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Miscast: The Playwright Decides, and No One Else Gets a Vote

There is a moment in the life of every playwright when someone walks into a rehearsal room and announces that the character you wrote is not, in fact, the character you wrote. The director has a vision. The institution has a policy. The casting committee has decided that your Irish Catholic mother from the Southside of Chicago would be better served by an actress who has no connection to the world you built because connection, in the current theatrical climate, is less important than representation, and representation is whatever the people who control the stage say it is. You sit there. You watch your play become someone else’s argument. And you have two choices: you can let it happen, or you can pull the production.

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Queensborough Bloodbath

There’s a bloodbath going on in Bayside and the site of the letting is the campus of CUNY-Queensborough, and the dagger is called “Pathways.”  Pathways, if you haven’t heard, is the new principle of uniting, and unbinding, disparate CUNY satellite campuses into a single, unintelligible — “Borg Cooperative” — where every course and teaching philosophy all land on the same page, and a student can take a class here and have it count for full credit over there and, as a member of the CUNY community, I believe Pathways sounds great in theory, but in current practice and cudgel, Pathways is a gangplank for faculty and the end of being for any idea of a proper, well-rounded, college education on a undergraduate CUNY campus.

Pathways is, of course, all about the bottom line — enrolling more students and graduating them quicker and paying faculty less money — but the end result will be students who are not as educated as their peers and who will be irreparably intellectually maimed, all in the name of convenience and parsimony.

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The Dramatic Arc of a Manhattan Murder

Now that we know the shootings last week in Manhattan near the Empire State Building were a curious mix of both murder and bystander-gone-wrong, I’d like to take a moment to deconstruct the dramatic unfolding of events that happened that morning over a 2.5 hour arc to demonstrate how the social news spread first, as a terrorist attack on the Empire State Building, and ultimately became the truth of a revelatory revenge murder.

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Murder in Manhattan: A Collateral Empire Shooting

Three hours ago, news broke there was a murder on the streets of Manhattan near the Empire State Building — and shots were fired right across the avenue from the CUNY Graduate Center:

A gunman was fatally shot by police after opening fire near the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan. Nine people were injured and one of the victims was declared dead at the scene.

The shooting occurred at 9:03 a.m., and began near the intersection of 33th Street and 5th Avenue.  NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly identified the shooter as 53-year-old Jeffrey Johnson. He was armed with a .45-caliber handgun that was concealed in a black plastic bag.

Johnson was a disgruntled employee, who had been fired a year ago from his job as a designer of womens accessories for Hazan Imports, located at 10 West 33rd Street. He confronted a former co-worker, a 41-year-old woman, and fatally shot at her three times, including once in the head.

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Mac Wellman's Free CUNY MFA

Playwright Mac Wellman has an interesting idea:  Give CUNY students a tuition-free Master of Fine Arts degree to allow them to study the Arts without going deep into debt. Mac wants these students to learn how they construct the world so they can understand their place in its spinning.

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