Notes From The Underground: LA vs NYC subways
Yeah, LA’s got a subway. Make all the jokes you want. Skip riding it. Inhale gridlock fumes while inching forward at 2 miles an hour instead. We’ll be thrilled to […]
new york
Choosing A Financial Occupation
It’s a strange thing tripping through lower Manhattan these days. A few blocks beneath the rebuilding of One World Trade’s Freedom Tower, a project remarkably far along considering the glacial […]
Hurricane of Hype: What does not kill us, makes us softer!
So all the fuss over Irene being a totally devastating experience ended up like most nights with overhyped women… A blue-balled dry humping. Granted, there was serious flooding, but hardly […]
The One Man Odyssey
The history of the one-person show is likely as old as language itself. Maybe older. It’s not unreasonable to imagine an overly animated, pre-linguistic Australopithecus grunting out story points in […]
Stage vs. Film
There was an awkward moment after the Off-Broadway opening of The Common Air. The play, which links 6 characters during an airport delay, was written with Robert McCaskill, who also […]
The Air In Ojai
I did not recognize the 805 area code, but after answering my reliably spotty iPhone, I was surprised to learn it was an equity theater in Ojai, California who wanted […]
The Topography of an Audience pt 1
From the stage, it’s never boring figuring out what type of audience you‘re performing for. Audiences are limitlessly fascinating. They’re living organisms. They may act as a whole, but like […]
The Topography of an Audience pt 2
Once they settle into their seats, the topography of an audience is a fascinating thing to measure. Bleecker 45 is a 300 seat house with a thrust stage, meaning the […]
Control, Alt, Repeat
“How do you remember all those words?” It’s a common question civilians often ask of actors. And the basic answer, save horse-sized pills of Ginkgo biloba, is brutal repetition. […]
You Asked For It
Whenever you produce a play, you can be sure there’ll be a confluence of conspiracies awaiting you prior to opening that will insure the maximum amount of stress and anxiety […]
Plenty More Fish In the Sea…
Of all the multitudinous living organisms in the phylum cordata, none are quite so fucked as fish. Scientifically, the entire species is toast for several reasons. The sad thing is, […]
I Me Mine
(Originally published in Elmore Magazine) It was somewhere between the birth of Napster and credit default swaps– when the rest of our understanding of how markets work went out the […]
Wanderlust
What’s most essential about cities like Manhattan, Paris and London are not their endlessly variegated tiers of high and low culture, their multitudes of peopledom, or their architectural majesty. Those […]
Freddy D’s Party on 114th
The newlyweds in 5L pull open the door at the same time my boy D does, and we all step into the hall landing, blinking freshly ceased sleep from our […]
Re-gentrified
As modern as it may feel, the current all–too-trendy invective against the gentrification of certain New York neighborhoods is almost as old as the city itself. E.B. White complained about […]
Before the Corridor
It was January 2000 and America breathed a collective sigh of what-ever at the undevastating non-effects of theY2K bug. For months prior, the algorithm had been fear-mongered onto every front […]