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This is the United Stage

We welcome you to the new home of the United Stage!  Since November 25, 1996, we were a website dedicated to supporting Playwrights who wanted to direct their own plays.

Now, as United Stage becomes a blog, we find ourselves still supporting our founding mandate, but we have expanded our world view to dig deeper into how Aristotle and his Poetics continue to unearth our divine rhythms to affect our human motivations in the world.

We look forward to expanding our definition and understanding of our universe in live performance!

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Creation Breeds Imitation

Aristotle taught us we learn through imitation.

If Aristotle is right, then we need to be wary with our adoration in imitation because modeling the behavior of the wrong person can imprint a life in awful and classically tragic ways.

The creative process is also inspired by Aristotle’s revelation.

We only create what we what we experience.  There are no new ideas.  Nothing is created from nothingness.

Every inspiration has a core.  Every idea has a pre-existing father.

Our job as artists is to conjoin separate, disparate, and outrageous existing ideas and present them as new thoughts that spark inspired learning processes in others.

We teach through surprise connections.

We learn because creation breeds imitation.

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Lindsay Lohan Proves Her Illiteracy

Young people look up to other young people. Unfortunately, many of the role models young people choose to use to model are not worthy of imitation or the attention. If you ever needed proof of why young people should not look up to celebrities and imitate their morality and their behavior in the classic Aristotlean way of learning and mimicry, please read actress Lindsay Lohan’s incoherent — and frankly, illiterate — public sympathy card to genius film director Robert Altman’s family she released on Tuesday to see the sad, living proof, of a Long Island public education and the perils of false celebrity.

Ms. Lohan

Continue reading → Lindsay Lohan Proves Her Illiteracy

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Raised On Radio

At 14-years-old I started in radio in Lincoln, Nebraska as the host of a weekly 10 minute interview show called Unique Youth. I would celebrate kids in the community who were making a positive difference in the lives of others.

Rick Alloway was my mentor and defender. Unique Youth aired on KFOR 1240 — the number one station in the city — and on their FM sister station X103 (now known as KFRX 102.7 after the advent of digital stereo tuners) at 5:30am Fridays.

I was quickly able to move up to weekend air shifts and I steadily worked in radio at KFOR and X103 as well as KLMS 1480 (the call letters at the time were pronounced “Kay-Elle-Aim-Esh-ah!” on air in an old-time classic boss jock performance) and KBHL FM. Later I added television to my resume when I became the teen movie critic on Kidding Around — with hostess Leta Powell Drake — for broadcast powerhouse KOLN/KGIN-TV and those stations had a coverage map the shape and size of the entire state of Nebraska.

Continue reading → Raised On Radio

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Haunted by the Tragedy of Wendy

Today I am haunted by yesterday and the tragic death of Playwright Wendy Wasserstein. She died of lymphoma at the age of 55. Her sister died of breast cancer at 60. Wendy, unmarried, left behind a six-year-old daughter named Lucy Jane who was born three months premature and weighed 1-pound, 12-ounces at birth.

Continue reading → Haunted by the Tragedy of Wendy