forking in Los Angeles

Right, so, let me announce this show before it happens this time...

Forking is going to Los Angeles... look for it at the Theatre Asylum from February 20th - March 14th. Live in LA? Buy tickets here.

I had the chance to revise the script after the San Francisco run... After watching all thirteen San Francisco performances (I had to, right? had to see the different vote combinations in action), I had a pretty good idea where the play could be tighter, and which moments could use a little more clarity. So, those of you seeing the show in LA are going to see a better script.

One of the ways in which writing plays is more immediately-gratifying than writing fiction is that you get to participate in the experience by sitting in the audience--you get to see/hear/feel the emotions and reactions of the people around you. It's hugely interesting and also extremely helpful for sharpening your craft. With a voting play, the audience experience is even more transparent--you can hear people applauding and shouting out their hopes and desires for the characters, and you can hear how that changes from night to night.

Thanks to everyone who came to see the show in San Francisco... we sold out every weekend show, as well as a couple of Thursdays and a Tuesday.

fork this.

Right, so, here are some things that are happening:

First, Forking. Forking is a choose-your-own-adventure play in which the audience determines the outcome of the play by a series of 15-20 votes (it's not always the same number because there are votes that only come up if the play takes certain forks).

You can read the San Francisco Chronicle's preview, and if you're in town, come see the show. It runs through the 31st, and it has been selling out, so get your tickets in advance.

Second, I'm in the Playground writers pool again this year, and I've had a couple of staged readings this season; if you're local, keep an eye on this page to see what the topic is each month and see if I have a script that makes the cut. It's worth coming even if I don't; the shows have been great this season.

Third, I've been commissioned by Playground to write a full-length play (title: Fifty Years Hungry) which just had a table read last Saturday and which will have a staged reading during this year's Best of Playground festival... I'll post a date when I have one. That play is kind of exactly the opposite of Forking in just about every way. Except for there is one scene where they're drinking vodka out of a bottle, but that's it.

Fourth, I just found out the short play that I used as source material to expand to write Fifty Years Hungry has been selected to play at the inspiraTO festival in exotic Toronto, Canada! My first international performance. That's going to be June 4th-13th. They're actually going to post the script on their web site for a few weeks while they do an open call for actors and directors, so you'll be able to stop by and check out the script if you're curious. It's a downer, though, so pick a day when you feel lousy already.

Fifth, I've got a couple of other things coming up, but I'll wait to post about those until the ink is dry. Good stuff, all of it.

With some chagrin I have to admit that lately I've been better about posting events on my um (*cough*facebook*cough*) page, so if you are local and want to stay in the loop on my events, you can, um, friend me.

Happy new President, everyone.

Litquaked

I love San Francisco.

Yesterday was the last day of Litquake. This year's Litcrawl was awesome, including deadbeat venues that forgot we were coming and forced us onto the streets, and at least one near fist-fight by a couple of dudes so high on literature that they couldn't stop talking shit to one another. This was my first year on the Litquake committee, and I have to say, I've always been amazed at how well this thing comes together on how little money, and watching it happen from the inside out I'm just more impressed, not less.

I curated and emceed a reading during the third phase, at this little clothing store on 21st. The reading was called
Unfit to Print: Writers Read Lost Scenes from Unpublished Writing That Lived Fast, Died Young, & Left a Beautiful Corpse
and the readers did an awesome job.
Kent Zimmerman read from his un-published porn how-to manual that he helped Seymour Butts write.
Kaya Oakes read hilarious out-takes from her promotional materials for her book on Indie culture.
Holly Shumas shared her mis-begotten memoir proposal, and
Literary Deathmatch champion Sam Hurwitt exhumed some half-brilliant, half-awful pages from his novel-in-a-drawer from ten years ago.

If you didn't make it this year, be sure to get out to the Litcrawl next year. If you don't live in San Francisco, move here. There were so many great readings, including but definitely not limited to my friend Kara Platoni at her very first Litquake reading, reading a supremely comic excerpt from the pages of one of her seven nanowrimo novels.

giant rabbit.

q: what the hell have you been up to?
a: giant rabbit.



(this is my consulting company and it is right now taking up absurd amounts of time. this is our new logo, designed by Jon Adams. we are working on a new web site that uses it instead of just ripping off Durer.)

(we are growing; when we get a little bigger, I will have more time. this sounds like an insane lie, but I believe it to be true, or at least that is what I tell myself.)

PianoFight! Another short play running at ShortLived

My short play "Twice As Bright" is a 3rd-round replacement play at PianoFight Production's ShortLived:

It's running Fridays and Saturdays at the Off-Market Theater at 965 Mission, and (this is brilliant) you can brown-bag your own booze into the theater.

The way ShortLived works is that the audience votes after every show; the lowest-ranked three plays get the boot and are replaced. "Twice As Bright" will be running for at least one more weekend, but after that, it's subject to the whim of the mob...

May 8th - 25th: catch Leo in Best of Playground

My short play 'Leo' is going to be included in this year's Best of Playground festival, from May 8th-25th at the Thick House theater in San Francisco.

The other plays in the show are great; here's the lineup:
"O Happy Dagger" by Crish Barth, directed by Tracy Ward
"The Boy Who Did Not Listen To His Mother" by Cass Brayton, directed by Nancy Carlin
"Three Stories" by Garret Jon Groenveld, directed by Lee Sankowich
"Leo" by Daniel Heath, directed by Jessica Heidt
"Panopticon" by Aaron Loeb, directed by Barbara Oliver
"The Known World" by Geetha Reddy, directed by Chris Smith
"Giving Up The Ghost" by Lauren Yee, directed by Jim Kleinmann



(Hey, are you reading this blog b/c of my article over at Script Frenzy? If you live in the Bay Area, you should check out Playground... it's an amazing program that supports new playwrights, it doesn't cost anything, and you get to work with some incredible people. So, if you're local,
a) come see the festival, and
b) apply for the writers pool next year.)

Grandma's Got a Gun

The valiant men and women of the Office of Letters and Light asked me to write another piece of script-writing advice for this year's Script Frenzy, so I did.

You can check it out here:
Grandma's Got a Gun, or, "Who You Calling a Minor Character, Anyway?"

(And here's the one I wrote last year... that one is all about dialogue.)

Xcalak, Mexico

new pictures up over at TMIAW:

Leo - a short play at the Berkeley rep, Monday, Feb 18th

My fourth play of the season, Leo, is going up at this month's Monday Night Playground staged reading series at the Berkeley Rep. Every year Playground has a mathematics-related topic in February; this year it was 'The Ghosts of Departed Quantities,' a phrase from a famous anti-calculus polemic from the early 18th century. My play is about a dead hamster, naturally.

Sorry About the Hurricanes (Sheherezade 2008)

For those of you who live around the Bay, my short play 'Sorry About the Hurricanes' is running this weekend at Sheherezade 2008 at the Exit Theater in San Francisco:

It's a night of nine short plays about 2007, and 'Hurricanes' closes out the line-up. Because Soumyaa (the director) is a mad genius, the play features a guest appearance by an actual robot. The event is a fund-raiser for PCSF, and there's wine, and you can drink the wine -in the theater- (there should be a state law or something that says that all theater should be that way).

all up in a school bus (a short play about zombies)

I wrote a fake deleted scene from Night of the Living Dead (1968) for
this play-writing contest.

They're doing a staged reading of it this Friday, 1/25, after the production of Speed the Plow at the A.C.T. The play starts like this:

FIRST ZOMBIE
We should get all up in a school bus or something. I'm sick of this nickle-and-dime shit.

SECOND ZOMBIE
School bus. Yeah. And then we can go to space and get a pony and become president. Keep walking.

FIRST ZOMBIE
I'll go right in the front door, you know, it folds, it makes that noise, and everybody's screaming, and when they try to get out the back, you're waiting. It'll be a big yellow box of candy. Only with pigtails.

The play is only three minutes long, so I wouldn't cross any time-zones to see it or anything, but if you're in the neighborhood and you were thinking of going to Speed the Plow anyway...

cenote azul

a few cenote pictures up next door:

I hate summer

It was so hot that summer that the dog went nuts. She took to knocking over furniture for no reason. When it got dark, she would go out back and hunt fruit. You could see her out in the moonlight, pouncing on fallen apples like they were trying to go somewhere.

I was convinced, that summer, that eating salty food made you less thirsty. This is obviously bullshit, but my eleven year-old self took his own opinions very seriously, and tended to make sustained efforts to convince everyone else that they were correct. So there I was, sweating like some kind of Saint's relic in my second-hand Lakers jersey, eating salted peanuts, shell and all, while the dog knocked Aunt Betty out of the hammock and I wondered why nobody paid me any attention.

When it was September and the heat hadn't broke yet, my dad buried four whole chickens, bone in, at the four corners of the yard. He said the earth was angry. Couple days later it finally rained. Too late for the yard, though; it was just wet and dead. But I sat out in the rain anyway, burnt grass sharp and wet under my palms. The dog laid down on the porch as if nothing had even happened, and I thought to myself that maybe eating all those salty foods hadn't helped out after all, and that maybe if I never mentioned it again no one would ever remember anything I'd said about it.

underwater off Cozumel, Mexico

New photos up over at TMIAW.

the fridge

"Can't go in that junkyard." Josie walked with her hands stuffed in the pockets of her puffy red coat.

"Why not?" Paul followed after her eating fries out of a bag, five at a time.

"They got a fridge in there. You suffocate."

"Not if you just stay out of it." He hadn't even wanted to get into the junkyard until Josie told him he couldn't. It was dark, and too cold to even think of climbing a fence.

"They had a whole family suffocate in there."

"You mean the kids."

"I mean the whole family."

"Must be a big fridge."

"It's big all right." Josie laced her fingers behind her head and stared over the rusted barbed wire that spiraled along the top of the fence. "Must be something to look at. Must be beautiful."

Paul stepped up behind her. His breath puffed white in the cold. He was eating as fast as he could, but the fries were cold already, and so were his fingers. "You're full of shit, anyway."

"No," Josie said. "Ask anyone."

Paul gave up on the fries and tried to huck them over the fence, but the bag came open, and the fries just scattered lamely over the grass. "Well, what the hell, then?"

"Maybe they wanted to be found together. In a million years. When archaeologists dig up the junkyard, they wanted all four of them there. It might have worked, even. It was only chance somebody found them, you know--it took a couple of weeks."

"They had to have got rid of it by now," Paul said.

"Or maybe they just thought they could get out again." Josie walked up to the fence and pressed a white hand against the chain. "I think it's kind of romantic."

"No way they still got it in there." He walked to the fence, too, and looked through a gap in the plastic slats that ran through the chain links.

Josie moved behind him and covered his mouth with one cold hand. He couldn't talk because of her hand, or he would've said, 'What the fuck?' She pulled his knit hat down over his eyes and pinched his nose shut.

Paul couldn't see, and he couldn't breathe. He could feel Josie's breath on the back of his neck. He tried to turn away from her but she didn't let go. Finally he brought his hands up, grabbed her hands and pulled them off, and turned to face her. She was close to him, nose almost to his. Her eyes were wide, a strange look in them, and she grabbed his arms and kissed him.

Paul froze like a cat lifted by the scruff. Her lips were cold. She covered his eyes with her fingers. He let them close, eyelashes brushing her palm.

"See?" She whispered, close to his ear. "Romantic."

Paul was in no position to argue, not waiting for her to kiss him again like that. But he told himself that he was going back there the next day to find out if the fridge was still there, and if it was, he was going to tear the lid off that thing himself.

The hands that slid under the back of his coat were cold enough to make him gasp.