PROLOGUE

I realized only after writing the entirety of this edition's content that this marks the one year anniversary of Art and Craft. Thank you so much for tuning in each month; my hope for every edition is that I provide a little snippet that compels you to engage with or consider something of the topics at hand, and that doesn’t happen without your thought or attention. My goal for this newsletter is not metrics and visibility—it’s dialogue. If there are any topics you find particularly compelling, or editions you have found to be most engaging, I’d love to hear about them. I’m considering doing a year’s retrospective and ranking what I’ve released so far, either for the next edition or for a special edition.

The anniversary marks an exciting event, as well. As I write this, at 11:08 PM on February 26, I have just confirmed I will be taking part in the Summer 2026 Session of the Yale Writers’ Workshop for screenwriting. This will be a weeklong program where I will have the opportunity to kick my scripts around a circle of other dedicated writers and receive guidance, hopefully, from people who know the craft very well. This opportunity, I want to be very clear to note, is only possible through the support of my parents, and I want to give all credit to them for helping me actually attend the thing.

So… exciting events on the horizon. Thanks again for being here. I’m so very, very eager to share what comes next with you.

ART

Catchup from January—a coupla reviews for various forms.

Under the Radar swept into town these past couple months, meaning New York City’s theatres have been filled with experimental theatrical projects I’ve made a point of catching. Though I missed out on the free tickets being offered by Mayor Mamdani and Governor Hochul, a generous birthmas gift from my parents allowed me to snag tickets to a few of these shows, one of which I even had the chance to see with Ryan while they were visiting the East Coast from their studies in LA.

I also had the chance to hit a restaurant I’ve been meaning to try for ages now with my friend-and-roommate. The experience, a classic New York arrive-two-hours-early-and-camp-outside-the-establishment-in-the-snow, yielded a gustatory experience for me that reminded me of the sort of rich, subtle expression that can go into food; it also defeated my sweet tooth.

Both these occasions reinforced to me the value of sharing experiences with friends and family. More on the individual events, and the way company enriched them, below.

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 Try/Step/Trip

Last year, I journeyed alone to the West Village to catch an Under the Radar play because my college theatre experience had alerted me that UtR was a hip, avant-garde theatre event that all cutting-edge thespians should be able to refer to off-hand; the festival’s tagline is “Unlike anything you’ve ever seen.” The show I saw—“play” doesn’t feel a fitting moniker for what this was—was a series of shoots by a professional photographer with his three subjects, each related via voice-over to the photographer’s lived experiences. As he posed his subjects, handed them props, and adjusted lighting and scenery, the pictures he took were displayed in real time on two massive screens flanking the stage.

The play itself was a commentary on the relationship between a photographer and their subjects, a photographer and their own psyche, an audience and the object of their attention. It was vivid and absorbing, surprisingly kinetic for what was essentially an hour-long photoshoot. I remember being intellectually stimulated, though not compelled on some spiritual level. After the show, I lingered in the lobby, eager to shake the photographer’s hand and ask him about his work—but I realized I didn’t have anything that felt worthwhile for me to ask him. As the crowd thinned out and the man of the hour drifted closer and closer my way, I fled, slipping out of the building to eat dinner at a dimly-lit Italian place next door, a lone diner drawing pitying smiles in an intimate setting clearly intended for couples. I ate a lasagna flight I could hardly see in the candlelight and tried to ignore the coughing of the man sat next to me—”I'm not feeling well,” he murmured to his date—while I hunched out of the way of wait staff flitting past my aisle seat.

This year’s Under the Radar was different. This year I started off with Ryan.

While they were on winter leave from their grad studies in Los Angeles, Ryan took a train from Boston to New York and spent a weekend with me in the city. Amidst the frenzy of activity we planned for ourselves, we scouted out the available showtimes for Under the Radar and chose tickets for Try/Step/Trip.

The decision wasn't entirely ours. Given our packed schedule for the weekend, we had very few slots to cram a play into, and not a great many plays still running which met our parameters. Those parameters were simple, mind you, really just one ordinance: “The play should be a play with a story.” This simple mandate, however, slashed our options within this festival of experimental delights. After all, Under the Radar shows push boundaries as a matter of rule. To find a conventional play amongst the event's many showings was an oddity.

So ultimately, “choosing” Try/Step/Trip was a matter of the piece being one of the few more narrative works being presented with a showtime on Sunday night. Those circumstances turned out to be fortuitous.

Try/Step/Trip is a piece by Dahlak Brathwaite built around rhythmic performance. While he operates a turntable and a sampler upstage right, his ensemble details an autobiographical story of his experience in a twelve-step program resulting from a drug charge.

The piece is an account of American institutions and identity woven into a hip-hop tapestry. It’s an absolutely magnetic show. It has great music, riveting choreography, and compelling language all driven by an utterly compelling cast. These actors are capital-C Charismatic.

The medium and form of the show itself, this hip-hop musical—“musical” feels diminutive somehow—weren't simply for show, or to cash in on Hamilton’s success; they reinforced the themes of the show by emphasizing the repetition, remix, and synthesis of the playwright's ideas and experiences. The physicality of the “step” form resonated throughout the small black box theatre. It had a dynamism that had audience members clapping and calling out and cheering the team on in the midst of the performance. The energy was electric. 

I should note—I only put “step” in quotes because my brief internet search did not yield any satisfying matches for what the style was, but one of the cast members designed choreography for STOMP, if that's any indication of the sort of performance we witnessed.

Watching the piece with Ryan enhanced my experience of the play because we could talk about the thing afterward, reflect together. We are currently assembling a play about our experiences traveling across the country together, and it was such a blast being able to talk about what about the play inspired us, how its impact was shaped by its creative team. Being in the black box theatre together, I told Ryan about seeing our mutual friend in the same space for a Shakespeare show some months back, where he’d nailed Caliban in The Tempest. We revelled together in the way we were swept away by the performance, the ways it resonated with us.

Best of all, at the end of the night, we travelled home together, sharing the moonlight and looking forward to the next day.

The Visitors

I owe my having seen this play to Madz, a friend of mine and of the newsletter. They got me free tickets to a Friday night show, a benefit of their work in audience services. Thanks again, Madz!

The Visitors was a really nifty play in how it explored initial contact with a foreign people. It was built around the contact of Indigenous Australians with European colonists in the early days, I think, of European invasion.

The play started off with the actors speaking entirely in their native language. It occurred to me that I could watch a well-directed work in another language and be totally riveted throughout—I was almost disappointed when they started speaking English. I think I love being immersed in things I don’t understand, in art. I love the challenge of sitting in something expressive and trying to figure it out. As it was, when the actors eventually shifted into English I still got to delight in their Australian accents.

The rhythm of the dialogue was nice, which was a good thing considering the play was fairly philosophical and conversational; I could sit back and just enjoy the flow of how the characters engaged with each other.

There was a way the set and costumes got rediscovered at the end of the play that was absolutely beautiful. What began as a mish-mash of modern formal European attire was unfurled and rearranged to create gorgeous Indigenous dress. The set itself, appearing throughout the rest of the piece as a craggy outcropping and vast rock walls, was draped in dusk and lit in the soft glow with intricate patterns as the actors described the shape and secrets of their native land. It was an ending that swept me away in a sense of awe and compelled me to learn a bit more about the events amidst which the play took place.

Watch Me Walk

This play was showing at a relatively small theatre at Playwrights Horizons. I saw it as a matinee because the performance was listed as Masks Required and I still get a little antsy in crowds sometimes. Ugh, what a play.

It was as emotionally dynamic as it was physically dynamic, which is to say very. The play began with the audience doing exactly what the title suggests, watching the writer and lead actor, Anne Gridley, walking back and forth around a blank stage. The point of all that, though, was that the playwright has a disability which impacts her gait, and the prolonged act of simply watching her walk very quickly sparked an empathic connection with the performance. I write “empathic” as opposed to “empathetic” because I think there’s less of a potential association with pity in the former; her starting the play in such a way very directly challenged the audience to consider our judgements of her stride, our feelings of our own physical capabilities, and what feelings we might experience were we in her position or a similar one.

The tone of the play was biting and self-aware—it made me think about how I engage with people and the patience, consideration, and judgement I offer or do not offer. At the end, it very directly addressed the phenomenon of an audience paying to attend a play, ultimately a piece of entertainment, centered around someone’s disability, noting how people with disabilities are often leveraged for amusement and worse. 

What does it mean for me to enjoy art centered around someone else’s disability? I think there’s a normative instinct to think in terms of “Oh, they’re so brave, they speak so truthfully, how amazing that I have learned more and been bettered by their art.” I think the playwright managed to avoid constructing a piece in such a way where that was an easy response, though. She spoke, frequently with significant and certainly justified vitriol, about the hypocrisy of her environment, her own insecurities, her frustrations. She talked about her judgements of herself, and reflected on how she is typically seen and engaged with. She did everything to make the audience painfully aware of our own gaze.

It was a phenomenal play regardless of its broader philosophical implications—it inspired me to think about the psychological connection between an audience and a performer, how that bond can be established and tugged on. The play started with the Gridley walking the stage and introducing vocabulary of disability to the audience and ended with a profound exploration of the playwright’s relationship with her family. It began intensely voyeuristically and ended bringing the audience in on a sing-along in its penultimate moments. Each moment I reflect on it here it occurs to me more how brilliantly structured it was.

It was meaningful for me as an able-bodied audience member; I know at least one friend of mine with a disability who was even more compelled by it for its personal resonance. Apparently, the playwright is a local who attends the same climbing gym this friend of mine does. I hope they have many rich interactions.

Ulysses

Ever since studying them in Contemporary Developments in college, I have wanted to see a performance by Elevator Repair Service. They’re known for their efforts porting works of literature to the stage; their best-known example of this is Gatz, an all-day extravaganza that sees The Great Gatsby recounted word-for-word by the company as they make a grand mess of the stage. When I heard they were performing for Under the Radar, I knew I wanted to get a ticket—and was able to thanks to a generous gift from my parents.

Their production this time was titled Ulysses, and, naively, I anticipated a retelling of the classic myth. No, this was an account of James Joyce’s modernist epic, word-for-word save for cuts made to render it palatable in three hours’ time. It is, after all, a long-ass book.

The play took place at the Public Theater, a venerable NYC institution. It was a dark and rainy night. The brick building was an extravagant titan in the dark. When I entered the theatre, I realized it was the same or similar as one at which I’d attended a play for Ithaca College’s Field Studies program about four years ago.

Senior year of undergrad, four years past. Time flies.

The chatter inside the theatre indicated it was a lot of Informed Theatre Audiences. I noted the crowd. A lotta white folks, a significant chunk—maybe most of them—late Millennials or older. Probably older, though who knows; evidently, my scale of time is becoming distorted. I could tell they were Informed Theatre Audience Members because they were abuzz with talk about Gatz—everyone here seemed to be in on this avante-garde-cum-relative-mainstream theatre company.

For a while, it seemed like the chair to my left was going to be blissfully empty, but no dice—just moments before the show began, an older woman took her seat. While I waited, I took in the set: three tables arranged in a line end-to-end, eight chairs facing the audience from behind the tables, a glowing clock on the back wall house left that display the time in real time.

The audience was definitely on the older side. The intersection of people my age who know about ERS and who have the money to afford tickets to the Public on a whim is a narrow intersection, I imagine—but it might have simply been how things shook out that night.

The show began. An immensely charismatic thespian with a rugged face sauntered onstage and explained the central conceit of the performance to us: James Joyce’s Ulysses, spoken as written, save for time skips. It would be confusing, the man assured us—such was the author’s intention. The actor sat down behind the table alongside his fellow company members, and the show began.

Gatz, famously, saw office workers discovering Fitzgerald’s opus in their workplace and descending into revelry as they made their way through it—I was eager for this tidy reading to turn into a raucous festival, and was pleased to see it so. What began as an orderly, well-acted recitation turned into a carnival as Leopold Bloom made his way through the streets of Dublin and encountered scholars, journalists, priests, and prostitutes. Props flew through the air, music permeated the theatre, and the clock whizzed and spun as time and text advanced and retreated.

It was great fun. I wasn’t sure what the takeaway was; I’m fairly certain James Joyce would be very pleased to read that. At intermission, I scratched a note in the little leaf-green journal I’ve been taking with me most everywhere nowadays: 

A chore, intermissions are. I get they’re more for the actors than the audience, but I for one could do without them. I’m perfectly happy to sit through a film that’s engaging enough. I’ll do the same for a play.

When folks started returning to their seats, though, the woman to my left seemed to notice my note-taking. She turned to me as she returned to her seat and struck up a conversation. I can imagine her inquiry was somewhat out of interest, somewhat out of awkwardness—she had brushed my butt, I think accidentally but certainly rather assertively, as she was getting back to her place in the house. They certainly had us packed in.

She asked me what I was taking notes on, and I realized I didn’t have a great way to respond. I wanted to make it clear I wasn’t some critic eager to call attention to my judicious eye as the play unfolded, but I wasn’t sure how to pitch Art and Craft. Sort of for myself, I supposed, but also for some friends and family.

She seemed satisfied with my answer. It’s good exercise to think more deeply about things, she observed. I couldn’t argue that.

‘I like things with more of a plot,’ she said about Ulysses. ‘This? Ehhh…’

The whole rest of the play, I was as preoccupied with this wry, gray-haired woman’s reactions as I was with the show itself. The piece truly broke free of the readerly structure that contained it by the second act, and saw all the weirdness of Joyce’s book—I mean, I would imagine, having not read it myself—put to stage.

It was, as my audience-neighbor had said at intermission, relatively without Story (‘I tried to get through the book, but I couldn’t’). We were just along for the ride—and it was a fun ride. The play ended, like the book, with a long stream of consciousness as Molly Bloom reflected on her infidelity—to be clear: Leopold is no saint, either—and her relationship with her husband. Then, the lights came up, bows were had, and the audience began to file out.

I stuck around with the older lady, though. She seemed like she knew what she was talking about. She recommended plays to me coming in the spring at Off-Broadway theatres before we parted ways. Is she secretly a big-leaguer? I wondered. I was wearing my mask, given the crowd; I wondered if my full handsome face being visible to her would have left a deeper imprint on her memory. While the rest of the audience milled down the narrow four-ish flights of stairs, we packed into the elevator, where she greeted another audience member. Old friends in the industry? They definitely seemed like venerable theatre sorts.

I didn’t ask, though. I figured if she wanted to, she would tell me who she was; I figured I was cooler for not prying. Instead, I shook her hand and told her my name, adding, “I imagine I’ll be seeing you at theatres around town,” something like that that grasped at profundity. She smiled back, charmed or cringing: “I imagine you will.”

And then I left, having attempted to arrange fleeting meetings of chance into poetry, passing, dressed in dark clothes, through the moonlight and rain, towards home.

I wonder what I’ll remember more—her, or the play?

Thai Diner

It's a very hyped restaurant. I have the issue, I find, where I get excited about getting excited about things. I exercise independent thought as much as I can, and I also find that when something popular reaches me through the right channel, I have trouble resisting the desire to jump on the train. I say “the right channel” because I actually tend to be pushed away from things that are “too popular” in pop culture—I only begrudgingly watched Breaking Bad, for instance, even though I later discovered exactly why everyone was talking about it. But if something makes its way to me through, say, a niche Reddit forum populated by enthusiasts, well, I'm all ears.

The challenge with Thai Diner is that its mainstream popularity is matched by its popularity on r/foodnyc, and so getting in is an ordeal. Reservations are booked weeks in advance. The lines day-of can stretch down the block at peak hours. Chris and I had been planning on going for weeks to talk about the tour, though, and we were undeterred. I steeled myself to eat a meal in a bizarre timeslot and we headed downtown.

I won't waste time describing the wait—it was wonderful, actually. Once we were finally seated, we found ourselves tucked away at a comparatively peaceful corner table, away from the busy aisles of the restaurant proper.

The decoration of the place itself is singular. My mainstream American sensibilities would describe it as “kitschy,” and I suspect that word transcends cultural boundaries in the case of this place—check out their website linked above—though the label doesn't feel like one I can dole out here. After all, I have never been to Thailand, nor studied it with much depth.

The food, though, didn’t require any expertise on my part to delight in: disco fries featuring curry and peanuts instead of bacon and gravy; grilled eggplant with a spicy sauce; french toast that was essentially a cinnamon bun with berries and condensed milk.

Like I said, Thai Diner is a much-vaunted, much-hyped establishment. I'm wary of being susceptible to the vibes. The food, though, seemed more than simply tasty. Rather, it featured a palate of flavors I've never quite experienced before in this combination, with each item revealing several layers of nuance as Chris and I ate. The food played with my taste buds in a way they are not accustomed to, the french toast to a degree that eventually proved overpowering.

It is a rare occasion when I deem something “too sweet”—the last time it happened, I was in a local Massachusetts diner with Ryan and had ordered a “s'mores waffle," an item topped with fluff, chocolate, and graham cracker crumble served, I think, with syrup. The aforementioned Thai Diner dish marks the second occurrence of this. Both times, I finished my meal anyway, partly out of stubbornness and partly out of a deep desire to avoid creating food waste. Let the sugar crash come. I've weathered worse.

It was all the better sharing the experience at Thai Diner with Chris. Tucking into the disco fries and the eggplant together, remarking upon our individual meals, turned what would have been a delightful meal on its own into something I got to share with someone else. The meal didn't end when my appetite was sated. Enjoying it with someone else multiplied my own experience. Looking back on it, I don’t just think of delicious food: I think of the friendship I have with Chris that allowed us to enjoy the food so much together. I think of my gratitude for his having taken the trip—not to mention waiting in the big long line—with me, and indulged a meal that was a bit in the pricier range of what I would have gotten myself.

Food is better shared, I think. I'm plenty capable of enjoying a meal on my own, but I feel best about indulging in something special when I'm doing it with someone I care about.

CRAFT

Quit waffling and write a damn outline

I’ve been trying to make the same play work for almost the past two years exactly now, working through various drafts since March 18, 2024. Back then, it was called ASVAB, and it was inspired by my work with a student who took the titular military exam. Now, I’ve landed on a much better title, Aptitude, but it has still been kicking my ass until recently.

I love the rhythm of language. There’s just something about the way it resonates with me when it sounds right, something I try to capture whenever I set fingers to keys or pen to paper. Language and thought, I think, come relatively easily to me when I write—Story is a pain.

Previous drafts of ASVAB/Standardized/Aptitude have seen plenty of talk but not much story, going on for over a hundred pages before terminating unceremoniously once I ran out of things to write and got frustrated with my lack of a resolution—or a plot, for that matter. When I bemoaned this to a supportive friend who also happens to be a talented writer, their advice to me was pretty straightforward: ‘Have you thought of going backwards and forwards? Really doing some specific planning?’

No, I hadn’t. Not before setting into what was going to be draft four, at least. I had written a sequence of events for early drafts, a bit of a play-by-play. It had been vague, though, a little difficult to hew to in writing the piece.

Outlining tends to work for me. It is immensely useful for me, when I get lost in my logorrhea, to have a checklist of events to return to and progress through. Am I losing the thread? Wrap it up. Get back to the list. Make it make sense later.

My challenge in outlining is that it often just feels like work to me. It’s not necessarily the fun part of writing, and, even while I’m outlining, can leave me with a plot that has just as many holes as if I were writing spontaneously. I enjoy considering how a script’s structure can enhance its meaning—I love the idea of having written an immaculately-plotted piece. I just have trouble putting it together, and then when I’m outlining, I’m just worried I’m procrastinating on the writing itself. There are so many ways to theoretically structure a script. Three acts. Five acts. Climactic structure. Feminine structure. Circles. Pyramids. Mirrors. Dominoes. Myths. Archetypes. Heroes’ journeys. Triggers and heaps. Cats in trees.

My friend inspired me in some ineffable fashion, though, and I recommitted myself to outlining this asshole that’s been nagging me these past two years. My mission was simple: identity how I want the play to end, what I want the audience to walk away with, and build backwards form there. Figure out what I actually want out of this play, and then figure out how to get there.

And you know what?

—Well, I won’t brag about it working until I have a draft I’m satisfied with. But I spent a couple weeks plotting, and I feel like I actually have a coherent structure to work with. Looking at the planning process this way made it feel like an engaging puzzle, not a chore; I felt like I was actually building a good script, in focusing so intentionally on detailing the story, even when I wasn’t writing the dialogue itself.

I’m making my way through draft four of Aptitude now. I’m eager to have a draft of this play—any full-length script, really—that I’m proud of. I’m keen to get stronger with story. I think I’m getting my reps in. Here’s to many more.

—

Michael