The Culture Cure

Met Museumgoer looking at Felix Vallotton's 'The White and the Black" (1913)

How do we keep it together during times of chaos? 

A friend recently posted on Facebook: 

"Happy to say I'm taking some time off to get my head/body together (right now they're in different time zones) but I had to cancel my plans for a walk-on-deserted-beaches sojourn because of family responsibilities...I wonder if I could run a few possibilities by you wonderful people?"

His ideas ran the gamut from Meditation and Psychedelics, to Electroshock and Gastric Bypass, to Public Service. (Already attempted: lying in bed all day with the shades down reading a long book about targeted killings by the Mossad.)

He asked if we had any other suggestions. 

It was half-kidding, but, in days like these, half-not. 

Many of my friends and I feel worried about the sky falling. (Indeed, tragically, just before Christmas a woman was killed by a piece of a building near Times Square.)


Reading my friend's post, I realized I hadn't written on this blog in more than a year - since before the midterms! The last one I felt compelled to register had been about the bomb scare at work. 

So what have I been doing since? Immersing myself in what I'm learning to think of as the Culture Cure. 

First and foremost, I continued writing (and rewriting) a play - my first - about George McGovern, Thomas Eagleton, and McGovern's daughter, around the issue of mental health, the Presidency, and the conflict between public and private lives. 

Director Adrienne Campbell-Holt's stellar cast: (Lucy Consagra, stage directions) 
Susannah Perkins, Juliana Canfield, Greg Hildreth, Zoe Winters, Greg Keller, CJ Wilson, Susie Pourfar, Peter Grosz, James Udom, Adam Harrington

Audible sponsored a developmental reading at the Minetta Lane Theater with an amazing director and cast that helped my next revise. And also continued my hard-won wisdom on the realities of the theater marketplace. 

Meanwhile,

Imitation vs. Inspiration

I had a creative breakthrough on the play I'm writing, and it could have happened a lot earlier, but I was resistant. After hearing my idea, which was loosely based on an incident in my family, my teacher suggested that I read the play The Loman Family Picnic by Donald Margulies, but he also cautioned, "It may be too similar."

That scared me. There have been many times when I've had promising creative ideas only to find out they'd "already been done" or a similar one had just sold. Since I was writing my first-ever play, and Margulies has won a Pulitzer, I decided

Writes With Others

People think of writing as a solitary pursuit. But it's not that simple.

I had an idea for a play, and decided to take a class, because I've never written a play before. I wanted to self-impose deadlines, but most of all, I wanted feedback. We meet only once a week, and I have found myself waiting until the last minute to get the stuff on paper.

Sure, I like procrastinating as much as the next writer, but what's really going on is that I am craving the input of The Room. The actual class itself -- hearing the work out loud and getting reactions from everyone -- really makes me miss TV writers' rooms.

Everybody outside the business -- and more than a few people inside the business -- seems mystified by the group-think of a TV writers' room. "So what, you all write it together?" Well,