Writing

Beginning in childhood, writing has always been my default mode of self-expression. Inspired by a course during my first year in college, I wrote an autobiography in the third person. When I showed it to the editor of my college’s literary magazine, he said I had a good ear for dialogue and might try writing a play instead. The summer after graduation I finally did just that, and the following year it got me into the playwriting program at the Yale Drama School, where I began what became a life-long journey of artistic exploration. 

 

“The Gilded Cage”

The Gilded Cage,” an opera composed by Victor Kioulaphides, for whom I wrote the libretto, is about Phillis Wheatley, a slave who was adopted by the wealthy Wheatley family in Boston during the American Revolution and became a famous poet. She eventually married a freed Black businessman who became imprisoned, and Phillis died in poverty. In this scene we see the couple fighting. See Link for full video.

 
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My first theatrical script…

… was a libretto based on “The Scarlet Letter,” which I wrote at Princeton for James Dashow, who used it for his senior thesis. That summer, after graduating, I wrote my first play, “The Bookcase,” which then got me into the Yale Drama School the following year. It was basically realistic in terms of conversation, but also kind of science fiction surreal and absurd. The first reading of it was in my parents’ basement. I then wrote a number of one-acts, including “The Writer,” which I directed at the Exit Theater in New Haven, and “Drive-In,” a comedy about the ‘50s, which was my most “successful” (i.e. well-liked) at Yale. One summer I wrote “Seven Loving Women,” which was performed at the Aspen Theater Workshop, with me in the lead role.

In my second year at the Drama School, I stopped writing naturalistic plays and began exploring new forms, trying to do for theater what was happening in music and the visual arts. In “The Sphinx,” based on the Oedipus legend, every character had a set of word modules, from which all their lines of dialogue were formed, but there was still a plot and characters. In “We Four,” though, which came next, there was no longer any plot but just characters named A,B, C and D. Finally, for my thesis play, I had out-patients from a psychiatric hospital write whatever they wanted on file cards, which were then scattered about the stage and read by dancers as they picked them up, accompanied by a flutist and bassoonist, who gradually took his instrument apart, down to the mouthpiece.



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After graduation…

…I worked intermittently on various plays, including “Colloquies,” which were lines, unassigned to any characters, for an ensemble of actors to improvise with. (In retrospect, I see it as actually a form of conversational poetry, not a play at all.) “Grasping” was a screenplay about my divorce, and “Mama’s Boy” a kind of autobiography, featuring a play-within-a-play-within-a-play. Thou Shalt Not Come has two separate plots that converge in the end, and To Die 4 takes place within the mind of a nursing home patient.

I have also written several opera librettos, including “The Gilded Cage” (see above), “The Vision of Perpetua” and “Dance of the Stones,” all of which I also directed (see Directing).

Over the years, too, I have written some poetry,, including “365: A Journey to the Present,” which consists of the poems I wrote every day for a year. Another set of poems, Signs of Myself, has one poem for each sign of the Zodiac. After that I wrote 40 Thoughts, each about a paragraph long, accompanied by selections from my photographs. This was followed by pieces even smaller in size: Life Sentences, which are 366 sentences ranging from the personal to the philosophical..

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