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The Unfinished Work: Why Artists Demand Proof of Life

A playwriting teacher of mine once said something that has rattled around in my head for decades: “You can write a play, but it doesn’t exist until it finds life in the first production.” The Chair of our department disagreed with that assertion, and vehemently so. The script is the work, he argued. The text is complete in itself. The playwright’s obligation ends when the final period strikes the page.

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Relaunching Boles Dot Com as a Preservation Portal and Restoration Reserve

Since uploading over 500 videos to Vimeo PRO — I’ve been thinking about content and production and restoration and preservation of all the things I’ve worked on over the arc of a lifetime — and I decided now was the time to start digitizing the mountains of paper and film and video and audiotapes that engulf the small gully of my world.

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Demolishing Deconstructionism

“Deconstructionism” is a dangerous political application that has taken root in universities as a serious method of discovery and recognition of textual art in performance. Deconstructionism is nasty because — like Peer Gynt’s endless onion without a core — the whole attempt to pull apart and redefine the whole of something falls apart in your hands the moment you try to apply Deconstructionism’s molehill to a mound of merits.

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The Necessity of Expressionism in a Modern World

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari — “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” — is a silent 1920 German Gothic movie that set the new standard for terror in a darkened theatre, and that movie also epitomizes the artistic ideal of “Expressionism” that took populist hold in Germany after World War I.

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The Sean Hayes Newsweek Homophobic Slur

When I watched Forrest Gump navigating a boat and catching hundreds of pounds of fish, I never once thought to myself that it was completely unrealistic for Tom Hanks to portray a shrimp boat captain because he was not a shrimp boat captain. Nor did I have a problem with Gary Sinise as a lieutenant who lost his legs in Vietnam injury — even though I knew fully well that Gary’s legs were perfectly fine. Why, then, does Ramin Setoodeh of Newsweek insist that a gay man cannot convincingly play a straight character?

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