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Preplay: The Courtroom in the Wings

The news of my removal from my own show came from the producer. I had obtained the rights, signed us to a first-class theatrical option, and written the book and lyrics, all of it inside the year the rights contract granted to us. The director hired to stage the all-or-nothing reading was not my choice, and he was friends with my collaborator. After the failed previews, I was unceremoniously let go. When I asked my composer collaborator why this had happened, the director called me instead, and said that nobody wanted to talk to me. I had no choice but to sever the show, and my attorney fought to get me paid, credit on show. Everyone stonewalled him as well. That is the whole record, at the width the print ruling allows, because the identifying details of the production and the collaboration stay blurred in print for the privacy of the living, and the blur is logged in the specimen record beside its telling.

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Jury Duty: Theatre You Cannot Leave

The envelope looks like a bill and behaves like a warrant. It arrives in the plain mail between a seed catalog and a credit offer, your name printed the way only a government database can print it, and inside is a summons: report to the courthouse on a Monday in March, at half past eight in the morning, prepared to stay. You did not audition for this production. You signed no contract, negotiated no fee, read no script. The paper tells you what happens if you ignore it, and what happens is contempt: a fine, a cell, or both. Of all the performances running in America, this is the only one that conscripts its audience. By the end of the week you may be deciding whether a stranger loses liberty, money, children, or, in the courtrooms that still ask the question, life. The republic keeps one room in which that decision belongs to twelve people who did not volunteer that morning, and every seat in that room is filled by force of law.

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The Oldest Actor: A Theatrical History of Fire on Stage

A man lies on a palace roof in Argos, bored past endurance, waiting for a light. He has watched a year of nights for the one signal fire that will tell him Troy has fallen. When the beacon finally flares, his cry opens the Oresteia, and Western drama begins with a man announcing flame. Aeschylus understood something in 458 BC that the theatre has spent twenty-five centuries relearning: fire is a performer. It carries news, changes fate, pulls the eye from every competing object on the stage, and refuses direction. Each age of the theatre has hired it, and each age has paid the bill.

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The Occupied Space from The Empty Space

There are two books on my desk tonight. One is thin, secondhand, printed in 1968, and it has followed me from apartment to apartment for fifty years the way certain arguments follow a person: quietly, patiently, refusing to concede. The other arrived this week in a shipping box with my name on the cover, and it exists because of the first. It is the answer, finally long enough. The thin book is Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, the most quoted stage doctrine of its century, and mine is The Occupied Space: Sixty Years After The Empty Space, and it is the longest answer I have ever written to anything: twelve chapters, a coda, and a half century of rehearsal rooms behind every page. This is the story of the quarrel, the trial, and the answer, told the way I can only tell it here, at home, at length.

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Haven’t We Always Been Friends?

Aristotle drew a ladder. I drew a circle. A scheming actor asked to climb, and I answered with a question built to end the conversation. Years ago, in a rehearsal room that smelled of coffee and radiator dust, an actor I will call Curtis said six words I have retold wrong for decades: “I want to be your friend.” We had known each other three years by then. We had built shows together, struck sets at midnight, shared the particular intimacy of people who fail in front of each other at ten in the morning and repair it by eight that night. His sentence cornered me. I laughed a little, the way you laugh when you need two seconds to find a door, and I said, “Curtis, haven’t we always been friends?”

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The Necessary Art: Taking the Title Back

Today I am publishing a book about a theft at the center of Western culture, one its victims were trained to take as a compliment:The Necessary Art: Aristotle’s Six Elements in the Clinic, the Courtroom, the Proof, the Blueprint, and the Republic. It runs 342 pages in paperback, it exists in a Kindle edition and a free reading edition you can download right now, and the audiobook will follow as soon as the voice is ready. Those are the facts of the launch. What follows is the case for why this book exists, because its central fact has stood in plain sight for two hundred and eighty years while the people it names were trained to take the theft as a compliment: the professions of the working world were robbed of a word, the robbery has a date and a paper trail, and the word can be taken back.

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The Rented Crowd: Nero’s Five Thousand, the Paris Claque, and the Box That Laughed for America

For the better part of two decades, the laughter of the United States lived inside a padlocked box. Charles Rolland Douglass, a CBS sound engineer who had spent the war helping the Navy develop shipboard radar, built the device in the early 1950s and guarded it the way a sexton guards a reliquary. The laff box, as he called it, stood a little over two feet tall and worked like an organ: keys for titters, chortles, belly laughs, shrieks, a foot pedal to let a wave of mirth swell, crest, and die on command. Douglass wheeled it from studio to studio himself. Clients heard the output and never saw the mechanism. Only his immediate family knew what the inside looked like, and when he finally stepped back from the work, his sons carried the trade forward like a guild secret. The industry word for what he did was sweetening, which tells you the industry understood the product. Sugar is what you add when the thing itself goes down easier disguised.

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