Big Ideas

In the 1930s, if you were really rich and needed a libel lawyer, there was only one person you called: Macdonald DeWitt. He was, in many respects, the Johnny Cochran of his day; his OJ Simpson was the NY Post, which he defended successfully. Descended from a wide variety of wealthy early Americans, many of them politicians—and at one time a candidate for the New York State Supreme Court himself—he was, at the very least, a notorious and controversial figure. He was also, as it happens, my great uncle’s patient. (My great uncle was a well-heeled doctor with, um, well-heeled clientele.) These were the days in which doctors and patients were often friends, mind you, and the two were close. So close that when DeWitt passed away in 1967, he bequeathed his entire personal library to my great uncle… who in turn bequeathed his own library (including DeWitt’s books) to me. Some of the volumes are both valuable and precious to me: early editions of Darwin’s ORIGIN OF

As I’ve started to get deeper and deeper into the development of my new solo performance piece for The Welders, I’ve felt this urge to invite people into the fretful, revelatory process of being a writer: to show, for the record, a bit of what it actually looks like to live and tell stories, at least from my perspective, in the 21st century. So for the time being, while I’m working on that still-untitled piece (as well as a variety of other projects), I’m going to keep a simple diary of sorts. The effort may be to no one’s benefit but my own, and if so, well… failure is useful. But if you find some use in what I share here, I hope you’ll let me know. September 1, 2014: First public reading of my Welders piece, pictured above, at the Kennedy Center as part of the 2014 Page to Stage Festival. Felt good. Actually, really good. Left with the clear sense that I’ve got something and that I can do this. September 2, 2014: Writing date with my

My four year-old son loves to play Angry Birds. Actually, to be perfectly clear, what he loves is to watch me play Angry Birds for him, given that he can’t quite manipulate the little slingshot well enough on his own yet. We cuddle up together on our favorite red love seat, my iPad held carefully between us, and I fling birds while he cheers me on. He knows which birds have which special powers, of course, and he also understands which birds are most likely to destroy which substances. “The yellow birds are good for wood, Daddy,” he instructs me, “and the blue birds break the glass.” He giggles with glee every time a black bird explodes through cartoon stone or a big red bird reduces an ice structure to fragments. The more chaos I create, the more he likes it. I’m not surprised by his love of the game. Little children love destruction because it helps them feel, in a world built for grownups, power. My son doesn’t yet know destruction’s c

Science has been much on my mind of late, thanks to a visit I made not long ago (with a dozen or so other playwrights and theater makers) to the National Institutes of Health. Three hours considering the potential intersections between genomics, bioethics, medicine, and storytelling with some of the most accomplished scientists and artists in the country was invigorating and inspiring… but it also left me with questions. Early in our conversation, a few people around the table started talking about art and science as if they were non-overlapping magisteria, to appropriate the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s well-known term: distinct worlds that operate according to different principles and that address different aspects of what it means to be human and to understand the universe. This struck me immediately as an inaccurate over-simplification, and I tried to articulate why. A play, I suggested, is merely a hypothesis. The production of that play is an experiment, I continue

In the last few hours leading up to April Fools’ Day, you may have noticed several people posting any number of “warnings” to friends on Facebook and Twitter: “Do not be taken in,” they all said, “by the crazy stories people post.” Were there more of those admonitions this year than in the past? It seemed to me there were. I value skepticism. I believe it’s in painfully short supply in our credulous country, which all too often sets ridiculous claims about everything from astrology to trickle-down economics to “traditional” marriage on equal footing with evidence-based, scientifically-sound arguments. Our newspapers, social media feeds, and television broadcasts often make it seem like every day is April first in America. We are hard-wired, evolutionarily, to believe. The mechanisms for belief have evolved in our brains. Some of us are better at it than others; I’m not so good at it myself. The necessary genes either didn’t make it into my DN