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From Page to Stage: Newark in Black and Blue in 2004

In the Fall of 2004, I was teaching a course at Rutgers University in Newark called “From Page to Stage” where the idea — as I was teaching the course — was to take original scripts written in class and present them in live performance to learn how the process of active creation worked.

The final project was a series of group presentations where students shared their lives as they were living it — and the alarming result of one racially diverse group was: “Newark in Black and Blue.”  That group’s bruising presentation was tough and blunt and dramatic and I decided we had to record that performance in audio so we could preserve the truth of the moment.

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The Nincompoop

Scene:  A blackened room.

Time: Yesterday.

(THE ACADEMIC is shining an interrogation light suspended from the ceiling into the eyes of THE PUBLISHER — who is blindfolded and tightly lashed to a steel chair with lengths of rusty chain.)

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The Carrie Diaries Review

When the television show Sex and the City had its original run on HBO, I was neither a subscriber to HBO nor particularly interested in the sex lives of four women that lived in New York City. A mere nine years after the show ended and two movies later, there is a new television show called The Carrie Diaries based on the teenage life of Carrie Bradshaw, one of the four women from Sex and the City. It chronicles her life and struggles as a high school student in the early nineteen eighties.

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The Magnificent Spectacle of the London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony

I am still over the moon with the sheer spectacle of the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympic games.  You just can’t beat an agricultural, pastoral, setting that changes into the Industrial Revolution right before your eyes using the labor of 10,000 actors on a live world stage.

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Drinking Donkey Semen: How Goodness Declines into Dramatic Satire and Animated Cynicism

I’m not one for mocking and cruelly kidding around with people.  Sarcasm has been misunderstood and misinterpreted too many times by well-intentioned people who then land in large vats of trouble dealing with the aftereffects of a failed sense of humor.  When we think of valuable entertainment, the Golden Years of Hollywood are often a common touchstone:  1939.  The MGM Musicals.  The world was glorious and ripe beyond our homes and into our dreams and we could not be stopped as a nation after risking ruin, but ultimately winning, World War II.

Continue reading → Drinking Donkey Semen: How Goodness Declines into Dramatic Satire and Animated Cynicism