Currently, my play "Scott Stein's First Play" is running at the Sacred Fools Theater, off Melrose and Heliotrope, in Los Angeles. It runs next week, Tuesday and Wednesday, at 8pm. It's part of a duo of one-acts called "Puttin' on the Fritz."
Check it out if you can.
It isn't my first play. I wrote it in 1999, during a summer in Ireland as a student under Marianne McDonald, UCSD theater professor, who flew me out to Cork.
My last play, to date, was 365.
It was a play a day I wrote for 365 days.
You may recall such an idea. Suzan-Lori Parks has produced her "365 Days, 365 Plays" in many, many theaters.
The funny thing is, I wrote mine a year before her. August 31, 2001 to August 30, 2002.
I started on my birthday. I wanted to see what a year could bring if I dedicated myself every day, doing what I liked most—just writing the beginnings of things. Beginnings have such promise. I feel free. Later on, obligations to form keep us tied to ideas. I freeze up midway. But the beginning was a wild world. So I wrote 365 short ones.
Then September 11, twelve days later, taught me what a year could bring.
Many more changes came over the course of that year. Ones I couldn't predict. 9/11 was the biggest. I stayed through the project as best I could. It became, on many days, my blanket, my throughline.
I read a random play today from one of the three binders that contains the writing. I turned to a random day.
I really love what I wrote.
I love so many of the pieces I wrote for it—they're messy, they're weird, but they're truer, in some way, than anything else I've done. I've really wanted to see them performed. Bits and pieces. A jukebox of random days. No audience would ever get to see more than a few. That was my idea—celebrate the randomness of life. That year, 9/11 made me a bit of a Dadaist.
It was hard to convince anyone, and then SLP did hers, and now it's tied to her. And everyone praises it, or hates it. But that's not the point. Such an idea shouldn't be tied to anyone. It's a form, not substance. It's a massive sonnet. Anyone can write this. It's what we think in those days that makes the difference.
Or maybe not. I don't know. But my last play was taken away from me. I can't do anything with it. It's unwieldy, and lost, and I love it. A big misshapen baby that I want people to see.
I haven't written for theater since then. I think 365 broke my heart. This decade also broke my heart in some way I can't figure out. The way we turned such a moment of sorrow on 9/11 into a grandstanding excuse for war. The ways in which we haven't changed. I don't like what we've become, or what I've become.
Maybe I'll write another play. But the truth is, I feel like theater is as commercially-driven as any other medium. TV, movies, games, books, theater...they're all the same in the end. They're all made on Planet Earth for humans. The illusion of theater being a sacred landscape...well, I won't say it's not true. For some it is. But that's true for the other forms, too. It depends on what you believe in, what sacred space you make for yourself. I had my heart broken, that's all. It hasn't fully come back yet. I'm looking around. If I feel it, I'll write it.
I'm working on a novel now, for young adults. Or for regular adults, too. It's about dreams, New York, piracy, corruption, lost things, and the journey to adulthood. It is influenced by Mark Twain's Huck Finn, by Terry Gilliam's movies. I like fiction. It's my first love. But theater is the most direct way of writing, for me. It just speaks right out of my head. I have to translate into fiction. On the other hand, theater has to be directed and performed, while fiction can be directly imbibed.
Every form has its advantages and disadvantages.
