Throwing Out the Opening Pitch...

Today is our first read-thru of From the East to the West at NoHo Arts Center. Opening Day. Not sure who's gonna throw out the first pitch yet.

I've been here about 120 times before. First read-thru, first rehearsal, first cast meeting. It's a very exciting day for the actors, the director and everyone involved. A few I remember with some interest.

Ordinarily the actors are on pins and needles because often times they don't know who they're up with. At least I always was. But that may be because often times I was the hired gun. The ringer brought in to upset the balance of power. The opening read-thru of Moon for the Misbegotten was like that. I was doing Jamie Tyrone in that particularly distressed piece of writing by Eugene O'Neill. Opening day was disastrous. As it is in many cases, I knew no one in the cast that day, shook hands with everyone, had a pastry and a cup of joe and just started acting. The director, who I suspect works in a factory somewhere today, wanted us to "whisper the lines with no inflection," because he wanted to "mold the music." Er. Someday I'll write an entire blog on bad directors. Actually, that's a lot of material, so maybe four or five blogs with a "...to be continued" attached to each.

I did Lost in Yonkers six times. Six different productions. One of them won a whole slew of Jeff Awards in Chicago - I was doing Louie, as always, the tough but ultimately soft gangster. On opening day once again I knew no one - I had been shipped in from NY for this one. But a weird thing happened. Turns out we had all done the piece elsewhere...some, like me, several times. So when we started the read-thru, none of us opened our scripts. The entire cast just hit the lines at a dead run. Remarkable. Now, mind you, this was a big-time, hotsy-totsy production. Big Equity theatre, big names in the cast, all that. It was cool.

Taught me something, that opening day. Something I had been waffling over for several years. Some time back I read John Gielgud's autobiography. A little gossipy for my taste but some of it was quite interesting. In it, Sir John said he always came to the first rehearsal OFF BOOK. That is to say, he memorized the lines, regardless of the size of the role, before opening day. This is in direct opposition to the standard American, method-influenced, approach. One must discover the line organically as one discovers the "still life" of the set and one's surroundings. Horseshit. An early revelation about Mssrs. Stanislavski and company. Although for the real actor rehearsal is the golden time, the most fun, but it is NOT why we're there. We're there for the fat lady (again, Sallinger, thank you).

I have, for years, urged my students to come in off book. Most ignore me. Hell, I ignore me.

There may, in fact, be some merit to Mr. Stanislavski's organic, discovering approach. But I think he failed to grasp the overwhelming ability of the American actor to rationalize, not to mention his inherent laziness.

I remember working, several times, I'm sorry to report, with a despot of a director in South Florida. Rather fancied himself the Otto Preminger of the stage. In my mind I always picture him in a lion-taming costume. He was infatuated with "table work." That's when the cast is not allowed to get on their feet and actually work for a long time after opening day. He just wanted to read the script over and over and "talk" about it. Oh, my lord. This guy would sit and pontificate endlessly. I think on one of those occasions we were doing a play called Born Yesterday, the old movie with Billie Holiday. We sat and discussed the play till I thought I really might just fall off my chair in a dead faint. While a decent script it was hardly Lear or Hamlet. These kinds directors, charlatons all, just don't want to let go. Directors like this think, for some ego-laden reason, that they, rather than the actors, have the final say in the presentation of the piece. This guy still runs a theatre down there, and still routinely churns out bad work. Oh, well.

So, today is a big day. A fun day. We'll hit the ground running. The last time this play was read publicly was almost a year ago today at a small theatre in Chicago. I was doing some work in Indiana at the time and came up to see the reading. It wasn't bad, actually. And I was gratified to learn that the theatre had to turn away about 100 people because it was filled to the rafters. It was just a little Saturday afternoon reading of a new play.

I think it safe to say, a lot of people have been waiting for this one. In Chicago I was told by a good buddy of mine at Steppenwolf that this play had been discussed for several years now and in fact some theatre folk thought it was a myth, that it didn't exist at all. That makes me smile today.

It does exist. And it is the best I can do at the moment. It is a deeply personal piece of writing that I have long refused to show. But today, we show it, and work on it, and get it on its feet.

I am reminded of Sondheim's line in Sunday in the Park with George..."Look, I made a hat. Where there NEVER was a hat!" He has a way with words, that Steve.

See you tomorrow.

From the East to the West

A quick one. Gentle Readers will notice the new poster to the right (that's stage left for the actors reading this). All came about rather suddenly, actually. The Artistic Director of NoHo, James Mellon, and I decided to go with a benefit performance of the new piece, a "tweeking production" as it were, before the play moves to a larger venue. When it does move, John Schuck, the amazing actor you may have seen about a thousand times on television and in movies (for you older folks, he played Sgt. Enright on the old McMillan and Wife series - for you younger tots, he's constantly on Law and Order) is attached to the play in the lead role. Also my buddy and wonderful actor, John Bader, is attached in a supporting role.

This is gonna be really fun and really hard. We have 23 days to mount this thing. First readthru tomorrow at 10 AM. Everything cast except one role. Excellent young actors. And (I'm having nightmares about this) I'm stepping in as not only the director but also in the role that Mr. Schuck will eventually play. It's another huge role. As soon as we close I go into rehearsal for Praying Small. Why do I do this to myself?

Truth is, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Incidentally, the incredible poster design is courtesy of Chad Coe.

See you tomorrow.

On Learning the Damn Lines...

I've done a few big ones. Lines galore. And each and every time, it's really, really difficult. I did a one-person show some time back called "Give 'Em Hell, Harry." James Whitmore originally did it. In fact, there's a filmed version of the actual stage play back in 1975 and, unbelievably, Whitmore actually got an Oscar nod for it. I guess because it was on film it was eligible, even though it was simply a camera pointed at him onstage. Anyway, it's a big one to learn. Two and half hours, more or less, of being Harry Truman on stage. Did it for a long stretch back on the east coast.

To learn it, I thought I'd play with a few different techniques. I have a few friends, decent actors all, back in NY that swear by the tape recorder method. Tape the entire role, sometimes even the entire play, in a monotone and read it into a tape recorder and then listen to it over and over and over, ad nauseum. On the surface, it seems maybe the most painless method available. The problem is, my mind wanders. I lose focus. Tried it with the Harry gig and it started out swimmingly. I always had the headphones on, everywhere I went; the store, driving (this was before the cell phone laws), sitting around the house, everywhere.

I quickly learned an ugly truth about myself; I don't have the focus for this. I couldn't concentrate on the words. They were just so much noise in the background of my life. I call this technique now The Osmosis Technique. For me it is tantamount to sleeping with the script and hoping the words come to you in your sleep. It just doesn't work for me. I suspect some of that has to do with my own failings as a person lacking the skills to concentrate for long periods at a time, though.

Another technique, which actually does work to a certain extent, is the writing approach. The actor actually writes the words over and over. Whole notebooks filled with the same lines. Sort of like Jack Nicholson in The Shining writing the same sentence over and over. Creepy scene, that. So I tried it. My hand cramped up and I lost interest. I found that in addition to being frustrating, learning lines became physically painful. Out that one went.

I once asked Sam Waterson (one of the most "normal" people I've ever met that also happens to be an actor) what he did. Remember, Sam did a two hour, one-manner about Lincoln back in the day. He said exactly what I was afraid he was going to say..."Pace and talk, pace and talk, do it again, just pace and talk." Er.

Moriarty shared a technique I thought was sheer lunacy until I tried it. He told me to learn the "big chunks" backwards. That is to say, start with the last sentence of a long monologue or soliloquy and then learn the second to last sentence and so on and so on. He said the human mind will instinctively move quickly toward what it knows best, and what it knows best is what it learns first. He said that's how he learned Richard III when he did it at Lincoln Center. I tried it. It works. But it's too hard. Again, the old focus problem. I'm just not disciplined enough for it.

There is a famous story of Olivier learning Othello in a field of cows. He wanted his voice a full third lower than his actual speaking voice for the role. To do this, he felt he had to first LOSE his own voice. So he would march out every morning to a neighboring field full of cattle and begin shouting Othello's lines. Oh, to be a fly on the wall, or more appropriately, a fly on the cow, for that one. The image is startling: Lord Olivier out amongst the beasts of burden screaming the great lines of Shakespeare at six in the morning in the English fog.

So today, I'm back to Sam Waterston's very practical advice. Pace and talk, pace and talk. That's what I'm doing today. I did it yesterday. And I've found, like I did back in my Harry Truman days, that I really only have about three to four hours in me. My mind begins to reject after that. It's like every morning I have a gallon bucket to fill in my head. Once I've filled it with as many memorized words as it will hold, everything else just spills over and is useless.

I remember the late Mick Denniston, a good director and friend, telling me tongue-in-cheek, "The script is just a guide." He was referring to my unfortunate habit of paraphrasing. Well, this time I'm paraphrasing myself. So every single time I get lazy as an actor I'm disrespecting the playwright. And I'm finding the two exist in a fragile, small room in my head. They're forced to hang out together day after day. I'd very much like the playwright to be the Alpha Male in this hesitant co-existence. But the actor, as always, the actor is very, very slippery.

Oh, and you'll notice I'm starting to discover the bells and whistles of the blogging world. Note the new pics to the right. That's stage left for the actors reading this.

I'll see you tomorrow.

On Jim Barbour and Kyle Puccia

Not to toot my own horn, but I seem to have a remarkable history of befriending extraordinarily talented people at the very beginning of their creative cycles.  That is to say, just as they themselves begin to understand how different they are as compared to those doing essentially the same things around them.  Two perfect examples of this are my dear and lifelong friends Jimmy Barbour and Kyle Puccia.  I met them both when they were in their early twenties.  

James Barbour is, in my opinion, the most powerful and commanding Broadway star working at the moment.  Jim is a big guy.  Physically, I mean.  About six feet, four inches, in ramrod perfect shape, handsome and gregarious, with a speaking voice that brings Moses to mind.  I recently saw him in concert at The Colony here in LA and there were moments when I simply shut my eyes and was transported.  When he gets cranking, and has the right song under him, it's sort of like being in the middle of a vocal typhoon.  One feels like all they can do is hold on and see where he takes us.  

Kyle Puccia and I worked together for the first time in a dreadful little play called The Straight Man at a new play festival in Virginia.  We had both been brought in as hired guns.  Oddly, neither of us had a lot to do in the final analysis in this sickly little piece of writing, but I do remember a moment when we had to walk behind the "stars" of the show as random people on the "street."  We would change our characters as we saw fit.  Neither of us had the least bit of respect for this piece...anyway, as I remember it, all we had to do was walk, in some sort of character, about twenty feet from stage right to stage left.  We simply couldn't do it without bursting out laughing at each other.  It was one of those kind of jobs.

James Barbour and I met in Kentucky while doing a rep season consisting of Camelot, Drood and 1940's Radio Hour.  Jim was Lancelot to my Arthur in the former of these.  As the story goes, frankly I don't remember this but I'm told it's true, I was in the parking lot about to make my way to the theatre for the first read-thru.  Someone pointed me out to Jimmy and he came down to introduce himself.  I had my back turned at the time and when Jim got to me (you have to understand, at that time in Jim's life he was a VERY serious young man) he tapped me on the shoulder and when I turned around he said, "Hi, I'm James Barbour and I studied with the Royal Shakespeare Company."  Jim claims I said, "Hi, I'm Clif Morts and I don't give a shit." Regardless of what was said, for whatever reason, we became instant best friends.  We just clicked.  We had the exact same sense of humor (very rare thing, indeed) and since that moment in that Kentucky parking lot back in 1988, we have spent literally HOURS quite simply immobile with laughter together.   Years later we were doing 1776 together at some regional theatre and we were nearly asked to leave a coffee shop because we were laughing so hard and disturbing the other patrons.

The next time Kyle Puccia and I worked together was in, of all places, Rockford, IL, doing a play called Big River.  My old buddy, Bill Gregg, was directing it and had cast the entire show except the lead role of Huck.  At the time I was living in Chicago and Bill called me one night and said, "I can't find a Huck.  I've auditioned about 300 people in Chicago for the role and I don't like any of them."  I said, "Billy, you've already directed your Huck.  (he had had the dubious honor of directing 'The Straight Man' all those years before) And his name is Kyle Puccia."  Bill said, and this still amuses me, "Kyle can sing?"

Over the years, Jim and I did nine professional shows together.  We would lose touch, get back in touch, lose touch, get back in touch, over and over.  Eventually, Jimmy was tapped to step into Carousel at Lincoln Center as Billy Bigalow.  His Broadway stature was launched.  I drifted off into a life of teaching and writing.  

Kyle, of course, blew the lid off the role of Huck in Big River.  He was a very good thing in the middle of an average production.  

So here I am in the City of Angels.  Kyle and Jim both live about ten minutes away.  I'm writing a one-person show for Jim called "3 Upper."  He will win an Obie for it this time next year, mark my words.  Kyle is writing the score for my play Praying Small at NoHo.  Interesting thing about Kyle...I always knew he wouldn't continue to limit his creativity to acting alone.  He was far too big for that.  There was a sense of frustration with Kyle when he was young because he knew, inside himself, how talented he was.  He just couldn't figure out what to do with it. Now he has.  Interesting thing about Jim...he knew he was going to be a star.  It was written all over his face, even at 22.  He just didn't know when.  

Kyle and Jim are in my life again now.  They both, from a distance, saw me come through a very dark period.  But not today.  Not today.  

Today we've got some work to do together.  And some laughs to share.  And a long and hard-wrought mutual respect for each other.  And I can't help thinking of the old Sinatra song...You ain't seen nothin' yet!  Jimmy and Kyle...let's kick some ass again.

http://kylempuccia.blogspot.com/?spref=tw

http://www.jamesbarbour.com/

http://jamesbarbour.blogspot.com/2010/01/view-from-cone.html

I'll see you tomorrow.

"He has spent his life being underestimated..."

People seem to like it when old guys make a comeback.  I remember when I was in high school and Muhammad Ali had taken, late in his career, a fight with a killer named Ernie Shavers.  As a rabid Ali fan I was concerned.  Everyone was.  What was he doing?  He didn't need to prove anything.  He was Muhammad Ali, for God sakes.  He had been to the mountain top a dozen times; Liston, Frazier, Foreman, Norton.  He was 38 - ancient in the world of professional boxing.  And now, inexplicably, he had taken a fight with one of the premier knock-out artists of a generation.  The bald-headed gladiator, Ernie Shavers.

I watched that fight in my childhood home back in Missouri.  I was alone that night for some reason.  Just me and the TV.  I could hardly breathe.  Please, I kept praying, please don't let it end this way.  Not after all the miracles.  Don't let Ali be knocked out as an old man in the ring with this guy who's only gift was a punch like a horse-kick.  A guy that didn't belong in the same sentence with this idol of mine who had rocked the world so often in the past.

The fight went all fifteen rounds.  Ali, no longer in possession of his greatest gift, his remarkable speed, held onto Shavers, punching in flurries, being careful, rope-a-doping now and then, snapping his still formidable left jab and generally calling upon all his hard-gotten ring skills to stay ahead.  And Shavers just couldn't tee off on him.  Ali was too slippery, even at thirty eight.

And then the fateful 15th round came.  Ali was comfortably ahead on points.  His corner was telling him to just get through the round.  Don't take any chances.  But Ali was a champion. Perhaps the greatest champion in the history of the sport, in fact, and he had no intention of just "getting through it."  I watched in shock as he strode to the middle of the ring, waved the neanderthal Shavers in, and unbelievably, started trading big guns with him.  This was suicide, plain and simple.  Shavers was a beast.

And the world watched something astonishing.  Ali and Shavers stood toe-to-toe.  Spine shattering punches.  No quarter.  Neither backed up.  Ali threw shots as hard as he had in his entire career.  Shavers lined up his cannons and prepared to take Ali out.  And with thirty seconds left in the fight, Shavers started backing up, and stumbling, knees wobbling, and finally Ali, in a complete reversal of all that is holy, had him on the ropes and was bombing away. Shavers was barely hanging on.  The arena was in a frenzy.  I was literally shaking with pride. 

The bell rang.

Ali stood in the middle of the ring and arrogantly stared at the crowd as if to say, "Never. Never. Never underestimate me."  Shavers barely made it to his own corner.  The old lion had beaten him like no one had ever beaten him.  The dancing master had turned into a heartless thug right before our eyes.  The kingdom still belonged to the king.

I can't wait to get back on stage.

See you tomorrow.

On Preparation

As I start on this massive memorization of the role, I thought it might be interesting to talk a bit about process.  For the uninitiated, "process" is simply a word the actor uses meaning "how do I get there from here."

Angie and I had my dear friend, John Bader, over for dinner last night.  John and I have known each other for twenty six years.  We were interns at a creepy, little theatre in Iowa called The Old Creamery together.  This was back in the day when an actor could work at an Equity theatre for forty weeks, take a "test" to compensate for ten more weeks, and walk away after a year of internship with their Equity Card.  Equity is the union for stage actors and imperative if one wants to make a living at this stuff.  This is what John and I did.

There are maybe a handful of people on the planet whom I will engage in conversation about the nuts and bolts of acting.  John is one of those people.  Jeff Wood is another (a fine director and one of my earliest and most satisfying collaborators), Jimmy Barbour, the late Robert Fiedler, maybe a few others.  I simply don't have the patience for the misunderstandings and the, well, bullshit.  Too many actors want to talk about how they "rehearse" not how they find what they want to actually work.  They confuse process with practice.  Subsequently it often becomes mind-numbingly didactic and convoluted.  Words and ideas are twisted and tossed and before you know it, the conversation has become almost impossible to understand unless you've read Hagen and Adler and Strasburg and Bobby Lewis and Meisner and God knows who else.  Not to mention that ninety percent of these people don't have the acting chops to back up what they're saying in the first place.  So what happens is the entire conversation becomes masturbatory and self-indulgent.  It's just so much yapping.

But with people like John, I discard my general rule of not talking about acting because I know he understands and can follow my serpentine thought pattern.

So we sat out in my sun room (soon to be my office) and we talked about acting.  And since I'm about to start work on Sam Dean in Praying Small, I thought it would be a good thing to recount.

I am not a method actor.  Used to be.  Used to live and die by it.  Used to read Hagen and listen to Adler (actually met her) and Strasburg (He died just before I got to NYC) and take all of it as the gospel.  It took me awhile but I finally realized these people were all talking about rehearsing a role.  I have no interest in what is done in rehearsal.  Theatre is Machiavellian in that the ends always justify the means.  So the means are incidental.  The end is when the fat lady (I'm paraphrasing Sallinger here) is actually moved by what she sees on stage.  That's the job.  That's what it's about.  Here's a truth - no one gives a shit what the actor is feeling.  It's all about what the fat lady is feeling.

Gentle Readers of this blog will recognize John Bader from a hundred television and film roles...most notably an award-winning stint on a show called The Practice on which he played a very eerie serial killer.  In the late eighties and early nineties I studied intently with the brilliant actor Michael Moriarty (more about him in another blog) and John was working with NY theatre icon Julie Bovasso.  I think it safe to say we could not have been farther apart when it came to "preparation."  John was all about finding an immediate honesty before proceeding. And I was all about finding the external things and hoping the honesty caught up with me.  

Interesting thing happened over two decades, though.  John slid toward my way of thinking and I drifted towards his.  We think almost (almost!) exactly alike these days.

The best way I can explain this to a layman is to recount a story Michael Moriarty told me over copious bottles of white wine many years ago.  He told me the story of Olivier and Anthony Quinn working together in Becket in London and then on Broadway in the mid-sixties.  Quinn was, at the time, known as a quintessential method actor.  One of Elia Kazan's boys.  Olivier, of course, thought all of that to be utter nonsense.  The story goes that Quinn, playing the king, was struggling his way through the Act I final monologue, mumbling and groping, desperately trying to find a moment of "truth" in his work and all the while Sir Lawrence was watching, utterly transfixed, from the wings.  After a half hour or so of this, Olivier stepped out on stage and said, "My God, Tony, I've finally sussed out the difference between American actors and British actors.  It's like football, really.  You American method actors absolutely REFUSE to run unless you have this ball of truth tucked firmly beneath your arm.  Whereas we Brits run as fast as we can and hope to God someone throws us the ball!"

There it is in a nutshell.  

I'll see you tomorrow.

On Being Overweight and Forty Eight...

I can remember being in college and my early professional stints piling on the make-up in order to ostensibly look the age of the character I was playing.  I've never had a make-up class in my life.  Everything I know about stage make-up was learned vicariously, watching other actors, learning from them.  One early role I recall is playing Porter in my first Deathtrap (I've since gone on to play both Clifford - twice - and Sidney in professional productions).  I was twenty, I think.  It was way back in my Tent Theatre days in Springfield, Missouri.  This is the notorious production that had the director, an older gentleman named Howard Orms, declaring at the initial read-thru, "These guys are NOT gay, they're JUST GOOD FRIENDS!"  I decided that I had to change everything about myself to play that age.  I adopted a sort of waddling walk (to indicate the character was in his forties, I suppose) and caked on the make-up so thick I could have done the title role in The Elephant Man.  I rather fancied myself the Olivier of the midwest.  Unbelievably, I was allowed to go onstage like that.  I can only imagine what the audience must have thought.  Back then I was especially enamored with stipple. Remember stipple?  This was a dabbing technique that allegedly allowed the actor to look like he had a few days growth of beard.  Problem was, I have always been a face-toucher.  My own face, that is.  Always swiping, touching, wiping my own face.  Little thing I picked up from Brando.  Anyway, to do that with a mug full stipple and before long I looked like a six-year old who's been baking brownies with his mom.   No matter, I loved stippling.

So today I find it amusing that I am told I can't play thirty-three anymore.  I've added a very simple, elegant scene at the opening to inform the audience that this is a memory play.  

The truth is, I don't like writing episodic work.  Praying Small is completely episodic.  And non-linear.  That is to say, at various time throughout the piece, Sam is seven, sixteen, twenty three, twenty eight and finally thirty three.  It bounces around in time so the audience is taken back and forth through his life.  Very dependent upon theatricality and the willingness of the audience to suspend their, well, disbelief.

I don't like writing like that.  It's easy.  And in a way, sort of cheap.  It's TV writing.  

I prefer writing in the Aristotlean Unity of Time.  Meaning the time that elapses on stage is the exact amount of time that elapses in the audience.  Chekov was pretty handy at this.  Of the living playwrights, Lanford Wilson does it exceptionally well (Tally's Folly, Fifth of July).  It is far more challenging to the playwright because he and he alone is responsible for shepherding the audience from one emotional valley and peak to another.  He cannot rely on the "fade out" or the "black out" or the "meanwhile, back at the castle..."

I stopped acting for a living around 2000.   Many reasons for this...the biggest of which I can't really go into.  In the past ten years I have gained a not entirely incorrect reputation as being the hermit-like, demanding, eccentric acting teacher on the Northside of Chicago.  The Reader (Chicago's second-rate version of The Village Voice) called me, "The most prestigious acting coach in the city...if you can find him."  A part of me always liked that.

I came out of my self-imposed exile in 2005 to do a couple roles at Florida Rep.  Upon returning to Chicago, I immediately went back into my hole and began teaching again.  

And during this entire time I wrote.  And wrote.  And wrote.  I wrote Praying Small in the basement of a warehouse where I had set up a computer and printer in a dark corner.  The warehouse was part of a complex with The Salvation Army where I was working as a drug and alcohol counselor.  I would finish my 9 to 5 existence and wander down into the depths of this dusty, dirty, cavernous warehouse and write my magnum opus.  

So now I'm in Los Angeles and about to play the role I wrote in that warehouse basement all those years ago.  Another blog will explain why I'm here.  But mostly it has to do with falling in love with a girl named Angie.  

I've been offered the title of "Playwright-in-Residence" with NoHo Arts Center.  They don't realize it yet, but because of that, they have become the recipient of a whole gaggle of plays written in a dark, dusty, cramped, magical warehouse basement.

See you tomorrow. 

A New Day, A New Play

Started memorizing my own play today.  Praying Small, it's called.  Doing it at NoHo Arts Center in April and May with an open ended run.  Basically, that means the play will run for as long as there are butts in the seats.  This is the third of the "big three."  It opened in Chicago with Actors Workshop.  Actually, it opened that theatre.  The inaugural production.  I think it ran for a few months (I stepped in at one point to play one of the supporting roles).  The theatre brought it back the following year.  It's a money-maker for several reasons.  One, it's simple to produce: no set to speak of, a few lights, some sound cues and some good actors.  That's really it.  But the play is about recovery from addiction and generally what happens is through word of mouth the AA and NA community in whatever city it is playing begins to fill the seats.  Of course, it is not really ethical to advertise with that community,  so it really is entirely a word of mouth type thing.  So after bopping around in several other venues it made it to NYC in 2009.   A small company named LoveCreek did it there in a small theatre in the Producer's Club in mid-town.  Saw the DVD some time back.  Clearly some production hurdles there.  But lots of passion.  And now...Los Angeles.  

NoHo is a wonderful facility for the play.  This is the kind of theatre one sees in a movie when the characters are actors and they are rehearsing a play "off-broadway."  There really are no theatres like that in NY.  They are all little shit holes;  horrible places where really fine work is being done in the dirty confines of backrooms of bars, stifling, windowless spaces in the upstairs corner of a bookstore, someone's living room...for all it's lure, NY, aside from the big theatres, is physically a terrible place to do theatre.  But NoHo is a beautiful, little theatre. With a balcony, no less.  

The lead character in this play is a massive role.  I should know, I wrote the goddamned thing. His name is Sam Dean and he is 33 years old.  My name is Clif Morts and I'm 48 years old.  And I've been asked to play the role in my own show.  More on that tomorrow.