Writing is a lonely venture. It entails long hours of solitude and the agony of wrestling with demons and self-doubt.

So the opportunity to give and receive feedback with other writers is (mostly) a welcome one. The important thing is partaking in this blood sport with fellow writers you trust, whose work you admire, who make your work better and who are receptive to your thoughts about their work.   That's a lot of qualifications. Such writers do exist, but it's clear that I am very picky when it comes to whom I enjoy giving and taking criticism.

For the ​​27th Annual UW Writers Institute, I've been tasked with critiquing the work of a number of writers I've never met. Aside from their names and the ten pages of manuscript they each have submitted I know nothing about them. I don't know how long they've been writing, how new or successful they've been, or even if these ten pages are all they have or simply the beginning of a completed seven book series. I don't know if a particular writer is 17 or 70. (The writing itself doesn't always give me a hint of age.)

Nonetheless, that's my job: to do my best in reviewing these ten pages and offering my thoughts.

It's a daunting challenge - akin to commenting on a friend's newborn baby Even the ugliest child deserves a kind comment. It's important to be honest and frank, but it's also important not to damage a fragile and earnest soul who may be the next Jack Kerouac. Besides, I just could be wrong in my assessment. I have never enjoyed reading James Joyce, for instance, so what does that say about me?

Some of the manuscripts I've received are utterly brilliant, so much so that I find it difficult to offer any comment at all other than, "Wow"  Wow isn't a particularly helpful critique and it doesn't fill the two written pages and thirty minutes of conversation that the submitter has paid for. For at least two of the writers currently on my docket, I am having a very difficult time figuring out anything to say other than Wow. They have awed me with their command of the craft.

There are a couple of writers whose work is perhaps less than awe-inspiring, to my reading tastes, that is. And yet, that doesn't mean they don't have a story to tell. I struggled with the craft of writing for years. I still do. It's not easy. Taking the plunge at all is difficult. Finding gentle ways to help guide new or clumsy writers is important. I had my mentors. Writers who saw something in what I was trying to do that wasn't quite there yet. Without their encouragement and their criticism, I never would have attained the (limited) heights I have.

Critiquing other writers makes me a better writer. That's something I learned as a member of various writing groups over the years.

I can only hope I have something to offer these writers, that I will meet next week. ​​​

My favorite actors are those who transform themselves with every role - actors like Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman. Locally, it's actors like Jim Ridge, Colleen Madden, Brian Mani, Edric Johnson, Jamie England, Jordan Peterson. Donovan Armbruster.

This season, I have the sweet challenge or playing educated, upper-class English gentlemen ​in three plays from the first half of the twentieth century (plays by Agatha Christie, George Bernard Shaw, and Noel Coward).

It wouldn't necessarily be wrong to play them all the same​. There's a lot of similarities between these characters (a police detective, a British colonel and a medical doctor). But where would the challenge be in playing them all the same, and how boring for me as an actor (not to mention boring for any audience member who might happen to see me in all three plays). The trick is finding what distinguishes these gentlemen from each other and bringing those distinctions to life, without being gimmicky or imposing a physicality or vocalization that reads false.

Just as I was starting to sort this out in my ​tiny actor's brain, the director for my current role (Sam White) started squeezing me into a box where neither my body nor my voice wanted to go. To say that I was resistant was an understatement. Sam wants what Sam wants, which is his right as a director, but what he wanted wasn't making sense to me and I couldn't figure out how to weave his direction into my performance.

Then finally it hit me. Sam was offering me the key to playing this British colonel in Misalliance very distinctly from the police detective I just played in The Mousetrap. I stopped fighting his direction, and it is starting to feel like I am becoming "someone else" - which is what every actor is required to do.

The show is still a couple of weeks away from opening, and it's up to Sam to decide if I'm satisfying his direction. It will be up to the audience to determine if I meet my goal of becoming someone else - a distinct character, true to the script and appropriately idiosyncratic. And then in a few weeks, I get to start the process all over again when rehearsals for Blithe Spirit start.

It's an actors dream.

There's much that I enjoy about theatre, but foremost is collaboration.

In this most recent project (Are We Delicious at Broom Street Theatre, Madison Dec 3-12)​ eight of the eleven people pictured above write, act, direct and stage manage. The other three keep us motivated and on track.

We each wrote a play. We each act in two (or more) plays. We each direct and stage manage a play. And all of this went from concept to opening night in ... six days.

Thanks to my delicious creative partners. This has been a sweet ride, with one more weekend of performances to go. I never imagined I'd write a piece about two strangers kidnapped in Somalia at Christmas, or that I would play God in one play and a Mafioso in another - all part of a single production.

For those of you who can't make the show, here's my contribution to the work, "Spiny Bone". Too bad you can't see the terrific performances of Dan Steger and Jason Compton, who nailed it.​
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I haven't been writing much lately. On the blog that is. Partly because I've been busy writing off the blog.

There's this worrisome play I've been working on for, oh, let's say two years. The first two scenes fell on the page almost without my help, it seemed, and two years later, after numerous re-writes, those scenes are pretty much intact.

After those first two scenes, I put the project away for a bit because I didn't know what my characters were going to do next. Then a month or two later, they let me know, and scene three was laid down. It also has stayed intact.

The play needed an ending. After another month I wrote one. I took it for a reading at Playwrights Ink in Madison and it justifiably bombed. It was too neat, too staged, too everything. It didn't work.

Months went by. I wrote another ending. Didn't like it.

More months. Another ending. Didn't like it either.

Then one day this fall I heard or saw something that gave me the idea for the perfect ending for this play. I wrote it, and since it involved a rather unusual method of murder, I vetted it with a doctor who provided some good recommendations to make it viable.

I'm hoping to have a reading of the play, "WILL", in Madison this winter, and then the woeful process of submissions begins. Very, very, very few theatres produce new works, and those that do mostly produce new works from writers who are already affiliated with that theatre. So ... wish me luck.

But meanwhile ... here's a short monologue I just finished. It was inspired by an online audition I had for "Are We Delicious", a show I'll be writing for and acting in this December. But this piece won't be in Delicious. It's for something else, and now, if you like, for your enjoyment (if that's the right word).
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Roughly six months ago, I wrote a column with this title - referencing several actors who were so damn good that they challenged the heck out of me and consequently made my own work better.

Well, here we are again.

This time the culprit is an actor name Sean Langenecker. ​

Sean's a little, well, off-kilter - at first glance. But that's just an illusion. He's definitely in a league and often a world of his own. He's high-spirited, zany, energetic, handsome, and like many actors - actually rather shy. He's playing the eccentric Christopher Wren in Strollers Theatre's current production of The Mousetrap. And with every line, every movement, every entrance and exit and even when he's sitting still on stage - he pushes the envelope. On opening night last week, it felt like when Sean was on stage all the oxygen in the room was being taken up.

I suppose it would not be unnatural for a fellow actor to resent his powerful presence. I liken it to what I imagine it would be if I could act with, say, Carol Burnett. Carol Burnett worked with a lot of great talent, but when she was on stage, no matter who else was in the scene - the stage belonged to Carol Burnett. She had that magic.

So does Sean. ​​​ I hope he has some inkling of how good he is.

Dorothy Day was a most ordinary woman. If you encountered her on the streets of New York or any other city, you would likely not have cast a second glance. Soft spoken, she seemed to me to walk through the world simultaneously resolutely and cautiously – as if she always knew just where she was going, while always sensitive to whatever or whomever she might encounter. She had a strong, firm handshake, which matched the steady gaze from her kind eyes when she looked at you.

My mother was fortunate to live the last year of her life at the 1st Street Catholic Worker in lower Manhattan, in Dorothy Day’s own quarters. I’d gotten to know Dorothy in the previous couple of years, through my friendship with Daniel Berrigan, and I had visited many times. I also had three friends (Bonnie, Barbara and Dale) from Oklahoma who had moved to New York and were now regular volunteers at the Worker.

Of course I was aware of Dorothy’s history and her importance to so many people. I knew how her Catholic Worker “House of Hospitality” had been replicated in more than a hundred communities around the world. I knew how simply she herself lived.

Still, when I think back on it, I must not have appreciated fully the gift I had been given – to spend time in her presence, to engage her in quiet conversation, to break bread with her at the 1st Street soup kitchen where my mother volunteered.

I was not surprised that this Pope honored Dorothy Day by acknowledging her words and her life in his address before Congress yesterday. Pope Francis is after all a Jesuit, and it always seemed that the Jesuits “got” Dorothy Day, more than other Catholics especially the various Popes in Rome during her lifetime, to whom Dorothy was often a thorn in their side.

So here’s to you, Dorothy Day, for some long-overdue ray of recognition for your service and your example.

And thank you, for being so good to my mom.

This afternoon I attended a one hour talk-back session with our state representative, Todd Novak. The topic was the egregious education policy changes written into the proposed Wisconsin state budget, poised for approval by the state legislature. This budget will effectively transfer millions of dollars of tax dollars from public to private education, stripping public schools of desperately needed funds, and filling the coffers of for-profit private enterprises that are currently universally religious in nature.

Approximately thirty concerned citizens attended, including parents and administrators and school board members from a number of schools in this legislative district. Not one person spoke in favor of the proposed changes. The attendees came armed with facts and figures, detailing exactly how much money each school in the district stood to lose as public funds, collected locally, flow to private schools located outside our district. These private schools will also, according to the policy written into the ‘budget’, not have to answer to any standards or tests, which are required of the public schools. They can teach anything they want. They can teach nothing at all. They have to follow no standards.

Add to this the unimaginable proposal to eliminate even minimal requirements for teachers, and you have a clusterfuck of major proportion. The current proposal before the legislature would allow anyone to teach, without any teacher training, without a bachelor degree, hell – even without a high school degree. This proposal has made Wisconsin the laughing stock of the country, even the world. Rep. Novak said that the language for this section of the budget is being ‘pulled back’ because there has been some outrage over it – but it’s only being pulled back in part.

It was a wretched way to spend an hour – tormenting oneself with the harsh realities of what a Republican governor and a Republican State Senate and a Republican State Assembly want to do to public education in this state.

But the worst of it was not the endless list of calamities that this legislation will inflict, bad as they are. What offended me the most was Rep. Novak saying, no less than eighteen times in one hour: “Unfortunately, the train has left the station …” And then he would shrug, and smile and pretend to commiserate with the parents and educators who universally – to the very last person in the room – opposed the proposed changes that promise to eviserate public education in this state.

The train has left the station.

And with this glib statement, Rep. Novak washed his hands, again and again and again, of the problem. When an attendee challenged his hiding behind this phrase toward the end of the hour long meeting, he intoned that he only meant to say that the move toward privatization in education started before he was elected to the Assembly, and that it’s not going to be stopped now. His response was hardly a response at all. It doesn’t matter whether this travesty was initiated ten years ago or ten minutes ago – shrugging your shoulders and meekly smiling is not an acceptable answer to a constituency that is outraged by the back-door dealings of private school profiteers and legislators in Madison.

We deserve a better answer. We deserve a better state representative – one who will represent us and not simply vote the party line. We deserve (our children deserve) better schools.