Last night—a reading at the center of the fourth draft of my new play, Morning Journal; generally, reflecting on a year of the BCTR.
People keep showing up to the readings, I guess because they're technically free or donation-only. And since the Times Zoomers review, I've detected a concrete uptick in young actors who want to figure out how to audition for the plays, and I don't really know what to tell them because we don't have auditions; we're just kind of making things up as we go along.
The nice thing about being unsuccessful, or at least semi-unsuccessful, is that you know that the people you're working with are working with you for the right reasons. They like the material, they like each other. The more you get clout (in contemporary parlance), the more you have to just think twice about why someone's talking to you or asking to be involved in a project. It's not their fault; it's not your fault; it's just the circumstances. A year ago, I didn't envision myself in this position—with a growing company behind me. In fact, I think there was a generalized social belief that I’d peaked with Dimes and that the rest of my fading drama career would be unintentional self-parody.