PROLOGUE

Consider skipping the rest of this Prologue section if you are sensitive about current events. I only touch too lightly on them, but I figured I’d make note here. You can click here to proceed straight to the newsletter’s main content.

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I couldn’t bring myself to finish Art this month.

For starters, I realized partway through January that even over halfway through the month, I had lines and lines of newsletter, hours sunk into it, but nothing to show for my own playwriting, or narrative writing in general. This was after my six weeks on Miracle on 34th Street had already eaten up the time I would have spent on playwriting the past couple months.

Then a series of murders in Minneapolis occurred and I further couldn’t bring myself to write anything else newsletter-related. I hesitate to write any calls to action, because there’s more I could be doing, myself. I’m not here to step on a soapbox or wallow or anything like that. I just had to at least mention it. Please consider reading the statements of the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. It was a bit tricky to find just a clean page with each statement—these were the clearest I could identify.

I’m posting Craft because I already had it finished, and it pertains to my recent adventures on tour. Art I am going to hold over to next month; its subject matter, the Under the Radar Festival in New York City, won’t resolve until then, anyways.

ART

See ya next month

CRAFT

“What’s the play?”

This past month has marked my first month back from my time on the first national tour of Miracle on 34th Street. I should note that I am obligated, whenever invoking the experience, to specify that it was indeed the first national tour of this musical.

Throughout my life, I have taken to seeking connections, searching for themes, and hunting for motifs. Challenges and novel experiences, trials and tribulations—they’re all fodder for the story engine. It was inevitable, then, that my time on M34—as we would affectionately abbreviate it—would yield a story, some written account, perhaps a new narrative nonfiction prose piece for a special edition of the newsletter. As we made our way south from Detroit en route to our final stops, that inevitability nagged at me more and more: what’s my takeaway here? What’s the story? 

It’s the greatest lie that I have to tell myself as a writer. Maybe it’s what writers always have to tell themselves in order to fulfill their craft: “Everything has a narrative.”

It wasn’t coming together for M34, though. Maybe it was the gravity of the experience, or the scale—it was over a month of my life, my first time on tour, my first professional theatre experience period. I couldn’t perceive some grand story unraveling beyond the simple play-by-play of the events of the tour. I didn’t see the arc.

It almost bothered me, in a way. How could I go through all this—meet all these cool people, see all these new places, gain all this professional theatre experience—and not get a pitch to The Moth out of it, at the very least? Sounded like a raw deal.

The tour ended. We closed our show at the Capital One Center in Tysons, Virginia. A handful of the under-30 technicians, myself included, spent New Year’s week in an Airbnb in the area, bumming around someone else’s suburban mansion; we played pool and drank and played video games and made food for each other and, finally, we went our separate ways. Still no story. Still no story as I rode an Academy bus home with a friend from the production; even as the bus pulled onto a holiday-bedecked 34th Street in Hudson Yards, a tidy narrative did not leap in front of me and wave its arms above its head. Still no story as I hosted my companion for a golden weekend in New York, debriefing about our experiences and walking around Midtown. I was just tired, more than anything.

On the Scriptnotes podcast, John August of Craig Mazin have said that a story isn’t just what happens—it’s an intersection of ideas, and how those ideas are communicated, that makes a story. My intersecting idea—the seeds of a story—hit me after all was said and done and I was fretting over business expenses on my credit statement. WHAM! It was stress! Here is what’s haunting me! It all came together in the form of an idea for a play.

I can’t say too much here. If I write about the idea too much, I’ll never actually write the play. I’ll just say it’s an America play. It’s one that has me thinking about Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal, and how much of a person’s art is just them remixing and regurgitating their own experiences and the experiences of others. I need to be thoughtful and synthesize instead of reiterating.

My artistic drought has lasted long enough. Hold me to a rough draft!

I just need to redraft this other thing first.

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Much more, always, to be done.

Michael