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The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf

I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.

The God in the Wire book cover

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The Ruse of Non-Traditional Casting

Non-traditional casting is a political ruse that needs to end.  If you haven’t heard that term before, “non-traditional casting” is a politically elevated cultural cudgel that argues you can cast any actor of any gender, Race, color or creed, in any role for any reason and the audience will be fine with it because the theatre is colorblind and Race-neutral and culturally sensitive.  It’s all a bunch of hooey.

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Dr. Howard Stein on Owning the Subject

In a conversation with Robert Chapman many years ago, he who was the co-author of the play, Billy Budd, and the director of the Loeb Theatre at Harvard University, I mentioned a playwright whose work seemed limited to me.

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The Provenance of the Provincetown Playhouse as a Failed NYU Revival

The Provincetown Playhouse holds an important niche in early American Theater History as the staging point cradle of the great Playwright Eugene O’Neill’s earliest, and most challenging, plays and the theatre was the hearthstone for premier plays written by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edward Albee, John Guare, Sam Shepherd, Charles Busch, and David Mamet.

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Eugene O'Neill and One Hundred

He was not at home in the world.
The Gods chased him into a corner
Where
With a trembling hand
He touched
His certain romance with the universe
And Calendar.
Love was the cruelest month.