I’d announced my hiatus on both platforms, you see, and I wanted (a bit urgently, if I’m honest) to find out how people had responded. On Twitter, there was a string of replies wishing me well, a few virtual hugs, and direct messages from concerned friends. (Thank you!) On Facebook, there were also a few supportive comments… along with just a touch of snark from one or two people. Nothing I hadn’t ever seen several times before, actually, when I’d seen others make similar pronouncements.

In case you’re wondering, I’m not proud I did that. In fact, I think it’s safe to say I’m a little bit ashamed. So why share it with the world? Because I really want to make what the recovery movement calls a “fearless and searching moral inventory” here. I’m crawling into a cave to look for dragons… so I can’t be surprised if I find them, and I can’t really pretend they don’t exist, either. No matter how ugly or scary they might be.

———————

Here’s the fully honest truth about what inspired my little break from les médias sociaux, as I sometimes like to call then when I want to make them seem more important than perhaps they are: I started to not really like the way I was behaving some of the time.

Slowly, quietly, while going about my business and tweeting more than 35,000 (!) times, I somehow managed to forget that there were human beings reading my tweets, not “brands.”  In the ever-burgeoning crowd of semi-strangers, furthermore, I lost sight of a few of my friends. People I love and respect and admire and even work with in the real world, not to mention people I’ve met and come to care about in the virtual world. I started to speak somewhat carelessly and broadly, neglecting to consider how my tweets might “land” with people. I wasn’t at my best.

Meanwhile, on Facebook, a similar pattern was beginning to emerge. Even after the widely acknowledged heat of the political season had wound down, I found myself engaging in occasional… well, let’s call them virtual donnybrooks. I commented wildly, sent messages in haste, and once or twice communicated in tones I would never have used had I been speaking face to face with someone.

More importantly, my heart was now and then turning sour in ways that really made me uncomfortable. I just didn’t like the way I was thinking about things, or about people—about fellow human beings. My behavior and my feelings weren’t squaring with my own highest image of myself. And I felt pretty rotten about it.

So… I decided to stop for a little while.

———————

In the first few days of my social media silence, I noticed a parallel silence beginning to form in my mind. It had once been full, I was discovering, nearly all the time, with the flotsam and jetsam of my friends’ thoughts and lives, amassed from both Facebook and Twitter, and suddenly there was just… nothing. It felt lonely. I had nothing to think about. It was unsettling.

I also began to feel like I had nowhere to put my own thoughts. Passing observations about… whatever: things I heard on NPR, articles I was reading, interactions with my son. There were more random bon mots that I wanted to utter than my casual interactions with other human beings during an average day could possibly accommodate. (Though perhaps all those mots weren’t as bon as I thought they might be. With no one to re-tweet or like them, how would I know?)

And then, rather more quickly than I might have predicted, the silence in my mind began to be filled up with what felt like deeper, slower, more substantial thoughts. And the impulse to issue 140-character proclamations of one kind or another dissipated: not entirely, mind you, but enough that I noticed. I felt more present, more connected to the people I was interacting with… especially at home. It felt really, really good.

———————

So I started to sit for a bit and just observe, without judgment, the impulses I still had to tweet or make status updates. I recorded a few things I felt like sharing (but didn’t), without editing or curbing my impulses in any way. Here’s one of the first such utterances I repressed:

This New Yorker take-down of Dr. Oz makes me fall in love with the magazine all over again: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/02/04/130204fa_fact_specter

Now… those who know me well can probably see my hallmarks all over that sentence. It’s about exposing pseudo-science, for one thing; it invokes the New Yorker, with which I’ve had a long and complicated love affair, for another. But what strikes me most about it now is one word I would probably have glossed over before this hiatus: take-down.

Why did I choose that word? Why didn’t I use, say, analysis? I can tell you this much: I actually put very little thought into the selection. What I did put, more than anything, was emotion.

My limbic brain, roiling with feelings about the subject, created that sentiment. Few (if any) higher editorial faculties were involved. What I wrote didn’t gently invite fans of Dr. Oz to re-consider his value as a source of medical wisdom, as “analysis” might have suggested. The word “ take-down” implied that if you didn’t agree with me, you weren’t quite New Yorker-worthy, in a way, in my estimation. There’s a smug superiority baked into the sentence’s grammar that’s just unmistakable. Another dragon hiding in that cave.

———————

By the third day without Twitter, I was starting to feel guilty about not replying to the tweets people were undoubtedly directing my way. I got emails about a few direct messages, too, and those nagged at me particularly harshly. My smartphone popped up with a notification that my wife had updated her Facebook status, too (I forgot I had set it to do that), and I struggled to wait till she got home to ask her about it. Whatever she posts almost always inspires or challenges or delights me.

And I knew there was more to be entertained and enchanted by, too: friends’ big life events, thought-provoking blog-posts, moments of wisdom and clarity and levity, opportunities to connect. You know, the stuff that’s really valuable about social media.

But I didn’t want to go back yet, not for a few more days… mostly because I wasn’t sure I’d figured anything out yet. You can’t make a foray into the dragon cave, after all, and not come out with treasure. Even if it’s only a few rough gems.

———————

A day or so later, I got an email from LinkedIn, the social network with which I’ve had the least engagement. My friend Bob—a well-known comic book writer and editor who teaches and writes fiction as well—had “endorsed” me for… get ready for it… my expertise in social media. I had no idea what to do with that meaningfully-if-accidentally timed message. I quickly deleted it… but I couldn’t really let it go.

A quick look at LinkedIn (which I decided didn’t count as an end to my social media fast, given that I don’t really interact there) revealed that several dozen people have made similar endorsements of me, not only for social media but for the oddly similar social media marketing (what’s the difference between the two?), digital marketing, and blogging. I get why people have done that; I’ve lectured on social media, and I’ve advised a wide variety of fairly high-profile clients (at my day job) on their social media strategies, so my resume makes it seem appropriate. But right now, it rings false.

After my recent rough patches on Facebook and Twitter, in other words, I find myself questioning the scientific validity of LinkedIn endorsements, rather than letting them go to my head. I suppose they’re a lot like Klout scores in that regard; my number’s fairly high there, too—though shrinking, certainly, with every passing day in which I don’t tweet or make status updates—but I find myself wondering now whether one can actually earn a high Klout score without sacrificing… something. (I don’t know what, but something.) I almost wish that whole platform would just go away.

Because here’s what I’m thinking: if I really was a social media “expert” with a high Klout score, I wouldn’t have been so careless on Facebook and Twitter at all.

———————

So maybe that’s the first bit of treasure I’ve discovered here in the cave: a big gold plate of humble pie. I am not quite the expert I thought I was. I’ve been sitting with that one for the last few days and it’s feeling right and necessary and (sadly) true. I have a lot more to learn. More to consider. More to just observe and think about. More care to take when I participate.

And you know what? I honestly believe lots of us do. I’ve seen so many friends—people I love and admire—also behave… well, not ideally on social media. I don’t think (and perhaps I should have made this clear from the beginning of this blog post) that I’m particularly unique in anything I’ve admitted here. We’ve all seen people write awkward things; we’ve all at least thought about tweeting or commenting with less-than-generous sentiments ourselves, and some of us actually do it all the time. And that makes me wonder, rather sincerely, whether social media brings out the worst in us or simply reveals some of the ugly things that are always already there, but invisible. I can’t speak for others, but perhaps in my case, it’s a bit of both.

So… when I do return to social media—which by this time I’ve decided to do in conjunction with the publication of this blog post—I am going to do my darnedest to keep a new sentiment in mind: be your best self. (Not long ago, I published a blog post containing seven steps to success for playwrights on Twitter, and this will be the first of three new tips I want to add to that list.) I want to be my best self in all of my interactions in social media. That’s going to take diligence, attentiveness, and a willingness to admit when I get it wrong and re-think how I say things sometimes. It won’t come easily… but it really does feel pretty important.

———————

While I’m thinking about re-thinking how I say things… I want to share the next revelation I’ve had during the last few days: the “enter” key is much more powerful than I ever realized before.

What I mean to say is this: I give a tremendous amount of thought and consideration to the blog posts I write, both here and elsewhere. I work my way through multiple drafts, editing and re-editing; I get feedback from other readers, consider studiously what they’ve told me, and re-write again; and then I do one or two copy-editing passes through the text before I finally hit that “publish” button. (Sometimes even do another draft AFTER the blog post has gone live, too.) The result may not be perfect, but it’s all very carefully-crafted. And it’s also much truer to that best self I’m trying to become.

So here’s my second revelation: I need to start thinking of my enter key—the one that makes a tweet or a Facebook status update go live—like a “publish” button. The act of publishing feels so much weightier to me, as a writer, than simply making a comment. So much more meaningful and significant and (here’s the important part) considered. In other words, I need not only to think before I tweet, as I suggested in my last blog post… I need to allow for a revision phase, too, even if it’s only a few seconds long.

I need to think of my social media updates, in other words, the same way I think of all of my writing: as damned important, worthy of careful deliberation, and (more often than not) deadly serious.

———————

The final revelation I had during my break from social media came from another suppressed Facebook status update:

At three years old, my dear, sweet son Porter seems to have finally acquired his very first imaginary friend. Nana—his sister, he calls her—lives in “a rainbow house” that’s very far away. You have no idea how much I want to go there with him sometime and see it.

(That was a particularly hard one not to share, I must confess; I’m glad I get to do so now. The other tweets and status updates I collected without posting? Gone: I deleted the file. It’s probably—definitely?—for the best.)

I spent considerable time mulling this new development in my son’s psychology, which I found (as I bet all parents do) endlessly fascinating. How does he know such detail about an imaginary being? How can he speak to her? How do they interact? And it was only after a good long while that I realized (duh) that I do that, too. It’s almost exactly what I do when I write. My characters are extremely real to me. The only difference, I believe, is that I’m perfectly aware that my characters aren’t actually real… and I don’t know, developmentally, whether my son’s figured that out yet.

But maybe, I suddenly realized, I needed to figure something out. Maybe an imaginary friend was exactly what I needed.

I’ve always known this, but it’s hitting me more directly now than ever before: in social media, everybody’s always listening. Anyone and everyone can witness every interaction you ever have. So what if, every time I tweeted or posted something on Facebook, I imagined one friend—a real person I’m really connected with—reading what I was writing. Instead of thinking (while I’m writing a comment) “Here’s what I really want to say to this person,” what if I asked myself “What would I say to this person if I also knew my imagined friend was going to overhear it?” What would that do for me?

I think it would do a lot. So I’m going to try it. And I know exactly who to imagine, too—the person who reads, thinks about, and comments on more of my writing than anyone else: my patient, thoughtful, brilliant wife.

———————

I got an email today from a friend who realized I was taking a break from social media, but who still wanted to reach out to me to make sure I was doing okay. His pleasant, concerned, humane note of friendship made me realize I was ready to go back, if only to sustain connections like that one. But… not right away.

As I write these last words, I’ve queued up this blog post for three more days into the future, just to give myself a little more of what I’ve come to think of as my “quiet time.” (I’ve begun driving home from my office in the afternoons without the radio on for similar reasons; silence has genuinely begun to seem golden.) I’d like to think that I’ve enjoyed this time away enough that I won’t go back to social media with quite the same intensity… but my new-found (and tentatively held) humility about social media means I don’t want to make bold pronouncements right now. Let me just say, perhaps, that I’ll go back and see what I see. I’ll take my three pieces of treasure out of the cave and, you know, do my best.

And perhaps I’ll also take other breaks from social media, too: whenever things begin feel a bit too raw, maybe, or whenever I’m not feeling really connected to people and to my purpose in the world. And perhaps in time I will become the expert that the world (or a small part of it, at least) thinks I am.

We shall see. Hope, and see.

#1: DON’T USE TWITTER.COM

Here’s the first and perhaps most important bit of news I can share with you: Twitter.com is for suckers. The best way to tweet is by using one of two programs — either HootSuite or TweetDeck – that are designed to make Twitter much more robust. After you create your Twitter account, pick one of those two platforms (I use HootSuite myself) and create an account there, too, then do the following:

• On either HootSuite or TweetDeck, you can create multiple columns in which to view tweets. Your first column will simply show you all the tweets written by everyone you follow. That one’s easy: it’s built into the platform, so you won’t have to create it. (For what it’s worth, in time, you’ll pay the least attention to it. There’s really no way, after all, to keep up with what everybody’s saying all the time. But you can look at it now and then to see what people are interested in.)
• Next, create a second column to show you ONLY the tweets that include your Twitter handle — that way you can be sure to reply to people who tweet to you. This is the column you should check most regularly. Don’t let tweets go unanswered for long.
• Your third column should show you all of your Direct Messages; those are private tweets meant for your eyes only. You won’t want to miss those… but they won’t come very frequently. Then again, some of the most important chats on Twitter happen privately.
• Finally, you should create additional columns beyond those three to follow specific hashtags. All of the most vital ongoing conversations about theater happen on hashtags. Speaking of which…

#2: LEARN THE LAY OF THE LAND

There are two hashtags in particular you really need to know about. First, there’s #2amt: you should create a column in HootSuite or TweetDeck for that one immediately. It’s a 24-7 worldwide channel for conversation about theater, and you never know when a rollicking back-and-forth is just about to start… or, if you like, you can start one yourself by posing an interesting question. (Pro tip: listen for a while before diving in. But then… do dive in.) The second hashtag of interest: #newplay. Conversations on #newplay tend to be a bit more curated, often (but not always) inspired by the good folks at HowlRound. I have a column for that hashtag in HootSuite, too, but I only tend to slide it into view when there’s a scheduled chat. Finally, you should look for any region-specific hashtags having to do with theater. In DC, for example, we have #dctheatre on which to chat about local matters. Los Angeles has #lathtr. There may be others as well.

#3: TREAT TWITTER LIKE A PARTY

In some ways, Twitter is sort of like the very best theater gathering you’ve ever been to. The room is always filled with this completely intriguing mix of old friends, new friends, complete strangers with interesting histories, people you know from a distance that you’d really like to meet, oddball hangers-on, those one or two people you’ve got crushes on, and just enough boors and loudmouths to have something to talk about. So how would you handle yourself at a party like that? Anyone with half a brain knows: be on your best behavior; be interesting, but not obnoxious; be your real self; and be respectful about entering conversations with people you don’t know… but don’t hang back, either. (Twitter doesn’t reward wallflowers.) You do those things, you’ll get along just fine.

#4: DON’T SELL, CONNECT

Let me be perfectly clear about the worst mistake I see playwrights making on Twitter: tweeting links to blog posts and articles, over and over again, without ever engaging with people. (I should perhaps have written that last sentence in all caps to get your attention, but I’m showing some restraint.) If that’s all you do on Twitter, you are missing the whole point of the platform. Twitter is NOT a broadcast tool: a place for you to shout to the world. Twitter is a place to connect, discuss, debate, encourage, invite, incite, learn, listen, discover, make friends, and wrestle with big ideas in small sentences. If all you do is log on, shout “look at me” or “look at this,” then log off, you’ll fail to make the most of the medium… and in time, people will start to tune you out.

#5: THINK BEFORE YOU TWEET

Are you old enough to remember what it was like to hang out in certain chat rooms? Roiling expressions of pure human emotion, they were sometimes so full of rage and vitriol that there was no room for civil discourse at all. Twitter, in its worst moments, can sometimes become like that, I’m sorry to say. I’ve fallen into the anger trap myself; anyone who spends time on Twitter at all can say the same, too. In time, it becomes clear how important it is to consider your 140 characters very carefully, especially in the heat of any given hot moment. Having issued that warning, however… please do forgive yourself when you fail, because you (probably) will. Just ask forgiveness, learn from it, and move on.

#6: BE PATIENT

Can you remember the first time you learned to play, say, chess? Even after you learned the rules — which probably took a while all on its own — you still needed quite some time to master the strategies behind the game, to learn how to explore multiple permutations in your head, and make it all feel natural. Twitter is like that. (Chess is harder, but still…) You can’t expect to just create an account, log in, follow a bunch of people, and “get” it. So be patient with yourself. And don’t expect to learn followers overnight, either. Some of us tend to feel entitled, as writers, to an audience. We expect them to show up just because we’ve arrived. That just ain’t true on Twitter, where you earn followers by being engaging and insightful, over and over again, for a long period of time. Be patient with that, too.

#7: WHO TO FOLLOW

Make it easy on yourself: start with your friends. Look up the Twitter handles of people you know in real life. That way, you’ll feel less awkward tweeting to them. (Pretty soon, they’ll introduce you via Twitter to their new friends… who will become your new friends in no time.) After that, find a bunch of artists you admire or arts institutions you value and follow them, too. You might find their tweets interesting and worth replying to, but you also might not… and there’s NO shame in unfollowing someone if you find yourself bored. (It’s YOUR Twitter feed, and you should take responsibility for curating it so that it feeds your creative life. You should periodically groom the list of people you follow and remove the dead weight.) Finally, take a look at @IFollowPWs — it’s the largest-available list of playwrights who tweet. (Disclosure: I created it as a resource for playwrights.) If you follow it yourself, the account will (eventually) follow you back to add you to the list. And if you comb through the list of people followed by that account, you’ll see playwrights far and wide all across the country — famous and inspiring — to consider following yourself.

And that’s it — that’s my advice. You do those seven things, and you’ll be fine!

In a few days’ time, my play THE BUTCHER—which happens to have been inspired by a real (if little-known) terrorist event that took place in the DC suburbs in 2004—is going open in New York. (It’s a three-day workshop production at the Players Theatre as part of The Theatre Project.) I’ve been sitting with this fact sort of heavily since April 15, wanting to tread carefully and make smart decisions… and, more importantly, use the story I’m telling as a way to (hopefully) convene a healthy conversation.

With that desire in mind, I tried to schedule a talk-back for the night I’m going to be seeing the show myself, on April 26… but the  theater was, unfortunately, already booked. Instead, I thought perhaps I’d create this simple blog post, with an offer to converse in any way that might make sense, in the comments below, with anyone who might care to chat. I don’t have any answers, of course—who among us does?—but I do have a desire to wrestle through this scary and confusing world with company, rather than doing it alone.

So please join in. Oh… and if you plan to come this weekend, I hope you’ll also consider this blog post a trigger warning of sorts. These are intense days we’ve all lived through, and I don’t want to send anyone over any edges accidentally. My play doesn’t include any scenes of overt violence or terror, though there is some blood… and more than a few references that might give people pause. So be forewarned.

I’ve been wondering about something lately. How often do you think a theater actually manages to “flip” its programming? I’m not even thinking about a radical shift: from Grand Guignol to theater for young audiences, for example, or from Shakespeare to solo performances. I’m thinking about moving from fairly unambitious programming full of time-tested, broadly-accessible musicals and comedies, imported hits, chestnuts, and money-makers to a renewed focus on engaging, sharp, smart, new work. How often do you think that actually happens? Seems like it might be a difficult trick to pull off, doesn’t it?

To be honest, I think many of us carry around the assumption (which may or may not be a good one) that programming typically flips the other way—from innovative to conservative—as a theater matures and develops a more stable, reliable audience. Or not flips, rather, but slowly migrates. The question is: can change actually happen in the other direction?

We may be about to find out in DC. Not immediately, mind you, but over the next couple of years. Why? Because the artistic director vacancy at Olney Theatre Center has just been filled by Jason Loewith, who left his position as the Executive Director of the National New Play Network to take on the challenge. The appointment of Loewith, a noted national champion for the development of new work, has raised expectations significantly, among the city’s theater practitioners, about some sort of transformation in programming.

“Olney Theatre Center is known for its traditional fare,” said DC-area playwright Allyson Currin. “But Jason’s track record and premiere-oriented aesthetic are undeniable. Olney is clearly expressing its desire to innovate and expand its programming into new play premieres and development by naming him as Artistic Director.” Fellow playwright Bob Bartlett – whose new play WHALES had a reading at NNPN’s inaugural DC-Area Writers Showcase in 2011 – shared a similar sentiment: “Jason’s appointment at Olney should mean great things for living playwrights.”

Loewith shares the community’s sense of optimism… as well as its understanding of the task at hand. “I’m excited and terrified by the challenge,” he said. Luckily, he’s not really starting from square zero: “Olney’s assets include a passionate team of theater makers, multiple facilities, and a diverse and dynamic audience,” Loewith said. “And I’m not talking about one ‘monolithic’ audience, either. I’m talking about a lot of folks who adore family-friendly musicals, a lot of folks who adore form-breaking new plays, and a lot of folks who adore mid-century classics. So the trick for me is to program to each of those audiences rigorously and separately while maintaining a coherent overall artistic vision.”

—————————–

On a modestly-related note, I wanted to share a statistic that’s emerged from this year’s slate of nominees for the Helen Hayes Awards. In an appearance on a local radio program hosted by DC’s NPR affiliate, Linda Levy-Grossman—president and CEO of theatreWashington, the body that administers the awards—noted that 49 of the 200 plays nominated for the 2013 awards were world premieres. For the mathematically disinclined, that’s a robust 25%.

In a city noted largely for its impressive achievements in classical theater, musical theater, and theater for young audiences, to have such a large quantity of new work receive recognition of that nature is a sure sign, it seems, of the health of the city’s new play infrastructure. These are definitely boom times in DC for playwrights… even without the appointment of a national leader in new play development to the artistic directorship of one of our more prominent theaters!

UPDATE: I’ve been thinking about this post today, and I want to make sure that I’ve managed to avoid putting any inaccurate or inappropriate expectations about the future of Olney Theatre out into the world. I do NOT wish to have conveyed any sense of entitlement on the part of myself or of any other playwrights. My intent in celebrating Jason Loewith’s appointment to his new post was really just to say “Hey, look, one of our heroes and friends got a great new gig!” The gig, however, ISN’T—to be painfully clear—to produce nothing but new plays by DC-area playwrights. The gig is to serve Olney’s audiences in whatever way Jason, in his wisdom and leadership, sees fit. I look forward to supporting him in that endeavor in whatever way I can—including just plain visiting his theater to see what marvels he produces—and I know many other playwrights here in town do, too.

In the early years of my adulthood, when I was teaching young students to write, I could often be heard saying that my time in the classroom working with young people was more than enough. Later, after I’d stopped teaching, I became Uncle G to my brother’s three children, and I thought: that’ll do quite nicely, thank you. And for some time, it did.

But then, at 36 years old, I had the great good fortune to be at the hospital when a very old and very dear friend emerged from the delivery room. “It’s a boy,” he announced, with more newness and wonder and terror and transformation than I ever thought three words could express. In his eyes I saw what felt like a universe of feelings and ideas… and I was instantly overcome with the desire to enter that universe myself.

I denied it for several years: I was not, perhaps, quite ready to accept so sudden and sharp a revision to my own plans for my life. But eventually I surrendered to the truth, and three years ago today I was completely overtaken by Porter Karl Suilebhan: my complicated but total joy.

On the day he was born, I became a father… but in some sense, I am always becoming a father anew every day. The challenges I face in caring for him grow continually more complex and demanding. In the first days and weeks of his life, we struggled mightily, like all parents, to parse his cries, learning which meant the need for food and which meant exhaustion… but that task seems incredibly simple now in retrospect, having long since had to do everything from teaching Porter how to dress himself to explaining the nature of death after the loss of our cat Helen.

Becoming a father has taught me things I don’t think I could have learned from any other experience. About myself, about my own childhood, about my parents, about adulthood, about leadership. These are new lessons for me: still a bit ineffable, but real nonetheless.

(I’m not sure whether these are lessons one can learn without becoming a parent. Some have rebuked me for saying that; perhaps I’m wrong. I would counter that I think there are also probably lessons one can’t learn without, say, completing some great feat of physical exertion like climbing Kilimanjaro… or from living through tremendous tragedy… or from years of meditation… or from a thousand different other human achievements. Parents aren’t superior to non-parents, in other words, at least not to me; we just earn a different merit badge.)

For the first couple of years of Porter’s life, his presence affected my work as a writer in ways I am sure I will continue unpacking for a long time. Lately, though, I’ve begun to notice more subtle influences on the rest of my theatrical career, as a devising artist, performer, collaborator, and blogger. And it’s troubling me.

I’ve begun to see the whole theatrical world through the lens of parenthood, whether I want to or not… and I know that’s neither fair nor accurate. I have less tolerance for melodrama than ever before. I feel alienated from my fellow practitioners, whose schedules for rehearsing and devising and meeting are often completely out of sync with the demands of parenthood. I’m lonesome at times; in my worst moments, I feel like nobody else (in the theater) understands me or hears me. And I’m painfully, constantly aware of all my shortcomings; I have a sense about my work as an artist and advocate that I’m barely meeting every challenge, if not sometimes falling short… which is exactly how I feel about raising my son more often than I’d like to admit.

I’m really a mess sometimes!

(I keep it a secret, but it’s true.)

And yet… I own that I chose to be a parent. Nobody forced becoming a father on me. In addition, I am also well aware that (particularly within the theatrical community) I’m privileged to be ABLE to be a parent. The economic and social constraints of art-making are real and hard. Not everyone who wants to be a parent can be. And my heart goes out to those whose dreams are — temporarily, I hope — deferred.

And the truth is that for all of its difficulties, parenthood is still (forgive the hackneyed phrasing) the single greatest thing I’ve ever done or (I expect) will do. The transformations I’m experiencing (and still trying to figure my way through) will in time come to seem smaller and less important: I have faith in that. I’ll get a handle on them, or they’ll get a handle on me, and I’ll become a new person.

And in the meantime, I take great consolation from the small miracles of becoming a father: the moment I finally figure out how to whisper my son into eating green beans; his unasked-for kiss when I drop him off at day care; our daily morning hour of Lego and Play-Doh and making stuff and laughing together. Together, they more than make up for the pains of the rough unfolding of the new me I’ve been experiencing of late. In fact, they’re everything I ever wanted. I just SO glad I finally figured out I wanted them!

Some of the artists who remained were (almost miraculously) granted permission to create their own parallel arts institution. The Jüdischer Kulturbund, as it came to be known, was an artistic smash hit: a huge subscriber base in multiple German cities and several seasons full of critically-acclaimed plays, concerts, lectures, and operas. For the Nazis, on the other hand, the Kulturbund was a completely different kind of success: propaganda. How bad can things be, the Nazis told the world, if the Jews are still free to make art?

But things were bad, as we know, and soon to get worse. Restrictions on the Kulturbund grew and grew. First, only Jews were allowed to attend performances. Next, the Kulturbund wasn’t allowed to perform the work of any German artists—Beethoven, Bach, Wagner, Goethe—and then they were only allowed to perform work by Jewish artists. Finally, as Jews were being rounded up all over the country, all but one of the Kulturbund’s venues was shut down, a few courageous artists managing to slip out of Germany before the doors of history closed… and then that last venue perished, too, as the extermination began in full force.

What was it like to make music and tell stories under conditions like that? How did the members of the Jüdischer Kulturbund even speak, let alone create art? How, for that matter, have artists throughout the world and throughout history—from Pussy Riot and Ai Weiwei to the Belarus Free Theatre and Salman Rushdie—managed to keep creating in the face of so much terror and repression, threat and tyranny? How do any of us, really, find the courage to express something beautiful in what can be a very ugly world?

These are the questions I’m going to be wrestling with as part of my newest project, a difficult-to-describe, interdisciplinary, transmedia, ensemble-generated piece I’ve been working on now, quietly and behind the scenes, for a couple of months. I’m thrilled, finally, to be able to say more about what my collaborators and I are up to. Allow me to introduce them before I describe a bit more of what we’re planning.

Gail Prensky is the head of the Jüdische Kulturbund Project, as well as the originator of the entire endeavor in which I’m participating.

My film collaborators include Mark Harris and Thomas Kaufman. Mark is probably best known for his work as the director of the Oscar-winning documentary film Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport. Tom is not only an accomplished director of photography, he’s also a published mystery author.

My theater collaborators include Shirley Serotsky and Renee Calarco, both of whom are probably at least somewhat familiar to many of my blog’s readers. Shirley is the Associate Artistic Director of Theater J, as well as a freelance director. Renee is a Helen Hayes Award-winning playwright and former Dramatists Guild representative for DC.

Of course, we wouldn’t all be together without Theater J. Gail and artistic director Ari Roth have been discussing the project for some time, and it was Ari and Shirley who introduced Gail to both Renee and me—two of the theater’s Locally Grown playwrights. Theater J is very graciously providing a home for the work we’re about to begin, furthermore, and we hope to keep working with them long into the future. We’re honored to have their support and encouragement.

So… what are all these fine people up to?

In the short term, Shirley and Renee and I are going to spend three days in early June exploring the subject matter I’ve described above with a diverse ensemble of actors and musicians. I’m going to serve as project director, providing high-level oversight of the work being created; ultimately, I’ll be collating whatever gets created into a finished script. Shirley’s going to serve as ensemble director and lead dramaturg, supporting the ensemble’s day-to-day efforts. Renee will act as devising ensemble lead, coaching the team in its devising efforts and ensuring best devising practices.

While we’re working, meanwhile, Mark and Tom are going to be pointing their cameras at us. They’ll be documenting our devising process, capturing whatever scenes and songs we develop, and when the devising work is complete, they’re going to conduct one-on-one on-camera interviews with all of the artists involved in the process. Earlier, Gail filmed a similar series of interviews with surviving Jüdischer Kulturbund artists; she’s also gathered the scant archival photographs that remain of the Kulturbund itself. Mark will then edit all the film they gather in DC, along with Gail’s source material, into a short trailer.

Why so much work for a trailer? Because the ultimate end game here is much larger than a mere weekend of devising. The trailer is intended to help us raise the resources necessary to create TWO even more ambitious pieces of art: a fully-devised, full-length interdisciplinary performance piece combining theater, music, and film AND a full-length feature documentary about the process by which that performance piece was created. Did you follow that? So our ultimate vision is to let the story of the Jüdischer Kulturbund inspire the creation of two interrelated pieces of art: a film about the making of a play, and a play that includes elements of film.

We have a long road ahead of us: not only the creation of the trailer, but also the big work beyond that, from fundraising and logistics to the actual effort of creation. But I hope you’ll agree this is a very vital subject: one that speaks not only to the middle of the 20^th century, but also to our present world as well. I’m honored to be working on the project… and to have such powerhouse artists with whom to keep company. (More of whom we’ll be adding in the next few days as we cast the ensemble!) I hope you’ll stay tuned and support us in any way you can when the time comes.

I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Traveling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

– from “The Whitsun Weddings,” by Philip Larkin

illustration by Julie Dubiner

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Recent conversations on Twitter have brought to light the truth about the seeming void into which we playwrights submit our work. In short, what we hoped was true actually is: literary managers are not, in fact, lining their cats’ litter boxes with our plays; they are merely tremendously overworked and have little time to read and respond to submissions.

We playwrights—who spend inordinate amounts of time discussing the seeming futility of the open submission process—were happy to hear that a lack of response didn’t always indicate a lack of attention. But does it matter if, in the end, the result is the same? Too many unread plays, too much rejection by silence, and next to no productions: results fostered, at least in part, by a broken system.

I’d like to suggest that the system can be fixed in ways that will promote better communication between playwrights and the people to whom we submit our work, improvements that just might increase those needle-in-a-haystack odds of production through submission, even slightly. Because while open submission can work, I believe it can work better. Here’s how:

1) Narrow your submission window. Instead of allowing plays to come in year-round, create a short window of no more than two months and commit to reading and responding to every play received during that window within a year’s time. I know, that could mean that Playwright X might miss the window, and Playwright X might have written the Next Great Play—but if Playwright X’s play isn’t going to get read because there’s mold growing on it, then the argument is moot. And maybe if Playwright X misses the window, she’ll try harder to make it next time.

2) Narrow the number of submissions you accept. If you don’t want to narrow the window, how about shortening the list? Change your submission guidelines to state something like the following: “We begin accepting submissions for any given year on January 1; when we reach 200, submissions are closed for the year.” Then, if it just so happens that you’re all caught up on your play reading before the year is out, you can keep reading what’s been submitted after that first 200. Nobody’s going to know if you let that list slide to 250 or 300. The bottom line: don’t accept more plays than you can read and respond to.

And the responding—in any form—is important. I know that theaters don’t always like to respond because some playwrights push back, but responding does several things: 1) It shows respect for the work we’ve done and our efforts to share it with you 2) It encourages a playwright whose work intrigued you to submit again, so that 3) You can start developing a relationship that might actually lead to something productive. Responding helps to grow fruitful associations that are so important, but if you’ve got more plays lying around then you can possibly attend to, the fruit dies on the vine.

3) Reward your ten-minute playwrights. If you have a ten-minute play festival and several of the plays really connect to you and/or your audience, invite the playwrights to submit full-length plays and give them special-pile privileges. If you decide to produce one, you can remind your audience how much they liked the short play they saw by the same author and voila!—you have name recognition. Many playwrights participate in ten-minute play festivals in order to make connections and realize some success. It’s good juju to reward them for this, particularly if any of the following are true:

• Your festival charges a fee.
• The festival does not pay royalties.
• The festival makes money for your theater.
• Your theater accepts agent-only submissions.

4) Reward your reading participants. We all know there is money available to theaters that do new work—and also that for too many theaters, a reading series is the only new work they do. If this is you, don’t promise production of one of the scripts the following year if that isn’t going to happen. And, as with the short play festivals, if a script really resonates, see what you can do to help it get before the eyes of someone who might actually produce it. Maybe even recommend it to an agent you have a relationship with. Then let us know you’ve done that, so that we can follow up, and the script doesn’t get lost in yet another stack.

5) Tell the truth. If your theater has no intention of producing a brand new play by an unknown—either to the whole world or just to you—close your open submissions. It might come off as elitist, but at least it’s honest. The way things are now, in the practical corners of our hearts, we know that we don’t stand a chance against established names or someone you have a great relationship with, but as long as you have open submissions, we hold out hope. And waste time that could be spent writing.

I read a blog post not too long ago that also suggested the system is broken, and further suggested that “There’s a small cadre of playwrights whose works, like salmon, swim along national byways through New York City and around the regions. They are The Selected, receiving a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval from sundry dramaturgs, most of whom graduated from the Yale School of Drama and other institutions of its ilk. And suddenly, their plays are being developed in the New Play fortresses such as the Sundance Theatre Institute and at South Coast Repertory’s Pacific Playwrights Festival and the Alley Theatre’s New Play Initiative in Houson.” Neither the author of that post nor I are suggesting that these playwrights are not good or worthy, just that they are not the only ones who are, and that there must be a better way to ensure that a select group does not get the lion’s share of attention just because it’s easier to do it that way.

For many of us, it’s not even about the money; we just want to get our work in front of audiences. So away from the issues presented in this blog post, I believe many of the above suggestions can help. We don’t want a slice of the big green cheese—just some realistic opportunity. To be fair, there are theaters that employ some of these practices, but not nearly enough. If every theater that doesn’t adopted one or two of these ideas, maybe change would begin. And if that’s not possible, please help us understand why.

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The ideas expressed above are a contribution to the ongoing intellectual discourse about theater. Though I’m honored to share them, they represent the thinking of their author, not necessarily my own. If you’d like to make a contribution, too, just let me know. Provocative, smart, and even dangerous discourse is always welcome.

I am reminded of the word fuck. (Bear with me here.) I love the word fuck. I grew up in an era in which fuck was a dead-on expression of a certain level of extreme feeling that no other word seemed to capture. Unfortunately for me, that era seems to be gone, or at least disappearing. But that’s perfectly understandable. Language must change, after all. (Fuck itself might not have always been so vulgar, in fact.) We will always have other words to replace the words we lose. If we writers do our jobs, that is.

What we can never — and will never — lose, however, is the need for vulgarity itself. There must always be words that are somehow taboo to utter. Words that shock and shake and unshackle our civilized grammar. We need them, you see, because there will always be atrocities to respond to. The need to express great moral anger.

So… back to the standing ovation. If, in fact, the standing ovation is becoming almost as commonplace as the casually-dropped f-bomb… I wonder then what might replace it. In the theaters of the future, how will an audience genuinely moved in some over-the-top fashion express the full measure of its emotion? Will theatergoers start rushing the stage, for example, like fans storming the court at the end of a particularly thrilling college basketball victory? Will there be high-pitched, keening wails of some sort? Undergarments (or flowers, or octopi) hurled at the actors? (That one seems silly, I realize.) How will we all give voice to that genuinely rare (I believe) experience of having been transformed by a performance?

I honestly don’t know.

Food service. I worked my way through high school as a busboy in an Italian/Greek restaurant. (After four miserable days as an ice cream vendor that put me off soft-serve ice cream forever.) The job was rough, but it kept me in movie money… and it taught me a great deal about how hard some people have to work for a living.

Carnival work. After high school, I ran away and joined the carnival. No, I’m not joking. I took a job as a carny at Jolly Roger Amusement Park for the summer, then joined Deggeller Attractions, the largest touring carnival company in the country… mostly because I was terrified by the thought of going to college. But at the last second I reversed course and headed off to Northwestern.

Typesetting. My first gig in college was a radical shift: I basically lied my way into a gig as the typesetter for the renowned Daily Northwestern. The interviewer asked: Have you ever used a Linotronic 300? I lied, point blank, and he hired me, then read the entire operating manual overnight and stumbled my way through things for a week or so till I figured it out for real. That work-study job led to a full-time deal the following summer as the typesetter for the Jewish Times, plus a weekend gig (I needed tuition money) for Penny Stock News. It was good work in a now-dead industry. I was part graphic designer, part computer programmer. I learned a lot.

Journalism. The next job I lied my way into: reporter for the now-defunct Windy City Sports. I was a poetry major at Northwestern, and by then I was working as one of several assistant sports editors of the Daily, but I was still completely unqualified to write about what I got paid (very well) to write about: running, swimming, health clubs, jet skis, you name it. Later in my life, I parlayed that experience into a year as a book critic for the Baltimore City Paper and a subsequent year as restaurant reviewer for another now-defunct publication, Voice of the Hill.

Health Food. Toward the end of my tenure at Northwestern, I took a second job — I wanted to graduate with as little debt as possible — as a clerk at a place called Good Earth Natural Foods in Evanston. I worked in the dry goods section most of the time, though occasionally in produce, and I really liked it; my co-workers were wonderful people. I wasn’t there long enough to get the really choice assignment of working behind the register, but I was able to parlay the gig — when I moved to London to write for six months after I graduated — into a job at the legendary Selfridges. (There’s a Masterpiece series with Jeremy Piven about the founder of the hundred year-old store that I’m really looking forward to.) It paid well enough, but the real lasting benefit was having been a temporary but genuine part of the UK’s Are You Being Served? experience.

Publishing. Back in the United States — in Boulder, specifically, where I’d gone to follow a girlfriend — I took my first job in publishing at Westview Press, which was at the time (and may still be) the largest publisher of academic books that isn’t affiliated with a college or university. I arranged our exhibitions at major academic conferences and managed our advertising program. I left publishing for a year to get a master’s degree in poetry, but I returned for a gig as subsidiary rights editor for Brookes Publishing in Baltimore; the highlight of that gig was an unforgettable trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair. Seriously, if you’re a bibliophile, that’s heaven.

Teaching. I started my seventh career at 24 years old. I became a teacher of creative writing for middle school students at the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins, a position I held off and on (while pursuing other jobs) for five years. Those young students were miraculous. I loved that work in the complicated way in which anyone really loves anything of genuine importance.

Curriculum Design. At that point, I’d been teaching writing for so long that I started to stumble into side gigs designing a variety of writing curricula… and for a brief period, those gigs became my sole financial support. I wrote lesson plans on subjects with which I had some expertise (poetry, fiction, composition) and on those with which I was utterly unfamiliar (environmental science, history, anthropology) — once again, I cheated my way into being offered various opportunities for which I then had to scramble to prepare myself. Though I ended up writing curricula for great clients — Kaplan and Sylvan chief among them — I found it to be tedious work that I was quite happy to stop doing as soon as I could afford to.

Academia. I found more solid financial footing when I also began working in academia. Having taught at Johns Hopkins while getting my master’s degree, I became an adjunct faculty member first at the Community College of Baltimore County and then, later, at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where I was happily ensconced for a couple of years. I almost turned the corner and became a full-time academic, but something in me resisted the thought of being cloistered in an ivory tower. It felt like something I shouldn’t do until I was much older, if at all.

Web Production. While I was hanging out at MICA, I made what turned out to be a really pivotal career decision: I joined the communications department as a web producer. At the time, the internet was a very new thing, and my only qualifications — having designed a remote-learning writing curriculum for Johns Hopkins and having once programmed a Linotronic 300 — were enough. I did limited graphic design work and programmed a small amount of HTML, and I honestly believed at the time that it was really no big deal. In point of fact, though, I left MICA to take a gig as a full-time producer at a company managing website development for Discovery Channel, Toshiba, US News & World Report, and a few other major clients. I had no idea when I made that decision that I was setting a new course for the next 15 years or so… but I was.

Software Development. The next two years of my life were a complete blur. In an attempt to get filthy rich quickly, then retire and do nothing but write — though at that point, I’d pretty much stopped writing poetry and hadn’t yet found a replacement — I joined a dot com called HiFusion: the first free, filtered internet service provider. I put in hundred-hour weeks for a year for a company that went from 25 employees when I joined to 250 employees six months later back to 75 employees six months after that. At the end of the first year, the company was bought, and almost everybody was fired… except me (and a handful of others). We became an educational software company called Mindsurf Networks, and we repeated the exact same cycle of hiring and firing and furious work for another twelve months, at which point the 23 of us who were still working were sent home with several months of severance and a slew of crushed dreams. The software I’d helped design was bought for a pittance by McGraw-Hill and, I think, quietly discontinued after a few years.

So… here’s the catch. I did all of that — ALL of it — before I ever wrote a single line of a single play.

When the last dot com went from boom to bust, I walked out with no debt, enough savings to keep living without work for another six or eight months, and a case of complete and total psychic exhaustion. I was 33 years old, I’d long since abandoned poetry (which had been my raison d’etre since I was 20 or so), I’d tried my hand at what felt like every other genre of writing, and I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do next. I’d lost something, and whatever it was, I had no clue where to find it.

The happy end to that story is that a month later, I enrolled in the only playwriting course I ever took (at the Bethesda Writer’s Center, bless their hearts)… and a year after that my first play, THE TREE HOUSE, was winning awards and getting readings… and the next decade of being a playwright has unfolded in a similar fashion… and I still feel like I’ve finally come home as a writer. In addition to being a playwright, as you probably realize (or you wouldn’t be here), I write blog posts and give lectures on a variety of theatrical subjects and advocate for playwrights in DC and nationwide. Theater has become my dominant career.

Meanwhile, I’ve also spent the same eleven-year span of time happily earning my keep in yet another career: Digital Communications. I spend half of every day as an account director and communications strategist for Threespot; I get to help organizations I really believe in engage with people on the web, on social media, through videos, and in every other digital channel. I’ve worked with the Peace Corps, the National Wildlife Federation, NPR, the Drug Policy Alliance, Zipcar, Medicare, the Department of State, and about fifty similar clients. Every day is a new intellectual challenge. Every year I continue to learn more about technology and brand strategy and audience engagement; this year, for example, I became a Certified Scrum Master. It’s been good for me.

What’s really REALLY been good for me these last eleven years is having a combination of financial security, intellectual engagement, and creative opportunity. My days can sometimes be crazy. I’ll write a blog post and revise a scene and take a meeting with a client during the morning; send out scripts and write a creative brief and do some audience analysis in the afternoon; then attend rehearsals and catch up on work emails during the evening. (All while being both a husband and a father, I should add.) But everything gets done, and everything finds its proper level, and I can afford a nice home with a library and a study and a playroom for my son, and I still get to sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world, so to speak. It’s a good life.

I want this same life for every playwright. A combination of stability and creative adventure. But I really don’t know how to tell young playwrights to get what I got. Do I tell them to spent 19 years working in 11 different careers before taking up playwriting? It seems absurd, and yet… all that experience is what qualified me for a part-time position that pays me a more-than-decent salary and gives me time to write. Without those first 11 careers, I wouldn’t have the final two. Moreover, so much time spent living in radically different cultures — everything from the carnival to the classroom — has proven to be great fodder for my work.

All of which is to say that, though I’m wary of generalizing too broadly from my own esoteric experience, I do think I can assert with some authority: if you want to be a playwright, get a second career, too.

With the same passion you pursue writing for the stage, pursue something else. Something more lucrative, something you like, something the world clearly wants more of. (Because that’s sometimes hard to see about theater.) Make it your second-favorite profession, if you must, but make it something you expect to do forever, or at least until (like me) the next career comes along. Get a degree in nursing; you can work three shifts a week and support yourself really well. Learn how to do graphic design and take on flexible freelance jobs that flow around your writing time. Spend your winters giving snowboarding lessons at ski resorts and your summers writing. Find whatever combination works for you.

The truth is, you are almost 100% certain never to make your living writing for the stage. It just doesn’t happen very often. But you are going to live your entire life as a wage-earning contributing member of society. It is — and you must hear me on this one, because I lived hand to mouth for several years early on — much better to do that with some financial certainty and day-to-day enjoyment. If you don’t pay any attention to your need to be a worker in the world, you will end up marginalized and impoverished and unhappy. And believe me, your writing is going to suffer.

Now… I’m not saying you should enter some demanding, more-than-full-time career like, say, the law. Let my two years in that dot com be enough sacrifice for all of us. And yet… if you love the law, for example, as much as you love writing, DO IT… but only long enough to convince an employer to let you do it half-time so that you’ve still got time to write. The five years or so you’d put in getting to that place might be worth the next thirty years of security and time to make art. You never know.

So that’s that. That’s my advice. Be like me, but don’t take quite as long as I took to figure it out. Get a second career early. Get it instead of an MFA, because (unless you’re getting that MFA from one of the top five playwriting programs) it will definitely be a more sound investment in your future as a playwright. It will keep you connected to the rest of the world. It will inform your work in ways you cannot now imagine. And most importantly, it will give you a fighting chance to live a balanced, happy, productive, creative life.

Trust me: that’s something you want.