my stupid theater company

Created by AI (can you tell? It took FOREVER.)

I shared this at my Birthday Party of Resistance on June 13, 2025

When I was a young man, I started a theater company. I called it something stupid, but I truly wanted to gather my talented friends around me and make theater.

 I had visions of a Steppenwolf, of a Group Theater, of an Annex Theater or a Printer’s Devil - I told my friends I wanted to make Seattle a theater city on par with Chicago and New York. My confidence might have been admirable, probably more cute or annoying than admirable, but my hubris makes me wince now when I think about it.  It was enough back then to convince several of my friends and Cornish classmates to join me. I wanted to produce a play that I’d written, a play that would be the beginning of a new company that would devote itself to developing New Work in Seattle.

 I came up with a motto, or tag line or slogan or whatever for my company. In my defense nobody challenged me on it. I don’t know why, maybe because they felt sorry for me or maybe because they thought it was cool. Either way, the VERY FIRST THING I came up with when “developing” my new theater company was this slogan:

“We don’t want to save the world, we just want to save theater. And if the world gets saved a little bit in the process, that is okay too.”

 What incredible and un-abashed, absolute ass-holery.

I remember that same year in the mid 90’s, being invited by Cornish to sit on a panel of local artistic directors who had started theater companies. This was about three days after I’d started mine and we had just started rehearsing the play I’d written. To give you a sense of scale - The play I’m talking about was a one hundred and seventy-five page,  3+ hour rock and roll musical with a live band, in which the two main characters did their many scenes together with one of them on pre-recorded video, fed from VCRs backstage to one of three big-screen TV’s mounted on seven foot pillars set across the length of the stage. This multi-media staging was necessary because I, the playwright and lyricist, played BOTH main characters, one of whom was God. Okay.

 Richard E.T. White , the Theater Department Chair at Cornish, didn’t know any of this when he invited me to be on this panel with actual, real artistic directors. He’d only just met me because he let us use Cornish to rehearse my play in exchange for us painting his new office. This was his first year as head of the Theater Department. All he knew about me was that I was a recent Alum, and that I’d started my own theater company and was rehearsing a show. I was at one very far end of the Seattle Theater spectrum. I sat on that panel with real Seattle artistic directors, like John Kazanjin and Timothy Bond and I think Jeffery Stiezer. Goodness. We were discussing making theater in Seattle with the graduating senior class. I remember sitting there and KNOWING I was out of my league but determined to fake it as best I could. I remember Mr. Kazanjin giving sage and reasonable advice about the realities of making theater in Seattle. He spoke very reservedly, very cautiously. He was even a little bit discouraging. It was hard, he said - and you had to be conservative in your ambitions.

 To this day I don’t know why I didn’t just keep quiet, or even just left the stage  to sit with the seniors, but I thought that I had to say something and I basically chirped that I was going make sure that MY theater company focused on NEW WORKS and that MY theater company didn’t HAVE any boundaries. I did admit that I was new and DIDN’T REALLY KNOW WHAT WAS POSSIBLE OR NOT POSSIBLE, but I framed that like it was my greatest strength. I told this group of 10 college seniors that for me, anything was possible, that I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and because of that I could do anything I wanted. I was going to start with my show, and then create the next Steppenwolf - I didn’t say that directly, but it was clear that was my plan.

 “We don’t want to save the world, we just want to save theater. And if the world gets saved a little bit in the process, that is okay too.” Asshole.

The slogan was too long, the play was too long, and the effort it took for me and my friends to produce and mount this bombastic, bloated, meandering mess of a multi-media meta-musical was off the charts. I was, for the first time in my life, exhausted. Having to perform that show literally made me sick. I broke my hand performing one night. The show was an embarrassing bomb, we played to the cavern of the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, empty except for friends and family. My Dad came every night but only because I’d written him into the show and he had a line he had to deliver from the audience. We ran for three weekends, I think 6, maybe even 9 shows and it was the most difficult and embarrassing 19 to 27 hours of my life.

 My friends, my theater company, because they really were all so very talented, did pull it off. The sets my dear father built for me were beautiful. The tech was impeccable and impressive. Lela produced and made everything happen with the 5 grand we raised. James ran the three VCR’s that fed the video feeds to the TV’s on stage flawlessly. Patrick live-produced sound from the booth. The cast, Julie, Eleuthera and Peggy Jo, were elegant, professional and brilliant. My best high school friend Dennis, who composed all the music and led the live band, something he had never done before in his life, was a champion.  Everything that was wrong with that show was squarely my fault.  I fought with Bob, our poor director. I refused to make edits. I ignored direction I didn’t agree with. I was not a good singer and I cast myself as the lead of a Rock Musical. The Stranger wrote that I needed to go into the dark closet that playwrights must go into and not come out until I learned how to write a play. Never has that miserable rag been more right.

 I didn’t do anything for two years after that. My theater company went along (in a much more humble and successful capacity) for those two years and I stayed in the background and supported my friends doing better, shorter shows. I wrote a 10 minute play for 9 Holes at the Union Garage and the audience laughed in a couple of places. I was back on top! I found a weird little stage under a Capitol Hill costume shop and acted in some Chekhov. I watched the audience line up around the block for late-night Twilight Zone episodes performed live on stage. So I wrote Money & Run, which was the polar opposite of my overwrought first attempt at putting on a show. Theater Schmeater took me in and we had a pretty good time for a couple of years. 14/48 asked me to come and write, and for the first time I saw what a truly living, breathing, pulsing, writhing, stinking, sweating, theater community looked and felt like. My first marriage ended and my life exploded into little tiny fragments. A cool playwright friend named Bret took Money & Run with him down to Berkeley when Impact Theatre did his show there and I will never be able to repay him because that is where and why I met Alyssa. Alyssa, in turn, saved my life and made it possible for me to rebuild it to places I never thought I’d go. LA and fatherhood to name just two. 15 years ago, she came back to Seattle with me and I’ve been trying to have it all ever since, with varying degrees of success. And in that time, nearly everything, EVERYTHING about the world has changed.

The point of all this - this whole EPIC ACCOUNT is that - I’ve changed the slogan of My Theater Company. The slogan now is:

“Actually, we DO want to save the world. We’d love it if theater survives, but what we really need to do at this point is to save the world.”

Let me be clear - I don’t actually think anything I do will move the needle. But I have to do something. And the only thing I know how to do is this. Get people together in a room, tell them a story they can’t get on their phones, and if it doesn’t save the world, it will at least save me.

 I think that last part sounds selfish. It is selfish. I’ve been worried for so long about sounding selfish, sounding privileged… sounding like what I am. But I find freedom in the fact it doesn’t actually matter what I am, it only matters what I do. I don’t matter. But we do. What we do matters.

I’m not looking for people to join me. I’m looking for people to join with. While I am a better collaborator than I was in 1996, I still have a lot to learn from talented people who I like. And talented people I don’t know that I like yet. I’m going to have another event like this, without the birthday, later this summer. Maybe the beginning of August. You are all invited to come and do this again and maybe more. If you are already engaged in Theater of Resistance and looking for support, want to talk more about Theater of Resistance, explore what Theater of Resistance means, have an idea for Theater of Resistance or want to play D&D  - my name is Wayne, send me an email at the link above.

And check back here for more stuff.

Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash