There comes that moment when you realize you've spent way too much time and energy restating your case to people who can't hear you from high up on their personal pedestals. So I'm going to make one final statement on a few topics, and the next time I run into the same familiar debate raging online, I will simply turn my back and surf happily away.


1. Non-Equity actors are by definition inferior to Equity actors.

For those of you who don't know and couldn't care less about the national collective of blogs and traditional journalism related to the theory and practice of The Theatre, inside the nutshell is this: a very Vocal Contingent of theatergoers has expended a significant amount of effort to make sure everybody understands one vital truth: actors who have joined the union are inherently more talented and dedicated to their craft than those who have not yet done so. This argument flares up every now and again over at Chris Jones' blog and a few other places around the theatrosphere and has thus far always moved me to respond. Most recently it became a point of contention after the Joseph Jefferson Committee got rid of the word "Citation" and decided to call the non-Equity Jeffs "Awards" just like the Equity Jeffs.

Horror and woe, cried the aforementioned Vocal Contingent! This makes it seem as though non-Equity performers are the equal of Equity performers! How will we ever know which actors are good and dedicated professionals, and which are merely amateur, dabbling hobbyists, if we can't determine that they only won a Citation, not an Award!

Ignoring the inherent condescension that always comes across when these arguments get made, I could spend more time pointing out the glaring logical flaw in your perspective, which is that Equity actors start out as non-Equity, and nothing about the invitation to join the union or the decision to accept the invitation makes them any better or worse an actor than they were before. If you like a certain actor in the Equity show he's doing now, it's likely you would have liked him in the non-Equity show he did last year. I am happy to point out, however, that you with your illogical prejudices are the one who missed out on that previous show. And as such, it sucks to be you.

I could let you know that your argument is inherently racist and possibly sexist, as there is already a well-documented lack of good roles for women and minorities in the American theater, especially as compared to the choices offered to young white males. If the opportunity to get cast in an Equity show is not present it doesn't mean that the people who lack those opportunities are any less of an actor.

But I'm done doing that, o Vocal Contingent. I disagree with you, is all it comes down to.

I disagree with you because of experience watching non-Equity performers do revelatory work and watching Equity performers phone it in. I disagree with you because of my own personal indignation at being called a "hobbyist" after the past few weeks I've had and the months I have ahead of me.

But mostly I disagree with you because you are wrong, wrong, wrong.

I admit that I have called in sick on days that I was in fact feeling 100% physically healthy. In most of those cases, however, I have declared those days to be "mental health days," which I consider something of a necessity since I have still not managed to secure professional help¹. The small percentage of sick days that have fallen into the category of "other" are those days when I have taken off work for no other reason than I didn't want to go to work that day.

Today and yesterday are legit. I've finally succumbed to the cold-type illness that seemed to strike down everybody around me while leaving me unscathed, for what seems to have been the entire year so far (at times it seemed like the entire cast and crew of Contraption were fighting off various degrees of the illness; Joe, I believe, didn't fully recover until after the show had finished). My schedule is, I know, a part of the problem, and it's kind of a small miracle that my body kept it together as long as it did.

I would like very much to stop feeling guilty for calling in sick for a second day. I have in the past gone back to work at the slightest sign of improvement, determining that the first day off was a more-than-fair accommodation on the part of my employer, and that abusing that generosity for a second day was at the very least a sign of spinelessness and crybaby-ism.

Today I decided that it did nobody any good, least of all me, to hop back into my life at less than 100%...which is not to say that I'm going to wait until I'm sure I'm completely and totally well, so much as to say that I decided it was prudent to give myself an extra day to heal.

The decision feels like rebellion against my own programming. It shouldn't be that way. It is. That's kinda sad.


¹ I have now made two good-faith attempts to connect with a therapist. One informed me that their organization is designed to help extreme cases; those who are so deeply in crisis that they can barely function at all. The other never called me back, which does nothing to alleviate my feelings of irrelevancy and rejection.

Woke up at 5:30 yesterday morning. Fed dogs. Left for work by 7:45. Worked day job from 9-5 pm.

Went from work directly to 6:30 call for Passage. Performed Passage from 7:30-10:15.

Went from Theatre Building to Neo-Futurarium, rehearsed for half hour, performed Too Much Light from 11:30-12:45 pm.

Came home at 1:15 am. Still alive.

The hell with you, Robert Downey, Jr. I am Iron Man.

- Moved last weekend. All boxes are unpacked and nearly everything has been organized. Oracle, in her typical fashion, is adjusting very well to her new surroundings. Cassie has spent most of the past few days sleeping, vomiting, and barely eating. She's not sick--this much is clear from the energy and life she exhibits when other dogs are around--but she doesn't adapt well to change. She's slowly coming out of her anxiety, but it's been difficult to watch her adjust.

- Burned through the entire first season of Friday Night Lights on DVD. The first season of Friday Night Lights may be the most perfect first season of any television show I have ever seen. It manages to be simultaneously plot- and character-based, and succeeds largely because of its ability to keep you constantly off-guard and unbalanced in the midst of what are otherwise normal, everyday surroundings. It manages to make you feel anxious about plot developments and human interactions that should only have one logical conclusion. Even the shimmering guitar-based theme song by W.G. Snuffy Walden is all the more endearing for being completely impossible to accurately hum even as it sticks in your head for days. I can't say enough good stuff about this show and the people who make it.

- Also working my way through Battlestar Galactica's third season. Colonel Tigh sitting down for a drink with his wife ("Exodus, Part II") is currently running neck and neck with the moment from Buffy's "The Body" when Anya rants about the utter stupidity of death, for the title of Television Moment Most Likely To Reduce Me To Blubbering Idiocy. (For the purposes of discussion, the last line of the last episode I have seen was "We give him his trial." Kindly refrain from talking about anything past that line.)

- I have resumed biking everywhere, finally, and couldn't be happier, even when almost getting run down along with a group of pedestrians by a pair of homicidal jackasses rocketing through a left turn signal that had switched off five seconds earlier. They got about fifty yards up Ridge before running into the bulk of traffic stopped at the corner of Hollywood. I know that they must have been happy to have saved those precious five seconds getting to that traffic jam.

- A Passage To India still going very well. For the entire month of May, I'll be performing in Passage from 7:30 to 10:15 on Friday and Saturday nights and then zipping up to the Neo-Futurarium as quickly as possible to perform Too Much Light from 11:30 to 12:30, and then on Sunday I'll be doing the same thing after the 3 pm matinee.

- The Neo-Futurists are holding auditions for male and female writer/director/performers at the end of May, a lengthy and difficult process for which my participation is mandatory (and, lest that sound churlish, eagerly anticipated).

- Immediately after Passage closes, I'll be heading to Minneapolis/St. Paul for two days to perform in a showcase at the Asian American Theater Conference, and then driving back home on Friday so I can perform in that weekend's TML.

- I'm also curating this year's installment of It Came From The Neo-Futurarium!, and performing in at least one of the staged readings.

- I will also be participating in part of the Neo-Futurists' run at Theater on the Lake this year, reviving our family-friendly TML Kids show.

- Later this year I will be involved in a Neo-Futurist deconstruction of A Christmas Carol, for which I will also be pulling some writing duties.

- As soon as that closes, I'll be heading back to Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, D.C. for a week's worth of TML performances.

- As soon as I return from D.C. at the beginning of January, I will be taking a six-month sabbatical from the Neo-Futurists.

I'm already wondering what I can fill that time with, because I'll still have the day job, and if that's all I have at that time, I'm sure I will go completely out of my mind.

The firewall at work finally figured out how to permanently and consistently block Google Chat, which up until this point would occasionally worm its way into activity by exploiting some gap in the system. This is in addition to the ban on LiveJournal, Facebook, and Blogger comments that are already in place.

I've been feeling increasingly isolated and starved for human contact as of late, so obviously this development was meticulously timed for the purposes of pitch black comedy.

(Again: I realize that they own the Internet there and can do as they see fit.)

I might need to start seriously considering misanthropy.

I imagine I'd be much more satisfied with my gradually decreasing abilities to interact with the outside world if I simply decided that everybody were abhorrent.

Opening night for A Passage to India went incredibly well; the audience was responsive and attentive for the show's entire two-hour-twenty-five minute story (two-forty with intermission), the tech went off with minimum hitch, and the following morning, we received word of the following conversation:



"Madam, if I may--?"
"What nonsense will you say now, you incorrigible gadabout?"
"Gadabout, am I?
"Gadabout, indeed, Joseph Jefferson!"
"Better a gadabout than a gadfly, would you not say?"
"Surely it can be agreed upon that you are both!"
"A gadabout gadfly! Egads!"
"Speak your peace quickly and be done with it, you rake."
"I wish only to mention to you that this past evening delegates of the theatrical awards committee that has been named in my honor attended a performance of an entertainment entitled A Passage to India..."
"And? And? You pause without reason, Mr. Jefferson!"
"And I am pleased to report that said entertainment meets with my expectations and gains my approval. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that I offer the show my Recommendation."
"Oh, how delightful, Mr. Jefferson!"
"What is more impressive, still, Madam, is how I am able to offer this Recommendation even though I have been dead more than a century."
"What? Is this true?"
"It is."
"But then surely that means that--"
"--You too are doubtless long dead!"
"But if we sit here now, discussing this Passage to India, then we can only be--"
"--Zombies, my pet. Yes. We are zombies."


Come see A Passage To India! Heartily recommended by Zombie Joseph Jefferson!

Today I almost made my contribution to the April Fool's Day spirit by changing my Gmail and Facebook statuses to read "is being downsized."

And then, when people who saw my status would send me a message of concern, I would reply with a devilishly grinning emoticon and the standard clarion heard so often on this day.

I didn't do that, however, because the thought of people being genuinely concerned about me and then being told that I was merely toying with their better natures as human beings felt somehow more terrible an April Fool's prank than doing something more conventionally entertaining, like going to a co-worker's desk and covering everything in shrink wrap.

My wife--who, by the by, I have as of today been legally married to for two lovely years--admonished me with the wise witticism "No guts, no funny."

Not that she's not right. But for whatever reason, sometimes you just need to exist without having anybody in your vicinity feeling negatively towards you. Sometimes you just need to know that people like you.

That's where I am right now.

Off to rehearsal I go.

Two days of lengthy tech rehearsals on top of Too Much Light and here I am typing up this standard-issue advertising entry before moving on to further play revisions.

I care not for your "sleep." Your "sleep" is an inconvenient concept that seeks only to trap me in its insidious prisons of rest and relaxation, its bars made of soft cotton and its locks made of warmth. I'll have none of your "sleep." Keep your "sleep" away from me.

(Seriously, I'll be okay. Come see this show. It's beautiful.)

Thanks to Dina for this one.

I'm going to be completely honest with the smokers in the audience for a moment. (For the sake of consistency, I will also be completely honest with the non-smokers, but the next few paragraphs aren't directed at them.)

I hate your cigarettes. I hate everything about them. I hate the smell of your burning tobacco hanging in the air, I hate the infiltration of your smoke into my lungs, I hate the way my skin feels after having spent too much time in your environment, I hate the way that your stench follows me home, settled in my clothing like unwashed railcar hobos.

I hate the way it destroys your voices, taking mellifluous tenors and sopranos and dragging them from the bumper of a 1987 Chevrolet over six miles of unpaved gravel. I hate the way it turns your incandescent teeth into the flickering fluorescents of condemned building boiler rooms. I hate the time it takes you away from our conversation because you need to go outside for "a minute." I hate the time it takes you away from sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters because finally your body decides that the only way it can convince you to stop poisoning yourself is to grow a rapidly metastasizing cluster of malignant cells in your vital organs, until you're forced to choose between the cigarette and the oxygen. I hate knowing which of you I'm more likely to lose earlier.

I hate the way your cigarettes manifest in my own sensibility, I hate the way I feel instantly cooler having one in my hand, hate the way my lips feel lightly holding one, hate that the Zippo lighter is one of the most elegant and beautiful small machines ever devised by man or woman, I hate the way your physical and psychological addictions blend into a single mosaic until you can no longer tell if each craving is the body chemistry demanding equilibrium or the mind's impression of self panicking because the cigarette has become a vital accessory of your identity.

I hate the way you will lower your eyes when confronted about your habit and mumble half-hearted acknowledgments for the one hundredth time that you should quit. I hate the way your eyes will flash defiantly and I hate the way I become your tyrannical oppressor, the way I tax you to pieces and deny you your bars and your airplanes and the way I force you to chew strange-tasting gum instead of enjoying your cigarette. I hate your insistence that I tolerate your habit, I hate your assumption that my feelings are less valid than the demands of your nicotine.

I hate the way every pack of cigarettes you buy contribute funds to the monstrous political lobby of Big Tobacco, one of the many Big Entities that buy and sell the intent of the American Experiment at whim, one of the many forces that pull our country apart at the seams year after year. I hate your rationalized support of men and women growing fat off the misery of others, men and women who turn their filthy lucre into war machinery, into theocratic politicos, into legal defense teams with sharpened teeth and claws, into escape hatches for insurance providers.

I hate your cigarettes and wish that the concept had died out with the Aztecs and Maya who first produced them.

But I hate this even more than that.

There is what I wish and there is reality, and the reality is that cigarettes happened, they became immensely popular, they weaved their way into the culture, and they will likely be here for awhile. The reality is that people have smoked and will continue to smoke cigarettes. We can debate for years as to what causes somebody to start smoking and what role the marketeers play, and whether or not the arts own some of the responsibility for the proliferation of the product, but the end fact is still there: people smoke cigarettes.

What Denver and other cities propose is to forcibly create a theatre wherein that truism cannot be reflected, to in fact scrub the theatre clean of this naughty little peccadillo in a way that has not and possibly cannot be accomplished in the world outside. It proposes that henceforth our theatre inhabit a universe in which no smokers now nor ever have existed, as if perhaps to offer a sort of apology for having allowed the habit to occur.

I'm sorry. I understand that the judges in Denver deemed that the choice of an actor to smoke cannot, in and of itself, be considered protected under the First Amendment, and the argument that no real murders or drug usage happen onstage is a strong one.

But speaking as a playwright, I would argue that this ruling does in fact infringe on my First Amendment rights to write a character who smokes, knowing full well that if this decision is taken to its most extreme dissemination that my play as imagined may never be allowed an audience.

Permit me a moment of personal example.

The second act of Vox Pandora originally began with the characters of Hope and Eleanor sitting in an outdoor cafe in Washington, D.C., while Hope smoked a cigarette. (Hope, it should be noted, is in fact the embodiment of that emotion; the last denizen of Pandora's Box, released by a wily politician intent on collaborating with her for both global improvement and personal gain.) To my mind, Hope's cigarette was there for a number of different reasons:

(1) It gave Hope a newfound "earthly" quality that differed greatly from her more divine leanings in the first act.
(2) It illustrated Hope's attempts to blend in with the greater swath of humanity around her, most of whom had no idea that she was a mythical concept made flesh. Indeed, Hope takes up smoking largely because it convinces others around her that she is breathing, something she otherwise has no reason to do.
(3) It offered subtle foreshadowing to events later in the play, when Hope's most ambitious representation of herself was set on fire.

The venue in which the show was produced could not allow cigarette smoking to occur, so I ultimately had to add an exchange in place of the stage direction HOPE is smoking a cigarette:


HOPE pulls a cigarette from a pack and starts to light it.

ELEANOR: You can't in here.

HOPE puts the cigarette away.


I will hastily add that I ultimately prefer this rewrite, and that I'm not complaining about "the butchery!" I had to commit on my play in order to follow the "oppressive dictates!" of an "authoritarian pig-council!" My revision process and my openness to such exploration is my own, however, and if some other playwright believes that their protagonist is by nature a chain-smoker, perhaps because that protagonist's mother was also a chain-smoker, why must they be forced to excise that detail from the character?

I find the whole thing offensive because I imagine a theatre a hundred years from now in which no play set in our current time period may offer an honest depiction of life as each playwright saw it. I imagine plays written about 1950s newsrooms and underground poker games in which every party involved dealt with the stress of the environment by munching on potato chips at every minute but steadfastly and virtuously eschewed cigarettes, even though it was well on record that men and women in these environments would often smoke.

My revision of The Accident God begins with the character of Andy Bauer on a smoke break. Unless, that is, I no longer can. I suppose I can put him on a lunch break, instead, but anybody who has ever worked a nine-to-five will tell you that there is a significant difference between a smoke break and lunch break in both duration of break and degree of relaxation. But if I want this play to happen in Denver, then a lunch break it will simply have to be. And at no other point may Andy be seen smoking. And sure, the character will probably work just fine if he has no smoking habit at all.

But in my head, when he speaks, he holds a lit cigarette. He punctuates his points by jabbing a little period in the air, about eye's-height, and he holds the cigarette the way he watched Clint Eastwood hold it in one of Sergio Leone's films. When he plays poker, his tell is subtle but unmistakable; when his hand is weak, he glances at the end of his cigarette after a drag, watching the trails slowly snake their way to the ceiling.

This is Andy, as I'm writing him. The Colorado appeals court is informing me that I cannot write this character if I ever wish to see the play produced (the only environment in which a play really lives).

Tell me how that doesn't infringe on my First Amendment rights?

So, to recap:

Smokers: I hate your cigarettes.

But: I acknowledge that you smoke them.

And: If the theatre is to be a relevant reflection of our society, then it must be allowed acknowledge this as well.


I'm sure there are holes in my case here.
I'm very tired.

Please, tell me where I'm ignorant or just completely wrong. I'm willing to listen.

As is their usual modus operandi, New Leaf Theatre is currently running a fantastic production of a play that most people in Chicago have never seen before and are unlikely to see produced elsewhere in the city; in this case it's Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, a two-act dramedy by Canadian playwright Morris Panych.

The standard disclaimer here is that I recommend New Leaf shows on principle, and did so even before they produced Vox Pandora last season. The other standard disclaimer, however, is that I don't mention or recommend specific shows until I've actually seen them.

I saw this one last Thursday. It's sticking with me pretty tenaciously, and I dearly wish I had the time to go see it again before it closes.

The most recent entry on New Leaf's blog deals with the question, raised in Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, of when one's childhood ends. I've now heard two epigrams dealing with this concept:


1) Panych's play posits that childhood ends "when you stop being happy and start remembering when you used to be."

2) The screenplay for the filmed adaptation of James O'Barr's The Crow offers that childhood ends "when you realize that you're going to die."


Prompted by marshalaw's entry on the blog, I've been thinking very hard about when my particular moment may have been, and I think it may in fact encompass both of the above observations.

( Lengthy Angst-Filled Memory Extraction in Progress... )

And there's this question of relevance hanging in the air like a swarm of locusts frozen in flight, buzzing with vicious hunger, not understanding what the hold-up is, knowing that they cannot be stopped and therefore finding the halted momentum utterly intolerable.

"Why?"

I am rewriting a play I wrote five years ago entitled In The Eye of Ivan, which some of you may recall if you were reading this journal that many years ago. It relates a historically fictional account of the architects of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, which was commissioned by Tsar Ivan IV of Russia to commemorate a victorious conquest of the Tatar people.



Ivan IV is better known by his colloquial title "Ivan the Terrible," for numerous reasons, including the possibly apocryphal tale that he had the architects of the above pictured cathedral blinded after they had finished, in order that they would never build a structure that could surpass it.

There are several conflicting accounts of who the architects were and whether or not Ivan the Terrible in fact had them blinded. Some versions claim that there were two architects, named Postnik and Barma, others claim that Barma was Postnik's assistant, others that there was only one man, Postnik, nicknamed Barma, others that Postnik was Barma's nickname. Some versions say that they could not have been blinded because they later designed the chapel of St. Basil's tomb that was added onto the cathedral...and others say that they designed this chapel despite being blinded.

The wonderful thing about telling a story that nobody can agree on is that your account doesn't have to answer to anybody. My version posits that there were two men, that they were blinded, and that they reunited later in their lives to build the addition despite their blindness. Somebody who feels differently is free to write their own story.

I am rewriting this play right now because it is in fact a very bad play¹, something that I was only able to determine with five years of writing in between me and the last draft. I have burned through the first half of the play in the past two weeks and changed almost every line in some way or another; I have reconsidered my plans for the second half and made a conscious effort to add second and third dimensions to characters that were little more than talking set pieces in the original version. I am experimenting further with time and memory shifting and in double-casting actors. I am imagining a scene I lacked the emotional maturity to even consider five years previous.

I summarized the above to a colleague recently and was asked the relatively simply question "Why?" As in, "why tell this story?"

I don't recall what I said, but I am aware that it was a weak and stammering response. I'm actually quite incompetent at the practice of justifying my own existence, so I didn't have any sort of elevator speech prepared to adequately express the themes I believed I was trying to explore in the piece.

Forgiveness. Redemption. Friendship. Loyalty. Life after tyranny.

None of that made it into my brain or out of my mouth. I'm sure I was incredibly impressive.

And yet, thinking about it today, as I begin revising the second half of the work, I realize that while the above ideas are present in the narrative and that I do wish to explore them in a theatrical setting, that the simplest answer to the question is that I wanted to tell a story about two specific people.

An author I once read or heard speaking--it may have been Neil Gaiman--once tried to make it clear to the audience that humanity was an endlessly interesting concept; that all of the best stories are not about ideas but about people having those ideas, implementing those ideas, falling victim to those ideas.

Since revisiting the research on this play I have been coming back, over and over again to the below painting by Ilya Repin, entitled Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16th, 1581, which relates the moment that the Tsar accidentally killed his son with the sharpened end of his cane after a ferocious argument between the two.



The different expressions on both of their faces haunts and moves me, because they're both asking the exact same question:

"What have I/you done?"

And in that single moment you encompass the entire tragedy of Ivan the Terrible. You can see his temperament ripple out to touch everybody unfortunate enough to have been on the wrong side of his madness. I want to tell this story because of the look on his face, because of the look on the face of a young architect about to be blinded for no good reason at all, because of the look on the face of that architect's daughter watching her father grasp at clods of earth as he climbs slowly out of thirty years of misery.

Yes, the forgiveness, the redemption, the life-after-tyranny stuff, that's there. That may be the sort of thing that allows a play about Russia in the 1500s to be taken seriously as "relevant" today.

And my questions, back to the swarm of frozen locusts, is "Aren't human beings always going to be relevant? That is, until there are no humans to speak of?"


¹ Admitting that was, I have to say, an especially bitter pill to swallow, since the last draft was what earned me a $7,000 Illinois Arts Fellowship in 2004. I find myself stunned that it was given such an honor, because rereading it now was excruciatingly painful, like reading the doggerel poems one writes in third grade as part of an introduction to rhyme and meter.

When I received the Fellowship in 2004 my reaction was an ecstatic yelp of pride. Four years in the future, I had no idea I would look back at the judges and wonder "Were you high?"

It turns out I'm Asian-American.

I know! I'm just as surprised as you are!

A little background on this revelation, and I've spoken about this before here and there so apologies for repeating myself. Over the course of my thirty years of existence, I have managed--consciously, unconsciously, or some combination of the two--to make my ethnicity a secondary characteristic, an afterthought in my third-party descriptions. In high school, a few of my friends remarked that I had essentially become my own adjective. I wasn't "that Indian/Pakistani kid," or "that theatre kid," or any such label other than "Bilal."

"You're just...Bilal," I was told.

Last year, on a paintball excursion in which I would be participating with a few people I'd never met before, loosestrudel described me to a friend of his who was looking for us in the parking lot as, if I recall correctly, a shorter bald man with a beard. The fact that I have skin the color of a basic Starbucks beverage, which would in fact have made finding me that much easier, simply didn't enter the category of Identifying Marks.

I'm not unhappy, really, with this situation. I feel that the issue of race, like that of sexual orientation, will only stop being a problem in America when people stop looking at it as the easiest and most prominent characteristic of a person. I would let out tiny shouts of jubilation when an interracial couple appeared onscreen without ever once having to deal with the "issue" of their inter-race love; I would let out slightly louder groans of agony when I would see commercials for episodes where a lesbian kiss was used as a viewer magnet.

So if most people don't immediately think of me in terms of my race or ethnicity, but rather in terms of my personality and actions, then I feel I've scored a little victory on the path to a more compassionate, tolerant humanity. I'm only one pebble in the well, to be sure, but I can find some happiness in that.

It's not that I avoid the issue of my ethnicity entirely, of course. I've written a number of Too Much Light plays dealing very specifically with my ethnic and cultural background, and I recognize that I have that voice, unique within our ensemble, to share. As a matter of fact, I will be performing a few of these short works in Minneapolis this June as part of the 2008 National Asian American Theater Conference alongside Regie Cabico and F. Omar Telan, alumni of the New York Neo-Futurists. I'm not in the business of active denial. I know I'm of Pakistani and Indian descent. I know that this means something; now perhaps more than ever before in my life.

All that said, I had something of an identity crisis a few weeks ago.

I have been, of late, rehearsing A Passage to India with Vitalist Theatre, opening April 10 at the Theatre Building, based on the classic novel by E.M. Forster (also famous for Howards End). I am, as you would expect, playing a number of the native Indians, most often the Indian Muslim attorney Mahmoud Ali. It is in fact the first time I have played an Indian of any kind onstage--barring, obviously, the act of playing myself in TML--as I have been cast most often as Hispanic, Black, or race-neutral (as in The Permanent Way, when everybody was playing so many characters that issues of gender and race took a back seat to being true to the story and people in question; which is why it wasn't necessarily jarring when I appeared, late in the play, as the only Scotsman with anything to say).

My Indian/Pakistani castmates in Passage are all most recently late of Silk Road Theatre's critically acclaimed production of Merchant On Venice; all of them are incredibly talented, which is intimidating in and of itself, but what sucker-punched me into the identity crisis was their innate connections with their ethnicity. All of us are being required to play native Indians during the time of the British Raj, but with the first two rehearsals it became very clear to me that I was the one who was really going to have to work at it. I was going to have to research the linguistics, was going to have to sit down and obsess over the dialects of Roshan Seth and Amrish Puri in Gandhi. Whereas my colleagues brought their authenticity to the table, I have had to go back and manufacture mine.

I was called in to audition, of course, because I'm an actor of ethnic Indian persuasion. I am not, however, I realized, an ethnic Indian actor. I'm actually an American actor who isn't likely to be cast as an American.

And I felt a deep sense of sorrow as I analyzed what it is you lose when you manage to assimilate.

I'm back from that, now. The rehearsal process has given me an opportunity to fill in the gaps of my experience as well as remind me that there is much I do still retain in my psyche even if I don't often use it. My dialect is coming along slowly but surely and I no longer have cold sweats about performing four shows a week as the most glaring example of miscasting seen in ages.

I've been asked before by friends and colleagues about my ethnic and cultural heritage in terms of how it connects to my artistic life. I believe obscurepoet asked me most pointedly, during the last round of Interview Memes about the likelihood that I might be more successful if I wrote more often about stories related to that ethnic background.

I can't deny that there are playwrights and novelists of Arab or Asian-Indian descent who write often and write well about issues related directly to their background, and I can't deny that I'm currently living in a time where American audiences are suddenly very hungry for stories about that strange and faraway culture that occasionally spawns evil murderous thugs bent on the destruction of the Great Satan West.

But I also can't deny that these stories aren't really bubbling to my surface. I can't change the course of my inspiration so easily. In my mind and my heart there are no compelling narratives about the Muslim family dealing with the generational divide; there are no stories of the terrorist with a sudden change of heart.

Right now I want to tell stories of blinded Russian architects, of inventors driven mad by their inventions, of ancient mythological concepts unleashed and exploited by the modern world, of a middle-class rural family in downstate Illinois inching closer to permanent damage and oblivion, of the otherwise-forgotten story of Isaac Newton's nemesis. These are the stories that found me, and I cannot ignore their desire for an author simply because I might be more successful trying to tell stories that other writers are far more qualified and skilled to impart.

I may one day get there. It may be too late by that point. That may happen.

At that time, I may have to be "Asian-American writer Bilal Dardai."

At that time, I may feel a deep sense of sorrow as I analyze what it means to become particular.

I'm currently reading Oliver Twist. At least, I'm trying very hard to read Oliver Twist.

I actually already know the entirety of the story fairly well, having read and reread the condensed illustrated classics edition when I was younger, as well as seeing several scenes from the 1968 musical (I have yet to see Roman Polanski's 2005 film adaptation, although I have heard very good things about it). But this is my first time reading the original Dickensian prose.

And I'll say that I enjoy Dickens' dry wit, his bemused collegiate phrasing that he employs even when he's making points about the way society has failed its poorest citizens. And he has an excellent sense of pacing and character.

But oh my God, I can't handle Fagin.

Now I was aware, beforehand, that Fagin was considered something of an insulting caricature of a Jew; that he was rivaled only by Shylock in classical literature as a problematic stereotype. But I had no idea how bad it truly was.

Understand, I'm not somebody who gets immediately sensitive about portrayals of minorities as unsavory people and criminals. The fact that Fagin was a loathsome criminal, possibly even a pederast, as well as a Jew, was not something that made me wary. There are in fact Jewish criminals. There are in fact Jewish pederasts. Taking umbrage at Fagin purely on those grounds is childish. I tried, very hard, to give Dickens the benefit of the doubt.

Alas, it can't be done. The character is interesting and complex in his motivations and interactions but is also an obscenity of ethnic prejudices. I don't know how much more often I can read variants of the phrase "the repulsive Jew" before I stop trying to read it altogether. I would not be surprised, at this point, to come across a chapter entitled--in Dickens' typical style--"Oliver discovers the Jew drinking blood, and watches him butchering boys for their manhoods".

I understand that these things are often a sign of the times, but I don't know how I can finish this otherwise compelling narrative when every few pages I have to deal with the issue of Dickens' bigotry.

At least it's harder to hear in Wagner, you know?

Ten minutes, give or take, until we begin the final performance of Contraption. Show is sold out, and there is a waiting list. Were I not being selfish, I suppose I could give up my seat to one of those unfortunate few who failed to make reservations.

But I am, in fact, that selfish.

More comprehensive thoughts on all of this much, much later.

I focus on absurdity. It forms, arguably, the basis of much of my artistic output; it certainly is the foundation of most of my political observations. I look for that which makes no logical sense and then I either attempt to rationalize it or spotlight it in the hopes that it will be rectified. Failing either, I often use that absurdity to craft a comedy about that absurdity, as often the only response I have to my own inability to foment change is to make a joke out of it. That's a defense mechanism, and it's not an uncommon one.

Last week there was a story in the news about a beef-industry worker who had blown the whistle on the practices of his particular meat corporation, exposing their cruelty towards "downer" cows--cattle that were too unhealthy to stand up and walk up the chute into the slaughterhouse--through their use of prods or other pain-inducing measures, directed at the eyes or other sensitive parts of their bodies. The economic reasons behind this are obvious; a cow that makes it onto the kill floor is worth more to the rancher than the other, less lucrative fates for these animals (making their bodies into glue or whatnot).

And my Absurdity Alarms went off.

Understand, the whistle is being blown not to spotlight the cruelty. The whistle is being blown because sick cows are turning into meat, into the very meat that makes it to the dinner table. But the story, for whatever reason, was spending more time on the gruesome practices than on the health crisis making its way to the supermarket.

I don't know what it was about Friday. Maybe the persistent gloom and boomerang ice storms of this winter, coupled with my continued inability to stop reading horrible tales of wanton massacre and endless war and young, drug-addicted parents leaving their baby to starve to death in their car, coupled with the image of a cow wearing an expression on my face like that of my younger dog, maybe that's what did it. But I asked myself how we could pretend to feel any sort of outrage over cruel behavior exhibited to an animal that was otherwise seconds away from being processed into pounds of meat. I asked why somebody was attempting to coerce sympathy from the audience as if the act of slaughtering an intelligent creature was only okay as long as it was done nicely.

Whatever it was, I just felt ill and uneasy for the first time in terms of meat ethics. My brain had just had enough of it.

I've decided to attempt vegetarianism.

I have attempted this before for personal health reasons and it didn't take. This time I'm trying it for something approaching ethical reasons, and this makes more sense to me. I couldn't make "to take care of myself" the motivation for the dietary switch, because I don't take care of myself right now as it is. If I really prioritized my physical well-being, I would be asleep right now instead of journaling. I wouldn't be working 38 hours a week by day and rehearsing another 20 odd hours a week on two or more shows. The art I'm making is more important to me, it turns out, than the health of the artist making it.

But ethics? The idea that one should not eat meat because it requires the death of a thinking, feeling life form? That, that, I can apparently get behind.

It's a sort of conditional attempt, I'm going to admit right here. I have no desire to take this to the extreme perspective; I'm not going to join PETA (an organization that I think embodies Santayana's warning about fanatics redoubling their efforts while losing sight of their goals) and I doubt I could go to full-out veganism. What prompted this mild epiphany is less about the ethics of killing the animal than it is about the cold, ruthlessly efficient process by which that killing occurs. I find the machinery of the slaughterhouse frightening and too easily applied to any living being that my cynicism then imagines a world in which more than cows get butchered in such a manner.

I could see myself eating an animal that I hunted and killed myself, could see myself resorting to hunting if I needed to do so. I feel that I could eat meat that I had somehow "earned."

I am aware that this position is rife with its own absurdities. There's no need to point them out to me; I already told you, I am a master of spotting absurdity and now I have decided to live with it in my own way.

It's an attempt. Really, it will always be an attempt. I'm too insecure of my faculties to ever think to myself that I've kicked the meat habit altogether. And I think I need to speak to a doctor about this attempt, but then again, remember what I said about my ability to prioritize my personal well-being.

I'm trying, I think, to cause a little less horrible death in the world. When I'm ineffectual at fomenting change, I apparently either make a joke about it or I stop eating from an entire food group.

Only two more weeks left to go see Contraption!

MUST CLOSE MARCH 1ST!

(We are unable to extend, unfortunately, because one of our actors, the rakish and talented Joe Dempsey, remains in such high demand that Remy Bumppo grabbed him for their next show. The price of getting to play with Joe is you must be willing to share.)

(I would point out, however, that this is its own subtle selling point for our show.)

Make your reservations now!

I have too many bad memories of being alone on Valentine's Day to consider it anything more than a holiday for Other People...like Secretary's Day and Rosh Hoshanah. I'm very much in love this year, but I don't need some ancient Catholic martyr's approval to feel that way. I don't need this day. Everybody else, please enjoy.

I arrived home tonight to find that all the power in my apartment was out, with the exception of the kitchen counter fluorescents and two electrical sockets. Turning the fuses on and off did nothing. When I mentioned the problem to my downstairs neighbor, who functions as de facto building manager, she got this horrified look on her face and said "Oh...it's worse this time." The electrician will be in tomorrow morning to deal with the immediate problem, and my landlady then insists that the entire unit is going to be rewired.

As a result, we are unable to TiVo tonight's episode of Lost.

The crepe I had for dinner is playing havoc with my insides.

I need more sleep.

And not a bit of that manages to mean anything in a world where horrors like this continue to happen.

xandra_lj, my dear friend and colleague, my Hope in Vox Pandora, teaches at NIU.

She is fine. I hope that she does not know any of the twenty-two victims, but then again, I'd have hoped there were no victims in the first place.

In memory of the hour or so of genuine sunshine we had today, and the nap I managed to take within said sunshine (one of the first naps I've been able to take in I don't know how long), here are nine music videos that make me smile.

These aren't all sunny, happy songs. Some of them just make me smile from that inner warmth that comes with admiring something so beautiful that your heart aches to witness it.

(And I'm deliberately avoiding Fatboy Slim's tap-dancing Christopher Walken video for "Weapon of Choice," the Foo Fighters' Mentos send-up "Big Me" and OK Go's "Here It Goes Again."¹ It would be cheating. Those videos should make everybody smile.)

In no particular order, and not all videos Safe For Work:



Feist, "1 2 3 4"


Fountains of Wayne, "Denise"


Beth Orton, "Conceived"


The Pixies, "Here Comes Your Man"


The Sundays, "Summertime"


Blind Melon, "Toes Across The Floor"


Stars, "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead"


Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Can't Stop"


The Notorious B.I.G., "Sky's The Limit"







¹ Although I will post this link to a high school talent show re-enactment of the treadmill-dancing video, just because I enjoy watching these four kids who seem like they maybe they weren't the most popular kids in their school, certainly not the aristocracy of the student athletes, but for one shining moment danced themselves into kings of the universe.