote movies and is dead.”

“But you said dangerous,” she said, rapidly tiring of me. “How is dropping the playwriting for the day job dangerous?”

“Well,” I said. “Where’s The Urge gonna go?

“The Urge?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Your constant compulsion to make a play. Where’s that gonna go?”

“Well…away. Hopefully.”

“Ha!” I laughed from high upon my horse. “It’s gonna turn into a neurosis! My bro Carl Jung described the unacted upon artistic urge best in his Modern Man in Search of a Soul:

‘A psycho-neurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.’

This is why you dropping art is dangerous for you and for a society at large.”

“I’m actually getting another call, so—”

“Have you noticed the correlation between the decline of experimental theater and the rise of MAGA?”

“Uh—”

“Hear me out: As our society produces more musicals about a non-child-molesting Michael Jackson and fewer formal theater experiments like what Foreman, Breuer, Akalaitis and Wilson did, then MJ musicals are gonna start being viewed as ‘good’ because that’s all there is left. The curious artists, the easily bored artists, the deep thinking artists, the manic-depressive artists and critical artists will have slowly but surely dropped their practices—- because… why bother? The people want MJ! But as you sit at your desk in an office in midtown, my friend, The Urge is growing! And as per Jung, if The Urge is not acted upon, the unconscious is repressed and what happens then?”

“Uh… what?”

“MAGA! You become Lindsay Graham and Amy Coney Barrett! Sycophantic rule-following unconscious-ignorers who take their repressed urges out on all of society! Don’t think for a minute that the theater world doesn’t do the exact same thing.”

My friend was now, officially, over me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a lot.”

“No, no this is…uh… actually inspiring.” My friend said.

Oh. Maybe I misread the room. I often do.

Just then, the door to the movie theater swung open. My kid and his friend shuffled out into the stark sunlight of the parking lot, each holding a gigantic plastic bucket of popcorn. I’m guessing the damage on that was about $50.

“All I’m saying,” I said, thinking about my credit card bill. “Is that theater is hard. But it’s much harder without a paycheck, wherever that paycheck comes from. We need a room with a view. So take the job. Then start making the most interesting work of your life.”

For the past month, I kept hearing this Voice in my head:

“Sara,” it said softly, “reread Slaughterhouse-Five.”

“I can’t right now,” I would mentally respond day after day. “I’m too busy to read anything for pleasure because I’m rehearsing a play of mine called Dora Maar. It’s about the surrealist artist, her tortured relationship with Picasso and how they made Guernica together. But it’s not a biopic. I loathe biopics. All of them suck—- plays, movies, shows. When it comes to telling a story about a historical figure, it seems creativity and experimentaion is immediately replaced with Wikipedia-style exposition 100% of the time. Do not get me started on Oppenheimer.”

“Sara,” the Voice said from deep inside an ancient file cabinet in my brain, “reread Slaughterhouse-Five.”

“Sorry,” I calmly explained. “Dora Maar is too consuming a project for me to shift my limited brain power over to Kurt Vonnegut right now. You see, the play covers the ten years of Dora’s life she spent with Picasso, but is told completely out of order. Imagine a Cubist painting, but as a play. Like Cubism, all parts of the story and characters are presented simultaneously via quick flashes of memory. No scene in the play is more than five lines long. The entire thing is staged before a canvas of ‘magic fading paper,’ which mimics the dimensions of Guernica. With actors using only water as ‘paint,’ images from the iconic painting appear, vanish and reappear. And that’s just the art part. This is me and director-husband Reid self-producing here. Do you have any idea how many years self-producing takes off the average American playwright’s life? And let’s not forget that I started writing Dora Maar in 2021. It took me five years of rewrites, rehearsals, workshops, total teardowns and renovations, a research trip to Madrid, chats with experts and a final scorch-the-earth narrative script reconstruction. And what I’ve been rehearsing all year for is only a 2-night workshop run. This isn’t even an opening.”

“Sara,” the Voice whispered across time, “just reread Slaughterhouse-Five.”

“I don’t need this right now!” I grew increasingly angry. “I have voices in my head telling me to do things all day everyday: Write this play and read this biography and watch this movie and go exercise and sign your kid up for this expensive sport and that expensive camp and don’t sit too long and don’t eat too much weed and does my neck hurt because I’m old or because my pillow is bad or because I’m on my phone too much and on and on and on until I start to wonder if perhaps my norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibitors need to be turned up to eleven. The last thing I need is another voice in my head telling me to read for pleasure at this critical moment in my artistic evolution!”

“Saaaaara,” the Voice in my head incanted, “reread Slaughterhouse-Five.”

“Look, here’s the thing I’m secretly panicked about,” I leveled with the Voice. “I don’t even know if Dora Maar works as a play yet. Like dramaturgical boiling oil on a skillet, my story jumps from Maar and Picasso’s first meeting to Maar’s attempted suicide to painting Guernica to hiding from the Nazis to Maar and Picasso’s first meeting back to Maar’s suicide attempt back to painting Guernica and back and forth and back and forth again and again and again. I personally love it, but do people want formal experiments anymore? Do people want to be confronted with mankind’s natural inclination to destroy itself? Do people want to know what happened at Gernika, Spain that beautiful April morning in 1937 or do they simply want a non-child-molesting Michael Jackson celebration told in conventional beginning-middle-end biopic fashion?”

“Sara,” the Voice was louder, “reread Slaughterhouse-Five.”

“Oh my god,” I suddenly realized something. “Dora Maar is way too avant-garde and will never work. Why didn’t I just write a biopic about Dora Maar? With plenty of fun Wikipedia facts and long explain-y speeches! And why didn’t I write Pablo Picasso as the dick-ish character everyone expects to see and throw tomatoes at? Oh my god what if the stultifyingly unfunny Hannah Gadsby comes and makes one of her stultifyingly unfunny Picasso jokes? Why did I have to render Picasso as complicated? Just because I personally think watching dicks on stage is way more interesting than watching non-dicks on stage, doesn’t mean everyone else does. And who the fuck am I to experiment with form?! I’ve never won a Tony. I’ve never even been a finalist for the O’Neill Playwrights Conference! What the fuck is wrong with me? Why didn’t I just write a girl-power version of Dora Maar—- who kicks Picasso in the balls with a real barnburner of a final monologue? Why can’t I just write a normal play?”

“Sara,” the Voice was fed up, “reread Slaughterhouse-Five.”

I took a beat.

“Well,” I said, composing myself. “I don’t need to read Slaughterhouse-Five because I read Slaughterhouse-Five when I was in high school.”

“Do you remember anything about it?” the Voice asked.

I took another beat.

“I confess,” I confessed. “I don’t. Actually… I don’t remember a single thing about it.”

“Nothing?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

The Voice was silent, just shot me a smug little grin.

“Fine.” I finally said. “I’ll read it.”

So on Saturday, June 13th, I took my kid and his friend to our local community pool. I told them we were staying there all day long— that’s noon to 8PM. I told them I would be “working” from my pool chair. I gave them my debit card for the pool snack bar to procure chicken fingers, cotton candy and Sprite.

And then I listened to the entire audiobook of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

Here’s a really, really reductive refresher (if you need it, forgive me if you don’t): Vonnegut opens Slaughterhouse-Five by saying it will be an impossible book for him to write because of all the horrific things he needs to describe. He then tells the life story of Billy Pilgrim, who, thanks to some kindly aliens called Tralfamadorians, learns how to experience his own life in non-chronological order. All at once, “unstuck in time.” The “homebase” of the book is Billy’s horrific experience as a P.O.W. in World War II witnessing the firebombing of Dresden— but if Billy closes his eyes and opens them again he’s a baby, or he’s 12, or he’s having sex with his wife on his wedding night, or he’s about to die, or he’s getting his degree in optometry, or he’s on display in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, or he’s the sole survivor in a plane crash— all things that happened to Billy Pilgrim over the course of his life, but that he gets to experience— we the reader get to experience— all at once. And so because of Billy Pilgrim’s trick of chronology, death is no longer the end, rather just another moment in time next to any other moment in time—- happening all the time.

And it’s through this portal that Vonnegut can allow himself speak the unspeakable, describe the undescribable— death camps, war crimes, burning children, civilian murder, tortured soldiers and finally firebombs from above. Because if there is no death, no beginning or end, if every moment is happening all the time simultaneously next to every other moment well, death isn’t so bad now. We can talk about it. Write about it.

Upon finishing the audiobook of Slaughterhouse-Five at my local community pool while my children cannon-balled and ate Ring-Pops, I experienced, yet again, Full Ego Death. So it goes. (You probably already know this, but after every instance and mention of death in Slaughterhouse-Five— from the soldiers to the lice living in their uniforms—- Vonnegut writes his iconic, comically tragic refrain, “So it goes.”)

I couldn’t believe what that Voice had delivered to me, completely against my will.

Despite me not remembering a single thing about Slaughterhouse-Five from when I know I read it high school, that Voice inside me had the wherewithal to pull some ancient file in my brain and unrelentingly foist it upon me.

It knew.

I knew.

Once I came down from the high of the death of my ego, I quickly refreshed myself on Kurt Vonnegut:

Vonnegut was a POW and witnessed the bombing of Dresden and did want to write about it. But that was in 1945. Slaughterhouse-Five wasn’t published until 1969. Vonnegut knew the story he needed to write, but it took him 24 years of rewrites, revisions and teardowns to locate the artistic form it would take. He knew the story was too traumatic to be told in conventional American beginning-middle-end style. Conventional American beginning-middle-end style is too weak to contain it, too cheerful, too boring. Vonnegut knew it wasn’t a biopic. So he took an enormous risk and experimented with form. And it worked incredibly.

So I’m glad I read it. I’m newly confident. Slaughterhouse-Five is just as avant-garde in narrative structure as my play about Dora Maar. BUT DO NOT GET ME WRONG: I am not worthy of fetching Kurt Vonnegut’s coffee. I am a hack’s hack compared to him, an amateur, much worse than Kilgore Trout. But I know this much is true: If I am making a play about Dora Maar, Pablo Picasso and Guernica it better not be a motherfucking biopic.

Theater is hard. So it goes.

POST-SCRIPT: When I first moved to New York to be an actor in 2003, I went to an audition one time in a building in midtown. When it was over, I pushed the “down” button on the elevator.

When the elevator doors opened, Kurt Vonnegut was standing there. Just him in an empty elevator.

I got in with him.

Starstruck beyond words, but trying to play it cool, but knowing I had to say something so I could tell this story 23 years later in a Substack piece, I said:

“Slow elevator.”

And Kurt Vonnegut said:

“Sure is.”

Soon the elevator doors opened and Kurt Vonnegut exited the building into the streets of New York.

POST-SCRIPT #2: If you want to see Dora Maar, it will be performing in workshop at Luna Stage in West Orange NJ on June 19th at 8PM & June 21st at 2PM. Tickets here. And it’s easy to get to. I promise.

Dora Maar is a Foxy Films show, directed by Reid Farrington, featuring the radiant Alissa Finn & fierce Rafael Jordan, with unmatched stage management by Margaret Fortuna Yassky.

My eternal gratitude to Ari Laura Kreith, Lucas Pinner and Laura Hoffman at Luna Stage for yet again taking a chance on my work.

In the spirit of my 2022 book, The Lost Conversation: Interviews With An Enduring Avant-Garde, I’m publishing an ongoing series of honest convos with interesting theater people here on Theater Is Hard.

The first conversation in this series is with Sophia Pesetti, the mind behind Stage Left Report.

In grand muckraking tradition, Stage Left Report points a flashlight at the machinery behind the scenes of American theater. Sophia’s boldness, stark commentary and call for action, accountability and responsibility standards in the arts is admirable.

She and I chatted the other day for a full two hours, but I extracted and categorized my favorite moments from our convo for this piece.

Enjoy.

• JEFFREY EPSTEIN & THE THEATER

THEATER IS HARD: You are very brave to speak out against hypocrisy in the theater. I try to touch that void on Theater Is Hard, but I often get skittish like, “oh I can’t say that! Oh that’ll end me! Oh that’ll be the one!”

STAGE LEFT REPORT: (Laughs)

TIH: But the Stage Left Report piece that did it for me was when you came out about the connection between Epstein and the theater world.

SLR: Yeah.

TIH: First, the reporting around Epstein being on a playwright’s wedding and baby shower invites and then their public explanation and second, the reporting on Epstein’s proximity to drama camps. I first heard all that first from Stage Left Report. That this motherfucker even had tentacles in the theater world.

SLR: Yeah. There are these little bastians you get into as kids. It’s theater, it’s dance. All these kids wanted to sit at the cool kid’s table, but instead found their little group of weirdos who accepted them. But they still have this ancient, root brain injury— this wound of not being accepted. They feel they need to work super hard or use their skills in order to appeal to that group of elites. So, of course that world is rife for exploitation.

TIH: Yeah, and gaslighting. What kind of response did you get from talking about the Epstein stuff?

SLR: My favorite— and the thing that makes me go crazy, which is why I need to pace myself— is at the end of my critiques I always get either, “Oh we’ve always known about this! No one cares! This is boring! Don’t talk about this!” Or on the other end it’s often an identity-based attack on me, like, “oh, she’s a feminist writer. This isn’t a real problem in the industry. Don’t talk about this.” But the way I know I’m onto something is that in either case, they always say: “don’t talk about this.”

TIH: I’m blown away by that. I can’t believe the hypocrisy. Like, it should be, across the board, unacceptable to be in any way connected to that monster Epstein. And you shouldn’t feel shaky about pointing that out.

SLR: Well, we were all kids in situations that could have been exploited. I can think of myself in these drama camps.

TIH: Oh yeah, same.

SLR: There are people who derive their livelihood and social lives and fame and power around the Epstein circles. These people have had to take bites out of the evil apple and they’re the ones who are gaslit. They’re the ones who say things like “oh, this is just how the industry works” and “oh you need to do these things.”

• THEATER SCARCITY MINDSET

SLR: I’ve been in closed door room meetings with my female bosses who are like “we love your energy and activism! But if you ever want to get a role like mine, you’ll have to leave things like that at home.”

TIH: Oh god.

SLR: Like, this is a woman trying to call me in? Just seeing those power dynamics, I think, make me extra sensitive to these things, so I call them out for what they are: a scare tactic.

TIH: I’ll never understand women being like that. If every woman could get on board with an immediate “no” to silence and bullshit. An immediate “no.” It would be a different world.

SLR: Exactly.

TIH: But the theater industry has pushed this scarcity mindset that makes artists so worried that if they say the slightest wrong thing, it’s like: “Oh I can’t believe she said that! I would never say that! That would ruin my…”

(Pause)

TIH: What? It would ruin your what?

SLR: (Laughs)

TIH: What is everyone so afraid of? What would happen if we spoke out? What do you have in the theater that… that could be so easily taken away? And if it could be yanked away so easily… what did you really have in the first place?

SLR: Literally.

TIH: Maybe because everything’s non-profit, maybe because there’s this “charity” vibe attached to the theater now, everyone’s worried it will go away.

SLR: Yeah, but we’ve always been worried that theater was going to disappear. I think that fear went into hyperdrive after Covid. Just like everywhere else in American society, there was a massive wealth redistribution in the theater industry. Labor became hugely undervalued. Artists and staff were laid off in huge numbers. And I’ve heard in passing — this isn’t a journalistic scoop or anything— that at some of the larger non-profits, there were also attempts at union organizing that got cut off at the knees.

TIH: Have these people ever seen Newsies?

SLR: (Laughs) Seriously.

TIH: Like, this is theater, right? Surely people who work in theater can make the distinction between the good guys and the bad guys. Even if they haven’t seen Newsies, right? Why can’t they make that connection in real life?

SLR: Well, there was this massive show of power by the managerial old guard, essentially to ensure that the old guard stayed in power. And I think a lot of the scarcity mindset is being marketed by them, right? Because they know theater’s not ending, right? They know we’re actors and writers and we’re not gonna stop, right?

TIH: But that’s what they’re banking on— our passion and desperation. Also, to block union organizing and also claim you’re a liberal organization? Really? And have a mission statement about love and trees and diversity? And then… get cagey about unions?

• NON-PROFIT VS. FOR-PROFIT

TIH: So by day, I work at a gigantic for-profit. And when I hear about non-profits manipulating people, banking on scarcity as we mentioned, blocking unions, some of the hush-hush stuff you’re describing, I start to think… at least a for-profit makes their motivation clear: money. Like, hi, we all know why we’re here.

SLR: You know it’s profit motivated.

TIH: Yeah. This guy I used to work for at my for-profit day job once told me that at for-profits, “it’s every man for himself, it’s Machiavellian.” I’ll never forget him using that term, Machiavellian. He was so matter-of-fact about it. But in non-profits, they hook you based on something you love, not money. Something that exists outside making money. So they are banking on your love of the thing— theater, dance, art. It’s like… existential prostitution.

• SURVIVAL

SLR: With the redistribution of wealth in the non-profits it’s like… who has access to these non-profit jobs?

TIH: Yeah.

SLR: What do these jobs mean in regards to someone’s actual livelihood? I moved out to New York with a little bit of money from my dad and mom and like, a hope and a dream, right? I was paying my own rent, living a life on the wage I was earning, but I found that a lot of my coworkers, collaborators, even artists and writers, were receiving a lot more support from family. Which allowed these jobs to be less survival jobs and more passion projects for them.

TIH: Right.

SLR: Their salary was kind of their spending money around New York City— their DoorDash, Uber Eats, that kind of money. That’s just a completely different material reality than I had.

TIH: So when it’s a passion job, they can keep the pay low.

SLR: When the job is both a job and your artistic passion and hobby, and you have all these other resources, you can say yes to everything without thinking about how it would affect folks that are in a different financial situation than you.

TIH: Yeah.

SLR: It’s untenable for anyone who doesn’t come from a privileged background. I think there are fewer people from all over the country who actually live in New York because there are so many people who can accept these $48K positions, or contract part time with no health insurance, because they have parental support, they’re staying with their parents, commuting in from wherever they’re from.

TIH: So the eco-system doesn’t really change.

SLR: I felt stupid when I found all this out. When I arrived with my Broadway dream. It’s the upper class end that can stick around and make careers for themselves. That’s one of the main drivers behind my writing online– to tell people: it’s ok, you’re not stupid, it was built this way. I’m also lucky to have a lot of really good friends outside the theater.

TIH: That’s important.

SLR: And really good therapists.

TIH: Also important.

SLR: And parents who, rightly or wrongly, told me I could do anything. Not necessarily true, but could get me into these rooms where I could actually see what was going on. My cousins called me the Forrest Gump of the theater industry. Because when you’re a pretty little white girl and you’re willing to play dumb in an interview— they will let you in a lot of places and say a lotta things they probably wouldn’t if they knew what you actually thought.

• THEATER DISCOURSE

TIH: A lot of theater writing and discourse is rooted in glamor or features or shined-up fabulous products and of course fawning reviews and stuff. The way we talk about theater now is frustrating. It’s that glamorous optimism that ironically gets me down. I wish people would talk more openly about the infrastructure.

SLR: It’s marketing.

TIH: Marketing?

SLR: Yeah. I mean, so much of the theater writing on infrastructure is divided into a couple areas. One area is when people look at their bank accounts and realize that the only way to make money off the writing they love to do is to kiss the ring, essentially. A lot of them work at these big Broadway marketing companies, their friends group are in that world, they have a social structure that rewards the yass-queen-we-love-this-Broadway-season! mindset.

TIH: Right.

SLR: And then there’s people who haven’t had the opportunity to get into the rooms I’ve been lucky to be in and still have that childhood dream of getting invited to the party. That root sense of belonging. That romanticization of discovery— like, “once I write the right thing!” or “once I get the audition!” or “once I get the producer!” I’ll finally feel content, I’ll get back to feeling what I felt when I was 10 or 11 and watched the Tonys for the first time. The kind of horrifying thing that informs my writing is that I’ve been in these rooms and it’s awful.

TIH: They’re selling to you based on your childhood dreams.

SLR: That’s their job. I used to work in a huge Broadway producer’s office and you walk in there and it’s like a sales office. It’s people pitching to rich people all day, not even pitching a story, they’re pitching the opening night party and hanging with celebrities at the opening night party. It’s so celebrity-focused. It’s a whole industry of just appealing to people’s celebrity worship and their childhood dreams, to get their money or to get their labor. And it’s too bad. Because it’s a beautiful art form.

TIH: I’ve been able to keep going based purely on existential reward. I do it for that flow state that’s waiting for me in writing or rehearsing or performing. That moment you transcend the daily grind? That’s the reward for me. The fact that the “why” isn’t being considered as much by people? That’s very sad to me. I worked in the tail end of New York’s storied downtown— where there was no marketing or money. Where theater artists made plays because if they didn’t…they’d… I don’t know… kill themselves? I mean, the stakes were that extreme. I mean, there are remnants of downtown, but theater theater in New York does mostly feel like this marketing machine.

SLR: Oh yeah. Even talking to theater makers 10 years older than me? There were places you could go to have a community. But now? Completely gone. Starting Stage Left Report is the first time I’ve felt that I’ve actually found community with a group of artists and people who share my ideas. Lately, I’ve been doing interviews only because there were people in the theater world I was seeing online where I was like… I would just like to talk to them!

TIH: Well, that’s how I tricked you into talking to me today.

SLR: (Laughs)

• GENERATIONS

TIH: I’m not gonna out your age but–

SLR: Twenty-nine.

TIH: Oh ok twenty-nine, good. So your generation of twenty-something women, I’ve noticed often calls shit out. Like, fearlessly. And the women my age— like the Gen X’ers— didn’t as frequently when they were twenty-something. Which is just conditioning, really. My generation—I’m an under-the-wire Gen X’er born in 1980— was conditioned to knee-jerk protect oppressing men. It took me a long time to claw out of that mindset. But the 20-somethings now? They asked direct questions. They weren’t conditioned to protect the oppressor.

SLR: Well, what’s different about my generation is that we don’t have— oh, I’m gay, but still— we don’t have men supporting us. At all.

TIH: Yeah.

SLR: I think about the elder-millennial women, a lot of them were trained by Boomer men, you know? Directors of production, stage managers, producers. So they have this allegiance to this class of men that— even if they didn’t say it to their faces– were always uncomfortable with them being around.

• GENDER PARITY, MAN-HEAVY SEASONS & AESTHETIC

TIH: Am I gaslighting myself or do I now see season announcements with like, mostly male presenting names? It’s like if theaters don’t intentionally force themselves to execute gender parity, is it correct to assume we just slide into Neil LaBute-town? Progressive-seeming theaters— and even conservative places just doing revivals— it still feels man-heavy. And it’s not just my opinion or imagination, The Lillys keeps track of this. One of the most shocking stats The Lillys offer up is that there are more women in theater programs at the grad and undergrad level than men by a landslide. But why then are the scales always tipped toward men? Is it an archaic instinct institutions have to simply trust a man’s work over a woman’s? Because if that’s the case I’m gonna go be a hermit in a cave somewhere.

SLR: It’s insane. Here’s my theory: There was this shift into women artistic directors, all straight women. But because of the funding streams, because of being a woman in a leadership position there’s this pull toward proving that you recognize the men, too. Like they were hyper-aware of putting too many female focused stories up there. Because a lot of what women write about is heart and difficulty and how things are just maddening for us. And I think when you are a woman in a position of power, you’re told by the board “you need to keep appealing to donors!” But in the Avoidant 2020s— as I call it— a lot of artistic programming are allergic to quote “difficult” playwrights, or difficult stories, or a play that’s not escapist enough—

TIH: Not feel-good enough.

SLR: Yeah.

TIH: I trained as an actor and then a playwright very avant-garde-ly. So these feel-good plays? I’ve gone into this ad-nauseum on my Substack, but my favorite play is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf— specifically because these two people are cunts.

SLR: (Laughs)

TIH: These people don’t want to get along, they don’t want to “find common ground.” Everywhere I look play blurbs use the inticing term “…as they find common ground.” Why would anyone want to watch someone “find common ground” with someone else on stage? I want a play that’s gonna end totally ambiguously and you’re gonna leave as if you’ve been through a violent attack on your soul. But there’s none of that anymore. And I want to make sure I say this: it’s not that artists and playwrights are incapable of it. The artists are capable of it. It’s the programmers. They are scared if it ain’t feel-good.

SLR: We had a decade of celebrating the male anti-hero, right? Breaking Bad–

TIH: Sopranos.

SLR: Yeah, but you see a woman acting badly, it’s like oh, she’s a bitch.

TIH: Or she’s evil. It’s just so pat, so ribboned up. I don’t know. Anyway, I could go on and on. My main point was I guess it’s ok to program all men again? Like, it’s fine. No one’s gonna yell and scream about it. Also, there is a real obvious way to stop this shit— we don’t go to that theater anymore. No more buying tickets. Really good way to fix it. But no one stops. Everything’s performative.

SLR: Absolutely. I mean, in our society now it does feel like people are rewarded for releasing their morals. I mean, look at the Met Gala. There’s this under-culture of, “hey once you’re canceled you get to party with us!” You get to party with the billionaires! There’s kind of this new culture emerging that says, “oh, it’s ok if you’re not perfect!” Instead of understanding the real power that we hold as consumers and art connoisseurs. But it goes back to that escapism. People being like, “ugh I don’t wanna think about how there’s no female playwrights here, I just wanna feel good and have a night at the theater.” And it’s like but…you can’t have both things.

TIH: But you’ve hit on the reason why people go to the theater now— they don’t wanna think about this complicated shit. They want safety and they want sureness because when they walk back into TrumpLand everything is chaos again. So maybe when these theaters program all men it’s like…surety? It makes people feel sure?

SLR: People don’t realize that it is all connected. That the programming we see reflects the world we are living in. People of my generation and the generation after, Alpha, I’m worried for their imaginations sometimes. We’ve all been squashed into these cultural boxes— like, sequels and franchises, this nostalgia pill that just puts you straight to sleep. And this has literally reprogrammed what audiences want to see.

TIH: We’ve redefined “good.”

SLR: Completely. I laugh when people are worried about how audiences are getting older and older and young people are not coming to the theater, but it’s like… we don’t see ourselves up there. Also, that’s half our weekly salary? But we do show up to places! I’ve seen some of the best shows at like, queer bars and after hours stuff cast with trans people who aren’t getting hired anywhere because them just being onstage is a political statement they aren’t interested in making.

• WHAT WOULD HELP?

TIH: What do you think would help make New York an ideal place again for theater artists? What would you inject? Is it money?

SLR: No, the money’s there, they’re spending it in the wrong places. I’ve seen $200,000 spent on a faulty high-tech scientific sound system that never ended up working. But they went on a months-long fool’s errand trying to prove it. But it never worked. We are spending money, but it’s in tech and AI and the future. Whereas I just really think that if we got back to, as you say, a more downtown world, we could build an actual community. Create actual programs that pay artists. Just a living salary– I’m not talking $200,000 speaker money— but just enough for an artist to live and work and use a studio in the city. Without expectations of a perfect polished product in the end. No, rather: we are creating a space for these arts to work together, dream together– you’re gonna have incredible art come out of that. But we’re just too profit-motivated.

TIH: Too fame-motivated, celebrity-obsessed. But about the result-oriented thing– have you been to the Mercury Store? Oh my god they’re doing it. I was in residence there in 2023. It was a like art spa. It’s this gorgeous performance space in Gowanus, Brooklyn run by Will Frears. And for a week, I just felt… free? We could pay are people, we could buy a computer. It was the most incredible experience. Why would you ever spend $200,000 on a speaker system, when you could actually use that money to alter the fabric of the culture of an entire city? That’s what they say they want.

SLR: That is what they say they want.

TIH: But again, the celebrity and fame obsession has become a cancer in the theater.

SLR: My theory on it is that the finance bros brought their fandom with their money. Bang for their buck, parties. They wanna be in rooms with celebrities. It has nothing to do with the artistic process.

TIH: Why don’t they go to Hollywood and do that? It’s the perfect place for that.

SLR: Yeah, I don’t know.

• RAGE

TIH: So what keeps Stage Left Report going?

SLR: Well, rage.

TIH: (Laughs)

SLR: All my best ideas come in the tunnel vision of rage.

TIH: (Laughs) Yes! Same!

SLR: And not letting rage become a secondary emotion like sadness or anxiety—-like focus on the rage!

TIH: And don’t let rage implode your life.

SLR: Yes.

TIH: Use it. Put rage to constructive use.

(Thanks so much to Sophia Pesetti and Stage Left Report for allowing me to dive deep with her. Please do subscribe to Stage Left Report here on Substack.)

In case you didn’t know (and please skip this if you do), Al-Anon is the sister of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Where Bill Wilson came up with AA as the way to stop drinking, his long-suffering wife Lois Wilson, built Al-Anon as the way for family members to recover from and respond to the destructive effects of living with and loving the alcoholic.

I think the best way to sum up Al-Anon is with their famous phrase:

“I didn’t cause it, I can’t control it, I can’t cure it.”

(“It” being the loved one’s alcoholism. This phrase is known in Al-Anon as The 3 Cs.)

I have long maintained here on Theater Is Hard my belief that the two greatest innovations of the 20th century were vaccines and Alcoholics Anonymous— and by default Al-Anon.

It is my belief that if the tenets of Al-Anon were taught in school, starting in kindergarten, if we could internalize personal responsibility and accountability, if we could abide by the serenity prayer, if we could truly live and let live, then we would not be living in Trump’s necrotic, blame-shifting, abyss-teetering America right now. We would be living in a literal utopia.1

Anyway.

Why am I talking about AA and Al-Anon on a theater Substack?

Well, I recently read Isaac Butler’s article on the state of our contemporary American theater ecosystem in American Theater Magazine, State of Play, which you can read here. Butler accurately and eloquently breaks down the landscape of American theater in our current moment—for the playwright specifically. It’s important to read and lays it all out: Everything now is institution-run, risk-averse, safe. Theaters claim to champion new work but don’t action it, playwrights are unable to survive financially and of course, the saddest of all, playwrights can no longer expect to have an artistic home. (That’s a reductive summation of the piece, definitely read for the fuller picture.)

Butler is right, of course. It’s bleak out there.

But as an acolyte of Al-Anon, I believe there is another way.

In the face of seemingly insurmountable institutional thinking, we cannot forget that it’s the artist’s role in society to flip the bird to literally everything. This includes hallowed institutions, conventional artistic philosophies, crushing trends and boring rules. It is our job to gleefully challenge all of it, not to crowbar and pick-me! pick-me! our way into it.

And I know: considering the iron grip institutions now have on the career trajectory of the average playwright, it’s scary to rebel against them. But… we can. We really really can. We must. It is our duty to rage against the world if we don’t like it. It is our duty to talk about it, write about it, post about it.

Because as Al-Anon says, “Nothing changes if nothing changes.” (Also, what can they take away from us? According to the State Of Play article, we got bupkes anyway.)

Another Al-Anon phrase is “Drop the leash or be dragged.” This is another great way of thinking about the illusion of control.

We cannot control Playwrights Horizons and how they choose to program mostly men with zero consequences. We certainly cannot control the people who still choose to buy tickets there despite their programming. I wish we could manage the programming there, we’ve definitely tried, but if we keep holding fast to that leash? Ever taken a yellow lab puppy on a walk?

But, again, we can control ourselves. We can choose to make work outside of Playwrights Horizons, outside all of this entire false construct. We can, as Al-Anon famously says, “detach with love.”

Another of my favorite Al-Anon concepts is “leaving the dance.”

In terms of the alcoholic, the dance is essentially: the addict acts destructively, their family rescues them, temporary calm is achieved, promises are made, hope is felt, but soon, because they experienced no consequences, the addict acts out again, the family rescues them again, and the dance continues for years, decades, generations. And as long as it does, the addict will never recover— may even die. But Al-Anon teaches the family member to exit the dance, painful though it may be. Because the paso doble doesn’t work with just one guy.

Let’s apply “leaving the dance” to Butler’s stat in State of Play that last fall The Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group had 1,000 playwright applicants and accepted only 10. The article explains that they couldn’t accept more than 10 because…uh…um… poverty? Yeah, that’s the ticket, poverty. Nary a pot to piss in.

Sorry, what’s that you say, kind reader?

Oh, you say it appears the Public is again renovating its already ridiculously lavish lobby?

Huh.

Well, prole that I am, I don’t know how much that costs, but last year I hired a contractor to fix my broken screen door and it was one of the most traumatic financial experiences of my life.

So I’m gonna guess renovating hundreds and hundreds of square feet of East Village real estate must be in high $20 millions which, when you add that to the almost $40 million the Public Theater already spent on the exact same project in 2012, I’d say the Public has the cabbage to accept all 1,000 of those applicants. With that kinda chandelier money they could pay each one of them thousand about $60k a piece. Sounds like a living wage to me.

But sure, just take 10 of them and tell us you’re poor. Do you not drink till 5PM either? (In Al-Anon, DENIAL stands for Don’t Even kNow I Am Lying.)

But it’s hard to say no, I get it. Let’s say the Public Theater Emerging Writers Group bangs on our door at 3AM, stinking of gin, in full Stanley Kowalski mode bellowing:

“Hey Sara?! HEY SAAAAARRRRRAAAA!! Apply to my programmmmm! No no no no no this time we’ll take you, I swear to god this time we’ll take you— hey hey hey hey what would you say to…semi-finalist? Huh? Ok ok ok ok finalist? SAAARRRAAAA!”

Crash. Vomit. Cops.

How do we artists respond? Well, what if we artists stopped applying in droves year after year? What if we just worked together instead? Isnt’t that how we started? How we trained? We all know enough people. What if instead of 1,000 applications they got, like, four? It might force institutions to “hit rock bottom” with no choice but to seek recovery— which, for the average American theater institution, means rebuilding their lit departments.

Yeah, we noticed. Very few lit departments in theaters anymore.2 Which in theory makes sense, landscape being what it is. Why should an institution pay a lit team to read new plays, scout out scrappy, innovative new productions and foster theater companies doing exciting stuff, when artists are willing to fight it out amongst themselves for that coveted slot! After all, this is Thunderdome!

“But Sara, we can’t throw our hands up in disgust!” the skeptics will say. “Don’t be such a pessimist! When the going gets tough, you just abandon the system?! It’ll get better! I swear to god it’ll get better! I’ll pour everything down the drain this time, I swear!”

Al-Anon would ask: “How important is it?”

This system? Not very. Institutional chaos is their choice, not mine. What is important to me is making a play. That’s all that matters to me, to all of us, otherwise none of us would be in this insane racket. And if the current theater landscape can’t help you make your play because it’s gotta be happy hour somewhere, then we do it ourselves. We self-produce, self-fund-raise, self-design, self-cast, self-rent, self-program, self-insure, self-market, self-hustle. We find a way to get the play up. We detach with love from the chandelier people, refuse to enable them, allow them to hit rock bottom so that perhaps then, when they re-emerge, they’ll genuinely value the artist.

And I know: self-producing is shitty, backbreaking and expensive labor. Fund-raising is even worse. Believe me, I know. I’ve been self-producing for decades. Every play I’ve ever done started off as a self-production. I’m self-producing a few things right now and it sucks. Would I kill for an institution to do all this work for me all the time? Yes, I would. But again, it’s wishing the alcoholic would stop drinking.

We are not as hamstrung as they want us to believe. We can do it without them. All of it. We can make theater happen outside this system.

One of last great avant-garde playwrights, Mac Wellman, used to say to us in grad school:

“Stop dreaming.”

It takes a second to realize what Mac is saying here. It’s not a discouragement, quite the opposite. If I could finish the sentence it would be, “...and just do it yourself.” We must stop wishing the contemporary American theater ecosystem were different and throw a brick at it.

We can do it.

The first step is admitting we have a problem.

Theater is hard.

This is my second diary entry about the theater.

In case you missed my inaugural piece about becoming my own archeologist-paleographer, you can read it here. But in a nutshell: I’ve documented my entire life from age 11 up to today in a vast and sprawling collection of journals and diaries, which I’ve long wanted to do something with, but which always felt too indulgent and overwhelming and also who the fuck am I, Anne Frank.

But after a recent revelation, I decided to extract only the entires about theater, break them down to their barest components and then adapt them for the stage, right here on Theater Is Hard. As mentioned in my first attempt, my introverted nature does not like this. At all. But a true theater artist does not shy away from discomfort.

So here goes:

DIARY ENTRY #2

I neglected to date this particular entry, but I know I was cast as Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz when I was in 6th grade so it had to have been toward the end of 1992, when I was 12.

When I read this entry out loud to my husband the other night, he howled with laughter.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked incredulously. “It’s not funny.”

“Yeah it is,” he said. “You sound like Pinky & The Brain.”

For you Youngs out there, Pinky & The Brain were characters on a hilariously adult cartoon sketch-comedy show for kids called Animaniacs which ran from 1993-1998, which covered most years of my adolescence and teen-dom, so I watched it all the time. You can find a best-of right here on the YouTube.

Pinky & The Brain were two white lab mice who lived in a cage.

The Brain was a combo of Orson Welles and Peter Lorre who, after being ignored, insulted, misunderstood, criticized or underestimated, would immediately threaten world domination. But his evil plans were needlessly elaborate and so always failed. His sidekick Pinky was a moron who sounded like Michael Caine with a head injury. But despite being a moron, it would be Pinky’s simpleminded solutions that would usually save the day.

The Brain, specifically, is a trapped little creature with no control over his environment, no control over anything really, except his unwavering belief in his own intellect and talent. Actually not so unwavering because in every short sketch The Brain cycles through towering grandiosity, humiliation, denial, then renewed grandiosity.

“Oh my god,” I realized in a state of horror. “I am The Brain.”

Reid laughed.

“But also,” I said. “I am Pinky. Look, I’ll show you!”

Today was probley one of the best days I’ve had.

Pinky is clearly driving my ego clown car. Only children and morons have “best days ever.” I mean, I still have good days, but at 45 it’s more like “most consistant stretch of hours without incident ever” rather than “best day ever.” Anyway, moving on—-

There was a drama meeting after school. Our school play is The Wizard of Oz.

Pinky is still behind the wheel, stating the obvious.

We do it on stage in front of 800 people.

When I read this, I wondered why I would tell such an obvious falsehood in my own diary. Who am I trying to impress? So, clearly, Pinky is still driving because there is no way 800 people came to see my jank-o school plays at my small, public elementary school. It is apparent that Pinky said this because Pinky, being a moron, can’t tell the difference between 100 people and 800 people.

Next up:

I’ve always gotten little parts with no lines, but today was my big break! I’m Dorothy.

Pinky is excited and driving faster and with more abandon! I can tell because of his use of the term “big break” which suggests passivity, dormancy, infantilization, ignorance (feigned or real) of one’s own innate genius and of course not doing any work but succeeding anyway.

Pinky, being a moron, believes this myth and obviously didn’t read my last breakdown of my childhood theater journal entry. In it, I attributed this detrimental American myth entirely to the Lana-Turner-Schwab’s-Drugstore-Pedo-Producer Hollywood legend. But with Pinky at the wheel, this myth will always be my North Star. In fact, it’s only as an adult that I’ve been able to shake it off. Kind of. No, I have. Definitely. Maybe.

The director finally came to her senses and now I’m the star of the show!

ATTENTION PEOPLE OF EARTH: THIS CHILD’S BRAIN HAS JUST BEEN COMMANDEERED BY THE BRAIN.

Pinky has been violently thrown into the backseat of my ego and The Brain is driving now. Thunder rolls and lightening cracks. “Obviously, this was never about me being discovered,” says The Brain. “This was about them being idiots.”

While Pinky was giddy for cheap external validation, The Brain was convinced of my superiority. “I was there all along, you fools!” The Brain howls. “That director must have been drunk or comatose or both not to see my genius! Little parts? No lines?! Olivier was in your midst, you buffoons! Well, look at me now! The worm has turned!”

I’m ashamed to confess, I still do this.

When I, or my friends, are rejected from things they really, really wanted and deserved, I have to blame the external world in order to protect my inner caged mouse. Because if I don’t, the vast, entropic mystery of the “why?” unfurls before me. The easy answer is you. The bottomless well of confusion answer is me.

Don’t get me wrong: I always know immediately when I personally blow it, fuck up, make a tragic misstep or say a stupid thing. Years ago, I had this great relationship with a venue out of town. I had toured a beautiful show of mine there for two years running. Talks were in place to make it a regular thing. One day, I got on a conference call with their team to talk logistics, timing, money and needs. That’s when I heard myself say one of the stupidest sentences that’s ever come out of my mouth. I won’t repeat it here, but just know that it made me look insane. I couldn’t believe I said it, while I was saying it. When I got off the call, I knew I’d never hear from them again. And I didn’t. So that was on me, 100%.

But when I put my best, hardest-working, dedicated, committed and impassioned foot forward and still don’t get the thing? It has to be because of their provincial tastes. Right? Right? Yes definitely! Maybe. No for sure for sure.

I called all my friends that didn’t get to try out because of sports and told them. They all envy me.

The Brain will not relinquish the wheel of the clown car, grips it ever tighter, leans on the gas and maniacally mutters, “of course they all envy me! Because while they were wasting their lives away playing volleyball and field hockey, I was lying wait, preparing to destroy them all with drama!”

The weird thing here is, I have no memory of anything from this day in 1992 except the part when I called my friends with my news. I remember that like it was yesterday. I remember picking up my 90s landline, I remember the feel of the plastic against my ear. I remember dialing my friends numbers one by one and going, “Guess what? I’m Dorothy!” “Guess what? I’m Dorothy! “GUESS WHAT!? I’M DOROTHY!” to about four or five friends. And I remember, to a person, each reacting like I had said “Guess what? I’m cute and you’re ugly!” Or “Guess what? My parents are rich and yours are poor!” Or “Guess what? Your boyfriend just kissed me! Byeeee!” I remember feeling bad about all of it. Really bad.

I could tell in their voices that they were jealous, especially Katie.

This is The Brain at his most vulnerable. Even the slightest tonal lack of enthusiasm is perceived as jealousy?

Because I know myself well enough to know I didn’t like making Katie feel bad. I don’t like making anyone feel bad. It’s a huge fear of mine, actually. So much so that I’ve been lately trying to be more of a dick. I’m way too compliant, way too “yes and,” way too trusting. But for some reason, on this day in 1992, I had to front like I didn’t care. Even in my diary. Even to myself.

Even The Brain confesses to the error of his ways:

I realized that it was pretty conceited to brag.

But to protect himself, The Brain puts his hands on his indignant little mouse hips and says:

But I don’t care.

But The Brain does care. Deeply. So deeply in fact that The Brain has to protect himself from his own bewildering empathy by declaring he doesn’t.

Katie and Sarah always brag about sports and dancing so now it’s my turn.

The Brain is still driving, but clearly moving across lanes from grandiosity toward humiliation and denial.

I don’t recall Katie and Sarah ever bragging to me about sports or dance. But knowing me, I saw them doing stuff I couldn’t do—or at least hadn’t been signed up for— and processed that as inherent bragging.

However, I do lean toward The Brain’s thinking here a bit, if you’ll indulge me.

I sit through a lot of child sporting events (mostly baseball as my older kid is on the fancy, expensive team now). I’m at games and practices sometimes 4 nights a week. I fully acknowledge the importance of team sports. I recognize that it’s not about them playing for the MLB necessarily, it’s about them learning life skills like collaboration, teamwork, strategy, coping with rejection, failure, success, timing and thinking words like “my coach is a cunt” but choosing not to speak them aloud. Parents pack the stands, cheer, obfuscate, curse, defend and protect.

I often wonder why this level of enthusiasm and engagement can’t be defaulted over to the arts as well. Why only one school play a year but 4,000 baseball games? Can’t the same life skills be learned and prized in rehearsing and performing, with the added bonus of learning a new play? Why can’t kids do theater as a sport?

“BECAUSE THEATER IS NOT COMPETITIVE, YOU IDIOT!” bellows The Brain from deep inside my brain.

Oh right. Well, not yet at least. But if institutions have their way, two naked playwrights will one day be thrown into Thunderdome to grapple to the death while bloodthirsty donors cheer and eat grapes and frequent the vomitorium.

Anyway, back to my diary and my final line:

I’m so happy about my big brake!

I can tell that The Brain has collapsed behind the wheel of my ego and, in a panic, Pinky has again taken over. I can tell, of course, because of the evocation of the toxic American discovery myth again, but also the Freudian slip of spelling “break” like “brake” which I can only assume indicates that The Brain is about to drive my ego off a fucking cliff.

Pinky was always the smart one.

Theater is hard. Cartoon lab mice managing my ego is too.

POSTSCRIPT

Here’s my quick and dirty adaptation of the entry, which is the artistic purpose of my archeology-paleography playwriting project, as described at the top of this piece.

September, 1992.

SARA’s bedroom. SARA cradles her landline phone against her ear. Emotionally she couldn’t be more excited. Physically, she’s like a tea kettle whistling, about to explode.

SARA: Hello Katie? Guess what? I’m Dorothy! Yeah! The director finally came to her senses! Yep! Ok! Bye!

She hangs up then dials again.

SARA: Hello Lisa? Guess what? I’m Dorothy! Well, isn’t it obvious? The director finally came to her senses! Doy. Dinner? (checks her Swatch watch) At 3? Oh. Ok. Bye.

She hangs up then dials again, emotionally and physically deflating.

SARA: Hello Nicole? Guess what? I’m Dorothy! The director finally came to her—-Who’s Dorothy? Oh, she’s… a character from The Wizard of Oz? Field hockey practice? Ok… bye.

She hangs up then dials again.

SARA: Oh hi. Is Allison there? Oh she’s at volleyball. Ok. Well… could you let her know that I…uh…nothing. Nevermind. Bye.

She hangs up.

SARA: I don’t care.

«end scene»

In the last few weeks, I’ve had so many good artistic moments.

I’m deep in rehearsals for Dora Maar, my charged and intimate new play about Dora Maar and Picasso, featuring my dear friends Alissa Finn and Rafael Jordan, directed by Reid, who’s also found a theater willing to host it. Also, I started acting (!!!) again, collaborating with director Melissa Firlit and actor Zack Calhoon in a new piece we are calling Careless People (working title), which is a found fucking text and which is intoxicating. In addition, my play that won’t quit A Trojan Woman is opening at Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis on June 3rd. I’m also annoying a bunch of other people, places and institutions to pay attention to me, to varying degrees of success and ghosting. Because hustlers gotta hustle.

Anyone who’s been doing it long enough can tell you that artistic success comes in and goes out like the ocean tides. You catch a wave, you surf majestically, but you will always wash onto the shore and you will always have to swim back out again.1 I do feel like I’m surfing at the moment. And it brings me an all-consuming joy.

But then, the other day, all my joy stopped momentarily when I saw the list of O’Neill finalists.

There are like…a hundred of them. A large percentage of them I would consider my friends, some even close friends. And suddenly I felt… empty? Small? Hollow? Inconsequential?

It’s not like I thought I’d be on there. I was rejected months ago. I was rejected the minute I clicked “Submit” last fall.

I’ve made no bones about my one-sided relationship to the National Playwrights Conference at The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Every year, for the past 20 years, against my better judgment, I text the NPC @ O’Neill:

“You up?”

And the NPC @ The O’Neill’s three dots pulse and pulse and pulse and then…nothing.

Left on read.

And like the pathetic ex-girlfriend I am, I keep submitting to my unrequited love. I probably always will.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not entitled to a coveted slot at The O’Neill.

I get how it works.

They have a new committee of readers every year and every year those readers don’t like my plays. (Or more likely, they’ve read my Substack and view me as a liability after talking so much shit.)

Plus, I’m used to rejection, all playwrights are. Being rejected from stuff after one read by a committee of strangers is every American playwright’s god-given right. This isn’t new. Again, I am owed nothing.

But because this is Theater Is Hard and my rule is stark honesty, I admit that being rejected in the first round from the O’Neill for 20 years running triggers a deep, ancient hurt in me. I can’t help but take it personally.

I am trauma-bonded to The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.

Here’s why:

In the Fall of 2001, I was an incoming student at the National Theater Institute at The O’Neill. NTI is the theater training wing of the O’Neill Center, more or less unconnected to NPC, although they share the same institution.

When I arrived at NTI on September 9th, 2001, we were warned about how rigorous this “theater bootcamp” would be: From 7AM to 10PM, 7 days a week, we would be acting, directing, playwriting, learning Russian movement, Meyerhold’s Biomechanics, Grotowski’s Poor Theatre, Alexander Technique, yoga, centering, meditation, Balinese mask technique, African dance, devising, collaborating, accents and dialects, vocal training, musical theater and so much more. It would be relentless and our sanity would be tested.

I was over the moon.

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, after our 7AM physical warm up, we were randomly paired up to generate a mask performance. We had to have it prepped and ready to present to the class in under one hour.

My mask (which I had constructed the night before) was grotesque— painted totally white, with coiled wires bursting from its red eyes and white fabric hanging from its face. I decided it was an inmate at an insane asylum.

My scene partner was a girl named Melissa Firlit.

With hardly a word exchanged between us, I loved her instantly.

Melissa was gregarious, bawdy, hilarious, swore like a sailor, lovingly called me a hooker, was refreshingly unpretentious and best of all— she spoke faster than me. I was shocked. Up until then, I had never met anyone who spoke faster than me. I felt immediately seen by this woman and I felt I saw her too.

At around 9:05AM, Melissa and I improvised our mask scene outside, atop the rolling green hills of the grounds of The O’Neill, overlooking the Connecticut side of the Long Island Sound.

I remember marveling at the majesty of the weather that day—the cloudless sky, sending summer off with a final farewell kiss, welcoming fall’s crispy embrace.

Then, from the main house, I spotted one of the O’Neill office staff walking toward us.

She wasn’t running or panicked, but there was something off about her approach, something surreal, David Lynch-ian.

“Hello ladies,” she said. “I’m sorry to interrupt your rehearsal, but we just heard that a plane has crashed into the Twin Towers.”

Unsure how to respond, Melissa and I just stood there silently, waiting for what she would say next.

I’ll never forget it.

“It’s probably just a movie stunt gone wrong.” She said.

Oh, I remember thinking. Well… it’s probably nothing then.

About an hour later, the mask performances started in The Barn. My mask, being an insane asylum inmate, repeated the same inane lines over and over and over again in one of my proto-avant-garde playwriting attempts.

But suddenly, the performances were interrupted. The O’Neill director, David Jaffe, entered The Barn. He looked ashen, moved cautiously. Something wasn’t right, something was Lynch-ian.

“Can we all sit in a circle?” Jaffe gently asked.

We did—all thirty of us 20 and 21 year old theater kids. Jaffe looked at each of us in the eyes. I’ll never forget the next thing he said:

“The world has changed.”

Just writing those words now, I still tear up, I still feel chills, I still feel wonder, confusion and fear.

Once we realized what happened, half the students went home— I’ve never been quite sure why. So we were left with a skeleton crew of kids, myself and Melissa Firlit included.

9/11 happening within 48 hours of my arrival at the O’Neill launched what was a very emotionally fraught semester. Yes, I studied hard there, but I also drank hard, did drugs hard, loved hard, wept hard and laughed hard. I acted irrationally, wildly, feverishly and with a sense of abandon I’ve never felt before or since. While there, I know I hurt people deeply. I also fell dangerously in and out of love. Several times, I slipped into otherworldly, late-night artistic trances. I wrote my first full-length play there. It was about a disfigured, misunderstood woman working the night shift in a meat-freezer. But really, it was about me, how I felt about myself, my body, my soul. I remember walking into the theater that night as an out-of-control actor with a colossal but fragile ego and walking out a playwright.

In my dad’s obituary, which I wrote for Theater Is Hard, I remembered what my old man said to me hours after those monsters flew planes into my city. It’s one of my favorite memories of my dad, it’s right here, just scroll down to the bottom of the piece for it.

Ironically, 24 years later, on September 11th, 2025, at around 9AM, my dad himself died at 85 years old.

Anyway, I remember every single day of my time at NTI @ The O’Neill. It was only 4 months, but each day felt like a month itself. When I graduated, I went home to Long Island— to my parents, to civilians, to boredom, to basic, to day after day after day after day, to the dull march toward death. That Christmas and New Years I quickly slid into one of my many stretches of unmedicated major depressive disorder.

Melissa Firlit and I have been friends and collaborators ever since that awful morning the world changed in 2001. We worked together consistently for our first ten years in New York, then had a painful falling out, then went to separate grad schools, then came back together (after I apologized during one of my many apology tours) and are now working on two plays simultaneously. The first is Look Out which I’ve written a lot about here at T.I.H and which will be developed and presented as part of North American Cultural Lab’s Deep Space Residency this September. The second, as I mentioned, is Careless People, (working title), in collaboration with my dear friend Zack Calhoon. I’m returning to acting for that one.

So back to the other day when I allowed my joy to be detonated by the list of O’Neill finalists.

Because of the story above, because of the trauma bond I have to the very grounds upon which The O’Neill sits, each rejection does feel personal— actually no, impersonal. Like, a schoolyard bully knocking my theater career out of my hand and laughing, “Haw-haw!” Nelson Muntz-style, year after year after year after year.

Melissa and I had a two hour phone call today. We talked about the shows, schedules, plans and theatermaking, of course. I mentioned how hurt I felt when I saw the 100 NPC @ The O’Neill finalists posted the other day.

“You don’t need that shit,” Melissa said.

“I know,” I said. “Do you remember when you called me when you were in the shower the moment you realized what was wrong with Look Out?”

“Yep,” she said. “I said to trap those girls in their mother’s bedroom!”

“See?” I said.

“See what?” She asked.

“Why do I need to workshop a new play of mine with a bunch of strangers at The O’Neill when I have you? It’s just…” I trailed off. “…it’s the prestige, the recognition. Finally, the recognition. God, what I would do with it… you know?”

“Alright listen,” Melissa switched to her razor-sharp business tone to combat my self-pitying. “I’m gonna read you Martha Graham,” she ordered. “Ready?”

“Ready.” I said.

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening
that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time,
this expression is unique.

If you block it,
it will never exist through any other medium
and be lost.
The world will not have it.

It is not yours to determine how good it is;
nor how it compares with other expressions.
It is your business to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.

You have to keep open and aware directly
to the urges that motivate you.
Keep the channel open.

No artist is ever pleased.
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction;
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes us more alive than the others.”2

She finished reading. I took a deep breath.

“Got it, hooker?” Melissa asked.

“Got it,” I said. “I am divinely dissatisfied.”

“I pity those who aren’t.” Melissa said.

Theater is hard. Getting into the O’Neill Playwrights Conference is also hard, but inconsequential. Stay dissatisfied, fellow warriors.

I’ve documented most of my life in diaries. I started with that entry above, in January 1992, when I was 11 years old, in 5th grade. With some exceptions, I’ve kept it going to the present day. To my mind, if I don’t write it down, it didn’t happen.

Here’s a photo of some of my diaries, easily my prized possessions:

For years, I’ve wanted to build something theatrical out of my diaries, but it always seemed too indulgent, self-important and brain-dumpy. Also, diaries made public usually come out of something or someone extraordinary—-Anne Frank, Sylvia Plath, Pepys, Kafka, Anais Nin, etc… (obviously, there are exceptions.)

But when I recently reread this first entry above, I wondered: what would happen if, like an archeologist, I dispensed with the entires about boys, boys and more boys, and excavated only the entries about theater. Or like a paleographer, what if I deciphered, bridged and reconstructed these old theater “texts” to make sense of one part of a person’s history and understanding of self? Could I unearth the theater misconceptions I imagined, cultivated, was fed and taught? Uncover the invisible steps, obvious mistakes, fixations, ups and downs? I’d have to keep it short of course, and most importantly, treat it strictly objectively, like Jung analyzing a patient’s dreams, behavoirs and patterns.

That first entry alone is begging for a dramaturgical analysis. I’m compelled to do it. And even though I feel really awkward about sharing this much, fuck it here goes:

DIARY ENTRY #1

I’ve heard from many theater friends that a drive to “live up to their younger self” is a common one, but often depressing, even destructive, if not kept in check.

The narrative typically goes: They decided who they would be when they grew up and if they don’t achieve exactly that, they’ve let that kid inside them down and they are a failure at life.

I have that. Bad.

Even though that 11-year-old girl from that diary entry above technically no longer exists, she is still my eternal metaphysical gatekeeper. I must, inexplicably, impress her.

My higher brain knows that impressing my non-existant 11-year-old self is a colossal waste of time for many reasons, but primarily because she was and is grossly ill-informed.

Her information about a life in the theater comes mostly from the night she saw the 1991 Broadway revival of Guys & Dolls starring Nathan Lane, Faith Prince and Peter Gallagher. It was nothing short of a religious experience for this kid. She decided that night, she will be on Broadway and she will live in New York City. “Probably right here in Times Square,” she remembers saying after the show. (It took her a long time to realize that Times Square isn’t really meant to be lived in, more run from.)

Oh look, there she is. I’ll try talking to this kid.

“Broadway,” I say, “isn’t a meter of success. If anything it’s an exercise in lowest common denominator capitalism, less true theatermaking and more cash-to-nostalgia mathematics and off-track betting, with a cos-playing movie star thrown in for good luck.”

“That sounds like loser talk,” my 11-year-old self says.

So I defensively rattle off my non-Broadway resume highlights to this kid.

I tell her stories— of endurance and pain, of joy, discovery, transcendence and inspiration, romance, heartbreak, tales of touring. I read her all 60 of these very Theater Is Hard Substack pieces. I tell her I hit over 1,000 subscribers last week!

“Huh?” She’s confused about why that subscriber thing matters. She’s probably right.1

I tell her that the family I built of two kids and a husband, came directly from the theater.

“Isn’t that great?” I ask.

“You didn’t marry Travis Decker?” She asks in shock.

“Uh, no,” I say. “You see, typically, the boy you crush on in 5th grade grows up to post MAGA memes on Facebook and downplay where he was on January 6th, 2021. Now, I know you wrote page after page after page in your diary about how much you loved Travis Decker, but ultimately, trust me when I say he wouldn’t have been a good match for you.”

“But I love Travis and he loves me!” she insists.

“I know,” I say. “Look, the important thing is this: there’s more to success in the theater than starring in or having a play on Broadway.”

She’s not buying it. I shift the convo a bit.

“My main focus isn’t even acting anymore, believe it or not,” I say. “I mostly write plays now.”

“Like Andrew Lloyd Webber?” she hopefully asks across time.

“No, not really,” I say.

“Well, then,” she thinks a moment. “If you’re not like Andrew Lloyd Webber, you haven’t quite made it, have you?”

“I hate to do this,” I say gently “but although Webber’s undeniable genius spanned decades, he does seem to have sputtered out.”

“What do you mean?” She’s frozen in shock.

“His more recent one, Bad Cinderella, was one of the worst reviewed plays in history— even The New York Post called it a dumpster fire mess with multiple personality disorder.”

“Did you see it?” She asks suspiciously.

“Uh, no,” I confess.

“Well then how can you hate it if you didn’t even see it?”

“Ordinarily, I’d agree with you,” I say. “But I can’t resist reading reviews like that so I do kind of feel like I did see it and can safely hate upon it. Plus, he had a good run.”

“You grew up to be kind of a bitch,” she says.

“Sometimes,” I admit. “But let’s dramaturgically break down your first ever diary entry, shall we? Line 1:

“I wish I was an actress. I wish someone like a director would discover my talent.”

“Now, I know you, 11-year-old self, are well aware of the Lana Turner ‘discovery myth.’ But in case my readers need a refresher: Lana Turner was a 16-year-old girl, a high school junior, chilling after school with an egg-cream at Schwab’s Drugstore in LA. Then, a Hollywood producer, who, considering Lana’s age, I can only describe as “Epstein-esque,” pointed at our gal, and barked, ‘You!’ and Lana went, ‘Me?’ and the Epstein-esque producer went, ‘You’re gonna be big, kid! Big, I tell ya! Bigger than a thousand Garbos combined!’ The creepy producer then immediately cast Lana in They Won’t Forget and she skyrocketed to super stardom.”

“That’s gonna happen to me one day!” she says, eyes to the heavens.

“No, it won’t,” I explain. “Let me fix all this for you. Firstly, none of that happened. Lana was actually named Julia Jean Turner and she wasn’t at Schwab’s, she was at Top Hat Malt Shop. And it wasn’t after school, she actually skipped school that day because she hated typing class. And it wasn’t an egg-cream, it was a Coca-Cola. And it wasn’t an Epstein-esque Hollywood producer, it was an Epstein-esque Hollywood journalist named William R. Wilkerson. Wilkerson, ‘attracted to her beauty and physique,’ approached 16-year-old Julia Jean, and asked her if she would be interested in the moving pick-chahs. ‘I’ll have to ask my mother,’ Julia Jean is on record as having politely said. But with her mother’s blessing, Wilkerson handed Julia/Lana off to Zeppo Marx for some reason, who handed her off to director Mervyn LeRoy who signed her at $50 a week with Warner Brothers. It is true that she became a star after that.2”

“What does Espstein-esque mean?”

I think about how to phrase this to my 11-year old self. “Well, you know how Lana Turner said ‘I’ll have to ask my mother’ to the creepy guy?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, when a much older man who admires your ‘beauty and physique’ approaches you, especially in the 1930s, you gotta make like you’re interested or else risk assault. Had Lana said, ‘back off, creep’ like she probably wanted to, she’d have placed herself in immediate danger. So ‘Epstein-esque’ is basically a descriptor of the male default predator mode, which is how you should assume most men are until they prove otherwise.”

“What?” She’s extra confused.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “You’ll end up ok—-well, except for this. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. The ‘discovery’ myth has done more damage to the psyche of the American artist than just about anything else, existentially at least. Unless you consider American Idol contestants artists, there is no ‘big break,’ nor should there be. There is only working or not working, practicing or not practicing. I’m telling you this now because I wish I had internalized that instead of handing my well-being and artistic success over to the external world and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. Anyway, this is the first time this ‘discovery’ misconception appears in your and my diaries, but certainly not the last. We held fast to this destructive myth for decades. Moving on to the next line—”

“My mom keeps telling me to forget all about it.”

“She—!”

“I know.”

“She always—-!”

“I know, I know. But listen, Carl Jung, my favorite shrink, would probably say that ‘the mother’ archetype in this particular diary entry is acting as an agent of the collective unconscious here— another mouthpiece for the external world’s discouragement of risk taking and pressure to conform. Shut up and just watch Friends reruns until you die, the collective unconscious commands. It seems to me, and I’m sure you’ve noticed, that the vast majority of parents either consciously or unconsciously dissuade their kids from committing to a life in the arts.”

“Yeah!” she agrees. “It’s like they love it when their kids draw and dance and paint and do the school play and stuff, but then they’re totally against it when we wanna be an artist when we grow up!”

“I know,” I say. “It takes an evolved parent to fully support an artistic practice past childhood. And the sad thing is that it doesn’t change. Like ‘the mother’ archetype in this diary entry, many other people over the course of your life take on that role, even people in the arts, people who claim to want to help you, even they will consciously or unconsciously pressure us to stop, to ‘forget about it.’ That it was cute for a while, but since it doesn’t appear to be having a financial return-on-investment, may as well forget it.”

11-year-old me looks mostly angry, but a little bit sad.

“Carl Jung also might also say,” I go on, “that ‘the mother’ is ‘projecting’ here. That perhaps she doesn’t like what this artistic desire in the child awakens in her and so in an unconscious attempt to shut it down in herself, shuts it down in the child. I see this a lot in the parents around me day-to-day, parents' of my kids’ friends, all who certainly mean well. They hold fast to a reassuraing narrative that they finally ‘came to their senses’ and quit acting/writing/poetry/painting/music/etc... My radar always goes up when I hear a parent say, ‘oh I majored in theater but I stopped acting a long time ago.’ I am sure this is, in part, connected to America’s toxic Lana-Turner-Schwab’s-Drugstore-discovery myth. This poor lapsed theater major took the bait that because a ‘big break’ or ‘a director,’ as you phrased it, never came around and said ‘you’re gonna be big, kid! Bigger than a thousand Garbos combined!’ then she wasn’t chosen by the external world and may as well quit. If only they viewed art making as a practice, like yoga. Ironically, in my community of parents, many do practice yoga, so they understand the concept of reaching for something unattainable, of striving but never achieving. Of discomfort, of constant improvement without a destination. And they don’t get paid for their yoga practice—- ironically, they’re the ones who pay out the nose for the privilege to do it! Why can’t they view art making the same way? Again, I blame the ‘discovery’ myth or attaching an artistic practice to capitalistic gain, to what the external world thinks. But, listen, and heed these words, young 11-year-old me. Ready?”

“Yep.”

“Repeat after me: Fuck the external world.”

“Fuck the external world.” She repeats.

“They cannot be trusted. The external world made Trump president twice.” I say.

“The guy from the Pizza Hut ad?”

“Yeah, he becomes president,” I say, holding up two fingers. “Two times. Anyway, I’m proud that you did not internalize ‘the mother’ discouragement you describe in your diary entry here. This entry marks the first time you rejected it, but I know you continue to do so, time and again, even when things get rough. So next line—”

“I just can’t stand seeing kid actors doing just what I can do.”

“I’m talking about Macauley Caulkin.” She explains.

“I know that,” I say. “In 1990, when he became ungodly famous, you became inexplicably fixated on him.”

“We’re almost exactly the same age—he’s August 1980, I’m September. Isn’t that amazing?”

“Not really, but you’re only 11 so I get it,” I say. “I know you are consumed with jealousy toward Macauley’s life and fame. If he can be an actor, right now, I remember you thinking, why can’t I? What am I doing wrong here? Why won’t my parents drag me to auditions? How do you even find auditions? His parents must really love him!”

“Yeah!”

“I hate to truth-bomb you first with Bad Cinderella and now with Macauley Caulkin, but,” I say, “that poor kid’s father destroyed his life and micro-managed him to the point of insanity and by 14, Macauley divorced himself from his father legally because of the psychological and financial abuse. So, a) you not being a child actor was a best case scenario, especially knowing how they usually end up and b) jealousy is a fantasy. No one’s life is as great as it appears. As Arthur Miller says in his brilliant play The Price, “there is always a price.” This is a guarantee. Anyway, I do wish someone had corrected me— you— about my burgeoning artistic jealousy here, the very moment it was born, as evidenced in your diary entry. This ‘I just can’t stand’ anger I was newly cultivating should have been transformed into curiosity, inspiration and admiration. But because it wasn’t redirected, I actually still carry the burden of artistic jealousy like an albatross round my neck. It’s this well-worn synaptic path I’ve tread over and over and over again, like an inmate wandering the halls of an asylum muttering, thinking it’ll be different next time, but to absolutely no avail. In fact, artistic jealousy has held my career back in many ways.”

“Really?”

“Defintely,” I say. “I’m not entirely at fault. America and its artistic institutions pit artists against each other. Which is wrong: we are colleagues, not gladiators in the ring. But now, after years of introspection, I’m much better at navigating it. When I feel it now, I try to knee-jerk to ‘the circle rises’ and not ‘pfft, who’s she sleeping with,’ which I know— I know— is a horrible confession for a woman to make, but again, I didn’t get much guidance in this department and my—your— rage was long unformed and ill-focused. These mental pathways are carved out early, and sadly, as you can see, mine went awry.”

“Well,” she says. “What about the last line?”

“Oh you mean—-”

“No one can make me give up what I have my heart set on doing.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Do you still feel this?”

“Stronger than ever.” I say. “Listen: theater is going to be very, very hard. But as one of your future heroes Richard Foreman said, ‘if you’re still doing it, you’ve made it.’”3

POSTSCRIPT:

Here’s my quick and dirty adaptation of the entry, which is the artistic purpose of my archeology/paleography playwriting idea, as described at the top of this piece.

January, 1992.

A small kitchen.

MOTHER stands at the sink, back turned, gazing out the small window above the sink, a million miles away.

SARA, 11, enters, determined.

SARA: I know what I want to be when I grow up.

MOTHER: (distant, not turning around) ..mm hm…

SARA: An actress. I wish a director would discover my talent.

MOTHER:… well…that’s a lot of work…

SARA: I know but—-

MOTHER: …studying all those lines…

SARA: I know! But I can’t stand seeing kid actors doing what I could do!

MOTHER: (almost inaudibly) …that’s nice…

SARA: No can make me give up what I have my heart set on doing. (Beat) Hello?

«end scene»

It was late, around midnight.

I was up, in sweatpants, nursing a Cycling Frog, grapefruit flavor.

Sure, I could be playwriting right now. I am working on something new, after all. Plus, all the men I live with were asleep. What better time to dive in?

But I couldn’t.

I was haunted by something that happened to me the other day. It had to do with Edward Albee.

I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, Edward Albee was there, in my living room.

“Hi,” I said to Albee.

“Ugggghh,” Albee responded with disgust.

“How’s death?” I asked.

“It sucks.” He said. “Why in hell am I here?”

“Well, something happened the other day,” I said. “And it has everything to do with you.”

“I guess you’re about to tell me about it?”

“Yep.”

I took a deep breath.

“But before I do,” I warned, “I have a bit of a preamble. Ready?”

“I guess.” Albee was already fed up.

“Ok,” I said. “If someone ever asks me what the best play ever written is, I could tell them instantly without even thinking about it: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by you.”

“Ah come on, don’t be a fool…”

“No no…It’s true.” I insist. “And I’m not just saying that because you’re sitting here in my living room. It’s just a fact for me. I think you were the last titan of American playwriting. You used language like Beethoven used notes, rhythm and dynamics and if we’re talking about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? specifically, I would genuinely compare your deftness with human language to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13 aka “Pathétique” Sonata. It crawls, then lurches, then sprints, then screams, then skips, then laughs, then smashes you over the head with a frying pan.”

“Anything to drink in this dump?”

“And structurally, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? welcomes you into a recognizable world of contemporary American realism, then shivs you with the ritualistic European Absurdism of “fun and games” and then kicks you in the head with an Expressionistic nihilism when you realize these are not good people with good intentions— these are real people whose deep hurt has made them murderous, capable of total annihilation.”

“Are we about done here?”

“At the risk of flattery and verbosity,” I continued, “I have to tell you that for me, Virginia Woolf? transcends even being a play. It’s more like something that happens to me.”

“Is that unusual?” Asks Albee.

“Uh, yeah, it’s unusal. This kind of play isn’t in fashion anymore. Audiences prefer their theater-going experiences less play, more lecture. There aren’t really characters in plays any more, just Issue-Driven, Non-Profit Mouthpieces to Ensure Future Funding. These Issue-Driven Non-Profit Mouthpiece characters don’t allow things to happen to them live on stage anymore. That’s too dangerous. Instead, they talk about things that they are sure of to other Issue-Driven Non-Profit Mouthpiece characters, who are also sure of things they talk about.”

“For chrissakes,” said Albee.

“And by the end of the play, everyone gets to experience sureness for a few moments. And sureness feels good. But then the houselights rise and phones turn back on and the sureness goes away and Donald Trump comes back.”

“He makes me puke,” said Albee.

“Agree,” I agree. “Anyway, I listened to Uta Hagan and Arthur Hill—-the original Martha and George— perform Virginia Woolf? recorded in 1962. It’s an extraordinary performance captured, amazingly, right here on YouTube. And of course there’s the essential viewing of the actually-married-at-the-time Liz Taylor and Richard Burton as the doomed couple in Mike Nichols’ exquisite movie version from 1966.1”

“It was fine.” Albee reluctantly agrees.2

“But your play itself? How you evoked the violence of marriage? The twisted psychology of marrying someone solely so they can punish you for your past sins? The oxygen tank of illusion needed to survive day to day? The make-believe that keeps us from killing each other? What happens when it’s gone? The sub-reality of nighttime and drinking? Perfection.”

“…” Albee exhaled in fatigue and exasperation.

“And just when the audience can’t take it anymore,” I went on, “you give us those final 30 painfully short lines between George and Martha. They’re not even lines really, they’re the dying strains of two fatigued violins confessing finally that they are both nothing more than two scared little children in this scary world.”

“Which we all are. Period.” Albee said.

“Here look at this,” I handed Albee my phone. “Here are photos of your last 30 lines in the copy of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that I’ve had since the mid-90s:”

“I’m not really interested.” Said Albee.

“Anyway,” I went on, “I would quite literally give my eye-teeth to be able to write plays like you. And the most enviable thing is: your plays, especially Virginia Woolf? feel like they were written in a single fucking sitting with no goddamn rewrites. Tell me you didn’t write Virginia Woolf? in a single fucking sitting with no goddamn rewrites?”3

“Did you conjure me from the dead to blow smoke up my skirt?” Albee grows increasingly disgruntled, “what is it you wanna tell me?”

“Yes yes in a second, but it’s important I tell you this preliminary stuff first, ok?”

“…” Albee rolls his eyes, but settles in.

I go on:

“The second best thing you ever wrote, also one of the best plays ever written, is Three Tall Women, a towering existential feat of a play. Three women spanning life’s three major epochs— youth (character C), middle age (character B) and near-death (character A)— who turn out to be the same woman. They debate the reality of events in their life, with each having a different view and opinion depending on where in time they stand at the feet of life’s colossus. And it’s all complicated by the estrangement of a gay son—- the imaginary son, the unacknowledged boy—- an invisible character who appears in play after play after play of yours. Clearly your Ur-tale. They say the play is about your adoptive mother? Is that true?”

“If I could tell you what a play was about,” grumbled Albee, “I wouldn’t need to write the play.”4

“Right! I marvel at the bravery it to took write it— not as an act of forgiveness, which it isn’t, nor should it be—-but as viewing her life as a whole, like an object you can hold in your hand. As you detail in A’s magnificent final monologue, which I photographed here:”

“What in god’s name did you do to the script there?” Albee asks.

“Oh, I’ll explain,” I explain. “That’s from a page in the script I used when I was a senior at Connecticut College. Myself and two good actor friends, Harmony Tanguay and Jenny Dare Paulin, self-produced and directed ourselves in a studio production of Three Tall Women and I cast myself as “A.”

“Surely you jest.”

“I did! Anyway, when I was a young actor, I had this bizarre compulsion to draw squares around my lines while I was getting off-book. It looks crazier than it was. I think, like George with Martha, it was a form of self-imposed punishment for not having much of an acting technique. See?”

“Anyway, performing that play was one of the most transcendent experiences of my life, but it was insane for three 21-year-old girls to perform Three Tall Women— a play about viewing life from its very end. How could we have possibly understood it? I didn’t! But I loved it anyway! And that’s yet another layer of your brilliance, Albee— and comes into the real thing that happened that I’m getting to.”

“Oh saints be praised.” Albee said.

“Yes yes ok,” I went on. “So, here’s why I’m telling you all this and why I conjured you up from the dead.”

“I’m on tenterhooks,” said Albee sarcastically.

“The other day, I was hired as a guest playwright at a university to give feedback on new plays by the undergrad playwrights. One of the playwrights, Riley, presented the first draft of their new play, a two-hander.”

“So?” Albee said.

“I love two-handers—- they are my absolute favorite play to write. I love two-handers so much in fact, I’m currently workshopping two of them as we speak: Dora Maar, my play about the surrealist artist and the making of Guernica, and Look Out, my own Ur-tale, about two troubled teens grappling with the fallout of their mother’s suicide—- the making of which I’ve written about a lot on Theater Is Hard.”

“Commercial over?” Asked Albee.

“Yeah, sorry.” I said. “The most beautiful thing about a two-hander is that each character arrives onstage with their entire biography of emotional baggage— their pain, joy, memories, delusions, philosophies—- all of which have brought them to this precise moment with this precise person for this precise reason, which triggers this precise play.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Smirked Albee.

“Anyway, Riley’s two-hander was lopsided. I could see that right away. One character was detailed and had an inner-life, opinions and wants. But the other character was an “arrow” character— or a character whose only reason for existence is to point things out for the audience.”

“Exposition personified,” Albee chimed in.

“Right. So I explained all this to Riley. I told Riley that transforming an “arrow” character into a “real” character is actually easier than it sounds. You simply complicate him—- brush in some wants, needs and contradictory details and thinking. Sometimes this can even be done in a single line or two. Then I said to young Riley: ‘Have you ever read The Zoo Story by Edward Albee?’ Riley made a face and said, ‘Who?’ And I said, ‘Edward Albee? The Zoo Story? It’s kind of the American gold standard for two-handers and launched a thousand “two guys on a park bench” imitations. Also,’ I told Riley, ‘it was the beginning of Albee’s lifelong dramaturgical descent into the wreckage of illusion and delusion, the violence of language and how love and hate are always preferable to indifference. You should really read The Zoo Story and steal what you can because—-’

‘Edward Albee?’ Riley interrupted.

‘Yeah, Edward Albee,” I said, knowing exactly what was coming next.

‘Pfft, I’ll skip it,’ Riley said, dismissively. ‘He said Black people weren’t allowed in his plays.’”

There was a long stretch of silence in my living room.

Finally Albee said—

“I didn’t say Black people ‘weren’t allowed’ in my plays, I said I didn’t write plays about Black people so it’s unrealistic to cast them.”

Another stretch of silence and then Albee said—

“Listen: I was a gay playwright in New York in the fucking 1950s, ok? I’m not a racist, I just think as an artist I have a right to be an absolute fascist about what my work is.”

“In theory, I agree with you,” I said.

“It’s just,” Albee went on, “that casting, say, Martha with a Black actor would instantly raise a lot of questions, since it’s a totally naturalistic play. Is this a Black college? Do we have a Black president of a white college? Not very likely.”

I took another deep breath.

“What you are saying,” I said, “is wrong. But I didn’t conjure you from the dead to convince you out of your antiquated belief system. Believe me, I want to try, I really do. There are a million arguments against your and your estate’s stance on non-traditional casting but the biggest for me is one that you, of all people, should understand.”

“Go on,” Albee eyerolled.

“All of theater is a fucking illusion anyway!” I yelled. “A collective agreement that we all say “yes” to in order for it to work. So suddenly deciding that different races playing different roles destroys the “reality” of your play? Your play has to be “real” in order to work, does it? So the actors playing George and Martha should actually be drunk on gin during the show? And they should throw the fight choreography out and just take the punches and strangles? Or the actor playing Nick should actually fuck the actor playing Martha on stage? Or the actor playing George actually has to have shot his mother in the face in his personal life? Are we all not in a theater right now but actually in a dump of a house in New Carthage? It’s all illusion, Albee! Let people cast whoever the fuck they want and trust that most carbon-based audience members have the imagination to go with it! YOU KNOW THE RULES, ALBEE! FOR CHRIST’S SAKE YOU KNOW THE RULES!”5

I inhaled, and then slowly exhaled.

“But I won’t say that,” I said. “I’ve gone to enough Al-Anon meetings to know that you can’t control what another person says and does. What I can do, though, is show you what your stance against non-traditional casting hath wrought upon your legacy. That young undergrad playwright Riley will never experience your tremendous body of work because you believed in that stupid, small-minded casting shit. So now, young Riley ain’t interested.”

“Riley ain’t interested…” said Albee, slowly.

“Nope,” I said. “And I get it. The Youngs today don’t have any time for the bullshit of the Olds of yore. Just as I’m quite sure you yourself didn’t have time for bullshit when you were a Young.”

Albee was silent for a while.

“Mind if I smoke?” He finally asked.

“Go right ahead.”

He does.

“Anyway,” I said. “I want to believe you’d have eventually changed your mind about non-traditional casting, had you lived another ten years. Because you’re that good and I cannot let you go. I will not. But maybe that’s just another illusion I have to live with. Because…who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

“I am, Sara….” Albee said. “I…am. Theater… is…fucking… hard…”

“I know… I know…”

I’ve written about artistic ghosting here at Theater Is Hard in the past. You might remember last year when guest Betazoid Lt. Commander Deanna Troi of the Starship Enterprise gave her thoughts on the phenomenon of ghosting in her Is No Response A Response?

But it’s been a while since I tackled ghosting head on and I have some new ideas about it.

A refresher on ghosting (not that you need it):

Ghosting is when one party abruptly ends all communication with another, typically with little or no explanation.

People usually think of dating when they think of ghosting.

Ghosting is pretty much expected in contemporary dating. I mean, I’ve heard it’s pretty much expected. But I haven’t dated in several decades. When I dated, it was in the beforetimes when there were no cell phones with which to ghost upon. I had old-school ghosting, which I would argue was much worse than new-school ghosting.

For example:

In college, I was feverishly, relentlessly, irrationally in love with this guy named Bradley (obviously that’s not his real name).

One time, Bradley offered to pick me up for a late night hang. Earlier that day, he said he’d swing by the side entrance to my dorm building at 10PM, we’d pick up some booze with his fake ID and then get crazy.

Ready to go, I waited at the agreed upon door at the agreed upon time.

And waited. And waited. And waited.

Maybe… he was running late? Maybe he left me a voicemail!

I jetted up the four flights of stairs to my dorm room and checked my landline voicemail.

Nothing.

I jetted back down— what if he arrived in that instant I left to check my voicemail?! That would so be my luck!

But nope, no Bradley.

After several hours, I gave up and went to bed.

I guess that was just a temporary ghosting because we continued to hook up intermittently over the years and I know I never gave him greif over standing me up that night. I know, I know, but I had a very tenuous hold on this gorgeous asshole and also I was only about 20. I had years of feminism to catch up on.

Ghosting a friend is much more complicated.

In my experience, suddenly exiting a friendship comes after a long period of putting up with awful shit, followed by a realization of who this person really is and how they consistently make you feel. This kind of reckoning can be handled in many ways, but I wouldn’t fault someone for ghosting the toxic party as a way to protect one’s mental health or even as a means of survival. I have been on both the giving and receiving ends of friendship-ghosting, as I’m sure you have, too. And for some toxic relationships, like with a narcissist, abuser or addict, suddenly going no-contact can be the only answer, sometimes even life or death.

But artistic ghosting is different.

Arguably, being ghosted artistically hurts more. Whereas I can guess at why Bradley stood me up that night in college— as mentioned, he was gorgeous, well aware of it, hilariously horny and easily distracted by shiny things— so no mystery there. Friendship ghosting, if people are being honest, can typically be unpacked, anatomized and, eventually gotten to the bottom of by everyone involved.

But artistic ghosting? I usually have no idea why that happens.

Because I already detailed my own recent case of industry ghosting via Deanna Troi last year, let’s not talk about me.

Let’s imagine a fictional female playwright going through a fictional artistic ghosting scenario. Let’s name her… Hypa Thetical. I assure you, Hypa is not me— I only wish. Nothing here happened, I made it all up.

Here’s Hypa’s story:

Hypa’s playwriting star is finally rising. She can feel it— everyone can. After years of hard work, investment and luck, regional theaters are finally poking around. Hypa’s also getting acceptance emails— the kind that make no mention of how many others applied. Theater is still hard for her, of course. The National Playwrights Conference at The O’Neill Center remains immoveable. But so does The Lambert Glacier in Antarctica— until it inevitably calves. With her recent success, Hypa remains hopeful that the NPC, arctic ice shelf that it is, will one day calve in her direction.

One rainy Saturday, Hypa sits at her kitchen table in her studio apartment in Astoria, Queens making a real dent in her new play called, Lurching Toward Infinity (working title). When suddenly—-

PING!

Although she typically ignores emails once she hits a flow state, dopemine fiend that she is, she looks at her phone.

It’s an email from Dick Salary, the artistic director at a major theater in the big city.

Yanked out of her right brain vacation, Hypa smashes open her gmail.

Holy fuck. Dick Salary is interested in producing Hypa’s play, Plunging Toward Forever, the prequel to Lurching Toward Infinity.

Hypa knows that in Trump’s Brave New America, a playwright receiving this kind of email is almost unheard of. Government funding is long gone and private funding depends upon the milquetoastiness of the plays programmed, which TV celebrity is involved and/or how famous their parents are. So Hypa being courted by an AD like Dick Salary is literally Major League Baseball rare.

MLB stats flash through Hypa’s mind for some reason: about 500,000 kids play high school baseball each year. Around 7% of them make it to NCAA baseball. And only about 0.02%—roughly 1 in 5,000—make it to the MLB, where fewer than 800 players are active at any given season. So, statistically, the percentage of baseball players who end up in the MLB is zero. Hypa doesn’t know the stats for playwrights, and she’s not gonna guess, but considering there are over 10,000 playwright users on New Play Exchange and only 82 LORT theaters in Trump’s America, Hypa has beat the odds.

Hypa, not wanting to sound too eager to Dick Salary, paces her studio apartment for 44 minutes exactly. Hypa feels that’s the precise amount of response time to indicate a full and interesting life.

She types Dick Salary a professional, enthusiastic, but cool: “Yes, I’m very interested.”

She deletes it.

She types it again: “Yes! I’m very interested!”

(You see, Hypa was raised in the 80s and 90s when women were conditioned to smile over email.)

Over the next two weeks, exciting emails are exchanged, plans come together, meetings are discussed and anticipated, premiere dates are bandied about.

But then suddenly, without warning, all communications from Dick Salary cease.

Well, thinks Hypa, it’s late August. Normal people usually go on vacation in late August. He’s probably in some fabulous island paradise with his wife Susan Salary and their kids. He works hard, he deserves a break. And look! He left in such a hurry, he forgot to put up an out-of-office message. Understandable. Forgivable.

Hypa waits two weeks, well after Labor Day, then emails Dick, “Hi, following up.”

She quickly deletes it.

She types it again, “Hi! Just following up!”

(She added the diminutive “just” because she was raised in the 80s and 90s when women were expected to apologize for asking for things.)

But her email goes unanswered by Dick Salary.

Four more weeks pass.

The leaves begin to change. There’s a snap in the air. In line at CVS to pick up her SSRIs, Hypa notices the first Halloween decorations of the season. A witch. A bloody hand. A 12-foot werewolf in cut-off denim shorts.

That night, Hypa decides to email Dick Salary one more time.

She contemplates her terminology carefully.

“Close the loop”? No, too corporate-aggressive.

“Bumping this to the top of your inbox”? No way, them’s fightin’ words.

“Circling back”? Too delusional.

“Perhaps this isn’t the right time”? Way too defeatist.

“Thanks for considering me anyway”? Pfft, thinks Hypa, may as well say thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another.

So what does Hypa email to Dick Salary?

Well, she thinks, nothing is always an option.

But isn’t saying nothing a form of complicity? Reinforcing rude behavior? Like when a kid gets in trouble at school and the mom says “you’re grounded for a week, mister!” But the kid counters with, “I won’t ever do that again.” And the mom says “Do you promise?” And the kids says “I swear to god!” And the mom caves and doesn’t ground him. But then a week later the kid gets in trouble again for the same thing because the mom taught him that bad behavior has no consequences.

Not today, Dick, thinks Hypa. Bad behavior does have consequences and Salary is gonna hear from me whether he wants to or not!

But Hypa doesn’t email Dick Salary. Ever again. Because the truth is, she isn’t really mad. She’s hurt. Deeply hurt.

Did Dick Salary think she forgot he offered Hypa the one thing she has worked her entire life to acheive? Did he think she was so buried in other offers that his was just one more? Did he think she wouldn’t notice his vanishing act? Did he think this playwriting thing was just a lark until her finance career takes off?

Wait! thinks Hypa. I must have inadvertently said something offensive or insane in our email exchange. That’s gotta be it! What could it have been? I don’t recall writing anything unprofessional but maybe I accidentally typed, “Stop The Steal” or “the moon landing was staged” or “Tylenol in pregnancy causes autism.”

Hypa clicks over to her “Sent” folder in Gmail and re-reads every email exchanged between herself and Dick Salary. She looks for something off-color she may have said, or even subliminally implied—- literally anything. But it’s all clearly professional, approachable and light—boring, almost.

Hypa starts to go a bit mad now.

She paces her studio apartment in Astoria, Queens.

She rehearses what she’s gonna say to Dick Salary if she’s ever in the room with him. (Then she remembers she was raised in the 80s and 90s and so must be a good girl.)

She gazes out the window at the city.

I know you’re out there Salary, she muses. I know you didn’t forget. I know this is a power play. I know you’re just toying with me.

Halloween bleeds into Thanksgiving. In line at CVS to pick up her SSRIs, a life-sized Santa towers over her, merrily asking, “Have you been a good girl this year? Have you been a good girl this year? Have you been a good girl this year?”

Later that night, Hypa’s mind starts spinning out: Maybe right after Dick Salary sent that last email to her, he was fired on the spot for embezzling funds from the theater and the FBI confiscated his laptop as evidence and he’s been in a holding cell ever since with no access to email.

Maybe the night after that last email, his wife, Susan Salary, told him she’s fallen in love with their tax accountant, Bruce, and she’s leaving Dick Salary forever to live with Bruce in his house in Aix-en-Provance, France. This then caused Dick to leap off the 59th Street Bridge but he survived and is now paralyzed from the neck down and can no longer email playwrights back.

Or maybe Dick was simply fired by the board because he’s a serial groper whose code-name among the theater staff is “The Cunt,” just like Prince Andrew’s staff called Prince Andrew “The Cunt” behind his back.

Maybe I dodged a bullet by being ghosted, thinks Hypa. Maybe I should be grateful.

Hanukkah passes and then the Christmas approach begins.

The week before Christmas, Hypa’s friend Pseudo invites Hypa to opening night of a hot new play about family secrets and old greivances called Fragments Of Us. It just so happens to be opening at the major theater run by none other than Dick Salary.

“I can’t go,” laments Hypa. “What if I run into the AD?”

“Come on,” says Pseudo. “I doubt he even knows what you look like. Plus, I got wristbands for the opening night party!”

True. Hypa and Dick Salary have never actually met in person, just over email. Sure, she knows what he looks like because she’s been Googling him since his first email in August, but chances are, he has no idea what she looks like.

Hypa decides to go with Pseudo.

After the show (and the roaring standing ovation for some reason), Hypa and Pseudo wander into the lobby for the opening night party.

It’s a pretty typical scene– cheap wine and light catering, all of it presented by actors and actresses in bowties holding trays.

There’s even an open bar, way over there, in the corner. Huh, thinks Hypa, a non-profit springing for an open bar is impressive. They must have high hopes for Fragments of Us.

There’s no line so Hypa decides to skip the cheap wine and get something higher octane.

“I’ll be right back,” she tells Pseudo. She heads for the bar, alone.

Once there, she spots a man a few feet away, also alone, leaning against the bar with one foot on a barstool stretcher and another on the floor. He’s hunched over a glass which probably very recently bore gin or vodka, but now only ice. He’s wearing a three-piece suit, with maroon and gold pin-stripes, like he swiped it from a Guys & Dolls strike. He’s even got a watchchain dangling from the breast pocket. Where’s the craps game tonight, Nicely? Hypa smiles invisibly.

Soon the pin-striped man attempts to chat up the bartender, who is another actress in a bowtie.

She’s not having it.

She tightly grins and tensely nods every time Nicely says something to her.

Finally, he asks for another drink. She politely, quickly hands him one and then moves as far away from this guy as the tiny makeshift bar will allow. Nicely swills the drink, represses a belch in that swallowing vomit kind of way men do and says to the actress-bartender, “Watch my drink, honey, I gotta hit the head.”

Once he’s gone, Hypa asks the actress-bartender who that guy in the Damon Runyon get-up is.

“Oh,” says the actress-bartender. “That’s Dick Salary, the AD here. He’s a douchebag.”

“That’s Dick Salary?” says Hypa, incredulous. “And he’s… a douchebag?

“Oh yeah,” says the actress-bartender. “That’s actually what the staff here calls him behind his back: The Douchebag.”

“The Douchebag?”

“Not very creative, I know,” she laughs. “But neither is he.”

Later, Hypa subways back to Astoria, Queens. She feels lighter than she’s felt in months.

The Douchebag, she thinks. That’s quite a legacy.

When Hypa gets home to her studio apartment, she isn’t tired at all, rather totally invigorated. She decides to keep chipping away at Lurching Toward Infinity. She flips open her laptop and starts tapping.

That’s quite a legacy, too.

(Theater is hard. Fuck the ghosters.)

If you do something long enough, the Youngs wanna pick your brain.

It’s really flattering when the Youngs ask me this. I always say yes. There is so much I wish an Old like me now had told me when I was a Young.

I got my brain picked by a Young recently.

I told this Young what I always tell Youngs picking my brain. First:

“Never take ‘no’ for an answer.”

Then:

“Pay actors as employees, not contractors, because in the state of New York it is in fact illegal for actors to work as contractors, even though everyone does it, and if you pay them as a contractor, even once, and they file for unemployment, you may end up in the 5 year court battle that I was in.” (For another Substack).

And then my third bit of advice:

“Offer to work for free.”

Believe it or not, Youngs used to like this advice. But they do not anymore. I don’t know when the changeover happened, but it happened.

Even over the phone, when I said, “offer to work for free,” I heard the Young’s eyebrows shoot up, a silent “ick” and a tacit “meh.”

I get it.

Historically, young artists think they know things.

Boy howdy did I ever think I knew things as a Young.

I’m sure you’ve encountered plenty of 20-somethings who think they know things. Ones with inexplicably towering self-confidence. Eviable, really! And why shouldn’t they have self-confidence? They’re young, gorgeous and not tired. The whole world is ahead of them.

But the truth is, this baseless confidence is simply a form of masking the shame of being an idiot.

But that’s OK!

Being an idiot when you’re young is liberating! Think of the journey of revelation ahead of you! 1

Anyway, after I said the whole “offer to work for free thing,” the Young said, “Uh…ok. Well…I don’t know.. I really appreciate you taking the time to—-”

To which I countered with this story (much to the Young’s dismay).

In 2002, the summer after 9/11, I wandered into the Jean Cocteau Rep and asked the first person I saw if I could work there for free which, eventually, led to my first professional acting job, as a JCR company member for several years (I was paid for the acting bit). I wrote a piece about it here. But the Cocteau sunsetted in 2005, when I was 25.

Shortly after that, my friend and I went to see The Wooster Group’s, The Emperor Jones, by Eugene O’Neill, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. I didn’t know who The Wooster Group was, but as an O’Neill aficionado, I knew exactly what to expect. I mean, after all, I was a Young. I knew things.

That show was only an hour, but it forever changed the artistic landscape in my brain.

This young idiot dialogue flashed through my young idiot brain:

“Whoa whoa whoa! There are rules here people!”

(Nope.)

“But you’re not allowed to take an old script by Eugene O’Neill and do whatever the fuck you want with it!”

(Yes, you are.)

“But you’re not allowed to talk, sing, move and dance in that hauntingly otherworldly way! It makes no sense!”

(That’s the point.)

“But what about tech, huh?!

(What about it?)

“Well, the rule is tech design is only used to serve the show and light my cute little face while I’m acting! You can’t use technology and media and sound and design as another character in the play!”

(Of course you can, dumbass.)

“And how about that tone?! You can’t perform a classic play in that irreverent tone!

(Why not?)

“Because all classic plays must be treated with museum gloves as the delicate precious works of thinly spun glass that they are and spoken in a Queen’s English kind of precious way!”

(Wrong again)

My young idiot brain started to panic and spiral now:

“But– but– but where are the actors acting? Where are the dancers dancing? The designers designing? Where is the traditional separation of labors that the American theater has hammered into my head for 25 years? Isn’t the theater about me? And my resume? And advancing my career? And waiting in line at the Equity building for 8 hours? Why did I waste all that time in theater school learning all that ego-driven shit when here is a company of artists clearly less concerned with themselves than they are about the work itself?!”

(Noble, huh?)

As the house lights came up, I suddenly realized: I’ve been doing it wrong.

I felt like a fucking fool. I had mountains to learn.

“Cool show,” my friend said. “Drink?”

I politely declined.

I subway’d back to my apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and immediately went to The Wooster Group’s website. They offered an unpaid internship and I applied for it. I told the woman who interviewed me that I could come in every Friday without pay for… the rest of my life?

“I just wanna be around this,” I remember saying.

SIDE QUEST: I wanna quickly mention here that I did not come from money, nor did I get family help in order to facilitate this free labor thing I did—- which I’ve written about here, here and here. I had the ability to work for free at both the JCR and TWG because I lucked into a flexible executive assistant role pretty early on, which I held on to with an iron grip for many years. My boss, a theater guy himself, was kind enough to give me Fridays off to hang at Wooster’s Performing Garage in Soho.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh yes!

Being allowed to just walk into Wooster was revelatory, although I was needlessly starstruck all the time so I was a nervous wreck, more than was appropriate. But thankfully, when I arrived, the company was on tour and all was quiet for the first few weeks.

In that time, thanks to Wooster’s generous archivist Clay Hapaz, I watched every Wooster Group show ever documented, going back to the early 1970s up to the present day. I watched every Spalding Grey show (Rumstick Road is still one of my favorite works of art ever, but also Point Judith, Nyatt School, his monologues and audience interview shows), Routes 1 & 9, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith (exquisitely performed by original TWG’er, Ron Vawter), The Hairy Ape, LSD: Just The High Points, To You, The Birdie! Poor Theater, The Temptation of St Anthony, House/Lights, Hula, Brace Up, and more. No exaggeration, I watched everything in that archive.

I didn’t watch all of this because I enjoyed it.

Everyone knows how the live theater experience simply does not translate to video. It’s one of the great, yet obvious, ironies of the theater.

I watched TWG’s archive because I was deeply ashamed of my ignorance about the avant-garde. I watched it because of how tightly the “rules” of the American theater had been imprinted onto my young mind, as evidenced after that Jones. I was 25, had majored in theater, completed rigorous conservatory training, even studied with the RSC in Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK and had been working professionally as an actor in New York for three years at that point. So not knowing about NYC storied avant-garde theater history, especially The Wooster Group, to my mind, was unacceptable. I thought Merrily We Roll Along was avant-garde (It moves backwards!) So I needed this crash course desperately.

Soon, the company returned from their tour abroad and started rehearsing their new version of Hamlet. I was told, if I wanted, whenever I wanted, I could watch rehearsal downstairs.

One Friday morning, a beautiful, late summer day, I climbed the towering flight of stairs from the Performing Garage stage up to their office.

When I got to the top, I heard someone come in behind me. I turned around and looked down that long flight of stairs.

It was this guy wearing a bike helmet, heading into the theater. I’d never seen him before, but from the top of the stairs, I inexplicably felt compelled to shout down:

“Did you ride your bike here?”

“Yep!” said the guy, friendly. “I ride from Brooklyn.”

“Oh,” I said. “I used to ride my bike in the city all the time.”

“You don’t anymore?” Said the guy, genuinely curious.

“No,” I said. “Now I get The Fear.”

I don’t know why I suddenly quoted Hunter S. Thompson to a stranger. It’s not like I was a massive Hunter S. Thompson fan, but I knew he frequently used the phrase “The Fear” in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas to describe the awful comedown moment when the drugs stop working and reality sets in.

What I didn’t know (and found out later) was that that guy in the bike helmet was a Hunter S. Thompson acolyte— knew every word, considered himself Thompson’s spiritual twin.2 So when he heard me drop a Hunter quote, he went gonzo. He introduced himself as Reid, the video designer for Hamlet.

The following Friday, someone asked me if I wanted to join the company after rehearsal at a bar down the street called Toad Hall. Certain I was experiencing an aural hallucination, I tagged along anyway. (With The Wooster Group. To a bar. In Soho.) Nervous to the point of total social paralysis, I pretended to play pool with another intern and tried to pretend to look cool.

Reid told me later that when he spotted me at the pool table that night, he leaned over to another Wooster designer sitting at bar, pointed me out and said, “I’m gonna marry her.”

We’ve been together for 21 years, married 15. (Children: 2). The theater is, has always been, and will always be, our love language. He is the most interesting, honest and beautiful person I’ll ever know.

I worked at Wooster for free for about a year and half, which included two tours with Hamlet to Paris and then Amsterdam (I didn’t tour in any official capacity, more as a stagedoor Johnny and Reid’s secret girlfriend). I eventually left (as did he) to focus on making my own work (a lot of which we made together), go to grad school for playwriting and further attempt to evolve my young idiot self into a self-actualized human being.

So what I’m trying to explain here, my sweet, dear, inexperienced Young, is that the Wooster Group never gave me a dollar. They did, however, give me my whole life.

Hey Young? Remember last week when that other Young Timmy Chalamet said that no one cares about opera and ballet? Well, what he was really saying, I think, is that because opera and ballet exist outside the realm of capitalism, because, typically, there isn’t a blockbuster ballet or opera opening in theaters worldwide, because ballet and opera have managed to survive for hundreds of years despite not printing money like Dune or that stupid ping-pong thing, Timmy can’t see its value.

Well, the reason why Timmy thinks this is because he’s an idiot.

But maybe one day, when Timmy’s a big boy, he’ll figure it out. Just like you!

Now, I’m not suggesting you should do anything you feel weird doing. As everyone knows, squeezing free labor out of artists has a sordid history in NYC. It can be hard to distinguish bteween you using an institution and an institution using you. I was using Wooster in the most glorious way and I didn’t expect them to pay me because I was young and an idiot. But again, this is all just my own opinion, narrative and experience, not yours. I wasn’t a nepo-baby and I’m assuming you aren’t either. So I needed a way to slip in the back door. I did it this way and it worked for me. I got a priceless education (plus, the whole love-of-my-life thing.)

When I interviewed 26 downtown NYC theater artists for my 2022 book The Lost Conversation, quite a few of them told me they found themselves in the same situation as I was just starting out—- no way into the business, no connections, not the daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, etc... So they, too, hung around places for free. And that’s how it started.

To be honest, I don’t even know if theaters allow Youngs to work for free anymore. Maybe it’s too much of a liability. Maybe there are laws against it now, I don’t know. But I am grateful that my self-confidence was flimsy enough as a 20-something to know exactly what I didn’t know and have the humility to try and fix that.

Because theater is hard.

“The American theater wears a fixed smile suitable for all occasions and all seasons.” —-Mac Wellman in his manifesto The Theater of Good Intentions.

Update for March 9th, 2026:

In the last week, I have added almost one hundred (100!) new subscribers, bringing me closer to 1k readers. I don’t have the words to express my gratitude and awe at this following. Thank you for your trust, imagination and curiosity. I do worry about the ragefully fun manifestos my new subscribers may have missed, writing that will certainly contextualize who I am as a playwright and the crazy shit I believe in. So for this week’s Theater Is Hard, I am reblasting one of my favorite manifestos, The Theater Of New Escapism, which I wrote one year ago, and which I see as our current theatrical movement (anti-movement?) Please do share this with any frustrated artist you know. Thanks!

Originally posted April 26th, 2025:

In 2016, when Trump became baby-dictator the first time, I remember thinking, “at least the art will be fierce.”

Because, historically, the more monstrous the fascism, the angrier, dirtier, more broken and nonsensical the theater.

Most importantly, fascism tends to reinvent the avant-garde.

That’s because fascists like their art straight up. They like art that looks like what it looks like. (See my Substack piece All Hail The Degenerates—- Hitler was into that kind of art, too).

Fascists like art about their country and how it’s a big, strong country that can beat up your stupid, weak country. Fascists prefer “artists” Lee Greenwood, Kid Rock and Ted Nugent because they say just what they mean. How kind.

Before I get into my Theater of New Escapism, allow me to give a quick refresher on some real artists, theater makers specifically, who hurt the fragile feelings of fascists with their plays.

Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theater is usually the first one people think of. Brecht (and the women he stole his ideas from) invented Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect, meant to shake audiences out of their passive consumption of fascist bullshit by having actors literally halt the play, turn to the audience and go, “Snap out of it, assholes.” Although master fascist bullshitter Joseph Goebbels went after him, Brecht got out of Germany early enough not to be executed (which wasn’t the case for a lot of theater people he worked with).

Another movement that hurt fascist feelings was Surrealism, which led to the Theater of Cruelty from the jarringly attractive playwright Antonin Artaud (tied with Chekhov for top smokeshow in the canon). Artaud wrote unpolished, unstructured, rageful, nonsensical, dream-logic plays as his fuck you to fascist order and state-worship. Artaud’s shriek of “distrust the rational!” riled up the fascists, who, like Trump fascists, were offended by stuff they couldn’t download into an adorable little soundbite like:

“Deutchland uber alles!” (Translation: Germany above all!)

or

“Mussolini ha sempre ragione!” (Translation: Mussolini is always right!)

or

“Make America Great Again!” (Translation: My daddy didn’t hug me!)

Then there’s Vsevolod Meyerhold, a Russian theater maker who invented a totally new form of theater called biomechanics— beautifully grotesque, expressive gestural movements, repeated again and again and again, paired with devastating rhythms, taking an audience on a truer emotional journey than any realistic play could.

But sometimes Meyerhold used his theatrical gestural system to make fun of Stalin (indirectly). Stalin, snowflake that he was, couldn’t handle it, so he arrested Meyerhold, tortured a false confession out of him and executed him by firing squad. Stalin also murdered Meyerhold’s wife in their apartment. She was an actress in his company.

And I can’t forget the also very gorgeous, allegedly shredded, Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca (ok, three-way tie) whose playwriting offended the not gorgeous, not shredded, short, fat, ugly fascist Francisco Franco.

Lorca’s plays were thinly-veiled gay stories, tales of forbidden love and deep longing. Lorca was as openly gay as he could be in little Franco’s Spain (which was not very) Lorca also championed women and the poor. Hurt by this, Franco executed Lorca without a trial or even a stated reason, and buried him, probably in a mass grave. No one knows for sure though, because Lorca’s body has still never been found.

But that was Europe and Russia in the 20th century.

Now, it was 2016 and America’s turn!

The orange rapist would surely trigger artistic ferocity, rebellion, innovation and rageful nonsense!

Come on, theater artists! Let’s confuse and offend the orange rapist! Let’s skewer him with absurdist poetry he can’t understand (try as he might!)

Let’s watch as he accuses us of treason and threatens to kill us! And let’s all laugh at the orange rapist and suggest he smile more!

The New York and American avant-garde will rise again!

But that didn’t happen.

What happened in the theater since the dawn of Trump is New Escapism.

New Escapism acknowledges American fascism but hides it away as a kindness to its audience.

New Escapism serves up a 2-hour long numbing cream to temporarily ease the daily assault of American fascism.

New Escapism plays hardly mention American fascism, as that would be a betrayal of the movement. Sure, since Trump there have been parable plays, metaphor plays and cautionary plays referencing fascism, but usually it’s a reference to old fascism, stories from 1930s Germany, usually. What is an audience supposed to do with this remembrance? Click their tongues and say “oh my how history repeats itself” and get cocktail it?

New Escapism is a heartfelt mission statement about love and trees.

New Escapism is nostalgia, like remembering Neil Diamond, Carol King, Tina Turner and a non-child molesting Michael Jackson.

New Escapism is staging movies from the 80s and 90s that everyone already loves like Back To The Future, Beaches and Death Becomes Her and going, “Remember how much simpler life was when these movies were out? Come feel that again!”

New Escapism ultimately says there’s nothing we can do to fight American fascism so let’s just not think about it for the duration of a full-length play.

I don’t like New Escapism, but I understand it.

I too feel helpless to fight the orange rapist and his rapist enablers. I too need a break. I’ve flipped through TIME: Great Photos of the 20th Century. I’ve seen the piles of bodies. I heard children taken from their parents at the border. I’ve imagined what happened to the Bibas family. I’ve seen the vacant stares of the Palestinian children in the Gaza hospitals. I saw 9/11.

New Escapism is born of the indisputable fact that we human beings, as a species, have reached our capacity for horror. We are not designed to see and feel and empathize with this shit a minute longer. And now you want me to pay $300 to sit in the theater and experience it more? No thanks. Neil Diamond, please.

I tried to escape New Escapism.

I made a play in 2021 called Mendacity, which wound up being a film because of Covid.

In Mendacity, I transformed Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof into a takedown of American fascism. I cast Senator Lindsay Graham as Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie The Cat, Trump as Big Daddy, Jared Kushner as Big Mama, AOC a Sister Woman and The United States of America as Brick.

There’s a sequence in my play Mendacity that I think sums up America’s version of fascism and New Escapism in one fell swoop:

BRICK: You wanna live in a fantasy world all the time?

BIG DADDY: Yes! A fantasy world puts you in the driver’s seat, not them. Look where mendacity has put me! Look what it’s done for me!

BRICK: But look what it’s done for me!

BIG DADDY: You haven’t believed hard enough.

BRICK: I can’t believe lies.

BIG DADDY: Lies are only lies at first! You can make a lie the truth if you want to!

(If you want to watch all of Mendacity, filmed at the height of Covid for an audience of no one at The Connelly (RIP), you can rent it here for a small cost. If paying for it is an issue, message me, happy to send it.)

So what are we to do?

Do we fight New Escapism? Or do we fully capitulate to it?

Isn’t that cowardly?

Wouldn’t that disappoint beautiful, brave artists like Artaud and Lorca?

I don’t know.

If Artaud and Lorca were alive today, they’d be totally different guys.

Artaud would get the mental help he desperately needed. Lorca would have come out decades ago. And if they were alive today, would they write the same way? Or would they too capitulate to New Escapism? As much as I can’t imagine Artaud enjoying a Carole King musical review, how can I say for sure? Maybe it would make him feel better for a few hours. Doesn’t Artaud deserve that?

Or is New Escapism what their brave artistic resistance wrought?

Did Meyerhold fight against fascism, under constant threat of death, so that today’s theater artists would have the privilege to not fight against it? To just dip out for a while?

Again, I don’t know.

But I see myself becoming a New Escapist. I’ve spent the year writing a massive new theater project not about fascism. It will most definitely provide an escape for an audience forced to gaze into Trump’s dark, Mephistophelian soul day after day, knowing his presidency will never end, knowing exactly where America is going: just another pile of bodies in TIME: Great Photos of the 20th Century.

Maybe New Escapism is nothing more than an act of community compassion.

Theater was hard for Brecht (and the women he stole his ideas from), Artaud, Meyerhold and Lorca. Theater is hard now, too. So why not find yourself a popular 80s movie, a yachtfull of cash, some ear plugs and a blindfold and help your community heal, if only for two hours at a time.

My 13-year-old son performed in his middle school’s production of Joseph & The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat last weekend. (You may have noticed my recent gushing posts about it).

Full disclosure:

Several months ago, my 13-year-old got in trouble at school.

As a punishment, I forced him to audition for Joseph/Dreamcoat, which he was most certainly not planning on doing.

But since closing night, my kid told me he plans to audition harder next year and that Joseph/Dreamcoat didn’t work as a punishment because he fucking loved it (his words).

I often worry if I’m a good mom, as all good moms do. Beyond validating their feelings, being present, smothering them with love and driving them places on time, I don’t really know what I’m doing. But punishing my kid with Andrew Lloyd Webber as a way of tricking him into loving Andrew Lloyd Webber? It was an act of parenting innovation I didn’t think I was capable of. I await the book deals.

Anyway, you probably won’t believe me when I say that my kid’s middle school version of Joseph/Dreamcoat was one of the most joyful, rigorous spectaculars I’ve ever seen on stage. But it was.

I’m not just saying that because my kid was in it.

I’ve suffered through hundreds of hours of school performances. Every parent knows how dreadful it is to watch other people’s kids doing things.

But not this show. This show was an exquisite, turbo-charged machine of choreography, singing, acting and most importantly, joy.

The reason why it was this joyful was because in this particular production, if you wanted to be in it, you could be in it. Because of that, there were over 100 kids on stage and 60 kids running crew. Yes, auditions were held, but only to place kids in roles, not to cut them.

This is literally the definition of inclusion—- that no-bullshit kind of inclusion you actually execute, instead of gaslight about in your feel-good mission statement.

When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, school plays were not interested in inclusion. Or joy, for that matter.

The person who directed all my high school musicals was this woman named Andie.

In my memory, Andie was an adult adult— but in retrospect, I know she was in her late twenties.

Andie was not a teacher, but a long-ago alum of my high school who resurfaced and somehow got the job without any real resume or theater experience to speak of (it was the 90s).

Andie was huge, both physically and emotionally. Imagine a gigantic, red-haired Liza Minnelli.

As mentioned, Andie didn’t believe in inclusion in the high school musical, she believed in cuts.

She scorched the earth with cuts.

Year after year, Andie’s favorite moment, seemingly, was when the cast list went up on the door to the auditorium. After the final round of auditions, all us theater kids would linger in the hallway outside, waiting for that door to creak open and Andie to come out with a slice of paper and scotch tape.

Up went that list upon the door.

But Andie didn’t then duck back into the classroom—- she’d stay for the reveal.

Whereas most adults would be affected by the sight of weeping teenagers, emotional shrapnel bounced off Andie like Superman. “This is show business,” she seemed to say. “Thems the breaks.”

But Andie could also be bought and sold. Andie shared state secrets. Andie talked shit about kids. Andie even harbored crushes on boys (nothing acted upon, as far as I know, but there were certainly rumors).

In the beginning, I liked Andie a lot and she liked me. When Guys & Dolls was announced as the musical my freshman year (1995), I went into pleasure overload. Guys & Dolls was the first Broadway show I ever saw, my gateway drug. I knew it backwards and forwards. I would be Adelaide.

The day of auditions, the role of Adelaide came down to me and this senior named Christa.

Andie called the two of us back in to sing Adelaide’s Lament over and over and over again. It was as if she enjoyed it. Why didn’t Andie just give me the role, I wondered, I was clearly hitting it out of the park. And Christa kind of agreed. She herself admitted to me that she wasn’t really a theater person, had no intention of pursuing theater after high school, and really only auditioned for Guys & Dolls as a lark.

“Come on!” I telepathed to Andie. “This role would be wasted on Christa!”

Soon, the door creaked open, Andie popped out and the cast list went up.

Christa was Adelaide, not me.

I wasn’t cut. Worse. I was a Hot Box Girl. A lineless, songless, faceless ensemble member.

I went numb.

Andie immediately took me aside and whispered words of reassurance in my ear:

“Sara, don’t freak out,” she said. “Christa is a senior and you’re a freshman.”

“So what?” I said, the levee about to break.

“Well, my policy is,” Andie explained, “if it comes down to two, seniority wins.”

I didn’t realize she had a policy.

After that, I slipped into a period of darkness and despair. I wept in my bed for days, totally inconsolable. The only thing that snapped me out of it was when my dad interrupted my crying jag one day with his journalistic matter-of-fact truism: “In ten years, you won’t even remember this.” He said. That helped me recover for some reason.

My sophomore year (1996), West Side Story was announced as that year’s musical.

Fuck Guys & Dolls, I thought. West Side Story was (and still is) my favorite musical ever. If I’m not cast as Anita, I thought, my wrath will be biblical.

That summer I worked on Anita songs and scenes to the point of exhaustion. I would get that role.

One night, shortly before the West Side Story audition, Andie had me and a few other girls over to her apartment.

I don’t remember why we went there, how we got there, how we got home or if any adults even knew we were there. I only remember two things: first Andie gave me a Zima.

Zima was a clear, lemon-lime flavored alcoholic malt beverage born out of the “clear beverage craze” that gripped the country in the 90s for some reason. Coke and Pepsi went clear for a while and I guess Zima followed.

Anyway, I was 15 years old and I had never tasted alcohol before. I knew I was too young for it, also I had no interest in drinking. But because it was Andie and because she was making decisions that steered the trajectory of my life and because I wanted to impress her with how chill I was, I took the Zima, opened it, drank it and got buzzed.

The only other thing I remember from that night is when Andie and I put our tap shoes on, went out on her tiny little balcony and tapdanced in the moonlight.

For a long time, I liked this memory.

Now, I don’t like it.

At all.

Aside from the fact that I cannot fathom an adult even wanting to spend time with a teenager who isn’t theirs, I cannot fathom an adult giving alcohol to one, especially a 15 year old, and then dancing with her. This wasn’t a mentor/mentee situation. It was a creepy, inappropriate situation. But it was the 90s and theater has a wider berth for shitty behavior, especially back then.

Shortly after that, I was cast as Anita in West Side Story.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Sara, aren’t you a white person?

Yes.

Allow me to explain something I have never admitted in a public forum before. I hope you will forgive my admission here and understand that I was 15, it was 1995 and I had no agency over my life.

Before every performance of West Side Story, Andie slathered my face in bronzer. She also used permanent hair dye to color my brown hair a deep jet black.

This was all Andie’s idea—-I was 15, remember—- and I thought nothing of it at the time. Now of course I know it was completely unnecessary, offensive and hurtful. I’m sorry it happened and I’m sorry I didn’t see that then.1

Anyway, I crushed it. A lot of transformative life events happened to me during the run of that show, but I’ll save them for another time.

After West Side Story closed, the following year’s musical was announced: Damn Yankees. It would be 1996, I would be a junior.

Damn Yankees was not my favorite musical—-anything about sports immediately bores me. Also, I had seen Jerry Lewis in it on Broadway in 1994 and I remembered him being laughable and not in a good way.

But there was of course the role of Lola, the devil’s assistant sent to earth to seduce Joe into staying “young” and relinquishing his soul to Satan. You probably know Lola’s big song, “Whatever Lola Wants” Lola gets! And little man, little Lola wants you. (Again, not Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.)

Regardless, that summer I worked on Lola to the point of exhaustion. I would get that role.

Also, that summer, both Andie and I were cast in our community theater’s production of Anything Goes, the great Cole Porter tap musical. (As referenced above, both Andie and I could tap). Andie, of course, was cast as the female lead, Reno Sweeney. I, of course, was cast in the ensemble.

I was 16 by now. Andie was close to 30.

At intermission one night, Andie and I were hanging outside by the stage door. She leaned on the crumbling brick wall of the theater and lit a cigarette. I sat on the ground next to her, trying to be cool.

“Well,” she said between puffs, “Damn Yankees this year.”

“Yes!” I said, “I’m totally excited.”

“You should be,” she said, vaguely.

“Why?” I said, coyly.

“Well,” she went on, “because I’ve already decided I’m casting you as Lola.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Pre-cast? That loathsome word: pre-cast. Bane to actors and directors the world over. But when it applies to you? Heaven! I was pre-cast!

“I’m Lola?” I asked, incredulous.

“You’re Lola!” She said, proudly, directly, confidently. “I mean, Sara: There’s no one else who can play that part but you.”

I fire-crackered to the moon. I was untouchable. I was Lola! And I didn’t even have to audition! I was so good, I was an insider! Fuck inclusion! I declared. Long live exclusion!

As the day of Damn Yankees auditions approached, I “prepared” for Lola, but… not really. Why should I? I already had the part. I visualized myself breezing into that audition room, pulling up a chair and gossiping with Andie about boys (yes, she gossiped about high school boys). I wouldn’t bother auditioning. Let those other rubes fight it out. I was pre-cast.

Side note (and this is important information for the story): That same summer, I had a falling out with my best friend, Allison. I won’t get into what it was about, but yes, there was a boy involved and yes, the entire school knew about it.

Anyway, it’s the day of the Damn Yankees auditions. The sequence of events of that day, and the next, appear in my memory in rapid fire succession.

I remember entering the audition room.

I remember getting a very strong bad vibe.

I remember singing “Whatever Lola Wants.”

I remember not feeling good about my audition.

I remember reminding myself not to worry: I am pre-cast. Andie said so!

I remember all the theater kids lingering around the door to the auditorium.

I remember Andie gleefully taping the cast list upon it.

Next to the name “Lola,” I remember seeing Allison’s name, my ex-best friend.

How… how could this be?

I remember going, ok, ok no bigs, maybe I’m Gloria, the plucky reporter, or Meg, Joe’s elderly wife.

But I remember not seeing my name.

Anywhere.

I remember reading and re-reading and re-re-reading that list.

My name was not on it.

I was cut.

I remember going numb. A deep, numbness of disbelief and betrayal.

The next thing I remember is having a conversation with my high school’s arts program director, Mrs. Holliman, in her office.

I remember coming clean, telling her that Andie pre-cast me and that it wasn’t fair that I was cut. And that even if I did blow the audition, I had a right to Lola because I had been promised her.

I remember Mrs. Holliman rolling her eyes, growing more and more impatient with me and my entitlement. I remember Mrs. Holliman told me that Andie should never have pre-cast me, but as a consolation prize, she will tell Andie to “un-cut” me and cast me in the chorus.

I remember saying I would rather not be in the show at all then go through that kind of humiliation.

I remember Mrs. Holliman saying, “well, then you have a bad attitude.”

So I was offered a chorus part, lineless, songless, faceless, even more anonymous than a HotBoxer. And to prove I had a good attitude, I accepted. I clearly remember being in the conga line for the song, “Who’s Got The Pain?” Remember that destestable song from Damn Yankees? You know the one. It goes, “Who’s got the pain when they do the mambo? Who’s got the pain when they go UGH!” It’s one of the worst songs ever written for the American theater and I never faked a smile harder.2

Anyway, Damn Yankees eventually closed and I do remember spiraling into one of my first bouts with real depression, which, as I’ve described here at Theater Is Hard, I am prone to when things stop working.

My senior year, 1998, I was accepted into college super early, around the middle of September. The minute I got that acceptance letter, I checked out of high school completely. I skipped class all the time, particularly gym class, which I loathed, and did the barest of minimums everywhere else. I certainly didn’t bother to audition for the musical that year. I know Andie directed it, but I have no memory of what it was. I was already gone.

All this to say, inclusion, real inclusion, is the way to shape the future of the American theater. When you cut kids who are putting themselves out there, which is fucking frightening for a teenager, you are robbing them of that specific vein of joy and magic that only the theater can offer the human soul.

I saw that joy on stage at Maplewood Middle School last week in their Joseph & The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. From everything my kid has told me, the process of making the show was joyful and magical and most importantly, every kid who wanted a piece of that joy and magic got one. I hope those kids never lose that feeling, whatever they choose to do with their lives.

The show’s director, Marc Kessler, did it right.

My high school director Andie? She did it wrong. (Oh, and she gave alcohol to 15-year-olds.)

Theater is hard, but it doesn’t have to be.

Characters:

PAM BONDI, Pam Bondi, female, 60.

SARA FARRINGTON: Me, female, 45.

Place: Hotel bar.

Time: Now.

(At rise, PAM BONDI sits alone, nursing a Jägerbomb. SARA approaches.)

SARA: Excuse me but— are you…Pam Bondi?

PAM: Who the fuck wants to know?

SARA: It is you! Oh I’m a playwright—

PAM: What the fuck is that?

SARA: Oh, uh…a playwright is…it doesn’t matter. Do you have a minute to chat?

PAM: Bitch why?

SARA: Well, I wanted to walk you through Carl Jung’s basic steps toward achieving selfhood.

PAM: What the fuck?

SARA: Oh Carl Jung was a groundbreaking psychologist in the early 20th century, the inventor of analytical psychology, the evolution out of Freud. Jung is far superior to Freud in my opinion, much deeper and more prophetic. Actually I’ll be honest: I’m going through a real Jung phase at the moment.1

PAM: I ain’t saying shit about shit.

SARA: Well maybe if I explain Jung and selfhood in the simplest of terms you’ll be more willing to evolve. Or at least… talk. Ok?

PAM: Fuck off.

SARA: Jung kinda broke down how to locate your true “self” by essentially doing these things— and remember this is really reductive and not necessarily in linear order—-1) develop a stable “I,” 2) meet your “shadow,” 3) withdraw your projections, 4) differentiate from the collective, 5) integrate your opposites, 6) develop a relationship with your unconscious and 7) recognize that suffering is transformative. Now, fair warning, Pam: I’m not a Jungian analyst nor did I study psychology— although I have been in therapy for most of my adult life and do hold a Masters of Fine Arts in Dramatic Writing.

PAM: Pussy.

SARA: Maybe. Ok first: Developing a stable “I.” My understanding is, basically, I’m a young child, right? And one day I do something externally, even though internally, I don’t agree with it. This is a big deal for a kid to experience for the first time. When mom says, “eat your broccoli,” and the kid thinks, “Ew broccoli. I’ll eat it, because my mom said to, but I am not a broccoli person.” That “I” is huge, it’s the blossoming of your soul, really. And Pam, you have to develop this muscle, otherwise the foundation for critical thought isn’t established. It’s what I describe to my kids as “working the system.” Sure, my evolving middle schooler thinks gym class sucks, but he’s gonna climb that stupid rock wall so he can go home and listen to Tyler. The more the kid builds his internal convictions, the stronger his foundation for future selfhood becomes. That way, no matter how choppy the seas around you grow, your “I” roots you in truth and reality.

PAM: Why the fuck are you fucking telling me this? Also, you’re ugly.

SARA: Well, my concern with you Pam is that you never really cemented the “I.” Would you say that’s accurate?

PAM: No bitch. Oh and newsflash: I scored the 2018 Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association Furtherance of Justice Award and the 2012 National Association of Attorneys General President’s Award and a shitload of awards for fighting fraud and corruption and sex trafficking and shit, mmmkay.2

SARA: Pam, while that is a very impressive resume, you still got taken. Let’s get to the bottom of it. Quick question: did your father and mother rule the Bondi household with an iron-fist?

PAM: Pfft, you better believe it. You didn’t do what daddy said, you got a whuppin.3

SARA: Ok! And so because of that, when your dad or mom said, “You’ll eat your broccoli,” despite hating broccoli, you internally went, “I will eat broccoli and I will like broccoli, because I do like broccoli, I really really like broccoli, actually I love it, don’t hurt me Daddy I’m a good girl don’t hurt me.” Because if you exerted critical thought, your “I,” you’d be punished. And honestly, I don’t think the “I” can really develop in fear. Does that feel right?

PAM: Go fuck yourself.

SARA: And so now when Donald Trump tells you something, no matter what it is, it “floods” you, to use a Jungian term. Donald Trump could say “Pam, I declare that every 3rd Thursday of the month all Americans must set their nipples on fire and sing Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Because you have no “I” with which to judge, you not only do it without question, you love it. It would become you, because there is no “you.”

PAM: Fuck you, I’m a lawyer.

SARA: You sure are. Moving on to number 2: “meeting your shadow.” Doing “shadow work” has kind of been cheesed up, bastardized and TikTok-ified in recent years. In fact a lot of unqualified people are claiming they came up with “shadow work,” but they did not. Carl Jung invented it. It’s one of his most important breakthroughs. Quick example: when I was in 6th grade there was this girl in my class, Nina. Nina drove me insane. She was tall, blond, into ballet and thought Full House was funny. Nina walked around with an obvious superiority that rubbed me and all the other 12 year old girls the wrong way, so no one liked her. Oddly, Nina’s self-assuredness rendered her a loner.

(SARA takes a deep breath, bracing herself)

SARA: One time, when the class was walking single file to the cafeteria, I did something to Nina that I have regretted for the rest of my life: I snapped her bra. I reached out, grabbed the back strap of Nina’s training bra, stretched it like a sling shot and released it. SNAP! Then I said, “you don’t need this.”

PAM: BADASS!

SARA: No! No, Pam, that was not badass! It was, and still is, one of the most vile, unspeakably cruel things I’ve ever done in my entire life! I think about it all the time, even now, 33 years later! And I knew the moment I snapped that bra—the moment I got the impulse to snap that bra— that it wasn’t my blossoming “I” but rather, my “shadow.” My “shadow” knocked and “I” let it in. “I” was terrified and ashamed of boobs and so my “shadow” wanted to hurt someone who wasn’t. “I” didn’t have a bra yet, so my “shadow” had me shame someone who did. “I” was absorbing society’s misogyny (it was the early 90s) and so my “shadow” took it out it on Nina, confident in her womanhood. Ever since that awful moment, I have been reckoning with the part of me that wrestles with my own womanhood, the self-loathing that society instilled in girls. Now, as I said, I’m not a professional Jungian analyst, but can I ask you: have you ever attempted to “meet your shadow?”

PAM: Where’s that bartender?

SARA: I didn’t think so. And Jung would say that if the “shadow” is unmet, it leads to moral rigidity, black and white thinking and extreme control issues over yourself and others. But here’s the thing, Pam: the “shadow” will always leak out. Like mine did on Nina. What does that leaking look like for you? Sarcasm, conflict, cruelty, masochism, baseless aggression, arbitrary other-ing— hate, basically. Does any of this feel familiar?

PAM: Well, I hate you.

SARA: Textbook unmet shadow, Pam.

PAM: Oooo I’m so scared of my own shadow! Ooooo!

SARA: Oh Pam, I’d tread lightly there. Which brings me to Jung’s next step on the path to selfhood: “withdrawing your projections.” This one is actually pretty easy. Quick question: When you sat in that House Judiciary Committee hearing the other day about the Epstein cover up and your blind protection of pedophiles, did you feel waves and waves of negativity coming at you?

PAM: Doy.

SARA: Why do you think that is?

PAM: It’s because everyone in there hates me and I fucking hate them right back.

SARA: But what if it’s not them, Pam? What if it’s you?

PAM: No bitch, it’s them.

SARA: You really believe that all 44 members of the House present there that day, all of them, to a person, feels real hatred toward you?

PAM: Does the pope shit in the woods? Of course bitch.

SARA: But Pam, just because you felt the feeling of hate does not mean it came from the external world. You have no control or provable way to quantify the external world, do you? We can’t know if there was hate in Jamie Raskin when he asked you why you redacted the names of the rapists but not the victims, right? We have no evidence of what he felt. As far as I could see, he just wanted answers to these horrific questions. But we do know there was hate in you. You are the one who felt it, but because you never developed an “I” and never met your “shadow,” you blame those awful feelings on literally anyone or anything else. You don’t look inward because there literally is no inward. Projection of your emotions is the only experience that feels real to you. Isn’t that right?

PAM: So you hate me too, typical.

SARA: I don’t care enough to hate you, Pam. So Pam, according to Jung, until to stop blaming others for what is inside you, you can never experience selfhood.

PAM: Where’s the bar menu.

SARA: So the next few Jungian steps toward selfhood serve as tragic chain reactions from missing those earlier three. Specifically, can Pam Bondi “differentiate from the collective?” In other words, is Pam Bondi’s identity separate from the collective? Obviously not. How could it be? If Pam Bondi has no “I,” if Pam Bondi never faced her demons, if Pam Bondi projects any weakness or negative human experience she has on Jamie Raskin, Pam Bondi will naturally inherit the belief system of the collective— in this case the “royal we” that is Donald Trump.

PAM: I want some fuckin onion rings.

SARA: But Pam, here’s the scary thing for you: if it hadn’t been Donald Trump who co-opted the hole where your critical thinking mechanism should be, it would have been Charles Manson or Jim Jones or Woody Allen. Because you missed all those Jungian steps, your mind was literally designed to be controlled by predators from an early age. Which leads me naturally into Jung’s next selfhood milestone, “integrating your opposite.” For a non-Pam Bondi person, this is pretty basic self-help shit. If you’re a workaholic, your opposite is fucking off and you must relax or you will burnout. If you’re a logical person, your opposite is feeling things and you must listen to your gut instinct more. If you’re always agreeable, your opposite is defiance and to get what you truly want, you must try and stand up for your needs. You get the idea. So Pam, what is your opposite?

PAM: I could use a nice thick line o’ coke.

SARA: Well, Jung would say you might need that nice thick line of coke to keep going because you are exhausted because never integrated your opposite, so you’ve become one-sided and top-heavy (bottom-heavy, in your case). It might look like ferocity for a while, like you’re a real shark in the courtroom, but it’s just air. Any minute now you’re gonna deflate and collapse. Either that or be indicted and dragged to Nuremburg. You can’t be one thing forever.

PAM: I want chicken fingers.

SARA: Two more, I swear, then you can go eat. The next step toward selfhood is probably Jung’s biggest breakthrough: You must develop a relationship with your unconscious. Did you ever do that, Pam? Jung said, essentially, that we are in fact 2 entities: the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. The conscious mind is more or less under our control— it decides, it opines, it acts, it forms belief systems, it shares a KFC Famous Bowl with Donald Trump. But the unconscious mind is completely out of our control. The unconscious mind gathers information throughout the day, but we have no idea what, when or how. We don’t even feel it working. Like ever. Like, you could be eating a McGriddle over the Lincoln Bathroom sink with Donald Trump, talking about how great he is, nodding, smiling, laughing at his hilarious racist jokes, feeling great about yourself. But all the while your unconscious mind is gathering intel. Pam’s unconscious mind could be going, “he raped children,” “he may have participated in murder,” “he is in the Epstein files 1 million times.” Your unconscious mind puts those thoughts in a vault only to be open at night, in dreams. Nightmares, in your case. Your unconscious mind speaks in symbols, Pam. But if you’re not taking those symbols seriously, do you know what’s going to happen to you?

PAM: Hey dumbass I was on the front lines of bringing down sex traffickers, ok? So I think I knows ‘em when I sees em. So why don’t you make like a tree and get outta here?4

SARA: Pam, focus. Do you know what happens if you repress the unconscious mind?

PAM: DONALD TRUMP DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG, BITCH!

SARA: Pam: Do you know what horrors await you?

PAM: (starting to cry) Please leave me alone…

SARA: You become your unconscious. The darkness eats you. Pam, you’re 60 years old!

PAM: (crying) No I’m not…

SARA: You’re a public figure, everyone knows you’re 60. When are you going to work on yourself?

PAM: (weeping) I’m…scared.

SARA: I would be, too if I were you. But here’s the good news, Pam. The final thing Jung says about becoming a full human being—and remember, this is reductive, culled from basic reading— is that “suffering is transformative.” What does that mean to you?

PAM: (whimpering) I’m going to jail?

SARA: Probably.

PAM: (wailing) OH MY GOD!

SARA: But Pam it’s not too late! Jail would be the ideal place for you to put yourself through a rigorous Jungian process of selfhood. Think of all the time you’ll have to be alone with your own thoughts and crimes! Prison is the perfect place for Pam Bondi to arrive at her selfhood! In fact, Jung would probably say that although prison doesn’t expedite the process of individuation, it certainly removes all distractions. Right?

PAM: (pulling herself together) No. The Dow is at 50,000. I will be fine. I will be…fine.

SARA: Ok honey. Then, I guess…all I can say is… I’ll see you at Nuremberg.

PAM: Is that a day spa?

SARA: Well, for Pam Bondi’s unconscious mind? I’d say it is.

PAM: Being human is hard.

SARA: Yes, but being inhuman is even harder.

For most of my life I’ve harbored a dark secret: I didn’t understand King Lear.

I know.

What kind of theater major with an MFA in playwriting doesn’t understand Lear?

Me.

I’ve been so ashamed.

For years, I’d roam the streets of New York avoiding eye contact with strangers for fear they’d uncover my shameful secret. “Can she tell I don’t understand Lear?” I’d wonder about a co-worker. “Can my boss tell? My gynocologist? That Starbucks guy? The way he handed me my latte? He knows.”

Lear paranoia followed me everywhere.

I mean, I understood the story: An old king gives away his land to his kids who then betray him (two of them, at least), quickly realizes the folly of what he’s done, regrets it, but by then it’s too late and the good kid dies. Also, there’s a storm. Also, there’s a B-story about a crazy guy in the woods (I definitely didn’t understand the B-story).

I’ve read Lear, seen it on stage once or twice and of course on screen—- McKellan, Olivier, Ian Holm, all the big boys. When the world ended in 2020, I forced myself to watch Anthony Hopkins’ King Lear. “Feel something, goddamit!” I shouted at myself.

But I didn’t feel it, not the way I feel Hamlet or MacBeth or Streetcar or Endgame or Long Day’s Journey Into Night or Merrily We Roll Along and countless other masterpieces.

Could something be wrong with me?

Should I seek help? Talk to my shrink?

“Good morning Sara! How are you?” she’d start the session.

“I might need to adjust my medication,” I’d meekly say.

“Oh no,” she’d be suddenly concerned. “What’s going on?”

And I’d confess, teary-eyed: “I don’t feel Lear.”

But—

I recently saw an exquisite production of King Lear at LaMama. Within minutes, I experienced true Ego Death.

My construct of self dissolved, and I became one with everyone who has ever lived, blithely enjoyed their youth, grown old and died.

Saints be praised: I understand Lear now.1

So what happened? Why now?

Answer: I got old. Doy.

I’ve been wanting to write a Substack about Lear but I couldn’t think of an angle, so for many days, I badgered by long-suffering husband, Reid.

“What should my Lear Substack be about?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I can’t just write about how I used to not understand Lear and now I do understand Lear,” I complained.

“Why not?” He said, in that fuck-you way I fell in love with.

Why not, indeed.

So, here are the 5 major plot points (as I see them) in Lear and why they were impossible for a young me to understand, but are devastatingly clear to an old me.

PLOT POINT #1: The love test.

Quick & dirty summary: Lear decides to divide up his kingdom between his three kids, but they have to tell him how much they love him first. Goneril and Regan blow smoke up his skirt, but Cordelia, his favorite, refuses to flatter him. He goes mental and disowns her. When his friend Kent defends Cordelia, Lear goes even more mental and banishes him.

OLD SARA’S INTEPRETATION: All Lear’s bluster and performative altruism is really just him panicking about death. He thinks about death all the time. I’m only 45 and I think about death all the time, too. The concept of being…nothing? Am I really just a human TV set? When I’m flipped off, am I really… off? Like off off? Then why work out or study or learn an instrument or get my hair cut or take a shower? Why eat healthily? Why not just live on Cinnamon Toast Crunch and meth? Why do anything if one day—very soon in Lear’s case— I will be…nothing. It’s an unbearable weight to carry. But the concept of legacy is comforting. When I am as close to death as Lear in Act 1, I will have my kids, my entire body of work, productions, published plays and books, my friends— all are a great and lasting legacy. You know what would also be cool? If I got all my friends, family and fans together at say… Dixon Place! And they told me how much they loved me. (I’d obviously cater it.)

Oh look, there’s my youngest kid, now 40, standing up to share how he’ll carry my legacy into the future. “Tell me, my son,” I say, “Ease my transition into death: What doth you love about me most?”

“Mom,” he says, “you actually really fucked me up and I’m in therapy now because of you.”

“But— but I gave you a great childhood!” I protest, “I exposed you to art and music and theater! I gave you independence and cash! So much cash! I was always supportive and emotionally present—- wasn’t I? I worked a soul-crushing day job for decades solely for your comfort! Tell me! Where did I go wrong?”

“You wouldn’t buy me Madden NFL 26.” He’d say. “Doy.”

“But it was $70!” I’d say. “I couldn’t rationalize spending $70 dollars on a video game! Also I’m not made of money!”

“Pfft, whatever,” my youngest would say. “It’s a lot less than what my shrink charges.”

Oh my god, I’d think.

My legacy is tarnished! I thought my youngest son loved me, but really he’s an entitled, spoiled little capitalist who’s into football! Worse— video games about football! Ye gods! My entire belief system is shattered! I’ve been living a lie!

“Well then kid,” I rage at him. “I hereby disclaim all my maternal care, propinquity and property of blood! And as a stranger to my heart and me! Hold thee from this forever!”

And I banish my kid from Dixon Place forever.

How can I accept death now? When my own flesh and blood thinks I deprived him? Also, look what my well-intentioned parenting hath wrought?

But I am going to die—- and soon! And I must accept death or else go mad!

I’d almost rather go mad…

YOUNG SARA INTERPRETATION: What a stupid idiot.

LEAR PLOT POINT #2: Gloucester sub-plot begins.

Quick & dirty summary: This rando guy named Gloucester has two sons: Edgar (legitimate) and Edmund (bastard). For the power trip, Edmund tricks his dad into thinking that Edgar is plotting to kill him. Edmund then tricks Edgar into thinking their dad is plotting to kill him. Edgar panics, rips off all his clothes and lives in the woods under a new identity: Poor Tom.

OLD SARA’S INTEPRETATION: I’m pretty sure Shakespeare invented the concept of the “subplot” here, but I suspect he didn’t do it for the sake of experimental theater or as a novel device. Shakespeare’s not flexing with a “hey nonny nonny, 2 stories at once, bitch!” There is a deep, pleading why in placing a second storyline in Lear. I think he included this B-story to completely undermine the canonical rule that art is for and about kings, queens, the rich and famous. By giving a nobody like Gloucester the same storyline as the king himself, Shakespeare’s saying “pain happens to everyone, big and small.”

This was incredibly ahead of his time.

It took generations for artists and audiences alike to recognize the beauty of everyday people. When Van Gogh painted his The Potato Eaters, people were disgusted. Poor people? In art? Ew. Who cares what they do? Give us kings!2

Also the Gloucester subplot tests my judgment and prejudice.

Like, which familial struggle affects me more, Lear’s or Gloucester’s? I would say Gloucester’s. I can relate to it more. Think about what it does to an adult child to suddenly realize that their parent does not love them? Like, if my older son started feeding lies to my younger son that I hated him, and if my younger son believed it, it would ruin his life. I’ve seen this happen to so many people. And to be perfectly honest, I have certainly grappled with this question of parental love with one of my parents for decades. The question of “does mom/dad actually love me?” is a bottomless pit of despair that causes a dangerous, life-long chain reaction— one that has definitely sent me into the “woods” to build a “new identity.”

YOUNG SARA INTERPRETATION: Shakespeare invented subplots. Cool.

LEAR PLOT POINT #3: The Storm.

Quick & dirty summary: When Goneril and Regan show their true colors, Lear realizes he has trusted the wrong daughters and goes mad in a storm.

OLD SARA INTERPRETATION: The storm scene is the most accurate literary symbol of “waking up” in the English language.

Oooooh, waking up—- the true test of getting older.

If you are handed the truth later in life, a painful, world shattering truth, will you a) face it bravely, even if it makes you look like an asshole or 2) Go full MAGA.

The choice is yours, old man.

If you can wake up, you will have a good, calm, meaningful life. If you can’t? I can tell you from personal experience that when you’re old, doubling down on a lie will lead to an early death. The emotional burden will eat you alive. I myself have woken up to so much in my 40s. Sure, I’ve woken up to the true natures of family like Lear does, but also friends, artistic collaborators, past boyfriends, bosses, day jobs, my own psychological patterns— I can see the true meaning of almost everything I did when I was young and it can be a very, very painful experience to recall. I have spent a good deal of time apologizing to people in my 40s. Oh, what I would do with a DeLorean and plutonium.

But what is the alternative to waking up? Denial? Obfuscation? A double-life? The spine of JD Vance?

Lear rages in the storm because the storm is his emotional life and waking up feels that big and bad, especially when you’ve gone your whole life thinking one thing and you were wrong all along—-“more sinned against than sinning.”

Famously Lear bellows “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!” but I think it’s less a challenge to nature from a delusional old man and more displaced rage at his family. Oh my god can I sing a few bars of that.

Also, who stands with you when you “wake up?” When you realize you were an asshole? When you are adult enough to apologize? Well, the “real” friends and family— in Lear’s case, The Fool, Kent and Edgar. I mean, the storm scene in Lear is the most spot on dramatic realization of a feeling I’ve ever seen in my life.

YOUNG SARA INTEPRETATION: Good monologue for an older actor.

LEAR PLOT POINT #4: Gloucester & Edgar’s reunion.

Quick & dirty summary: The B-story intersects with the A-story as Gloucester helps Lear escape. Pissed, Regan and her husband Cornwall gouge out both Gloucester’s eyes as punishment. Gloucester, now blind, wanders around the heath trying to locate a cliff he can jump off. His son Edgar, still disguised as Poor Tom, kindly “helps” him commit suicide by convincing him he’s actually done it and miraculously survived. Edgar then reveals himself to his father. His father, realizing he trusted the wrong son, is so overwhelmed by his true son’s act of kindness that he dies of happiness. (Which I didn’t know could happen.)

OLD SARA’S INTERPRETATION: I have always stood by the power and internal strength of an apology. As long as it’s sincere, I greatly admire someone who can feel real remorse. I mean, maybe not for all crimes. I wouldn’t accept an apology from Trump or Epstein or Putin or Hitler or that caliber of monster.

But…

Like yesterday, when Pam Bondi testified before the House Judiciary Committee in Washington about the Epstein files cover up. What if instead of calling US Senators “losers” in response to their simple request she apologize to the Epstein victims sitting behind her, Pam took a deep breath, stood up, turned around, faced the Epstein survivors and said, in all sincerity:

“O my follies! You were abused. Kind gods, forgive me that, and prosper you.” 3

Well, I mean…I think I’d be ok with her? If she meant it?

Of course she’d have to go on to describe her own trauma, the trauma that led her to crawl deep inside the devil’s asshole.

YOUNG SARA’S INTERPRETATION: Nah. Fuck you, Dad.

LEAR PLOT POINT #5: Death of Cordelia and Lear

Quick & dirty summary: Cordelia returns, tries to rescue her dad Lear, but Edmund orders her hanged and Lear is too late to save her from her execution. Lear carries Cordelia’s lifeless body downstage (usually) and speaks to her the saddest speech in all of the English language:

No, no, no life?

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all? Thou ’lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never—

Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.

Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,

Look there, look there!

OLD SARA INTERPRETATION: An English professor once told me that characters in classic lit don’t really change, per se. That they can’t. That the tension and suspense in any story is reading what they will or won’t do, not necessarily how they will change as people. And in fact if a character does actually change, well, what you have is a children’s book or a morality tale or a religious fable, not really a complex work of literature. Then he paused and said, “well, all except Ebenezer Scrooge.”

I don’t think I agree with that.

Who’s to say Scrooge doesn’t go back to being an asshole on Boxing Day? Dickens never wrote A Christmas Carol II: Return of The Cunt, so we don’t know, do we? But Lear? Lear changes. Granted, it’s on his deathbed in the final few minutes of his life, but he really does change. I mean, it’s in every line of that speech. 2 examples:

Pray you undo this button—

A humble request to a nameless servant if perhaps he could help him help his dead daughter breathe? He was totally incapable of that in the first act.

But because Shakespeare was so good it was criminal, he bludgeons the audience with one more bit of existential awfulness, that kind of upends my entire thesis:

Look on her, look, her lips, look there, look there!

What is this? Is this further delusion? Maybe… he hasn’t changed and he is mad?

In September last year, I saw my dad in the final 2 days of his life. I remember saying to him, “you’ll be ok, you’ll be ok” a bunch of times. I don’t know why I said it. But I said it. Did I say that for me or him? Both?

I know some people read Lear’s “Look there, look there!” as a final moment of delusion, but I think it’s instead a final moment of self-soothing, a “you’ll be ok.” Which is so beautiful it hurts. (Curse you to hell, Shakespeare.)

YOUNG SARA INTERPRETATION: You fucked up, old man.

Ok, there you go, my painfully reductive old Sara vs young Sara King Lear interpretation.

Ironically, I feel lighter now that I fully comprehend the burden of comprehending King Lear.

If you read Theater Is Hard, you’ve probably watched Slings & Arrows multiple times. (If you haven’t, buy all 3 seasons now and write it off as a business expense.)4

The final season of Slings & Arrows is “the Lear season.” (1st = “the Hamlet season,” 2nd = “the MacBeth season”). The protagonist, Geoffrey Tennant, my spirit animal, played to perfection by Paul Gross, says of King Lear:

“You can go right through the ‘ages of man’ with Shakespeare. And then, at the end, he gives you this enormous gift of Lear—- to anticipate your own decay.”

The real genius of what Shakespeare did with King Lear is that not only did he write a character who actually changes, he wrote a play that actually changes depending on where you are in your life.

I can’t think of another play that does that— a true literary prism.

Yes, getting old is hard. My neck hurts all the time now for absolutely no reason, my hair is completely silver, I now do that thing my gramma used to do where she lists every name of everyone in her family before landing on the right one. (“MikeDanJimPhyllisJaneNancySARA help me out of the car!”)

But old Sara has one thing now that young Sara did not, could not, would not: the bravery to wake up, be apologetic and humble. Like Lear in his final moment.

You poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, theater ‘tis hard.