When Bad Taste Has Rhythm
A reference can expire. The rhythm underneath it—and the nerve that put it there—may survive.
THE NOTEBOOK
Every play I’ve finished has refused to stay finished.
Where rehearsal keeps going.
The Notebook is where I follow the discoveries that arrive after the first draft—sometimes in the room, sometimes in conversation, and sometimes years after a production has closed.
A room. A line of dialogue. A whiteboard. A Post-it note. A box someone forgot to throw away. Small things have a habit of opening larger questions about playwriting, performance, memory, institutions, comedy, and the often invisible structures that shape how people think, speak, and behave.
No Notebook entry tries to explain a play completely. Theatre has always been a collaboration, and that collaboration doesn’t end on opening night. It continues in rehearsal, in conversation, and in the moments when a play becomes larger than the script that started it.
The best plans are temporary hypotheses.
FEATURED
Counting Jokes
Bert counted every three lines. I counted across three acts. For thirty years, both clocks ran at once.
Two Kinds of Trust
One kind of creative trust was discovered. The other was constructed.
Notebook reflections by category
Audience, Absence & Meaning
Rooms, Objects & Memory
Discovering Plays
Comedy & Form
Building Plays
Institutions & Invisible Systems
- What Exactly Are We Trying to Save?
- The Second Rulebook
- The Language of Concern Is Not Always the Language of Care
- He Is Trying to Answer Honestly without Becoming a Problem
- Taste as Power
- Surveillance Disguised as Care
- When Numbers Stop Being Evidence
- The Most Dangerous Rhetorician
- Does It Still Feel Like Clarity?
- What We Normalize
Some conversations begin with a play.
Others begin here.