Voice.

The other night I heard my words for the first time in a few years.

A friend is directing my play, Dinner for Several, in Rhode Island this fall. At his invite I went down and sat in on his auditions. As I prefer, I sat there quietly with no one knowing that (gasp! horror! panic!) the playwright was in the room.

For the record, I have never liked being the playwright. I'm this guy from the 'burbs who happens to have put together a script, and someone in the theater liked it. I try to leave my beret and cigarette holder at home, on the hall table next to my artsy bohemian disregard for ordinary people.

I went not because I wanted any sort of input on the casting process, but because I hadn't heard these particular words since Stacey's superb production at Walpole two years ago and--odd though it may sound--I wanted to know what they sounded like again.


The curiosity derives largely from my current mindset of feeling like I don't have anything to say that warrants an artistic expression. The thing about playwriting is that in the long run you don't just have to convince yourself that you've got something to say. You need a group of people to think you've got something to say, too. Everyone on the playreading committee, a director, a bunch of actors...there are a number of hurdles and/or filters between your deathless craft on the page and its public performance. In 2003, 2004, I obviously believed that I had something that required expression on stage. Now? Not so much. So the questions become: Did I really have anything to say back then? And how is what I had to offer artistically then different than now? It really boils down to: Who was that guy?

The tricky part, of course, is trying to answer that question via the struggles of actors cold-reading a script they've never seen. But that's part of the fun for me.

As an actor, I'm that annoying guy at auditions who you'd swear has already read the script. I can cold-read the living bajeezus out of a side. This odd thing happens in my brain--it's like it splits down the middle and while one part's doing the acting, the other part is reading ahead, deciding on how to hit the lines, and sending a message back to its partner. Some folks cold-read well. Others... Well, everybody loves a good train wreck.

Thing is, the words are the words. The jokes are the jokes. Even in a thick-lipped stumble through it, a good line can still come off as a good line. And during the auditions, there were laughs. Funny is funny.

Dinner also has its dramatic moments, and watching those I was struck by the honesty in the dramatic scenes the director had chosen. This play is about the amount of time and energy we burn trying to find love or, often, an overly idealized version of it, and how we alternately reveal and hide ourselves in the pursuit--not just from other people, but from ourselves as well. Heady stuff for a comedy, but I think it's in there. That's what I had to say. Would I say the same thing now if I was writing it? Can't answer that.

Since its debut in 2004 I haven't been able to get anyone to consider staging Dinner unless they knew me. It's been turned down by two publishers, including one who gladly publishes several of my short plays. I've seen the shows, I've listened to the audiences. I sat in a packed 235-seat theater and watched the thing absolutely enchant, night after night. I know how good this play is. I think I went to Rhode Island to remind myself--not just about the play, but maybe about me. Perhaps I knew that even in a stumble-through filled with apologies and stops and starts and odd choices, the core of thing would still shine and maybe I'd feel good about my writerly self.

I think I have always boxed off my life to some degree. The things I remember and the things I don't surprises me. When I try, in my mind's eye, to look back at the guy alone in the 20x20 studio with the keyboard on his lap, writing his first play at 40-plus, the image is fuzzy. The picture jumps, trying to fine-tune the clarity. It never clears. What I come away with is: whoever he was, he wrote a helluva play.

And sometimes I wonder where he went.