Tag: Theatre

Day 10 / Reason 10: I May Hate It

December 10, 2021

Lest you think I had these twelve blog posts neatly planned out before I started posting this virtual half-Advent calendar of reasons for going back to the theatre after an 8-year absence, please know that the idea for this one came to me in the bathtub two nights ago, when I suddenly asked out loud, “What if I hate it?” I smiled and a familiar sense of delight came upon me, because I knew that there’s a less than trivial chance I might.
I would say that over the decades I attended shows at Seattle’s big houses before retiring, I was wowed by maybe ten percent of the offerings, then moderately impressed with another thirty, disappointed by twenty percent, and then flat out hated roughly the remaining thirty.
Hell, as much I as I heaped praise on Amy Thone two posts ago, it’s also undeniable that she has appeared in shows which I have absolutely loathed. Back in 2010 I took my friend, the journalist Tom Paulson, to see the Seattle Rep’s production of God of Carnage, featuring Amy and her husband Hans Altwies. Tom seemed genuinely confused and shaken by both how bad it was, and conversely, how much the audience seemed to love it. At one point he turned to me and whispered, “Why are all these people laughing?” Before I could even think of something clever to answer, I blurted out the truth: “Stockholm Syndrome.”
Hating bad theatre is a big part of being a playwright. Hell, it’s a big part of being a theatre lover. Because anyone who really loves the artform understands that sitting through a bad play is infinitely more excruciating than sitting through a bad movie or television show. In the theatre, you’re trapped, and what’s worse, you’re trapped with other people (Sartre’s definition of Hell). The fact that live group suffering is multiplicative explains in large part why the stakes of live theatre are always so high, even when the mere facts would argue that they are invariably quite low.
So maybe you can help me out here. Why is the fact that there’s a better than negligible chance I might hate A Contemporary Theatre‘s production of A Christmas Carol such a compelling reason for me wanting to go? Am I a masochist? Or is it that I know, deep down, that if we are capable of throwing gobs of money, love, and attention at a production, and it still turns out to be horrible, then maybe we are right on track back to normal after all?

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Amy Thone, Bad Theatre, God of Carnage, Hans Altwies, Paul Mullin, Seattle Rep, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Theatre, Tom Paulson
Day 9 / Reason 9: I Figured Out How Christmas Carols Work

December 9, 2021

Maybe Charles Dickens was merely being twee when he called his novella “A Christmas Carol“, but let’s at least consider another possibility: he knew exactly what he was doing, and by titling the story as he did, he helped guarantee it would become a perennial holiday classic.
What is a Christmas carol anyway? It’s a song, which we know well, because we have sung it our entire lives, but with just one small wrinkle, a constraint on the magic: we can only sing it during a special time of the year. Outside of that time, the song no longer holds the same power, or really any power at all.
I can imagine Dickens’ wanting to employ similar magic for his story. By calling it “a Christmas Carol” he understood that he was narrowing the space on the calendar during which the story would be enjoyed, while deepening and widening its reach beyond any of his other classic tales. (I actually have no idea, really, what Dickens was thinking. I suppose I could Google it, but why ruin the fun of speculating?)
We have a terrible misapprehension of how art works in our current culture. We read a book, Moby Dick, say, and then we think we’re done. “All good. Moby Dick = finished.” We look at a single Jackson Pollack painting, maybe not even in real life, maybe on a computer screen. And we say to ourselves: “Good. ‘Action painting’ = big squiggly mess of colors. Got it! Moving on.” But that’s not how art works. Most art works through the mystical mechanisms of return. You have to keep revisiting, renewing, because each time you do, you create the opportunity for something new to happen. That’s the reward for your faithfulness.
A full engagement with art requires tapping into the dimensions of the sacred ritual and the mystical, even if you—like me—don’t, strictly speaking, believe in such dimensions. (Surely if you are reading this obscure blog about theatre, you have at least a passing familiarity with the notion of a willing suspension of disbelief. Theatre runs on this not-so-secret sauce.)
Whenever I talk about the ineffable effects of art, I always come back to the Hopi. The famous religious historian Elaine Pagels tells a story about a particular sect of that tribe who go through an elaborate ceremony every morning to make the sun rise. When asked what would happen if they simply neglected to perform the rite one day, they reply: “Oh sure, let’s plunge the world into eternal darkness for the sake of your stupid experiment.”
Winter solstices have been coming and going for billions of years before human beings strolled the globe. We don’t make the light bounce back out of the darkness by celebrating Christmas.
On the other hand, why risk it?

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Amy Thone, Bad Theatre, God of Carnage, Hans Altwies, Paul Mullin, Seattle Rep, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Theatre, Tom Paulson
Day 8 / Reason 8: Amy Thone

December 8, 2021

“Actors I know and love.”
That is the last line of yesterday’s post. So it’s only fitting that we come now to Amy Thone, who represents, for me, the epitome of that phrase.
But first, I need to stop and explain how I am mucking up the flow of this series of blogs, and mangling the architecture of its suspense. If I were being clever in how I promoted and distributed these little essays, I would save the best for last, and wait until day 12 to reveal my decisive reason for returning to the theatre, saying something like, “Of course, the real reason I’m going back is… ____.” But I will spare you that trivial grift and tell you right here, right now, good and early, because I remember when I first heard about the possibility and I thought to myself, “Oh crap! If Amy plays Scrooge, I’m going to have break my theatre fast to go see her.”
Now, full disclosure: ACT’s production of A Christmas Carol features two Scrooges, playing in repertory, because the role is so demanding, and because ACT offers so many performances. (Hey, if you got a cash cow, milk it, right?) This year features the inestimable R. Hamilton Wright, a seasoned veteran in the part, alternating with Amy, a newcomer to the role. Says Ray Tagavilla, who’s playing Bob Cratchit, and is himself one of this city’s finest actors: “Bob Wright and Amy Thone as both Scrooges on different nights are 2 different shows.” Indeed, I am very tempted to go see Bob’s version, too.
A career in theatre, especially in a town like Seattle, can produce some interesting ironies and some fairly cruel petty twists of fate, because, as long as I have known Amy (since 1991) and as much as I admire her as an artist (profoundly and unequivocally), I have never had the opportunity to work with her as a playwright.
Ironically (I warned you there would be irony) the very first moment I met her was when Amy auditioned for a part in a play of mine at Annex Theatre. She blew the room away with her monologue, and then again, cold-reading sides from my script. We offered her the part right then and there, but she told us that she was Equity, i.e. a union actor, and could not work at Annex, a non-union shop. She explained that she was auditioning everywhere because she was new to town and wanted folks to be familiar with her work.
Talk about heartbreak. There’s nothing quite like the disappointment a playwright feels when he knows in his bones he has the perfect person for a role right in front of him, but he can’t cast her because of the arcane rules of theatre. (Reason #373 why I left.)
Amy and I became friends anyway, and have spent the intervening decades admiring each other’s work from across the unbridgeable gap of show biz circumstance in all its banality.
Amy Thone playing Scrooge has dragged me back to the theatre, because, beyond her being my friend, and despite my determination to stay away, Dame Thone, as I teasingly style her, is one of those performers who will surprise you every time she walks on stage. You’re prepared for it. You know it’s going to happen, but there she is, surprising you anyway.
I have seen at least twenty-five different actors perform Scrooge. I have even played him myself as a young man. But I know with a certainty that Amy is going to show me something about this timeless character that I have never known before. And in showing me something new about Scrooge, she will show me something new about myself. How often are we offered such a guarantee?

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Amy Thone, Bad Theatre, God of Carnage, Hans Altwies, Paul Mullin, Seattle Rep, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Theatre, Tom Paulson
Day 7 / Reason 7: My Sons

December 7, 2021

When I fully and officially retired from theatre in 2013, my younger son Keelan was only eight years old. My older son, Declan, was eleven. This means that the person in their lives mostly likely to spark an interest in them for the artform is also the person who cut it out of his life when they were little.
I was mostly okay with this for most of the last eight years, but this May I was blessed with a unique opportunity, which caused my mind to start changing. May 21, 2021 was the 75th anniversary of the accident dramatized in my play Louis Slotin Sonata, and thanks to generous funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and additional support from Circle X Theatre and Trial and Error Productions, I got to produce a virtual “Zoom” performance of the play, directed by John Langs leading a cracker-jack cast and crew.
Running up to the night of the broadcast, we had no idea what kind audience we were going to have (as it turned out, quite sizable, thank you very much) but I found that in my heart of hearts the only two people I really I cared about watching it were my two sons. See, most of what I have written for the stage is for grown up audiences. So neither of my sons had ever seen a staging of one of my full-length plays. And I didn’t even know this sad fact bothered me until I had the opportunity to rectify it.
My sons enjoyed this virtual staging very much (or at least credibly claimed to, smart fellows.) And I subsequently promised myself to expose them to more theatre, when more theatre was available, especially now that they are both close to the age I was when I fell fully in love with the artform.
I never regretted not encouraging Declan and Keelan to do more theatre. They have their own interests, and to me there’s no one quite so cringey as the quintessential stage parent, foisting their dreams of show business glory onto their children in hopes of vicarious fulfillment. But, on the other hand… a man does prefer for his sons to understand what he wasted his youth on.
An added reason for taking them to this particular production of A Christmas Carol at ACT is the fact that neither one of them really knows the story beyond the Muppet movie version. (A fine iteration, for the record. No need to fight me in the comments on that point.) So I will be delighted indeed to sit with them and watch a great story, staged at one of Seattle’s great theatres, performed by actors I know and love.

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Amy Thone, Bad Theatre, God of Carnage, Hans Altwies, Paul Mullin, Seattle Rep, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Theatre, Tom Paulson
Day 5 / Reason 5 for Going back to the Theatre: A Contemporary Theatre

December 5, 2021

When I attended the University of Maryland on an acting scholarship, I was required to meet at the end of every semester with the faculty advisory board to discuss my progress as a student of the theater arts. At one such meeting, in the middle of my sophomore year, the head of the department expressed his concerns that I was “not a team player”. At the end of that academic year, I left college, for good as it turns out, though I didn’t know that at the time.
I have been a practicing Buddhist for over thirty years. The three jewels of Buddhism are the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha. “Dharma” is just a fancy sounding Sanskrit word for “the teaching” or “doctrine”. “sangha” is Sanskrit for “community” or “monastic order”; what Christians might translate as “the congregation” or “the church.” I feel pretty good about my relationship with the first two jewels, but I am the first to admit that I am bad at sangha.
I have an inherent distrust of institutions, and I am especially bad at trusting large theatre institutions. The larger they are, the less I trust them. From my perspective as a playwright, large regional theaters operate to maximize their own survival as institutions over the quality of the work they produce. I used to relish comparing the Seattle Rep to the Queen Mary ocean liner, now permanently attached to its mooring in Long Beach, trotting out the old adage, “Ships are safe at harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.” I used to think I could do something to help change this sad status quo, but after doing my damnedest to move the needle for at least ten years, I gave up. This impasse can certainly be listed among my reasons for retiring from theatre, but I’d be lying if I claimed it was the only one.
I always assumed that Seattle’s Big Houses would survive, regardless, because that’s what they were designed to do. I assumed they would always be there for people who wanted to watch safe theater, and, because I wasn’t one of those people, I didn’t have to care. Now, after nearly two years of lockdowns and dark stages, I am not so sure.
With eight years to think things over, I will straight up own my institutional distrust as a character flaw, particularly egregious for a playwright, for whom every achievement is necessarily the result of a team effort. I will also openly admit that A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) has been a pretty good friend to me as a theatre artist over the years. In 1997 ACT commissioned me as one of four playwrights to participate in a new play development workshop, and my play Louis Slotin Sonata received its first ever staged reading in ACT’s Bullitt Cabaret space. I have acted and written for many iterations of 14/48 at ACT, and for many years I was a teaching artist associated with the theater’s FirstACT program, which brings playwrights into Seattle high schools to teach young people the craft.
ACT has two mainstages, and several other smaller performance spaces, and has been very generous in opening these venues up to outside performing arts organizations, like New Century Theatre, The Seagull Project and 14/48, just to name a very few.
Until The 5th Avenue Theatre comes back online in January, ACT is the only live theatre actively producing in the downtown corridor. Think about that. Then think about the relationship of live theatre to the health of a city. What would Seattle look like without a flagship complex of performance venues like A Contemporary Theatre?
Would it look like Seattle’s downtown core does right now? Half-empty, garbage-strewn, whole blocks lined with tents and active drug markets obstructing the entryways to the small businesses.
Do we really want live in a city devoid of live theatre?
I’m not interested in that.
I want ACT to survive, so I am shifting gears, breaking my fast, and heading back to the theatre on Sunday, December 12 to join the crowd coming downtown to see A Christmas Carol.
Maybe I’ll see ya down there.

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Amy Thone, Bad Theatre, God of Carnage, Hans Altwies, Paul Mullin, Seattle Rep, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Theatre, Tom Paulson
Day 2 / Reason 2 for Going Back to the Theatre: My Sister

December 2, 2021
Against all better judgement I have begun a 12-part blog series enumerating my reasons for going back to the theatre, specifically to see ACT’s production of A Christmas Carol on December 12. This is day two of my virtual half-advent calendar.
I have never really fully explained why I left the theatre back in 2013. My reasons were personal, even if my retirement was painfully public. Maybe I’ll get to sharing those reasons someday, but before I can do that, I should state for the record who is to blame for me becoming involved in the art form in the first place. That would by my sister, Margaret, or “Maggie” as those of us closest to her know her these days.
Maggie first fully electrified my theatrical imagination playing Puck in her junior high school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was maybe six or seven, but I followed the Elizabethan text better than one might expect. Still, a lot of the language lofted over my head. Except when Maggie spoke, transformed as she was into a mischievous hobgoblin, seemingly in charge of all of the chaos reigning on the stage.

Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand,
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover’s fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!

I already had it mostly memorized, because I had listened to her memorizing it in her room over the weeks before.
The following year, when my sister played Gollum in the school’s production of The Hobbit, the gas really hit the spark plug.
“Bless us and splesh us my precious. Gol-LUM!”
She would practice her lines over and over in her room with the door shut, but she was loud enough for me to hear everything in the room Eddie and I shared next door.
“What’s it got in its pockets, my precious? Gol-LUM!”
These eponymous punctuations “Gol-LUM!” burst forth from her as seemingly uncontrollable, autonomic eructations welling up from the pit of her gut. Or rather, Gollum’s gut, for she had, indeed, become the twisted little monster.
“We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious. They stole it from us. Sneaky little hobbitses. Wicked, tricksy, false!”
Looking back now, she was so unlike other girls her age, in the mid-70s: so obsessed with hair and fashion and looks. Oh, Maggie cared about those things too, obsessed about them at times, but she threw them all aside when she came to inhabit Gollum. Once him, she didn’t care one bit about looking feminine, even though the director had squeezed her blossoming body into a green and brown painted body suit. She gave herself over completely to the character. It was really, for me, the first time I had ever witnessed such a transformation.
Now you may say, wait a minute. She was doing theatre, pretending. This wasn’t real. But when your oldest sister by six years is becoming an avariciously murderous monster in the room next door to yours, it’s real all right.
Keep in mind this is decades before the magic of Peter Jackson’s digital capture of Andy Cirkus’ pliable, gamut-running, psychologically insightful portrayal in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. It was even prior to the animated version of The Hobbit released in 1977. As far as I know my sister had never seen a performance of Gollum, and I’m not even sure she read the book. My sister had nothing from which to construct her portrayal but the text of the stage adaption and her own imagination. In other words, she did the quintessential actor’s job, and took fresh text (fresh to her anyways) and molded from it a character whom she then inhabited. Her portrayal of Gollum encapsulated everything about the theatrical process that would get and keep me stoked for the next three decades. As an artist, my sister set me on fire. With Puck and Gollum she showed me how weirdness and audacity could be leveraged into a gift you could offer other people in performance.
The key to my origin story as a theatre artist—which I never put together consciously throughout all those decades of doing it, and only just fully realized writing this—is that I started acting, and then went on to playwriting, because of my sister Maggie. She touched the match to my fuse as an artist, and I’ve been burning ever since.
Every one of my siblings has some experience with the theatre, but I was the only one who went professional. I got my Actors’ Equity card at the age of 19 playing Young Scrooge at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. I never used my union card again.
My Christmas present from Maggie that year was a beautiful, hardbound illustrated copy of A Christmas Carol. Here’s how she inscribed it.

1/11/88

Dear Paul,

I saw this book a week or so after we saw your show & I had to get it for you. I know that the show caused some inner turbulence for you but it is a timeless story that touches everyone’s heart. Your show was an excellent adaptation of the story. After buying this book I started thinking about what it is that makes this story so special. What did I come up with? We can identify with Scrooge’s past, present and future “personas”, and we can relate to the loss of Christmas spirit that seems to occur as we get older. We become so caught up in the ways of the world, that we lose touch with the ways of the soul. I’d like to believe that in this story Dickens isn’t merely encouraging the celebration of Christmas, he’s demanding that we celebrate life. The ghosts are merely showing us how we have allowed the control of our lives to be taken out of our hands. To you, dear brother, I wis a full, rewarding, happy, sad, thoughtful, action-packed, glorious and challenging life. I hope that you will enjoy this book & celebrate Christmas every day of your life.

Lots of Love,

MCM [Margaret Cecilia Mullin]

There’s so much I could tell you about everything my sister has taught me over the years, but if I had to boil it all down to highlights it would be these:
- Life is long, but ultimately short.
- Be weird when you want.
- Be loud in your love.
- Celebrate light in the darkness.
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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Amy Thone, Bad Theatre, God of Carnage, Hans Altwies, Paul Mullin, Seattle Rep, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Theatre, Tom Paulson
Testing… Testing… Is This Thing On?

March 18, 2020

It has certainly been a minute or two since I last posted here at my old blog Just Wrought. (Damn! Four years ago, Father’s Day!?) But I am considering blowing the dust off of it. (Metaphorically of course. I would never do anything as rash in this current crisis as literally blowing dust.)
I need a reliable platform from which to communicate, and, alas, very recently I have been hearing about problems with Face Book deleting posts for apparently no reason, and, let’s face it, all of the major social media platforms are utterly non-transparent and frankly a bit suspect when it comes to user data. When I post something here, I can see how many people have looked at it, and therefore have a much crisper insight into how well I am reaching people.
If you’re interested in my future offerings, some of which will be old-school style, essays, and some of which will be more like opportunities for actors, writers and other arts professionals to make a little extra spending money, then by all means, click “reload” a couple times on the ol’ browser, and heck, if you’re tempted, maybe even send a link of this post to a friend or two.
If I get enough hits here at Just Wrought, I’ll know I can use this as my primary form of communication on the internet. (Though of course, I will always post pointers to it on FB, Twitter, and Instagram.)
So if you’ve made it this far, and you like what you see, and you want to see more, say hello in the comments. And watch this space. I will have news on a special project I’m developing soon. Very soon.
Love,
Paul

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Amy Thone, Bad Theatre, God of Carnage, Hans Altwies, Paul Mullin, Seattle Rep, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Theatre, Tom Paulson
Better Dead, But Rich’ll Do

March 5, 2015

I don’t even have a dog in the fight that Brendan Kiley’s pulled me into here, but I think I might have to rent one.
Me on Face Book yesterday
* * *
Before I retired from theatre nearly two years ago I liked to write essays about the art form’s problems (“On Institutional Arrogance”), and what made it great, (“How Can I Talk About the Borrowers?”), but I never did manage to write all the essays I wanted to. By the end, I had a whole file full of titles I would never flesh out. I even wrote an essay about that (“Surplus Titles”). One of my favorite leftovers was “Better Dead”, under which I intended to provide an explanation to the uninitiated that despite the image they might hold in their minds of playwrights being central to the making of theatre in modern America, the fact is, our absence is the usual and preferred state of engagement, and if we can manage to be dead, preferably for a long enough time that our work is in the public domain, then we are even more popular among our non-playwriting theatre colleagues.
(more…)

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Amy Thone, Bad Theatre, God of Carnage, Hans Altwies, Paul Mullin, Seattle Rep, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Theatre, Tom Paulson
Saturday Morning Cartoons LIVE!

October 20, 2014
Death of an Institution
You may not have noticed, but just a few weeks ago a beloved American institution died the death of a ragdoll; and no less of an American institution itself than The Washington Post announced the passing in its recent article “Saturday Morning Cartoons are No More.” The Post lamented the last holdout:

This past Saturday, the CW became the last broadcast television network to cut Saturday morning cartoons. The CW is replacing its Saturday cartoon programming, called “The Vortexx,” with “One Magnificent Morning,” a five-hour bloc of non-animated TV geared towards teens and their families.

Those of us who remember the age of three and only three networks, also recall fondly that, once upon a time the only way you could watch animated cartoons was to wake up on Saturday morning and catch what ABC, NBC or CBS had on offer. Here is what a typical Saturday line up looked like when I was my son Keelans’ age. It includes classics like Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker mixed in with more circa 70’s fair, like The Scooby Doo/Dynamutt Hour, and a personal favorite, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, which came on so late, 12 noon, that my mom was usually hectoring me by that time to get outside because I had already wasted too much of “perfectly nice day” watching that “idiot box.”
“But Mom! It’s Fat Albert!”
Birth of an Institution
Happily, theatre—as specifically embodied by director/producer Jim Jewell— did not let the tradition of Saturday morning cartoons go gently into the good night. Instead, Jewell saw the demise coming, and made a plan to fill the gap with short plays written by teams of local Northwest playwrights and their kids. “Saturday mornings used to belong to kids,” says Jewell. “I remember waiting all week for that one day I could binge on cartoons for hours. So, we wanted to try and create that same feeling with some fun live theater, and what better way to understand what kind of art kids want to see than engaging them in the creation of it?”
The results of Jewell’s brainstorm will be making their world premiere over three Saturdays this November, at the Pocket Theatre [http://thepocket.org/] on Phinney Ridge in Seattle.
My sons, Declan and Keelan, and I teamed up to write “Magical Man and the Space Needle of Hideousness”, just one episode in the continuing adventures of Magical Man and his million-plus year sojourn in our paltry four palpable dimensions.

MAGICAL MAN: I call myself Magical Man. Yeah, I know it sounds stupid, but I can’t say my actual name in your universe. There aren’t enough dimensions.

I’ve been in your world for one million very, VERY boring years.

Today I will do what I have waited all those years to accomplish. Confront Roger Wickersham, bring him to justice for his transgressions. . . .

It certainly doesn’t hurt that Cody Smith and Samuel Hagen will be staring as Magical Man and Roger Wickersham, Evil PhD, respectively.
Other playwright/kid combinations include:
- “Don’t Touch That Dial!” by Penelope Venturini and Marcy Rodenborn
- “Roderick Saves the World (or at least the Day)” by Finn Judd and Maria Glanz
- “Feline Fitness” by Olivia and Jim Jewell
- “The Family Jynx” by Jack and Joe Zavadil
The plays will be brought to life by a talented ensemble, including Val Brunetto, Sam Hagen, D’Arcy Harrison, Cole Hornaday, Kacey Shiflet, and Cody Smith, with a special guest appearance by Paul Shipp. Co-directed by Shawn Belyea and Jim Jewell.
Here are the details broken out real simple like:
What?     Saturday Morning Cartoons – Live!
Who?     B-Sides & Rarities, a Partner Project of The 14/48 Projects, in association with Pocket Theater
Where?    The Pocket Theater, 8312 Greenwood Ave N
When?     November 8, 15, 22 @ 10:30am
How?     Tickets for Saturday Morning Cartoons are available at The Pocket Theater website (http://thepocket.org/see/) and are $10 adults/$5 kids online (or $14/$7 at the door). Seating is general admission and all children MUST be accompanied by an adult
Parents, I promise you a good time will be had by all!
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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Amy Thone, Bad Theatre, God of Carnage, Hans Altwies, Paul Mullin, Seattle Rep, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Theatre, Tom Paulson
What I Wanted You to Say When I Told You I Was Retiring

March 31, 2014

Reaction to my decision to retire from theatre has been varied, but the dominant themes have been disbelief, derision and dismissal. For every one friend or colleague who has said, “Seriously? Oh, well then I wish you the best on whatever it is you do next,” there have been four who have said something along the lines of:

“Oh, sure Paul. Retiring. Right. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Or…

“That’s hilarious. How can you retire from something that makes you no money? You know what? I’m retiring from poverty. LOL!”

Or…

“I give it six months.”

Perhaps the most perplexing response is…

“But I just saw your post about [your play being translated into French / your play being read at ____ / a possible production of your play at ______]. How is that you being retired?”

As if I would stop allowing the plays I’ve already written to be performed or read or translated. Is there a playwright in the history of theatre who has done this?
(more…)

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Tags: A Christmas Carol, A Contemporary Theatre, Amy Thone, Bad Theatre, God of Carnage, Hans Altwies, Paul Mullin, Seattle Rep, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Theatre, Tom Paulson