Starting

It Occurs to Me ...

I expect I'll continue to post things to Facebook, but that's not really conducive to maintaining a coherent stream of observations.  This will probably be, more or less, an open diary on stuff I'm seeing, reading, participating in, thinking about, embracing, etc.  This may end up being a place where I knock out rough drafts of paragraphs or passages that end up being revised for use in larger projects.

I'll start with where things stand today.

At the moment, I'm working on a biography of William Ball, the founder of American Conservatory Theater.  This is a commission.  I wrote an article for American Theater about how Ball's choice to plant ACT in San Francisco rather than in Chicago inadvertently helped trigger the Chicago theater movement.  (This was first expressed by Chicago critic-historian Richard Christiansen in a piece for a long-gone Sunday supplement, Panorama.)  Ball was inevitably an important figure in that article, and Kitty Winn and Charles Dillingham asked me if I'd be came to write a full biography.  And here I am, more than two and a half years later at a point which seems to be the beginning of the end of the project.

Tomorrow, Kristine Niven (my wife and founder of the AND Theater Company) and I go to Chatham, MA for the annual Summer Salt residency.  We gather a group of writers who improvise and improvisers who write and spend a week improvising on each other's premises, helping each other jump start projects.  This will be the eighth summer of this project, and several plays have gone from the living room of our generous hosts.  I wrote an article after our first summer that appeared in Dramatics -- "Improv at the Beach."

Also looking forward to returning to Evanston in September to accompany a friend to her 50th anniversary reunion at Evanston Township High School.  (She accompanied me to mine last summer.)  A chance to look again at a school that, more than college, taught me how to read, process information, examine the theories of others, and begin to formulate my own ideas.  While I'm there, I hope to see some plays in Chicago and connect with old friends.