_Let me make something very clear: Rattlestick Playwrights Theater is a perfectly comfortable and well-heated space in which to see remarkable new plays like Daniel Talbott's Yosemite. I have no doubt that the temperature inside the theater was well above that out-of-doors. Still, one look at Raul Abrego's wintry set, and there was no way I could take off my coat. Combined with Janie Bullard's ambient sound, it felt positively frigid in there.

And then four extraordinary actors - Kathryn Erbe, Noah Galvin, Seth Numrich, and Libby Woodbridge - entered with ruddy cheeks and running noses. Even bundled in winter gear ( A wonderfully detailed design from costumer Tristin Raines), none broke a sweat under the stage lights except for the amazing Seth Numrich, whose very physical role demanded it. Either director Pablo Pascal kept them all outside in the January air until the calling of 'places,' or they are really really good.

Yosemite is the story of three siblings played by Numrich, Galvin, and Woodbridge, who are sent into the Sierra Nevada foothills to dig a hole deep enough to bury a family secret. Jake, Jer, and Ruby are entrenched in something more than snow, and thicker than the woods around them. Of course the play is not about being cold. Nor is it about National Parks, though I do think it significant, and poetic, that this portrait of poor America is set on a Federally maintained wildlife preserve. Yosemite is really about poverty and the desperate acts it may inspire.

While so many writers struggle to respond to our era's socioeconomic issues in a profound and absolute way, Daniel Talbott simply tells us a compelling story about one very lost family. Other playwrights might attempt something more sweeping, would aim to make some grand statement by showing us a formal portrait of people who've fallen through some proverbial crack. But Yosemite ventures deeper, into an icy crevice. The folks here don't contribute to exit polls. They don't feed statistics. They don't make the headlines. But they do give us a cold hard look at today's America.

And it’s not pretty. Despite the gorgeous surroundings – and even Numrich’s fed-up character notes the beauty of the woods (It’s the ironic timing of his observation that makes it meaningful) – there’s no romancing the brutality of nature, within or without. Things get ugly, and not in an endearing ‘aren’t the country-folk adorable’ kind of way.

I hate that. I hate hearing an overeducated Manhattan audience chuckle knowingly at the charming eccentricities of non-New Yorkers acting wacky, folksy, or just plain dumb. Maybe it’s because of where I’m from, but I don’t like it when a play depicts the darker or less sophisticated parts of rural or suburban America, and then judges, or pities, or makes fun of people for their lack of urbanity. You know what I mean – plays written to point up all that’s wrong with America - ‘America’ being anyone that didn’t graduate from insert-exclusive-conservatory-training-program-here. I sit through those shows thinking ‘This is why they hate Obama.’

Yosemite doesn’t do that. For one thing, these are really complex characters, no stereotypical hillbillies here. They are written to be taken seriously, with great heart and dignity. Talbott doesn’t allow us to feel superior to them. In fact, one of my favorite moments of the play comes when middle sibling Ruby, heartbreakingly played by Libby Woodbridge , goes on a vaguely racist and rather classist rant against the behavior of some local ‘trash’ that prompts her brother Jake (Numrich) to drop his shovel and scream "We're not better!" In fact, he tells her, soon enough they'll be just the same. The story of Yosemite reminds us that with one small misstep, maybe the failure to read a faded blaze, anyone can get avalanched. You are not better than trailer-dwellers who sport Goodwill’s latest. In fact, you’re not really any different.

Having had a taste of the American dreamsicle, Talbott’s characters long for Disneyland. They’ve become disconnected from their own greatest desires. These kids aspire to the commonplace – anonymity, hourly wages, and a bunk in the back of the store. It’s the handiwork of the slightly younger of endemic poverty’s twin offspring, Disease and Despair. It kills.

So, in context, the sibling’s big secret is really less consequential than the circumstances that bore it. In fact, the scandal itself is far less shocking that the matter-of-factness with which it's dealt. It sets a tension in the way the play's characters are knit together, making the whole dynamic ripe for unraveling. That's an absolute banquet for brave actors. Yosemite’s fearless performers quite willingly hurl themselves from icy silence to full-throttle meltdown. (Please pardon all the seasonal analogies, but doing this play must feel like a ski jump or a four-man luge; once the gate comes down, you are gravity’s bitch.)

Now back to me shivering in my front row seat. I was close enough to see all the strings. I could touch the 'snow'. I could have unlaced Libby Woodbridge’s battered pink boots, so it’s not that I actually thought I was in the freezing cold Sierra Nevada Mountains. In fact, it bothers me when people say things like “It was as if I was there!” (Especially if the play is about war, ethnic cleansing, genital mutilation, or Les Miserables. Don’t lie, you did not really think you were in France circa 1788 with people singing, in English, about a bloody revolution - you’d have freaked out and strangled an usher with your commemorative 24601 souvenir t-shirt.)

It bugs me because I think it actually diminishes the work it means to compliment. It explains away the wonder, the mystery and impact - not to mention the very hard work - of what plays can do for people. I don’t want theatre to be ‘real’; I want it to be theatre. I want it to be truthful. (Which is why I bawled when what’s-his-name sang ‘Bring Him Home’ despite the fact that I was well aware of sitting in a cushy chair, in a Broadway theater, wearing an ugly tie.) The onstage replication of real life is not interesting to me. I mean, it’s cool, it’s okay, but it’s the revelation of the soul of a thing that gets me hot.

So why did my teeth chatter through this show? Was it the production’s ‘realness’ – the flawless design, the remarkably dynamic direction, some incredibly complex and nuanced performances, that snowball quality in all of Daniel Talbott’s stuff – a sense of inevitability, even in the silences, that makes an audience at once dread and long for whatever comes next…? Yeah, it’s all of that.

But, put simply, Yosemite has truth enough to make me shiver. It was the combination of a gorgeous set (which ought to be permanent displayed somewhere as art unto itself), powerfully drawn characters, passionate performances, and innovative staging that makes Rattlestick’s latest such a memorable experience. Taken all together, there’s an aching honesty in this show that I think is really exceptional. It’s not comfortable. It’s not cute. It’s really, no, it’s truly cold. And beautifully true.

Yosemite runs through February 26th at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre. Info and tickets here.

_In March of 2011, I saw a magical piece of theatre called You Are Now The Owner Of This Suitcase. It was staged in the cafeteria of a primary school in Queens by a company called Theatre 167, and it was unlike anything I’d seen in years. The energy of this collaboratively devised play, its mash-up of styles and the calibre of its performers, made me miss the kind of DIY work I did years ago at the Experimental Theater Wing. So when artistic director Ari Laura Kreith asked me to help write the final installment in their epic Jackson Heights trilogy, I jumped.

Now just weeks away from the premier of Jackson Heights 3am, I spoke to Ari by phone during our holiday hiatus from rehearsal. As I've also taken a role in the show, I should have been learning my lines. I typed up our conversation instead.

J.Stephen Brantley Having done a few of these shows, I guess you’ve got it mastered by now. It’s all clockwork, right? Easy as proverbial pie?

Ari Laura Kreith There are those moments - trying to coordinate twenty-one actors, some flying in from LA, and seven writers working on a single script, and we’ve got holidays and two venues and Equity rules - when it all seems a little impossible! But one of the things that’s amazing is that it really is an ensemble effort—there’s something about this sort of project that really draws in people who think of making theater as “our production” rather than “this is my piece.” So you made the posters, which are amazing, for example, and Jenny Lyn (Bader, company playwright) has done so much to bring our huge unwieldy script into legible and unified form. And finding a TD, Ross DeGraw, who really embraces this adventurous sort of process, has made so much of this possible.

JSB I am totally having a bromance with him.

ALK Ross is great! And so many other folks like him have helped out. Even relative strangers hear about the project and offer to help out. Plus the logistics do get easier—this time we know how to light the space, which was a huge challenge at first. I knew I wanted to work in three-quarters, and in a found space, because it feels really important for the audience to see one another as they’re sharing this experience. But figuring out how to bring lights into a low-ceilinged venue in a way that didn’t blow circuits and blind the audience and still allowed for creativity and control in the lighting realm was huge. That’s a challenge that Nicole Pearce solved beautifully last year, and knowing how to do it this time, feeling like we have a bit of a rep plot, makes it easier now.

JSB Not that you’re replicating what you’ve done before…

ALK No, but it’s certainly easier to explore a few new elements at a time, so this year we’re incorporating Andrew Lazarow’s amazing video work, and that feels like a new-yet-manageable piece.

JSB Found spaces, shared spaces, non-traditional spaces – I think we’re going to see more and more of that, but it comes with its own challenges.

ALK Yeah. Last year we bought chairs, which was crazy—transporting seventy chairs from IKEA. And yes, I brought my kids to IKEA with me to buy the chairs, so I was rolling them on a dolly with a two-year-old and a four-year-old…so anytime I get overwhelmed I focus on things like that, and remind myself that this year all we have to do is bring chairs up from the basement!

JSB The trilogy is like an epic love poem to Jackson Heights. How did it begin?

ALK Almost as soon as I moved to Jackson Heights, I started thinking about how to express some of the magic of the neighborhood in theatre. I love the way so many cultures come together here, and I wanted to celebrate and share that magic, both with people in the neighborhood and people outside it. For a while, just after Dashiell was born, I was artistic director of a company called Jackson Rep, and I developed and directed two solo shows that felt like they explored specific aspects of the neighborhood—one was Leslie Harrell Dillen's piece about a white woman who traveled to India for her stepdaughter’s wedding to a Sikh man, the other was an interactive show by comedy writer Carl Kissin where he involved members of the audience in his storytelling. And I was really interested in the ways each of these writers explored something specific about the neighborhood, and so I wondered what would happen if more writers got involved and if it became sort of a conversation. That summer, I was in Boulder, Colorado, trying to describe what it feels like to live in Jackson Heights, and it started to feel very urgent to me to create a piece that captured some of these things. So the first piece we created this way, 167 Tongues, was while I was still with Jackson Rep. Such a clear artistic ensemble coalesced around that project, and such a passion for a particular way of working, that it felt right to build a company dedicated to this kind of work. Though we’re ever re-defining what ‘this kind of work’ actually is!  So that’s how Theatre 167 was born.

JSB There’s something inherently dramatic about the mix of cultures in Jackson Heights. We all felt it that first night when we hit the streets for raw material.

ALK I’m in Maryland right now, and it strikes me that our life-on-the-streets and subway time in New York is really a gift.

JSB I’m in Texas. The population here is so diverse, and yet people still don’t ‘mix’. I think it has everything to do with cars. With drive-thrus.

ALK Right. But in a place like Jackson Heights, we see one another’s lives so constantly and with such taken-for-granted intimacy. We overhear each other’s most intimate conversations. How can we fail to grasp everyone’s fundamental humanity? And I don’t think of that as just a question about cultural difference-or-not, but that we have the opportunity to see deeply into the lives of others on a daily basis.

JSB This installment is much darker than the previous two. In some scenes, we see an uglier side of the neighborhood. How do you think it will be received by local audiences?

ALK Certainly we deal with some really dark topics—sex trafficking and drug-fueled violence are two of the most obvious. But we aren’t telling those stories in a gratuitous way—we’re looking at the need for connection and love, which are pretty basic and beautiful human impulses. And we’re exploring what happens when those needs aren’t or can’t be met, and how that can twist people.

JSB What we kept talking about in meetings was loneliness. I think it was important to all of us that we portray that kind of desperation honestly, but that we also transcend it somehow, that there is connection or at least the potential for it.

ALK Ultimately, I think this piece takes us to a place where, for the most part, those needs are met, often in unexpected or unlikely ways. And that will hopefully inspire the audience to think about the humanity of people they might otherwise choose to ignore, and possibly think about how they might have some sort of deeper connection to people they would otherwise look away from. So the journey to those dark places is necessary, I think, so that we can explore ways of moving toward the light.

JSB I think people will get that, whether they live in Jackson Heights or not.

ALK It’s funny, I guess I haven’t thought too much about how the story will be received, with the exception of clarifying that it’s not appropriate for kids.

JSB Yeah this is definitely not You Are Now The Owner Of This Suitcase.

ALK No. But these stories need to be told too, and hopefully even if someone is offended – and I imagine we will have a few walk-outs – they will be inspired to think about these things and explore why they were offended and what it is about that particular story that they think is untellable or unhearable. Part of our company’s mission is to give voice to people whose stories often go untold, and sometimes I think those stories aren’t told because a few vocal audience members are afraid to hear them or are offended by them. And it just seems like an obvious and necessary choice to honor our commitment to the people whose stories are often hidden out of deference to a few.

JSB Many directors would balk at the notion of wrangling ten overlapping storylines by seven different playwrights – as would many playwrights. In fact, there’s one who visibly shuddered when I told him about it. So what do you love about working this way?

ALK It’s like a huge party with amazing artists! Really! I love working with writers, and I think there’s something beautiful and challenging for writers in this process. When I first became interested in working this way, it was about the stories being told in the piece and how important it felt to truly reveal multiple perspectives on an event. But I’ve really fallen in love with the way it inspires writers to work out of their comfort zone, to explore things that they’ve never written and possibly felt they wouldn’t be allowed to write about because of people’s expectations of their work based on race or culture or sexual orientation or previous style-

JSB Or language. I never would have done anything in Bengali were it not for this show, that’s for sure. I was really nervous about writing characters outside my own cultural sphere. It took a lot of help and encouragement from other members of the company, a lot of mutual trust all around.

ALK And it takes a particular kind of writer—or a writer at a particular point in their relationship to writing—to embrace that process. It’s about being very generous with one another, being flexible with each individual piece in the service to the whole. We have one character who has changed ethnicity three times as he morphed to contain characters from several scenes. We have central events that have disappeared or moved offstage to allow the overall plot to build. We have scenes that have been written by three people together, with elements and characters from everyone’s stories. And I’m really grateful that everyone allows me to muck about and ask questions and suggest relationships. It’s really magical!

JSB There’s been a lot of synchronistic thinking from the very start. I think it’s because we all appreciate each other enough to allow that ‘magic’ in.

ALK The respect that everyone has for everyone else as artists, in building and developing and changing…it’s really about finding, together, what works for the piece. And the fact that there’s a shared perspective about how theatre can be a catalyst for a deeper cultural perspective and true compassion is central to allowing that to happen.

JSB I love your certainty in that. In fact, you seem pretty fearless, all the way round. Does anything about this work ever frighten you?

ALK I suppose I should feel scared bringing everyone into the room together for the first time and being the person who stands up in front and says, “In ten months, we’re going to have a show.” But I’m mostly just curious and excited about what’s going to happen. I tend to be very intuitive about who the collaborators for a particular project need to be, our collaboration being a case in point: I knew you understood and had an affinity for this kind of work and had read some blog entries you’d written, and I knew you were someone who brings great collaborative energy into a room, but I really didn’t know anything about you as a playwright, except that I just knew. And John Keller, who is one of our core actors, he and I laugh about how when he came to audition, he was in and out in three minutes and thought “Well, that did not go well,” but we ended up casting him and creating a role around what he’d brought into the room that day.

JSB I thought you’d known him forever. It seems like your sudden instincts lead to long-term collaborations.

ALK Yes, balancing out those intuitive, seemingly reckless choices are some truly amazing artistic relationships that developed over time; Jenny Lyn Bader and I have worked together almost since I arrived in New York, and I feel like she knows what I’m thinking better than I do sometimes, or like I can be in rehearsal with one of her scenes and know what she’d say about something even when she’s not in the room. And there are people like Rajesh Bose and Arlene Chico-Lugo, for example, who have been in all three plays in the trilogy and I just can’t imagine working without. It’s been so exciting on this particular project to be able to create roles for them that are really inspired by them as people, and I feel like their depth as people and as actors have really led us in creating that arc.

JSB I wanted to write for Rajesh right from the start. And I am just in love with what Arlene is doing as Adela. As a playwright, it’s so exciting and gratifying to have such amazing actors saying your stuff. I know, for me, it’s much less scary when that happens.

ALK If there’s one thing that scares me about these projects, it’s just the moments when I think about the hubris of it all—trusting my gut to know who belongs in a particular piece before it even exists, and then as the project evolves, shaping the stories and trusting that ultimately we will be telling something that needs and deserves to be told. Except that I really think the work has its own magnetic pull to it, that it draws the right people and stories together, and truly I’m just another person drawn to serve these stories in some way.

JSB How do you get there? What in your background prepared you for making collaboratively devised pieces like JH3am?

ALK I did my undergrad at Yale, and really struggled with the town/gown divisions—being at an Ivy League school in the midst of a decaying inner city. I spent my senior year creating an interactive theatre event, working with Yale actors and non-actors, as well as actors and musicians from the New Haven community. We created all these scenes that audience could walk through, exploring ideas of work, play and ritual, and staged the piece off-campus so it would be accessible to all. The experience was amazing: two hours of interactive theatre culminating in a huge dance party with an African dance band. The heartbreaking thing for me was that not one of my professors came. And then, when I did talk to a faculty member, he read me a list of names including Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Jesus, and told me I was walking a dangerous path because I should look where they all ended up.

JSB Um, yeah, cause those guys all totally wasted their time…

ALK Looking at it now, it seems pretty ludicrous, but as an about-to-enter-the-world college senior, it terrified me about my identity as an artist making community-based theatre and made me question whether there was a true home for this kind of work or, indeed, for me, in the theatre. After that, I was an actor for a while, did my MFA in Acting, and while I was in school I started a summer theatre company because I felt like my classmates weren’t being challenged in the ways I thought they should be. And so I started directing there, really to encourage friends to take artistic risks. We did new plays, because I thought it was really amazing that you could do new plays!

JSB It is!

ALK And I assumed I would stay there building that company and doing that. But then Jeffrey Carlson, an actor who had been one of the original company members before moving to New York to go to Juilliard, he came back and we did a season together and he pushed and challenged me. I loved it, and I realized that was what I needed to grow artistically, was to be in an environment where my collaborators were pushing and inspiring me like that. I never really thought of it that way til this moment, but there are all the things I loved then – community-inspired theatre, new plays, and truly collaborative and challenging artistic relationships – in the work that Theatre 167 is doing now.

JSB What’s the most challenging part of running a company like Theatre 167?

ALK I think it’s all the stuff that’s challenging about running any small theatre, really. The boring stuff. Where does the money come from, how to find affordable rehearsal space, who wants to go out and hang posters in the cold. Really not worth complaining about.

JSB Duly noted. Next question: Your two adorable kids frequently end up in rooms full of all kinds of people, from various countries and of many ethnicities, speaking multiple languages, all getting along. They don’t think it's normal, do they?

ALK Of course they do!  Don’t you?

JSB Well, now, yeah.

ALK Part of raising kids in New York is that they get exposed to so much—when my daughter was three, we found a man lying in the street on a freezing cold night and called 911 and she talked about it for weeks after. Sometimes it scares me. But I think it makes them more compassionate people when they understand that life is complicated, that they’re lucky to have a home, that sort of thing. And one of the things my kids are lucky to experience, both growing up in Jackson Heights and growing up around this particular theatre company, is a really glorious, very diverse and joyous culture.

JSB Now for the important stuff: Is my horribly offensive, half-naked performance as Leo going to cost you donors and get you banned from using PS69?

ALK I’m sure we’ll offend someone.

JSB It’s what I do.

ALK But your performance isn’t offensive! And Leo is very important. As we look at people whose stories aren’t told or are ignored, Leo is a prime example of someone we want to look away from because he’s in so much pain and doesn’t know what to do with it. It’s so easy to judge people like that, and yet the trajectory of the play reveals the ways that we’re all truly connected. And isn’t that something that we want people to think about, and want our children to learn? I don’t want to give the story away, but things might have turned out very differently if someone had been able to see and reach Leo that night. And I have a deep interest in the Leos of the world, and how we can pull them back from the void.

JSB I do too. And it seems possible in theatre, in that arena of what-if. I know bitchy, cynical plays are very fashionable right now, but I still believe in the power of theatre to bring people together.

ALK So do I.

JSB I mean, this show is hardly sunshine and roses, but if seven playwrights can all get along…

ALK And, not to be melodramatic or cheesy, but I feel like there’s something about walking the streets of Jackson Heights that expresses how we can live together as a global community—how we can be celebrate cultural difference and experience commonality. When Elodie was four, she was looking at a photo on the cover of the New York Times magazine; it was an article about a principal who had turned around a low-performing school in the Bronx, and he had been photographed with a number of his students, who were all African American and Latino. Elodie was very curious about the picture, and when I asked her why, she said, “These kids are all different from me.” There was a pause and then she said with admiration, “They’re older.” I love it that this is her world.

Theatre 167’s Jackson Heights 3am opens January 13th at PS 69 in Jackson Heights Queens. It will also play two weekends at Queens Theatre in Flushing Meadows Park. For tickets click here.

_As it is the season of listmaking, I thought I’d pitch in. This is not a best-of list and it will not include Charlie Sheen or Kim Kardashian. It’s just a run-down of my own most memorable theatre-related moments of 2011.

Of course I didn’t see enough theatre, I never do. I didn’t make it to a single Broadway show this year, in fact I missed tons of good stuff all over town. I didn’t even get to see the amazing Bobby Moreno in anything, and as much work as he did in 2011, there’s really no excuse.

But here’s the (very personal, highly subjective) list.

Doric Wilson (February 24, 1939 – May 7, 2011). I was lucky enough to perform in three plays by the legendary Doric Wilson this year. Sadly, 2011 was also the year that saw the indomitable playwright, leatherman, and raconteur pass on. I did a TOSOS reading of his The West Street Gang, and then performed an excerpt from A Perfect Relationship at Doric’s birthday tribute in March. He asked, no, demanded that I play Seymour in the annual Pride performance of Street Theatre, and I was thrilled to do so. Unfortunately, Doric wasn’t there to see it. Still, his presence remains undeniable, and being asked to speak at his memorial service was one of the great honors of my life. Thank you Mark Finley for making it all happen.

Doric’s exit was preceded by that of his fellow playwright and Caffe Cino alum, the great Lanford Wilson (April 13, 1937 – March 24, 2011) and by La Mama founder Ellen Stewart (November 7, 1919 — January 13, 2011). Lanford’s memorial service at the Lyceum was one of the greatest theatrical events I’ve ever attended, as funny and moving and inspiring as any of his plays. And while I only met Ms.Stewart once, like so many other downtown performers, I loved her and cherish her legacy.

All three were major inspirations for me. Now for the fun stuff:

Unforgettable shows:

David Adjmi’s Elective Affinities starring Zoe Caldwell, produced by Soho Rep, piece by piece, and Rising Phoenix Rep. I was at once unnerved and enchanted. More here. 

Dael Orlandersmith’s Horsedreams at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre. There’s a lot I could tell you about plays and heroin, since I’ve done a lot of both. But I’m just gonna say this show kicked my ass and pushed all my buttons in the best possible ways. Profound, provocative, dangerous, disturbing…and accurate. Take it from a middle-class white boy who used to cop dope in Harlem.

Anthony Johnston’s Tenderpits at Under St. Marks.This totally bizarre, weirdly sexy, one-wizard tour-de-force took me by complete surprise. Written and performed by one insanely talented diaper-clad Canadian, Tenderpits was one of the funniest and, well, most tender shows I’d seen in years. I don’t even know how to explain it. There’s drunken moose and ass glitter and a breakdown of Chekhov that had me rolling, as well as a very personal story about love and sex and art and justice, and discovering the magic of New York City, even if you are ‘poor as fuck.’ Johnston is a wonder.

And Taylor Mac's The Walk Across America For Mother Earth at LaMaMa. Of course.

It was year of amazing performances. A few of my favorites:

Alex Hurt as Hamlet in a four-person version called Elsinore at NYU. It is amazing what just four actors can do with some plastic sheeting, an umbrella, a bathtub and some major balls.

Gillian Lindig in Purge at LaMama. Holy crap.

Max Rhyser and Spenser Genesy in Dan Fingerman’s The Austerity Of Hope. Hotness.

Nick Lawson in Squealer. Holy crap and hotness.

David Drake filling in for Charles Busch in The Divine Sister. Not to mention Alison Fraser and Julie Halston. Geniuses, all.

Susan Barnes Walker in Duncan Plaster’s The Wastes Of Time.

Carolyn Baeumler and Jenny Seastone Stern in The Germ Project at New Georges.

Jacqueline Sydney and Tyler Lea in Ethos Perfroming Arts’ The Family Room. I also have to mention Jackie’s wonderful performances in my play Blood Grass at the Sam French fest, and in two readings of The Jamb.

But for me the year belonged to Laura Ramadei. Her performances in Lesser America’s Squealer, Boomerang’s Much Ado About Nothing in Central Park, and Jennie Berman Eng’s Exit Carolyn at The Drilling Company were each so complex, so rich, so funny, and so brave. I’m just astonished by what Ramadei does, every time, and by how effortless it seems. In addition to being an amazing actor, Laura also happens to be a phenomenal fight director.

Also...
I saw and heard some pretty awesome theatre design this year. Most memorably – Dust at The Ontological, Now The Cats With Jewelled Claws at LaMama, Woodshed Collective’s The Tenant, New George’s The Germ Project, and Janie Bullard’s amazing sound for Lake Water at the IRT.

I acted in a ton of readings involving varying degrees of staging this year. Most memorable were Kathleen Warnock’s That’s Her Way with the exquisite Danielle Quisenberry, and Chris Weikel’s Secret Identity in which I played a superhero invented by a bullied gay teenager. As with all of Weikel’s wildly inventive stuff, it was a blast. I even got kissed by a cute twenty-three year old!

Both Warnock and Weikel have studied at the ruby-booted feet of Tina Howe. I count myself very blessed to be one of ‘the players’ for Tina’s MFA playwriting class at Hunter College. It’s given me the opportunity to play some extraordinary roles in exciting new plays by six astonishingly gifted playwrights. Without a doubt, some of my favorite moments of 2011 happened in that alternately freezing cold / stiflingly hot fifth floor classroom at Hunter.

Plays I just can’t stop thinking about:

Micheline Auger’s The Feminism Of A Soft Merlot or How The Donkey Got Punched. I attended two readings of this remarkable and timely new play, and they did more for me than most full productions would. Auger makes the F-word dirty and dangerous once again. Feminism I mean. Being a man, I am going to doltishly proclaim Micheline's work both smart and sexy – wow! -  and hope that my doing so inspires her to write another scathing indictment of the intrinsically misogynistic raunch culture that has lately ruled our nation. She’s not bad…for a girl.

Emily DeVoti’s The Upstart at Rising Phoenix Rep’s Cino Nights. This bare-bones series of one-off performances of new plays continues to amaze the lucky few audience members who pack the tiny basement theatre at Jimmie’s No.43. DeVoti’s play is inspired by the true story of Brigid Hitler, Irish kin to, yes, that Hitler, and takes a hard look at our connections to history, to racism and gentrification, and the ways in which our little choices become consequential. Actors Edward Carnevale, Julie Kline, and Anne O’Sullivan were phenomenal in a smart, disturbing, unforgettable play.

Locker 4173B by Christopher Borg and Joey Rizzolo, produced by New York Neo-Futurists at The Monkey. This show totally blew me away. Borg and Rizzolo purchased the contents of a couple of storage lockers with the aim a creating a play inspired by whatever they happened to find. They got more than they bargained for, and so did I. Like urban archeologists, they unearth and piece together the fragmented evidence of some very real lives, and create a stunning socio-economic snapshot of today’s America. As the Indiana Joneses of New York performance art, the pair are hysterically funny. But Borg and Rizzolo also ask some hard questions about art, family and cultural identity. Locker 4173B was at once clever and incredibly heartwrenching, and deserves a longer run at some museum-theatre hybrid space. More New Yorkers should see this.

And my own stuff:

Furbelow. First there was a staged reading by a cast of fifteen amazing actors at the Hard Sparks launch party. Then a workshop by The Inkwell at Woolly Mammoth in DC. And a reading directed by Rose Lamoureax in Bridgeport. Too bad it would cost 20K just to costume this fucker.

Shiny Pair Of Complications at Fresh Fruit. Under the direction of Robert o Cambeiro, actors Marc Castle and Wayne Henry turned my sweet little gay marriage comedy into something really moving. Thanks, guys.

Eightythree Down. My play, directed by dynamo Daniel Talbott, performed by four of the bravest and most dynamic actors I’ve ever known, Melody Bates, Ian Holcomb, Bryan Kaplan, and Brian Miskell. This was Hard Sparks’ first full length production and a remarkable experience for me on every level. Working with Daniel aka Dantasia aka T-bott was challenging and inspiring and loads of fun. He moves people to want to do more and to be more, myself included, and I am so grateful to him for pushing me to push myself as both a playwright and a producer. The dude directed something like 700 shows this year, and I am certain that everyone he worked with would speak glowingly of his dedication and generosity. I sure do. And the fearless foursome who performed my play were not only insanely talented and hard-working, but also some of the kindest and most genuine individuals I’ve known. Dear Melody, Ian, Bryan, and Queerbait, thank you a thousand times for giving so much of yourselves to the insanity of Eightythree Down. I also have to thank the greatest stage management team in the history of downtown theatre, Bertie Michaels and Alex Mark: Books, hooray!

The Jamb. With Jonathan Warman at the healm, we did two readings of my gay coming of middle-age play, one for TOSOS’ Chesley-Chambers series, and the other as a Hard Sparks event. Both times I was filled with gratitude for playmates Hunter Gilmore, Jackie Sydney, and Aaron Tone. Here’s hoping for a full production in 2012!

As we look toward new projects in 2012, I’ll leave you with some inspiring words from a man whose centennial was celebrated this past year:

Make voyages! –Attempt them! –there’s nothing else…  - Tennessee Williams, Camino Real

Alternatively: Gorgeous Torture, or, "I love the smell of White Shoulders in the morning."

In David Adjmi’s Elective Affinities, a resplendent Zoe Caldwell as Mrs. Alice Hauptmann welcomes guests into a beautifully appointed parlor as a Chanel-clad spider might a fan club of flies. It's not merely a show but an afternoon tea, gorgeously produced by Soho Rep, piece by piece, and Rising Phoenix Rep. It was absolutely one of the highest lights of my 2011.

‘Staged’ in a brownstone on the Upper East Side, this is sight-specific performance at its most intimate. There was some wonderful, powerful, alternatively-spaced stuff this year - The Tenant and Sleep No More especially. Complete with Earl Grey and candied ginger, Elective Affinities appears on the more naturalistic side of that spectrum, delightfully so.

Alice’s house is gorgeous, of course. Crystal. Lilies. Nineteenth century portraiture and an appropriately somber staff to take your coat and serve your tea. You’re also greeted by an enormous abstract sculpture, black and roiling, that I’d liken to a giant lava foot. It dominates a mahogany-paneled living room, dwarfing a marble fireplace and a grand piano. From the start, the whole thing is at once lovely and sinister. I was all in.

Upstairs we were greeted, one at a time, by Mrs. Hauptmann herself. When it came my turn, she took my hand and leaned in, looking a bit concerned. ‘I don’t know you,’ she purred. After I’d introduced myself, she proclaimed my surname a very good one.

I’m fascinated by the idea of the savage inside, and how deeply a surface need be scratched to release it. Alice Hauptmann is certainly the picture of gentility. But one need only introduce the subject of government-sanctioned torture (or a bit of Animal Planet, which Alice gleefully proclaims ‘almost pornographic!’) to bring out her inner brute.

David Adjmi’s script is so sly. The way in which his Alice rationalizes brutality, the coolness with which she excuses, even embraces cruelty, sneaks up on you. It’s seductive, and by the time you realize you may share more of Mrs. Hauptmann’s world view than you’d care to admit, it’s too late. You’re pinned. When she rhapsodizes about the moment in which a gazelle gives up to a predator, she may as well be talking about the audience seated about her, well within striking range. Before I knew it, the teeth of Adjmi’s script sank in deep and I was done for. (I wanted to tell him so afterward, but he has such a smile that I turned shy, sure that I’d say something stupid.)

Mrs. Hauptman talks of having resigned herself to a certain fate. Her Germanic husband thinks her monstrous, as does her (possibly alcoholic) friend Dierdre, simply for speaking her mind. She might have you believe that she’s a doyenne in a doll’s house but I think she’s more like the big savannah cats she admires on the television. She’s patient that way, practically welcoming prey to a watering hole she’s secretly stalked for decades. Alice lacquers her nails blood red.

I was so lucky to have seen this piece, and to be there for a closing night toast. Ms. Caldwell spoke movingly about the passion and dedication of the team behind Elective Affinities, and it was obvious that everyone involved had tremendous love for the project. Hearing her speak, and talking with people from Rising Phoenix and piece by piece, I was inspired by the generosity with which this show was built. This is no-agenda artistry - no one is out to elevate themselves above anyone else. Instead it’s about creating something meaningful, building and sharing something really special. Ms. Caldwell asserts that it’s not really up to us to designate ourselves artists anyway, that it’s not our call to make. The opulence of the surroundings in which she spoke these words pointed up the willingness of a hardworking team of theatre craftsmen to muck in for the greater good of live performance. For me it was humbling and hope-filled. In a year that brought us ego-driven debacles like The Spidish Play, I say more power to artists like these.

And it is the power of art itself on which Elective Affinities finally hangs. The play begins and ends with Alice talking about that hulking sculpture she’s commissioned for the second floor. Her husband thinks it’s growing, and Alice has to admit that it does have a certain terrible power. It lurks and looms, always there like a desperate measure, just the other side of a beautifully paneled pocket door. It’s like survival. Whether a Manhattan dowager or a doe in the jaws of lioness, some instincts simply will not be denied.

Alice eventually admits the sculpture is horrible, but asserts that it is art, nonetheless. It is, paradoxically, beautifully cruel. As with war and torture and plays like Elective Affinities, you can but define your own life in relation to it, and take your lumps.

One or two?

When people ask me what Eightythree Down is about, I give them some version of my ‘elevator speech.’ Something about New Years Eve 1983, a home invasion, sex, violence,  “drugs and guns, if you must know.” But I realized this morning that the play is really about family.

I’m just back from a rehearsal retreat with the company of Eightythree Down. We all went up to Lake Lucille and spent a day and a half at a beautiful old country house there. The place has hosted theatre artists going back to the turn of the last century, and you can feel it. There is something in the stonework, in the creak of the stair. I love places like that, the way they make you part of the past even as they point you forward. I’ve been thinking a lot about legacy lately, and I like those rare moments when I feel like I’ve found my place in the ranks.

When you share an emotional process with people, you form fast bonds. It happens in wartime, during disasters, and at rehearsal. Life gets sped up, and what would have taken years to learn is suddenly common knowledge. Drama throws you into the thick of it, creating and then immediately testing the strength of a tribe. The particular dramas a company faces during production often serve as a sort of mirror of the play. Not that anyone at Lake Lucille was trading cocaine for blow jobs, that I know of...

I’m talking about the way a group of near-strangers can so suddenly become family by sharing a meaningful experience, in this case a creative one rather than something destructive. There must be a ton of plays about surrogate families. It’s no wonder really. What’s baffling is that plays that happen in houses are so rarely rehearsed in them. It’s so useful!

So we mocked up our set in a double parlor with pocket doors bisecting the playing space right down the middle. A rough-hewn parson’s table stood in for Martin’s bed. I watched the action from an ottoman that put me very nearly in it. It was amazing to see the cast just fall right into the play despite being in such a different space.

Director Daniel Talbott and the cast worked through the show moment to moment. There was a lot of laughter. (I love watching actors drop suddenly from real-world playfulness to the depths of drama: magic.) New questions came up, ideas were tried, set stuff tested. I added a few fun lines. The sun must have plopped into the lake when I wasn’t looking and it was time for dinner.

Being suddenly together outside of New York City, just as the characters in Eightythree Down are, seemed to infuse the show with something new. The night out there is a deeper dark. Country air is somehow heavier with sex, even as it soothes. And there was the nearness of water, with its dual nature of healing and destruction – a sense that things can go either way. It all seeped in and made for work that was filled with urgency, with danger, as well as with hope. Our after-dinner run-through was like jumping in the lake, plunged all at once in something bracing, mysterious, and a bit scary but alright as long as we were in it together.

There was other work done at Lake Lucille too, during meals, over wine or coffee, while swimming in the lake and sunning on a raft, and during the viewing of a fantastically bad film. Daniel has a really good sense of when a company just needs to be together, sharing space. That’s how family happens.

When I first met with Daniel to talk about this project, we discussed the way the characters in the play had formed a family, dysfunctional as it may be. It was a major topic during early rehearsals too. Drugs will do that, users band together in weird ways. But these characters are also united by each being an outsider somehow. Dina, Martin, Tony, and Stuart would not have come together during the final hour of 1983 were it not for some seriously messed-up stuff. But what they have in common is a need for connection. Soon enough, they’re bound in much the same way as blood relations would be. Shared experience makes for collective consequence. What would have been separate lives are forever intertwined.

Of course, the company members mounting this little monster of a show treat one another much better than do the play’s characters. It’s important that when you’re dealing with subject matter this potentially dangerous, both emotionally and physically, that everyone looks out and mucks in. As the action of the show has gone deeper into ugliness and desperation, the company has grown closer and kinder. It’s a subtle thing, tribe. It’s funny how family sneaks up on you.

Having met only weeks ago we can already go from bedlam to burgers like it’s nothing. We can sit around a table with everyone talking at once, or fall effortlessly into a collective silence. We tease each other mercilessly. We share secrets. We beat each other up a while, and then we bake pies. Family.

And if there was any doubt of it, they call me Daddy.

I’m into it.

Eightythree Down opens September 1st at Under Saint Marks in NYC’s East Village. For tickets visits www.SmartTix.com

Photos by Evan Caccioppoli