Youngblood Recommends... Buddy Cop 2

I saw the best show this weekend, you guys. Uber hip downtown company, The Debate Society, knocked the ball out of the park again with Buddy Cop 2. Even if the play weren't amazing (it is) I would suggest you see it based solely on actress/writer Hannah Bos's hair.

Check it:

That is not a wig, y'all.

As funny and ironic as the title and marketing tactics are, they belie what is actually a very thoughtful, touching comedy. I actually cried a little at the end. Don't you loove it when plays are good? Me too.

Two cops . . . in the kind of quiet little town where a kid dreams of growing up to be a fireman. Or a racecar driver. Where the only question you ask yourself at the end of the day is if you’re gonna knock back your cold one at Swanky’s, Spanky’s or Zingers. A town where neighbors pitch in to help neighbors in need. And where if you wake up in the middle of the night . . . you should keep your eyes closed. Because the man in red is there in the corner. Watching you. Smiling at you with his yellow eyes and black teeth. Best to pretend you’re still asleep.

The Debate Societyand Ontological-Hysteric Incubator present
BUDDY COP 2 - Opening May 20th, 2010
Written by Hannah Bos and Paul ThureenDirected and developed by Oliver Butler
Featuring: Hannah Bos, Paul Thureen,Monique Vukovic & Michael Cyril Creighton
May 20–June 128pm Thursday–Sunday, with an additional (8pm) performance on Monday, June 7.
at the Ontological Theater at St. Mark’s Church 131 East 10th Street (at 2nd Ave.), NYC
Tickets: General $18/Student $14
PURCHASE TICKETS HEREor by calling 212-352-3101. Cash only at the door.

Lucy in the Bayou

Hey, y'all!

Lucy Alibar, YBer at Large, jamming on you from way down the bayou.

It seems like everyone back in New York is tearing it up! Annie Baker got her well-deserved Obie, Jihan Crowther being all fancy with her New York Theatre Workshop Fellowship, Rob Askins on the front of the Times theatre section, Eli Clark with P73.....bangarang! I couldn't be more proud to be a part of Youngblood right now.

I'll be back on the Youngblog later on for some Day in the Life posts. We're shooting some really awesome scenes in the next couple of days. I can't tell you too much about them right now, but they involve helicopters, naked karate, and a special guest appearence by my awesome dad, Baya Harrison.

So stay tuned, and again, so proud of everyone back home!
xoxo
Lucy

Hot Playwrights III

I'm just going to go ahead and say it.

You can't talk about hot playwrights without singing the praises of Sheila Callaghan.

We all follow her on twitter, but let's be honest...we'd follow her anywhere. You make us CRUMBLE, Sheila! CRUMBLE.

Blogging Bloodworks: Conkel Edition

My play, The Sluts of Sutton Drive, is a dark comedy about a working mom who enrolls in a stripper-cise class only to realize that she hates men. A lifetime of awful sexual experiences come to a head in explosive ways when she becomes addicted to drinking household cleaning products and finds herself involved in a grisly crime.

I'm crazy, coo coo, insane right now doing the rewrites, and to be honest I'd like to take a break from thinking about it directly. I thought for this blog entry I'd share some of my inspiration points with you in a tidy list. I'm a man with exquisite tastes!

• Gossip. I was obsessed with riot grrl when I was fifteen and have been rediscovering it lately thanks to Gossip. I grew up in Washington State and all the cool, tough, brassy girls and arty gay boys (re: my people) were listening to bands like Bikini Kill, Seven Year Bitch, L7 etc. I'd all but given up on ever having bands this empowering and tough in the age of Miley Cyrus, but then there was Gossip. Portly lead singer Beth Ditto TURNS. IT. OUT. Their album, "Music for Men" is basically all I listened to while writing this. If you ever get the chance to see them live, RUN DON'T WALK.

• This is kind of vague but I don't know how else to say it: banal lady things. Shit that gets sold to women. Stupid shit that women actually buy. Like yogurt commercials, Sex and the City, Cathy comics, and women who pretend to be addicted to shoes. I hate and love these things so, so much. I was once presented as the only dude writer in a feminist theater festival. I was so saddened to find that all of the plays were basically about, like, weddings and yoga and babies and shitty things like that.
  

• The S.C.U.M. Manifesto by Valerie Solanas.
• All my friends are sick of me talking about Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, the 1970's sitcom/soap opera hybrid that I'm obsessed with. I'll just say this: it is amazing. The set is gorgeous in its ugliness, the lights are way too bright, and the all the actors are covered in pancake make-up. Plus, a sitcom with no laughter? Sign me up. It also doesn't hurt that the actors and writing are both brilliant. In a perfect world my play would look exactly this. So what if it doesn't take place in the 70s?

• This is going to seem really weird, but I read the complete works of Sarah Kane while I wrote this. That was probably influential. I hope people don't take this the wrong way, but am I crazy for thinking that Blasted is a little campy?
• The brilliant Roseanne Barr/Meryl Streep movie She-Devil.

• Your mom. Obviously.

Directed by Lila Neugebauer

Featuring Megan Hill, Nicole Beerman, Frank Harts, Paco Tolson and Curran Connor.

Thursday, May 20th
7:00 PM

Pace University
41 Park Row, 10th Floor
Schaeberle Studio Theater

FREE! FREE! FREE!

Super Cool Musician's Tour Diary: Day 4 -- Fallon, NV

Hey, you know what's uncomfortable? Altitude sickness.

Today's drive through the Tahoe National forest was without a doubt the most beautiful and painful I've ever experienced. 7,300 feet is quite a challenge for a kid who's lived his entire life on the East Coast and never been higher than the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge. By the time we reached the Donner summit my sinuses were frozen and my blood was bubbling. I think I would have driven off the mountain if the scenery weren't so unreal. Parts of it felt like we were driving through a 500 sq. mile amusement park. Uncle Zeke's Thunder Gulch, featuring lazy river:



...and mine shaft ride:



Once upon a time the Nevadan countryside was dotted with ranches and alfalfa farms. That all changed in 1973, when the entire state realized simultaneously that they could make more money by using all that floor space for slot machines. There are times when it seems like not one square inch of this state does not have a Suger and Spice video slot sitting on it. This is where the bed that I am sleeping on tonight is:



There are two festivals going on in Fallon this weekend -- the Spring Wings International Migratory Bird Festival and the Fallon Cantaloupe Festival. We performed at the bird festival, though we were encouraged to scout out the cantaloupe. To my (likely) eternal regret, we didn't.

The theater that hosted us was once again brand new and gorgeous and had, what my lifelong New York State-livin' brain decided was a "Western" feel. It had something to do with a series of wooden banisters in the house that were made of wood, like lots of things in the west are.

Ultimately, performing at the bird festival didn't have much to do with actual birds. We weren't specifically encouraged to make a thing out of it in the show, and it seemed like the audience was grateful to unwind from a long day of looking at waterfowl with two hours of non-bird-related entertainment.

Because we'd had three reps as a group in the last two days, the show went off like clockwork. Fewest bumps, best response. We did wind up with some pretty familiar Rewind suggestions:

Show #4: Fallon, NV
Playwright 1: Shakespeare
Playwright 2: Tennessee Williams
Movie Director 1: Quentin Tarantino
Movie Director 2: Alfred Hitchcock
Musical Style: Rap

...but kept it on the funny side of familiar.

After the show we met some honest-to-God cowboys. I would have a hard time describing to you just how actual of cowboys these cowboys were, but they were serious. Their job was, literally, to ride horses and move cows places. They also wore cowboy hats and had big bushy mustaches.

One day I will go to their ranch and we will ride. They don't know about this plan, but they will.

Tomorrow: I fly home and stop staying up past my bedtime to do this. I hope that these posts were some fun to read, despite not actually saying any of the things about regional theater that I thought I was going to be able to say. I enjoy writing more about lime-flavored potato chips and cantaloupe anyway. I think that came through.

Super Cool Musician's Tour Diary: Day 3 -- Modesto, CA

About mid-way through our four-and-a-half hour drive to Modesto this morning, I tried to explain the premise of these posts to our stage manager Rachel. We had just passed a prison, and I was feeling pretty awesome about myself for being on the outside. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: ...I decided to call it "Super Cool Musician's Tour Diary." Which is really funny.
Rachel: Sure.
Me: Yeah, I know. Anyway, it's about how we perform in all of these regional theaters and what they're like and how big they are and what other kind of shows they do and who comes to see them. It's funny and insightful and wry without being cynical. Like David Foster Wallace, probably.
Rachel: You realize that we're not performing in regional theaters, right?
Me: Wait, what?
Rachel: These are performing arts centers. Regional theaters are a different, very specific thing.
Me: Are you serious?
Rachel: Yeah. A regional theater is a self-sustaining entity that has an artistic director who programs a whole season. They hire directors, actors, and a technical staff and mount shows that run for an extended period of time. They don't import one-off shows like ours.
Me: But technically speaking, they are theaters in a region that's not New York. That makes them "regional theaters," right?
Rachel: No. Not really. Places like the La Jolla Playhouse, the Signature, those are regional theaters. Places like the Clark Center and the Gallo Center don't really count.

At this point, one of the actors chimed in from the back seat:

Debbie: Your blog posts are probably still worthwhile!

Faced with this, I did what I always do when I realize I'm wrong about something. First, I sulked for about 20 minutes. Then I insulted The Beatles. Then I decided to make lemons into limon-flavored* potato chips:

...and eat half a bag of limon-flavored potato chips. Then I decided to change the subject.

Yesterday, I mentioned I might talk some about what we actually do on stage as a group. A good, comprehensive explanation would take more than I feel like I can give at 1:30 a.m., so I'm just gonna write about one thing. But it's probably the most interesting thing to write about on a blog about a plays and the people that write them.

One of the games we play in our show is called "Rewind." It involves two to three actors, a host and a pianist. Before the game begins, the host sources the audience for a song title. The actors then improvise a short, underscored scene based on the suggestion. At the first logical break, the host freezes the scene and asks the actors and pianist to repeat it beat for beat in a variety of different styles of entertainment, solicited from the audience. The suggestions he/she asks for are typically some combination of the following:

1) A famous playwright or style of theater
2) A style of movie or film director
3) Your favorite TV network
4) A style of music

We tend to get a lot of the same suggestions show to show. This is particularly true when we ask for playwrights, because everyone knows the same five or six. Here's a short list of who those playwrights are, and what about percentage of the time we get them:

Shakespeare - 90%
Tennessee Williams - 5%
David Mamet - 2%
Neil Simon - 2%
Eugene O'Neil, Brecht, Kabuki, Theater of the Absurd, Rogers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Miller - <1%>

These, however, are big ol' estimates, and I've always wanted to collect some raw data. Below I've transcribed the actual Rewind suggestions from the first three shows of this tour:

Show #1: Arroyo Grande, CA
Playwright 1: Shakespeare
Playwright 2: Eugene O'Neil
TV Network: Logo
Musical Style: Opera

Show #2: Modesto, CA
Playwright 1: Shakespeare
Playwright 2: David Mamet
Movie Director 1: Michael Bay
Movie Director 2: Tim Burton
Musical Style: Rap

Show #3: Modesto, CA
Playwright 1: Oscar Wilde
Playwright 2: Shakespeare
TV Network: MTV
Musical Style: Screamo

As usual, everyone wants to see Shakespeare, and Mamet and O'Neil both made their customary side show appearance. But there were a few surprises in there. Oscar Wilde, I discovered, translates in my brain to "play something staid, Britishy and classical sounding. Unfortunately, so does Shakespeare. If anyone in the audience had really been paying attention to the underscoring at that point in the show, they would have been underwhelmed with me. More than they should be for my sloppy dress and poor frizz control, anyway.

The only suggestion we get more frequently than Shakespeare is rap. I have two guesses as to why this might be:

1) Our audiences tend to be predominantly elderly, and elderly folks have a hard time taking rap seriously.
2) They've all seen the episode of Whose Line is it Anyway where Wayne Brady and Stephen Colbert rap dying in an avalanche, over a beat that sounds suspiciously like The Doors' "Touch Me."

Above: The thing I was just talking about.

Oh, also, Modesto was not nearly as awful as everyone says it is, the folks at the theatre were absurdly kind to us, and it was nice to have high school students in the audience, because they engage better than the older folks. They also forced me to figure out what "Screamo" was on the fly, which I appreciated. I think I got it about 80% right.

Tomorrow: I either explain what it was like to perform as part of the annual Fallon, NV Migratory Bird Festival, or ramble on about something completely different.

*Totally lime-flavored, actually.

The Poison Cure

I know this probably ain’t the place to do it but. I’ma do it anyway.

So there’s this word in ancient Greek.

Pharmakon.

I showed it to one of my boys at the Greek joint I work at.

He said it was a last name.

Derrida says different.

He says it is a word that appears and does not appear in Phaedrus by Plato.

Derrida is interested in the way it operates though absent as part of a semi-evident word chain.

I am interested in it’s moving definitions.

It seems to be a word that slurs. A symbol that slides cleanly from meaning poison to meaning cure.

I wonder if it don’t pick up all the meanings in between. If so does that make it all words. Only being one word. If so does this make it mean the whole world entire.

Pharmakon.

My Ex used to say, quoting someone, that New York was an attraction repulsion devise to extreme to be invented.

It just is.

Just was.

Just exists.

Pharmakon also relates to two separate phenomenon that interest me a bit.

Writing.

And Jesus.

It seems that Pharmakon is used to describe the gift of writing. From the God Teuth to the King Thamus. As a cure for Memory.

Okay.

Then it turns into a poison for memory.

Writing.

Okay. So this thing meant to fix the problem insinuates itself in between the problem and us, exacerbating the problem and making itself as the cure more necessary. With the writing you don’t need to remember so good is the cure.

So that.

Other thing.

Pharmakos is also a religious custom. Seems people used to be cast out of the village once a year in ancient Greece. Seems it was to purify the village. Seems they was mostly the ugly and the poor. Seem it happened in May.

Seem like they took all the sin on them.

They treated them nice first.

Fed em. Got em drunk.

Then pushed 'em off a cliff.

Some folks think they were burned.

When it wasn’t the ugly and the poor.

It was the beautiful. The brilliant. The rich.

Especially in times of plague. In times it seemed the village was being punished more than usually.

That’s when the best went instead of the worst.

They come at Oedipus that way.

They come at all lambs that way.

Jesus seemed to throw himself in their way.

Seemed to step in between the problem and us. Seemed to say I’ll take one for the team.

So then every Sunday.

My family goes to church to eat the best man we ever heard of.

In magic. In symbol. In metaphor.

So we don’t have to kick anybody out of the village.

But that ain’t really enough.

Cause every once and a while.

The metaphor got to be reinvigorated.

We got to kill a bad man. With a lightening chair.

A monk gotta pour himself all over with gasoline.

A pop star gotta killim self with pills.

Or a car.

Or twelve year old boys.

Pharmakon.

Cure to disease.

And the mutherfucker of it is.

It is bigger than the definition.

It is bigger than the word.

It might just be bigger than all words.

It might just be a thing that we cain’t understand.

Just watch.

Over and over and over again.

So big. It takes up the entire world by bein the entire world.

Even though we know ain’t no angry God to appease.

Just us.

We keep doin it.

And if it is as inescapable as all that.

Mightn’t it be as though there were a God we cannot escape.

That’s what I been thinking.

Pharmakon.

The Poison Cure.

Come see E.S.T.'s Marathon.

I wrote a play with some of this in it.

It’s called Matthew and the Pastor’s Wife.

Blogging Bloodworks: Moench edition

Well. It's that time of year again. The Reckoning.

Every spring we come to the nasty realization that we were supposed to be writing plays all year, so we sign up for Bloodworks reading slots, hoping that a deadline will force us to get off our asses (or sit on them for hours on end, staring into computer screens) and pull something together.

In an uncharacteristic display of volunteerism the likes of which would probably have gotten me bayoneted at Gettysburg, I will be going first. My play is called IN QUIETNESS, and it is takes place in the Homemaking House at a Southern Baptist seminary.

A little background info: A few years ago, a certain seminary began offering a B.A. in Homemaking, open only to women. This came on the heels of the seminary president's decision to fire a female professor of Biblical languages (despite her tenure-track status), because he interprets that the Bible prohibits women from teaching men theology. This president also happens to be the president of the whole Southern Baptist Convention, and since his tenure began in the '90s the SBC has banned women from the ministry. These days the SBC actively promotes the concept of complementarianism—the idea that God created men and women as "equal but different." Men have been created by God to lead, and women to follow and support.

Now, I'm a feminist. I'm the daughter of two scientists. I’m also the granddaughter of a pastor and an organist. I grew up going to church every Sunday, coming home, and pushing a dozen lab coats out of the way to hang up my jacket in the hall closet. By age 5 I could tell you about Noah's journey on the Ark, pause for a breath, and then tell you about Charles Darwin's journey on the HMS Beagle. My dad can use a drillpress and thread a sewing machine, and so can I.

As a kid I never thought of these things—science/religion, power tools/cleaning solvents—as contradictions. It's probably no surprise, then, that I take issue with complementarianism. But that, me taking issue with that, that's not what this play is about.

A basic force that drives me to write is the desire to become a more compassionate person. The most wonderful moments I've had in life or art are those when suddenly I realize what a closed-minded, judgmental douchebag I am. And every time it happens it's kind of upsetting and kind of horrifying and kind of a gloriously enormous relief that I realized it while there's still time to do better. So for me, that's what writing this play has been about. Trying really hard to understand where the people I vehemently disagree with are coming from, trying to see the value in a system I have always viewed as outdated, ignorant, and unethical. Looking really hard at the grey areas and trying to have enough humility to admit that maybe, maybe, I could possibly be a little bit wrong. Maybe.

...Um. We'll see.

IN QUIETNESS

by Anna Moench

Wednesday, May 19 at 7pm

Schaerberle Studio Theatre at Pace University

41 Park Row, 10th floor

Super Cool Musician's Tour Journal: Day 2 -- Arroyo Grande, CA

Usually when we travel, we arrive at our destination the morning of our show. But because trying to fly all the way across the country day-of and expecting nothing to go wrong is about as silly as writing a blog post at 2 a.m. the night before you wake up at the crack of dawn to drive five hours on unfamiliar roads, we arrived in Arroyo Grande last night, which meant that we were able to wake up today and visit the town's famous swinging bridge:

(WOW, a picture would be so great here!)

...Doc Burnstein's Ice Cream Parlor:

(Imagine if I were able to post a picture of it and you could see just how charming it is. You would lose your shit).

...and the soon-to-be world famous Sweet Shop Named Desire:



(Artists rendition)

Our show was on the 617-seat main stage in the Clark Center, which was both beautiful and brand new. When professional photographers take pictures of it at sunset, it looks like this:



It was built entirely with donor money and used by several local high schools for their stage productions. They also program their own season, mostly music, dance and comedy from the looks of it. Some of what came before us this spring, in no particular order:

- The Peking Acrobats
- Yesterday, A Tribute to The Beatles
- The Best of San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition
- Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra
- The Guthrie Family Rides Again With Arlo Guthrie

I wouldn't say our show was quite Peking Acrobats good, but it was definitely Guthrie Family good. Part of that had to do with the amazing parmesan-crusted bread we were given to eat before the show. It was truly the kind of bread you tear in half, only to realize you really want the whole piece, and no matter that it's over on the counter in a Ziploc bag and you're already sitting down.

About 250 people came out to see us. It's weird for a 250-person crowd to feel small, and in a house that size it definitely does, but the audience at the Clark Center more than made up for it be being one of the most focused and energetic we've ever performed for. They even laughed their heads off at our opening blues game*, which last got a laugh in St. Cloud, MN in October, 2009.

As a result, the show was one of the better shows we've done as a group in a long time. We improvised a musical about a couple in the audience that met on MySpace and was married by Elvis. We invented a story about a coroner cursed with incredible longevity, doomed to embalm and plaster makeup on the faces of each of his friends and loved ones, one by one. And we closed with a scene about bong juice, in which I tried and failed to make generic reggae sound convincing on a grand piano.

I wish we could stay here for an extended run, but tomorrow we're off to Modesto, which seems to be a dirty word out here, for some reason. Whatever. I have a feeling I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Tomorrow: I give the Gallo Center in Modesto, CA the Youngblog treatment.

Hey look, I found a picture of the swinging bridge!



*More on this tomorrow, and the other improv games we play, including a very special discussion of playwrights.

Youngblood Recommends...

Woo-hoo Youngblood is now recommending things!

Such as:

Theatre!

And whatever else we feel moved to recommend. Stay tuned...

Hot Playwrights II

Obviously Will is an amazing writer. But I also think playwright Will Eno is sexy, even though I once got rejected from a workshop he was teaching. (Don't reject me... I hold grudges!)

He's sexy in a serious, introverted kind of way, like that kid in high school who read Nietzsche and always hung out in the art room. The kind of guy who grows up to be a hot Park Slope dad (which is how he looks in this photo.)

It's hot, but it can also go too far. I'll bet he'd want to go shopping for used books at The Strand on a first date, which is cool, but then he'd spend the whole time "teaching" you about his favorite books and making you feel lame for not being as well read as him. Plus, I'd worry that he wouldn't laugh when you tell a funny joke.

You're not so cool, Will Eno! What a jerk! WE'RE BREAKING UP. Wait, what? Sorry. I'm sorry.

Anyway, Will Eno is brilliant and pretty.

Super Cool Musician's Tour Journal: Day 1 -- Newark, NJ to San Luis Obispo, CA

I've spent the last seven months trying to convince the rest of Youngblood that I'm really, really good at playing the piano. I'm not sure how well I've succeeded, but it at least seems like when I say things like "modulation" and "mixolydian scale" in group, they tend to believe that I a) know what I'm talking about and b) have a good reason for bringing it up, other than an aggressive need to be listened to. In reality, my piano skills aren't all that great. But they're good enough that, occasionally, I get to go places and use them.

One of the groups I use them with is a short-form musical improv company called Chicago City Limits, which as its name implies, is based in New York -- nearish EST. In addition to our New York show, we perform on the road about twice a month. And when I'm trying to delay working on my Bloodworks piece, I blog about it.

When we travel, we wind up in a whole bunch regional theaters in a whole bunch of places. Many are brand new, built mid-last decade as part of their home city's downtown rehabilitation effort. Some are beautifully restored old vaudeville houses. But almost all of them put shows on stage, and most of them put bodies in the seats way better than we do in New York.

Since we're about to start a four day swing through California and Nevada, I figured I'd try and find out what business is like at the theaters we perform in, who their audiences are and what sorts of shows they have going on when we're not around. But since I’m a shitty journalist who will probably fail to ask the right person to answer those questions for me, I'll probably fill in with details of what it was like to perform there, and whether or not they had pepperoni sticks waiting for us when we arrived.

I wish I could start on this now, but as I write this, I'm on an airplane about midway between Newark and San Francisco, eating a turkey dog in a crescent roll. "Oh, you must have bought that turkey dog at the gate," you say. Nope. They were giving them out on the plane. FOR FREE. On an airplane in 2010. That doesn't happen.

Also:

1) Two Southwest Airlines 757s just flew by going the opposite way. If you ever doubted how fast planes go, wait 'till you see one fly by you in midair. They go FAST.
2) Three and a half hours into the flight I have yet to see ground. Apparently it was a cloudy afternoon basically everywhere in America today.
3) Listening to Semisonic at 30,000 feet is about the same as listening to Semisonic at sea level. Pretty good.

Tomorrow: I try my best to describe the Clark Center in Arroyo Grande, CA.

Because I left my camera at home, I will leave you with a file photo of a jet plane.

sub-Urban Dictionary

Technology is great, right? Except when it's terrible. But sometimes it's great. Like for instance, spell-check. A thing that is great, except when it's terrible, like when it tricks you into thinking you have a flawless draft when in fact you have a draft full of homonyms and misplaced character names. Naturally I always proofread everything I send out, I mean, really carefully, but for some reason I am mostly a terrible proofreader, except for a brief period of time that begins a half hour after I have mailed my submissions, a period during which I frantically read through the draft I just sent and suddenly locate every single one of its errors and a sad trombone plays wah-wah.

Anyway, a thing I do very much like about spell-check is the bit where you build your own dictionary. Just like the pioneers! You tell your spell-check machine to learn the words that you create/mildly misspell, and from then on it thinks those words are actual words! Even when they are not! And sometimes when they are! A writer's spell-check dictionary is a personal and precious object, which is why I am going to share with you a few selections from mine. I think you will agree that it reveals a rich artistic life.

• ahh
• Ahhhhh
• Apocalypsey
• bro-ham
• defeatarian
• Glenlivet
• Marx
• obvi
  
• teleporter
  
• Voldemort
• woooooooooo

I know, and I'm all, when is the Morgan Library gonna call me already? Sheeeeeeesh. PS I am not spell-checking this post.

Hot Playwrights

I was at an event for playwrights last year (it wouldn't be nice of me to say which one) when I had a realization: in general, we're kind of fugly. I looked around at these pasty, pudding people with their bad skin and jacked up outfits and thought, "I might as well be at a Dungeons & Dragons convention."

I know I'm generalizing in a way that's not very nice. I'm doing it on purpose because it's fun. I've written about it elsewhere, but Martin McDonagh is a massive exception to the uggo rule. Check it out:

Oh snap! He's one hot silver fox. Can't you just picture smoking a cigarette with him in bed? I don't even smoke!

I can only think of one playwright who I think is hotter, but I actually know him so I won't post his name here. What do you think? Who are the hip, stylish, sexy, cool playwrights?