Free Workshops

Next Saturday, I am fortunate enough to be giving a monologue-writing workshop at Youth Pride Rhode Island (link above). It's the first of twelve creative workshops offered for free for youth 13-23 years old. You can get a registration form on their website. Youth Pride's mission is to "provide support, advocacy, and education for youth and young adults throughout Rhode Island who are impacted by sexual orientation and gender identity/expression." The executive director is my long-time friend and favorite theatre director, James Robinson.

Water Weather

So you’re thinking this is a subject not within the purview of the Dramahound? Well, yesterday I received an attractive pamphlet in the mail from the city office of Emergency Management. It was not about preparing for a terrorist attack, but for a hurricane.

When I lived in Rhode Island, there was one bad hurricane. I ignored the warnings and went to work at The Perishable Theatre that morning. But after awhile, no one else came in, so I called my boss. He told me to go home- the roads into Providence had been blocked off by the National Guard. So I started walking home and was indeed met by several members of the National Guard, who told me to give up any idea of buying candles, the stores were all out. I went home, waited out the storm, the electricity came back on by evening and that was that. Other Rhode Islanders didn’t have power for a week, but I was lucky.

If you spend much time in downtown Providence, you can’t avoid being reminded of hurricanes. There’s a big, ugly hurricane barrier in the bay, and a plaque on the Biltmore Hotel showing how far the water rose during the big hurricane in the 1930s- almost to the second floor. There’s been two hurricanes that swung by New York since I moved here, the big result of which were office buildings taping their windows. Nothing compared to a really bad nor’easter. For a hurricane to do real damage here, it would have to come all the way up the bay. Ever taken the Long Island Railroad from Montauk or East Hampton? It’s a long trip.

However, the NYC pamphlet tells me a bad storm could put the lowest lying parts of the city under 30 feet of water. It has three levels of evacuation zones for flood conditions. I was surprised to learn that not only do I live in an evacuation zone (if wind speeds hit 110 miles per hour), my old apartment in Yorkville is in one as well. It also suggests what you should have packed in a bag to leave, and what your emergency supplies should be (mine are woefully insufficient). The pamphlet alludes to Katrina, which was a nightmare. But New York’s topography isn’t the same as the Gulf States. Still, if a tornado can touch down in Brooklyn and do the damage it did- not a wide geographical area, but I’ve seen the ripped off roofs and pulled up trees- anything is possible.

The City Watched by God

I’m taking a weekend excursion to Providence tomorrow, so I’m blogging earlier than usual. It’s not as easy to get to as it should be- for my entire adult life there’s been construction on I-95, and the train is always, always late.

I lived in Providence for part of the 1980s- first as a student at the Trinity Rep Conservatory, and then as the playwright-in-residence and tour booker for The Perishable Theatre. It was kind of a strange place in those days. The mayor, Buddy Cianci, had recently been convicted of having one of his thugs beat up his ex-wife’s boyfriend. On my way to school each day, I’d walk past Patriarca Vending Machines, which was the headquarters of the New England mob. Equally strange was the fact that Trinity Rep’s artistic director, Adrian Hall, was simultaneously artistic director of the Dallas Theatre Center. Which meant he was rarely in Providence, he was usually in Texas.

But that was long ago. Cianci did time in federal prison, the FBI cleaned up the mob, Trinity’s on its fourth artistic director since then. The reason I’m going to Providence is not to relive my misspent youth, but to see my friend James, who’s one of the smartest directors I know, and has done a lot of great work on plays of mine. He’s also one of those friends you can always rely on to tell you the truth, whether you want to hear it or not.

I spent a year of my life in law school in the 1990s, and while I was by no means friendless there, it was nothing like going to drama school. I still keep in touch with one classmate, who’s a corporate patent lawyer in New York. But the whole nature of the school (maybe the nature of the law?) was cold and competitive. There really was someone who hid a book on library reserve so the rest of us couldn’t do an assignment- like something out of “The Paper Chase.” There was certainly implicit and explicit competition at the Conservatory, but the equivalent of book-hiding never would have happened.

I guess I felt sorry for my George Gund School of Law classmates, that they wouldn’t have the opportunity to build the working relationships and the friendships that we took for granted in school. They certainly never had the opportunity to work on the “nightingale/lark” scene from “Romeo and Juliet,” and to hear James tell them: “It’s just like the ‘horse/mule’ scene from ‘Fiddler on the Roof’!”