Counting Jokes
Bert counted every three lines. I counted across three acts. For thirty years, both clocks ran at once.
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
Two Kinds of Trust
One kind of creative trust was discovered. The other was constructed.
Sometimes the MacGuffin Isn’t
The object is hidden once. The authority standing beside it is hidden twice.
Notebook entries by category
Building Plays
Discovering Plays
Trusting the Audience
Rooms, Objects & Memory
Institutions &
Invisible Systems
- What Exactly Are We Trying to Save?
- Invisible Rules and the Social Life of Institutions
- The Second Rulebook
- The Language of Concern Is Not Always the Language of Care
- He Is Trying to Answer Honestly Without Becoming a Problem
- Surveillance Disguised as Care
- Taste as Power
- The Most Dangerous Rhetorician
- What If Legacy Is Not What We Intend, but What We Normalize?
Comedy & Form
Some conversations begin with a play.
Others begin here.