I did a panicked double-check this past Monday, worried that I had somehow miscalculated. Perhaps a miscount would send me on an emergency read of The Normal Heart or Moon For The Misbegotten. But here they are, 52 plays read and commented on in one year.


Hamlet, The Children's Hour, Machinal, A Doll House, A Dream Play, Living In The Present Tense, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), The Laramie Project, Riders To The Sea, Lovecraft's Follies, A Night At An Inn, Frankenstein In Love, The Weird, Man And Superman, The Three Sisters, Doctor Faustus, Oedipus Rex, Our Town, Three Tall Women, Boston Marriage, The Little Dog Laughed, An Ideal Husband, Angels In America: Perestroika, Angels In America: Millenium Approaches, Civil Sex, The Crucible, The Piano Lesson, We Happy Few, Eurydice, A Lie Of The Mind, Take Me Out, The Brothers Size, The Last Days Of Judas Iscariot, The Changeling, Three Days Of Rain, Aria Da Capo, Actor's Nightmare, Stage Directions, Exception And The Rule, Women In Arms, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Dancing At Lughnasa, DEAD CITY, Shining City, Riding The Bull, The Invention Of Love, Betrayal, Love Song, Topdog/underdog, Black Watch, The Guys, Waiting For Lefty

... and?

What'd I learn? How'd I change? What life lessons did it teach me?

It wasn't exactly a transformative experience. Harold Ramis won't be playing me in the blog-to-book-to-movie. Truth be told it became a slog for a few reasons. Other than a few notorious culprits, it wasn't the reading itself ... it was the blogging.

• The writing became a chore because it fell in such a middle ground. I wanted something more compelling than a "thumbs up/thumbs down" but the pace and format didn't allow for a truly deep analysis. I tried to remain honest with my reactions, but often I had little reaction other than "another one bites the bust".


• The scattershot reading list didn't help. I think more focus would have helped. Had I stuck purely to new plays, or to classics I've neglected, or even just reading the Shakespearean canon in a year I would have had a more cohesive experience (and blog).


• As a corollary to that last point, I probably should have stuck to "new to me" plays at minimum. What can I say about The Cherry Orchard or Hamlet in 300 words?


• I really wanted to have the reading lists out in advance so people could read along, but that proved to hamstring me. I should have tossed any vague themes, and merely read from week to week as inspiration took me. As it stands, I have a huge play reading list in front of me, consisting of the plays I wanted to read but never got around to.

Obviously I re-read some amazing plays I'd discovered before. But the year's discoveries? The plays I'd rush out and shove in anyone's hand who'd listen? Machinal, The Children's Hour, Love Song, The Last Days Of Judas Iscariot, and Dead City.

This sounds like quite a bit of whinging, doesn't it? The fact is, I made a tangible goal and I stuck to it. Every week of 2009, I spent some time making myself a better theatre-maker, a better actor and director and teacher. Complacency can be so tempting. It's so tempting, especially as an actor, to sink back into that "primordial ooze" between shows and not continually work. This was an effort to awaken some of the drive to better myself that I used to have.

I think it worked, and the discipline helped me in many areas, as 2009 became a pretty good year: a farewell to smoking, 35 lbs. lost, landed a directing gig, was accepted into the Director's Lab, and played Macbeth.

And I read 52 plays.

Of course, I didn't limit myself to just the 52 plays here, I had some others I read for various reasons.

Come On Over by Conor McPherson
Included in the Shining City paperback, this isn't a bad little "gotcha" piece about miracles and faith and Bad Priests. I read it because I had the book in hand and a bit of extra time to kill.

The Caretaker by Harold Pinter
Read for an audition at the Salt Lake Acting Company. Wasn't cast ... which does not affect my opinion of the play: it's good Pinter, but not great Pinter.

The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter
This is great Pinter, and was the fifth of those plays I read during April for the Plan-B/Meat & Potato Directors' Lab.

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams
Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
God Of Carnage by Yasmina Reza
Various readings with friends in living rooms over a glass of wine. It' was a spring/summer of that in SLC.

Too Much Memory by Keith Reddin and Meg Gibson
Charm by Kathleen Cahill
Again with the reading for auditions at the Salt Lake Acting Company. Again with the not-being-cast. Both plays I'll look forward to seeing.

Macbeth by William Shakespeare
In a very fast process, I had about 24 hours to prepare myself to read for an audition. Though I had read it many times, and been involved in two productions it's always worth a refresh. It's a lightning read - I think it was about 90 minutes total, and 90 minutes well spent as I ended up playing it for Salt Lake Shakespeare.

Amerigo by Eric Samuelson
Again with the reading for auditions. This time, with success.

Bumps by Eric Samuelson
Believing by Matthew Ivan Bennett
Written for the fantastic kids at the Theatre Arts Conservatory.

There may be some others I've forgotten, but I'm well over 60 on the year. Not bad.

(Yes, many were for auditions. You all do read the complete play before auditioning, right?..... Right?)

Here we are at the end of the road. Four more to go, and and I'll call it a year.

I won't be doing this again in 2010, so this last month is a goodbye to 2009 and a welcome to whatever comes next.

I initially considered using this month to look back on other plays by my favorite writers of the year ... but instead I want to look forward. I've made no secret that I fully intend to get back behind the producing/directing chair and I hope to make that happen in the next year. I've also made no secret that I am deeply inspired by the task of breathing fresh, clear life into classic work. I'm inspired by things like David Cromer's Our Town, the work of The Hypocrites, the Goodman's O'Neill Festival, and other reinventions of plays we might otherwise roll our eyes at. It's not something you can force: that's how you end up with crappy concept theatre like "Moon For The Misbegotten ... on the moon!" One of the keys is reading and reading and reading until that spark fires and you can suddenly see through the layers of accumulated cultural detritus.

December 7: A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen I won't be reading the version I've linked to, but an unpublished new translation by acclaimed local playwright Eric Samuelson. Can I read this without thinking of the recent Mabou Mines version?


December 14: Machinal by Sophie TreadwellIt's attracted both Moisés Kaufman and Sean Graney. Good enough for me.


December 21: The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman This is the kind of play that fascinates me, a play with an excellent skeleton that's become neglected because we think we know what it is. (I'm also reading it because I happen to know some fantastic young actresses. I believe part of successful producing is, in part, figuring out your resources and using them effectively.)


December 28: Hamlet by William Shakespeare .... because it's Hamlet.

Fall leaves, football, pumpkin pie ... and an end in sight for this project. It's a time to be thankful.

November 2: Riders to the Sea by J. M. Synge Though we're only a few meetings in, I am thankful for The Director's Laboratory, a partnership between Plan-B and the good folks at Meat & Potato. It has energized me like nothing else.(Riders is November's assignment for the class, so I'm also thankful I can double-up.)

November 9: The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project More than anything else theatrical, I am thankful for Plan-B Theatre Company. How would I have ever guessed that a move to Salt Lake would find me a truly exciting and inspiring theatre company, and a theatrical home? This is the play that put them on the map.

November 16: The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (Abridged) by Jess Winfield, Adam Long, Daniel Singer Because I am thankful for Shakespeare. If the theatre gods came down and said I had to choose: a life of just Shakespeare or a life of everyone but Shakespeare ... I'd choose those 38 or 39 plays. I'll pay my respects with this little ditty.

November 23: Living In The Present Tense by ian pierce Because I am thankful for my Chicago years, deeply thankful. I worked with an incredibly talented multi-hyphenate in those days, and one of those projects is fossilized in this book ... but I want to read where he went afterward.

November 30: A Dream Play by August Strindberg I am thankful for those nights when my delightful wife has baked something wonderful, and friends come over and talk about theatre and inspire me. This reading is a result of one such evening and one such talk and one such inspiration.

Try not to be afraid. I know it's a shocking image, and could send you scurrying for the safety of your bed. Try to whistle past the graveyard ...

In Theatre Arts Conservatory's Student Slam 2008, Eric Samuelsen turned in a play that took me completely by surprise. What at first seemed a surrealist ensemble piece slowly transformed into a horror/suspense play, and it struck me that we've completely lost that in the modern theatre. Scary plays used to be a staple of sorts, and we've now happily walked away from the table and ceded the genre to television and film.

In honor of October, I'm spending the month looking at horror plays. It will be Spoooooooky, to be sure.

But there'll be candy at the end.

October 5: The Weird: A Collection of Short Horror and Pulp Plays by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa

October 12: Frankenstein In Love by Clive Barker

October 19: A Night At An Inn by Lord Dunsany

October 26: Lovecraft's Follies by James Schevill

The following is the result of a writing assignment for the Plan-B/Meat & Potato Directors' Lab, based on the style of the This I Believe radio series. Though a bit tangential to this blog's purpose, I share it because I quite liked the results.

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I believe that theatre matters.

I believe that theatre still matters even millennia after we gathered around the fire and reenacted that day’s hunt. I believe that even in an age of texts and tweets, gathering people in a room and telling a story is important and worthwhile.

I feel like I’m explaining my “belief” in gravity, or in a round Earth, or in the wetness of water. Yet in the early days of the 21st century, a belief that theatre is important and relevant and that it really matters puts me in the camp with the birthers or the flat-earthers, stylish in my tinfoil hat.

Theatre matters because it is still unique, because technological advances cannot breach the simple truth that we are all here together in this place and in this time. Each performance, actors and audience all gather in a temporary community that will never happen again. In a world that is slowly advancing beyond the physical limitations of time and place, theatre is one thing that cannot be timeshifted, cannot be virtualized, cannot be indexed by Google. Even as the social networks of the Internet gradually take us out of our local communities and make us members of larger groups unbound by geography, theatre still only can happen in the here and now.

I moved to Salt Lake City a few years ago, from a past spent in cities like Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. I moved to the far exurbs, and comfortably settled in to my virtual network. I worked from home with folks from the East Coast, and socialized online with friends from across the United States and beyond. Though I lived in Utah, I did not live in Utah. Some of that was that I simply felt like a fish out of water, an alienated intellectual agnostic in the heart of a theocracy. I didn’t have much in common with my community, and chose to find my own that was unbound by locale.

Then, one night, I went to a play: Hedwig And The Angry Inch at Plan-B Theatre. Suddenly I felt amongst my people. The crowd cheered and a drag queen swore, and loud, filthy rock filled the air … and I felt like I had come home. I was not importing my community from Hollywood or Chicago or London, I was not selectively living in a virtual community … I was here in this moment with these people in this place, and I found a people I could be a part of. I don’t feel that online communities are any less “real” than local ones, but they certainly are different. Though I couldn’t know much about the crowd around me, I felt a spirit that surrounded me and could sustain me.

My later work with Plan-B has highlighted my sense of this true “Community Theatre”. We’ve sadly made that term synonymous with “amateur theatre”, as if by virtue of our paychecks we are no longer a part of our communities. As if our union status or tax returns prove that we are somehow above our community and no longer come from it and speak back to it. But there should be no shame in the term “Community Theatre”, no shame in a theatre that gathers us together for a couple of hours and lets us tell the stories we need to tell and hear the stories we need to hear. It’s what all really important theatre is.

Especially here in Salt Lake, that community theater fills a need. There are many of us that don’t quite fit in the dominant culture, who feel ill-at-ease in a conservative state where a church wields enormous power. Mannie Mannim, of South Africa’s historic Market Theatre has a quote that resonates for me: “The critics of the Market said that we were simply preaching to the converted. But that wasn’t really right. What we were doing was giving nourishment to like-minded people.”

I felt this most profoundly playing a role as the kind of right-wing religious politician that defines Utah’s political landscape. I could feel the palpable waves of smug superiority rolling off the audience, accompanied by the occasional audible snort. I was immensely frustrated that I was unable to shake them out of their assumptions and get them to actually listen. I wanted them to confront their own prejudices. I wanted to shake them out of their red/blue worldview and get them to look for the shades of purple.

Then I stopped. … and listened … and felt. A Sunday matinee made me see that this was a secular service where people were taking in the spiritual sustenance they needed to get through their week in a larger society that wanted to exclude them. While everyone else was at their church, we were at ours. I gradually accepted that this was a chance for us to escape into a community where we felt among peers and could be among our people. As a performer, I was part of that community, not separate from it. It was not “us vs. them”, it was just “us”. Some of us were telling the story and some were listening, but that was beside the point: we had gathered together because this story and its communal telling … it mattered.

It’s ok to be nourished sometimes, to get a fill-up of community and belonging, to be reminded we’re not alone. This nourishment doesn’t only come from overtly issue-oriented theatre: we can be nurtured or challenged or inspired by beauty as much as politics. What’s important about theatre, and what makes it still matter at all is that electric sense that it’s happening to us together in this moment.

We make theatre, every time it happens. We can make theatre happen without lights, without set, without costume, without even a script. But without us, without that physical community gathered together, it’s not theatre … it’s rehearsal. That community? That nourishment? That theatre? It will always matter.

Try to remember the kind of September ....

Fall's starting, classes are beginning, and I am getting focused for a busy year. But "The Plays Must Roll".

So I'll take a tip from El Gallo, and take a trip down memory lane, or at least read some classics. I've made no secret of my preoccupation with David Cromer's current Our Town production which began in Chicago at The Hypocrites. I'm fascinated by that company and its artistic director Sean Graney ... and I'm looking at "old chesnuts" in a whole new way. This month may be a bit "bookish", but I'll get back to new works soon enough.

September 6: Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

September 13: Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

September 20: The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov

September 27: Man And Superman by George Bernard Shaw

No weeks shall skipped, but An Ideal Husband will not be posted until tomorrow at the earliest.

This will be another hodgepodge month of plays. Some I need to read for various reasons, some I want to read for various reasons. While I recover from Macbeth, I will be preparing for new projects including directing possibilities, teaching opportunities, and chances to learn. So, it's catchup month if you will, as we head into Autumn.

So while the month is August, the plays are not.

This is a selection of scripts that is Not Really So August After All.


August 3: An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde

August 10: The Little Dog Laughed by Douglas Carter Beane

August 17: Boston Marriage by David Mamet

August 24: Three Tall Women by Edward Albee

August 31: Our Town by Thornton Wilder

It's the Fourth of July, and I try to take a break each year from barbecues and baseball for history. It started when I lived in Pennsylvania: history is so palpable there that I wanted to engage with it. Independence Hall of the Fourth is a truly inspiring thing, ragardless of your political affiliation.

So: "Born On The Fourth Of July".

July 6: The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Unless I am counting wrong, this celebrates the midpoint of the journey: twenty-six down, twenty-six to go. So we'll celebrate with witch hunts and paranoia. I know it's a hoary old High School chestnut .... so's Our Town. "Hoary Old High School Chestnuts" are getting a second look from me.

July 13: Civil Sex by Brian Freeman

About activist Bayard Rustin. I first heard about the script while working with San Francisco's Thick Description, and was pleasantly surprised when it turned up in an anthology I had purchased for a completely different reason.

July 20: Angels in America: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner
July 27: Angels in America: Perestroika by Tony Kushner

It's been a long time since I read these, and its growing status as one of the masterworks of the 20th century makes me want to read and re-evaluate. (Is it cheating to call this two weeks worth of plays? I think not.(And I need to establish precedent for The Coast Of Utopia.))


(July's gonna be the real test, as I'm kinda busy. Please pre-excuse any lateness.)

Like many New Year's resolutions, it's tough to sustain through the dog days here when the beginning is far behind and the end is not in sight. The halfway point should be next month, and then it gets easier with each passing week. Frankly, the reading is never an issue ... I could read a few plays a week, I think. It's finding time to write and write honestly about them that is proving difficult. Even months in, I am still trying to find a voice for this project and it's not coming easily. I can only point to one or two posts here that I am proud of, and that's not a great batting average ...

I enjoyed last month's party so much, I see no reason to end it early. So the party continues into the early days of summer with another collection of plays that have no theme beyond "I want to read them".

June 1: Take Me Out by Richard Greenberg
... and speaking of batting averages, here's a play that's intrigued me for a while. As a sports fan and theater lover, I am always interested in plays that try to blend the two.

June 8: A Lie of the Mind by Sam Shepard
Just to see if Hillman is right.

June 15: Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl
The Grand Theatre here in Salt Lake has announced this as part of their next season. It's ambitious programming for them, and I'm very excited.

June 22: We Happy Few by Imogen Stubbs
Too few roles for women around here, and that's where the talent lies. So a play about a seven-woman theater troupe touring England during World War II caught my eye.

June 29: The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
It is shameful I have never read August Wilson. Shameful. In fact, it's one of the reasons I started this project: my realization that I just completely skipped a modern master.

I'd like to spend a month reading plays I will enjoy. Frankly, reading and writing bon-mots about Christopher Durang isn't the life of champagne wishes and caviar dreams that it first appears. It's a lot harder and more interesting to write about something that thrills you.

So, in honor of my natal month I am going to have a party. It's a party where plays I'm interested in but haven't met yet come by, have a piece of cake, and let me read them.

(That metaphor fell apart right quick, didn't it?)


May 4: Three Days of Rain by Richard Greenberg
A friend is directing this. A friend with whom I would dearly love to work, so let's see what is in there.

May 11: The Changeling by Middleton and Rowley
My oldest girl asked what a changeling was a while ago, just around when my wife and I went to our youngest's first grade class to talk about Ireland ... where girl asked about changelings. The good folk at Impact did an adaptation of the play just months before a Chicago friend was involved in a production. Universe ... I get the message.

May 18: The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis
What you don't know about me? One real interest of mine is Early Christian History: the Historical Jesus, the writing of the Gospels, the early Church, etc. It's endlessly fascinating stuff, and no figure more fascinates me than Judas ... both historically and theologically. So this promises to be a treat.

May 25: The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney
Because I want to read Tarell Alvin McCraney. 'Nuff said. (And because I bought this last year, and found a copy for nowhere near the obscene price Amazon is asking now.)

Theme? A theme? How about "Mark has a lot of plays he needs to be reading for various reasons, so he's going to read some of them here. Because in aiming at 52 plays this year, he did not actually mean to read 85 plays. Because he sometimes likes to read things that are not plays, and hasn't been able to do much of that so far this year." ... or call it "Spring Cleaning".

Don't bother trying to find a connection between them, other than they are one-acts and they are for a project I'm working on.

April 6: Exception and the Rule by Bertolt Brecht

April 13: Stage Directions by Israel Horowitz

April 20: The Actor’s Nightmare by Christopher Durang

April 27: Aria da Capo by Edna St. Vincent Millay

This may be the last "theme month" for awhile, as I've accumulated a stack of stuff I simply want to get to without corralling them into a group. (By the by ... if anyone has suggestions for how to "read" a musical, I'd love to hear 'em. Read the book, then listen to the soundtrack as I get to each song? I might like to do a month of musicals somewhere along the line here.)

But I could not let March go by without wallowing in Irish playwrights. I spent a semester at Columbia College with the wonderful Cecilie O'Reilly focusing exclusively on acting in Irish plays, and have never lost the excitement for that distinctive Irish voice that she taught her students. As usual, there's some new, some old, some famous, some obscure: and one's not even Irish.

"Irish Eyes". Sláinte!

March 2: Shining City by Conor McPherson
March 9: Dead City by Sheila Callaghan
March 16: Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel
March 23: The Lieutenant of Inishmore by Martin McDonagh
March 30: Women in Arms by Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy