My 2025 Theater Year.

Thirty shows this year. Eleven Broadway, 18 Off-Broadway and one at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. These 13 were my favorites (* = Broadway):

*Cult of Love (Big conservative Christian family drama. One of the adult children brings her lesbian partner home for Christmas. One of the family’s Christmas traditions is to play and sing traditional music together. Much of the storytelling happens in and around the songs, which are also wonderfully performed. Mare Winningham.)
*English (So many plays about the immigrant experience these days, but none have been so subtle and complex and surprising or quite so affecting—and theatrically inventive—as this one.)
Liberation (I think if pressed I would say this was my favorite play this year. Beautifully and ingeniously written and performed, deeply insightful about the span of time from the late 60s to now, and the effect those years have had on all of us. It packs a wallop. It is a play about our time, but also about mothers and daughters. And memory.)
Ghosts (Ibsen, Lily Rabe, Billy Crudup, Hamish Linklater, new translation directed by Jack O’Brien. This is why I live in New York.)
*Pirates of Penzance (Hilarious, sexy, full-on musical theater joy, totally delivered.)
*Sondheim’s Old Friends (I was kind of reluctant to shell out the bucks for this. Why? It was perfection. 40-some songs. Bernadette Peters still jaw-droppingly great. And don’t tell Patti but Beth Leavel’s Ladies Who Lunch was a revelation. It might be the first time I really got the song.)
Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl. (An unexpected treat. Thrilling even from our nosebleed seats. Cynthia Erivo as Jesus, Adam Lambert as Judas. All the power you want from that score. And the venue is magical.)
Oratorio for Living Things (I won’t try to describe Heather Christian’s work because I think the descriptions I heard for years were what made me resistant. In terms of just a pure, transformative theater experience, this was the one. It’s profound, and maybe indescribable. Just trust.)
*Little Bear Ridge Road (Great new Samuel Hunter play, Laurie Metcalf keeps getting better and better, which should be impossible but apparently it’s not.)
*Oedipus (I wish these Greek play got the same perennial treatment that Shakespeare gets. I was truly shaken when the curtain went down.)
The Baker’s Wife (Classic Stage Company. Gorgeous, transporting. The whole ensemble shines, Ariana DeBose is radiant, Scott Bakula will break your heart if Judy Kuhn hasn’t already stolen it. I thought it was just perfect.)
*Chess (Wowsa! The orchestra and those singers just keep knocking your socks off, one song after another. I loved this so much. I’ve been listening to the album for decades but never really knew the book. Everybody always says it was flawed or problematic, some people say this new production fixed the problems, others say it didn’t. But I found the story compelling, the singing and playing forceful and thrilling. I spent so many years waiting for Lea Michelle to come back to Broadway, and her return is everything I’d hoped it would be. This show is somewhere up near the top of my list.)
*Marjorie Prime (Chan and I saw an Off-Broadway production of this play 10 years ago and it left us both cold. I don’t know how or if the play was revised for this new production, but certainly a lot has changed in our lives, and in the culture, in 10 years. For one, ten years ago the idea of people having meaningful “personal” relationships with AI robots was pretty far-fetched; now it’s widespread and we’re all worried about it. And two, Chan and I both lost our mothers in the last ten years. The play landed deeper, hit harder, this time. We both left in tears. Wrenching performances by Cynthia Nixon and Danny Burstein.)

It was a good theater year in New York. The quantity of great new work is kind of breathtaking. Two things come to mind, though: most of the shows I saw this year were produced by non-profits, both on and off-Broadway, and most of my Broadway favorites were produced by non-profits (Roundabout and 2nd Stage); and, I just read yesterday that, counting the new musicals that opened in the fall and the ones that have announced spring openings, there might be only four new Broadway musicals eligible for Tonys this season. Which is too few. (I guess the rules say there can’t be fewer than four nominees, and that not all four can be nominated). Queen of Versailles is closing early this month, having lost all of it’s $26 million investment. Shows flop all the time, more often than they hit. I’m not a business person, but I worry, along with pretty much everyone but the super-rich, that the economics of New York theater, the sky-high cost of producing shows and the mind-boggling ticket prices, are a cloud growing bigger and bigger over the whole thing. It’s unsustainable.

Santa.

When I was around 8 or 9, my brother and I spent the night at a friend’s house down the street. Our friend’s father was what we used to call “strict” back then. We were all in sleeping bags in the basement, not sleeping, it was very late. Our friend’s father yelled from upstairs to “Go to sleep!” We stopped talking and laughing for a few minutes and then started again. He yelled again. After a few rounds of this, he appeared at the top of the stairs in his pajamas and yelled “Get up here!” Our friend slid out of his sleeping bag and slowly climbed the stairs. When he got to the top, his father grabbed him by the arm, took off his leather house slipper, and beat the crap out of him. For some reason, I associate finding out that Santa Claus is not real with that night. The memory of any specific connection is lost, but any time anyone brings up the subject of whether or not parents should perpetuate the Santa Claus thing, I’m right back in that basement with my brother and our friend and his father and the leather slipper.

Still Here.

I just got home from a followup visit with my cardiologist. I still have some pain, but I'm recovering. He told me how glad he was they were able to open the artery with a stent, that based on my condition before the procedure he’d been worried I would have to have bypass surgery. He shared with me the x-ray images from the procedure I had two weeks ago: images before and after the stent was placed (arrow is pointing to where the artery was clogged).

This Is What I'm Doing Now.

One thing that’s not ideal about where I live is that the closest subway is a 15 minute walk. We’re right at the terminus of several bus lines, so sometimes we take the bus to the train, but, if the weather is friendly, I’ll walk. I’m a fast walker, New Yorkers are fast walkers, I don’t get much exercise otherwise, and I just kind of enjoy the quick stroll through my neighborhood.

A few weeks ago, I started to notice after a couple blocks a tight feeling in my chest, not exactly pain, but distinct pressure. Which was strange because, only a few days prior, Chan had complained of a similar feeling. I’d been very worried about him—chest pain is alarming—and I wondered if mine was some kind of sympathetic reaction. I didn’t say anything the first few times it happened; it felt ungenerous to steal his chest pain moment. At the very least, he was first in the queue.

But it seemed to get worse, and to happen sooner in the walk, bad enough that I’d have to slow way down for the last couple blocks, or stop altogether and rest.

Whatever was happening with Chan cleared up. His pain was triggered by deep breaths, and he figured it was probably a vestige of a bad chest cold he’d had recently. Mine got worse, so I made an appointment with my primary care nurse. My blood pressure was fine; it always has been. He did an EKG, which was normal. He referred me to a cardiologist, and I saw him on Monday of last week. The cardiologist scheduled me for two tests the following week (this past week), and he told me that if I had pain while I was resting, especially combined with numbness or pain in my left arm or jaw, light-headedness, etc. I should go to the emergency room.

On Thursday morning our housecleaner was here, and I walked to the neighborhood coffeeshop where I often work while she’s cleaning. It’s a 20-minute walk, but I took it very slowly. And then I walked home. I felt some pressure in my chest, but it subsided quickly once I stopped. That afternoon, I did some cooking, nothing crazy but I was on my feet for an hour or so, and the pain came back. I lay down on the couch, it didn’t go away, then my arm started to feel tingly, but both symptoms seemed mild, and I hemmed and hawed for a good half hour. I wasn’t in real pain and my pulse felt normal. But when I stood up, I felt faint, I got scared, and I decided I didn’t want to die of indecisiveness, so I called an Uber and went to the emergency room. Chest pain gets you past triage fast. Chan left work early and rushed over. They didn’t find anything wrong with me, and the pain was gone after a half hour or so. The doctor, nurses, a student doctor, lab technicians, everyone was lovely, kind, communicated clearly, but I was there for five hours, mostly sitting waiting for test results and discharge papers. I guess that’s just the nature of hospitals.

Back to the cardiologist on Monday. The first test was like a sonogram, or maybe it was a sonogram, with the wand and the jelly, but instead of a fetus it makes pictures of your heart. I asked the technician if she saw anything bad. She said, “The doctor will look at the images and discuss them with you,” which I’m sure is just the protocol, but I felt like there was something in her voice. Then, on Thursday, a “stress test,” which comprises a shorter version of the sonogram, then walking on a treadmill while you’re hooked up to the EKG electrodes so the doctor can monitor your heart activity while you’re walking, then another sonogram afterwards, to look at how your heart has reacted to exertion.

I was apprehensive about the treadmill. For a couple weeks, I’d been taking everything very slowly pretty much all the time because exertion triggers the pain. I’m not sure how long I was on the treadmill, it felt like only a couple minutes, when I had two jabs of sudden, intense pain in my chest and broke out in a cold sweat. The doctor pulled me off the treadmill and onto the examination table. I was terrified, he told me to take deep breaths, that I was okay, he was there monitoring everything, and he held my hand till the pain subsided.

The cardiologist and the technician (maybe she was a physician’s assistant, I’m not sure) sat down in front of her computer monitor and looked at the blurry, grey moving images from the sonogram. Two of the images in particular they watched several times over, and I swear I saw their faces darken. They looked at each other, concerned. The doctor came over and stood facing me and said, “Based on your symptoms, the changes in your heart activity concurrent with the pain, and the sonogram images, I believe you have “significant coronary disease.” I have “blockages” in my coronary arteries.

High cholesterol runs in my family. We all have it, my siblings, my mother. I’ve battled it all my life—that’s not true, I should say I’ve battled it during the intermittent periods of my life when I’ve had health insurance. I take a statin drug for it now, a high dose, and the number is still higher than it should be. But I’m the first that I know of to have heart disease. Somebody has to be first.

Monday morning at 6:30, I will have a procedure called a “heart catheterization” at Mt. Sinai Hospital on the Upper West Side. It’s another diagnostic test. They’ll insert a tube into a vein in my wrist and feed it up into my heart to deliver a contrast dye, and then they’ll take x-rays. It’s to locate and assess the extent of the blockages. Depending on what they find, I’ll have one of four possible courses of treatment: One, they find no blockage (extremely unlikely based on the previous tests and my symptoms); two, the blockage is minor enough to be treated with drugs (the cardiologist says this is also very unlikely, based on the above); three, they find blockages in one, or two, arteries (in this case, they’ll place a stent or stents to open up the artery, as part of the procedure, since they’ve got the tube up in there already); and four, they find extensive blockages and/or blockages in the main coronary artery (the treatment in this case is bypass surgery—they’ll wait till I’m awake from the anesthesia to discuss this with me). I think with the stent I would go home that day. With the open heart surgery, I would be in the hospital for a week.

This is all moving kind of fast, and I wanted to get all the details down before I start to forget or make things up.  I’m used to telling everybody everything, but for weeks all I had was chest pain and uncertainty to share. I waited even to tell my friends and family until there was something concrete to say. And then suddenly I had bad news, or at least dire news. I’m looking forward to Monday and getting on with it. I won’t say I’m not very frightened (and these few days of waiting are excruciating). 

Fruition, etc.

About five years ago in a cabin in Maine, the thought popped into my head, “I’m gonna write a book,” and I sat down and started writing one. Now I see the end of it in my sights. Maybe it’s distant, I don’t know how distant, but I see it. All my scribbling and staring into space and digging through old stuff for five years is coming to fruition. I have in my hands a literary journal with a chapter from my book in it. The way it makes me feel, to have editors find my writing compelling and, through the process of editing excerpts for publication, to see that they get what I’m doing, that they feel some sympathy with it—it is, to say the least gratifying. It feels like a big step, a turning point.

Why have I so many times in my life just decided to do something I didn’t know how to do but had some notion that by doing it I would learn how? First there’s a story I want to tell and I guess it suggests or draws me to the medium that I think will work best to tell it. The feeling that I am not only telling a story but inventing the wheel is what really feels like making art to me, making something true and honest. And I’ve always just kind of wanted to do everything.

The other side of throwing myself into a new medium is of course at some point having to learn how an unfamiliar field, an industry, works. I’ve put aside thoughts of agents and publishers and readers and the business while I’m writing. I knew eventually I’d have to deal with all that, but I know from experience that those thoughts are needy, they have sharp elbows and an inflated sense of their own importance, attention makes them grow. They take over. They eat the work and grow bigger to fill the space the work left. But they know you’ll need them eventually.

Which is to say: If you know a literary agent or a publisher or editor you think might be intrigued by a book about three homosexual men, whose lives span the 20th century in America, looking for love, give me a shout.

People Like Violence?

Not that this is scientific but I was just sitting here thinking about how I’ve written three musicals in my life, all three stories are cautionary tales or warnings of some kind, each with an outcome distinct from the others, and all very different in terms of their success:

One, Frankenstein, warns that human arrogance will destroy us, and it does; the story ends catastrophically for everyone involved. Our musical was basically stillborn and abandoned. It didn’t work, and we walked away.

Two, The Life & Hard Times of Hester Prynne, says that things are bad but that we can make a better world if we commit ourselves to work for it. This piece was more successful, we did a couple of readings, recorded some of the music. It was in a good place, needed more time and work and support, but the collaboration fell apart and now it languishes.

And three, LIZZIE, a story of violent rebellion, a woman bashes her parents heads in with an axe and transmogrifies into a deity. It’s the most successful of the three by a mile—artistically, professionally, and financially. A hundred-some productions all over the world.

People like quick, unequivocal solutions and happy endings.

Granted, these three works span nearly the whole of my career—from Frankenstein in 1991, Hester Prynne in 2017, and LIZZIE, well, LIZZIE is hard to pin down because it was done and revised and done and revised a few times over 25ish years, but let’s just say the version people know now debuted, sort of, in 2009—which introduces all kinds of variables like differences in my level of experience and skill, changes in the industry, luck, the Zeitgeist (when we first started writing LIZZIE, a big concern was getting the audience to sympathize with an axe murderer—not a problem now). And maybe LIZZIE is just better. I mean it is, but that’s true in part because it (and we) persisted through years of readings and changes and workshops and festival productions and on and on, in other words development. Frankenstein we wrote, rehearsed, and put on stage in the course of a couple months, and none of us had ever done anything like it before. We spent about two years writing Hester Prynne. And LIZZIE was decades in the making.

Just thoughts, for whatever they’re worth.

Dad.

We had a sweet weekend in Columbus, where my dad has just moved into an assisted living facility close to where my brother and his wife live. We sat around and talked, sat around and didn’t talk. We took him and his dog out for very slow walks. He said yes when we asked him if he wanted to join us for pizza and beer, which surprised us all, and, also surprisingly, had no complaints about the pizza and said the beer (a local IPA) was “acceptable.”

I spent a good chunk of the time hanging pictures in his new apartment. It went smoothly, and he was pleased with the results. If you know anything about my dad and our relationship, you know I should be getting some kind of medal or something. The things about him that I hated most when I was young are now the things I find myself holding onto most tightly, because they are "him," and they're slipping away.

Uncle Jim.

It’s World Down Syndrome Day.

My mother’s little brother Jim has been on my mind a lot lately. He was born in 1947, at a time when doctors commonly advised new parents of babies with intellectual disabilities to leave their child at the hospital, that it would be better for everyone to put the baby in an institution before they got attached—which seems monstrous now. We have (had?) advanced so much in the last few decades—in the way we understand disabilities like Down Syndrome, but also in how we regard and treat people with disabilities and what’s possible for them.

Uncle Jim, mid-1950s.

It’s sad and depressing to watch the slurs, “retard” and “retarded,” getting more common again, especially, or maybe only, among the reactionary crowd who are, for the time being, running things. When I was a kid, those words were already strongly frowned on. (I think I got the lecture from my parents about the r-word at the same time as the n-word.) As kids, we heard them, maybe used them, but we knew it was a transgression, and we knew why: because those words hurt people like my Uncle Jim, and they hurt people who loved him.

It’s not unrelated that the Trump/Musk administration is defunding and eliminating federal programs that help people with disabilities—people like my Uncle Jim—live better lives. It’s only three steps from using “retarded” as a casual insult meaning stupid and worthless, which implies that intellectually disabled people are stupid and worthless, to asserting that resources spent to improve their lives are a waste of money.

We don’t just stigmatize certain slurs because they make individual people feel bad (though I think that’s not a terrible reason to avoid a word that has at least 100 benign synonyms), we discourage slurs because the way we talk to each other shapes our thoughts about each other, and shapes our communities’ attitudes, and behavior, and policies.

Some Days Are Harder Than Others.

Yesterday I was sitting here trying to read stuff on my computer screen—black text on white is the hardest—with the lines of text sort of floating up and down at the ends, and I tried to relax my eyes, to bring the double image together, to get used to this new prescription, which is much better than before but still, my ability to see depends on how tired, or not, I am, in other words how well I slept the night before. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t do it. I walked into the living room and sat on the couch and cried. Will I ever be able to really see, just open my eyes and look at the world, again? The things I love most, reading and writing, are more and more difficult, stressful, exhausting, and slow.

Why am I writing a book? I’ve been working on this book forever. Why did I choose seemingly the most challenging thing to do, to do? What keeps me going is that I know it’s very good. The writing I’ve done so far, which is a lot, is very good. And I see the whole thing, I feel the whole thing in me, and know how good it is. Or will be when it’s done.

I’m going to be 64 in a few weeks. I could be writing songs. I’m good at that. Not that songwriting is easy, in fact it’s gotten harder, because I expect more of myself than I did when I was younger, but I’ve been doing it for a while and I am skilled and confident. Songs are shorter; the energy they take, the focus, is less sustained. It’s easier to see the end of a song from the beginning, to keep the whole thing in one’s head at once. But I decide to write a fucking book when I’ve never written a book, which is not only challenging technically, I’m not just writing a book but learning how to write a book.

I keep doing this to myself. In the last 45 years, I’ve been a painter, an actor, a director, a filmmaker, an essayist, author, songwriter, and a raft of things that don’t fit neatly into any category, with varying levels of success at each (artistic, not financial which, for better or worse, I’ve never considered when deciding what to do). I follow my nose, but my nose doesn’t usually lead me to the next story; more often than not it leads me to an entirely different craft. What is my fucking problem? 

Even when I was like 5 years old I couldn’t choose between drawing pictures or singing or making up stories or dressing up like a girl and pretending I was someone else. By about 20, when I dropped out of a theater program and came to New York to study painting, I have believed that the medium doesn’t matter so much because everything informs everything else, that being a better painter makes you a better director makes you a better playwright makes you a better actor makes you a better filmmaker makes you a better songwriter makes you a better novelist makes you a better painter. (Or maybe I just have no discipline and a short attention span.)

Not to romanticize suffering, but the other thing I believe, and this knowledge came much later, is that if it isn’t hard it’s not going to be good. I mean that the work is hard. My bad eyes are just what I’ve got to work with. So I sat on the couch and cried for 20 minutes or so, then I remembered that there are writers who type with their toes because they have no hands, and the job is to just sit down and do it, which is what I did, after I took a nap.

Frances Katula Cheslik.

I’m pretty sure my great grandmother Frances Cheslik was born in New York. Her parents, Anton and Josephine Katula, emigrated from Poland in April 1881. Frances was born in New York in September, 1882, so the family lived in New York for at least a year and a half. Another daughter was born in 1887 in Minnesota, so they had migrated there by then. I don’t know why they stayed here so long before moving to Minnesota, which I think was their destination all along.

The Katulas took a ship from Hamburg via Liverpool to New York in 1881. Passenger list showing Anton and Josephine and their 3 eldest children (Frances’s older siblings). I can’t make out the spelling of those names, but the younger two appear to be twins.

1920 Census, the entry for Edward Cheslik lists his mother’s birthplace as New York.

I haven’t been able to find a birth certificate for Frances to verify any of this, though there is a record of her christening in Minnesota—at age 20, which is odd, but maybe she was marrying someone in a different church?—which lists her birthplace as New York. Census records sometimes show her birthplace as New York, other times Minnesota.

I’m not really doing genealogy here, or not in much detail, I don’t have the patience or time for it, but I’m writing about my grandfather, Edward Cheslik, and my effort to reconstruct his life, to whatever extent I can, has led me into the story of his ancestors, my ancestors, in Minnesota. And the connection to New York, especially to this neighborhood, my home, gives the story an extra charge and makes me want to know more. Where exactly did they live; what did they do here?

Grandma Lenore with her mother-in-law, Frances Cheslik

My grandparents, Ed and Lenore, Frances Cheslik, and my dad, Scott Cheslik

Frances died in 1961, about 3 months after I was born, which is around the time Ed (her son) disappeared for the last time. It’s not likely she ever saw me.

Show Boat, Again.

I saw Show/Boat: A River this week (Target Margin/NYU Skirball). I was, and I still am, very torn about the ethics of criticizing non-commercial, experimental work. In some ways it exists in the same New York theater eco-system and is dependent on positive attention and ticket sales, etc. But I also think the standards are different in important ways. Not lower, in fact I would argue higher. But still different. It can be very hard to accept work like this on its own terms (for one example, not expecting this show to be a “revival” of the musical Show Boat), but, though it’s hard, I think that’s what’s called for. Still, on the other hand, this kind of work shares some of the aims of commercial theater—to entertain and edify audiences, to sell tickets—so the terms are not completely different or at odds.

In the end, having such strong feelings and opinions about musical theater, I don’t know how I can not remark on this production.

The reason Show Boat endures, besides the gorgeous songs and moving story, is because it is the story of black and white people in America, which is to say the story of America. This is true on the surface level of its story and its characters and events, and it is deeply embedded in the music. It is provocative work; it was when it was written, and it is now. Any faithful production of the show gives the audience a raft of ideas for discussion and debate. And it gives artists who approach it a rich mine of stuff to think about, question, research, be moved by, argue over. It’s been revised many times in the last 100 years for film and theater, there is no “definitive” interpretation or production or even version of Show Boat, but the wrenching story and thrilling songs still enlighten and move. It literally, to me, feels like a show that is set in the late 1800s through the 1920s, at the height of Jim Crow racial terror in the South, but is about us, now.

Show/Boat: A River strips the show of its story and of most of the beauty and majesty of the music, and it adds a layer of theatrical commentary (most of it inscrutable). Where Show Boat, the musical, speaks simply and powerfully about race, Show/Boat: A River makes mud of all of that. Even if this were its intention, and I don’t think it is, it would fail as an interpretation of the musical because (besides being objectively terrible if judged by basic standards of the art form) it obfuscates the ideas inherent in the original work. But it also fails as a critique of the musical because the audience is never given any idea what the original work is.

These are thoughtful, serious artists making experimental theater, and the last thing I would want to do is disparage or discourage this kind of work. I invested most of my career in making experimental work. It is essential, and most of the people who do it are mistunderstood and under-appreciated by the wider world of theater. But I don’t think this piece was successful. It failed to say anything clear or trenchant about race (in the show or in America), and in the process obscured everything clear and trenchant that the show itself says about race in America, if you let it.

Happy Horatio Alger's Birthday.

I’m not sure exactly where to place Horatio Alger in my esteem. Not a hero or martyr, not exactly, or neatly, anyway. I’ve been a little obsessed with him ever since I read The Lost Life of Horatio Alger (Gary Scharnhorst and Jack Bales) about 20 years ago, a book which sets out to find the real story of Alger’s life separate from the myths that have grown around him and his books, and ends up being about the impossibility of such a task.

I won’t try to sketch out a biography here (besides the Scharnhorst book, which is great, there’s a very good Wikipedia page), but three facts keep drawing me back to his story: 1, his status as a hero of conservative politics, regarded as the originator of the so-called rags-to-riches American Dream myth (which is mostly based on a mischaracterization of Alger’s books), 2, his early and brief career as a Unitarian minister during which he was accused of molesting teenage boys, driven out of town by his congregation, after which the national Unitarian organization persuaded the church to cover up the scandal, and Alger moved to New York and began writing novels for boys, and 3, after he died, Alger’s sister, following a directive he left in his will, destroyed all his personal and professional papers, including all his correspondence. (This last fact is an extremely common occurrence after the death of queer people, making for one of the bigger challenges for historians of gay life and gay lives.)

In the first conception of the musical, Jack—which I put on the back burner at the beginning of the pandemic but will return to when I finish the book I’m writing now—I was weaving Alger’s story together with the story of my own teenage years. After changing my mind back and forth a dozen or so times, I finally took Alger out. It was cumbersome and too clever.

But I am determined to return to Alger’s story. I still feel compelled to make a case for sympathy for all the millions of queer people who had to daily negotiate crushing repression at every turn and figured out lives for themselves that may have brought them happiness or fulfillment or love but likely didn’t, workarounds that most people now would judge harshly by standards that queer people even today have only very tenuous access to and could not possibly have adhered to, that they were specifically excluded from, 150 years ago. Or 25 years ago. Or 10. The challenge of making that argument using the biography of a conservative hero and lover of teenage boys is for some perverse reason impossible to resist. (And my favorite song I wrote for the show is the one from Horatio’s sister Augusta’s POV.)

Alger was born in 1932, and Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Bootblacks was published in 1868. It was a big hit, and he followed it with at least a hundred more books for boys with roughly the same plot: a scrappy, smart boy (or, in at least one book, a girl) living on his own, has a chance encounter with an older, successful man who takes an interest in him, becomes the boy’s patron and introduces him to the world of business, where he flourishes and rises to some version of middle-class success. Even before the success of these books, Alger was devoted to the welfare of homeless boys (huge problem in mid-19th century New York), gave many of them room and board and other support, adopted at least one boy, and supported the work of various charitable organizations devoted to the welfare of boys that sprang up at that time, like the YMCA, the Children's Aid Society, and the Newsboys’ Lodging House. He spent the rest of his life writing for, socializing and living with, and helping boys in need, and there was never another complaint or even a hint of inappropriate behavior.

Shedding.

I’m consolidating the Life in a Box archive to ship to Minneapolis to join the Y’all archive at the Tretter Collection. It’s mostly digital media—video, audio, images, etc.—but there’s quite a bit of paper, too: notes, transcriptions of interviews, release forms, contracts, publicity materials, financial stuff. I’m sitting here reliving the joy and optimism of the whole thing but especially the last few months when we were getting closer and closer to finishing and feeling more and more certain that it was going to be very good. I couldn’t wait for people to see it, for it to get out to a wide audience it seemed certain to reach. I couldn’t imagine that it would not.

One of the big lessons of the period of my life and career depicted in Life in a Box was that that feeling of inevitability does not make it real, that no feeling of inevitability makes it real. I thought I had successfully and fully learned that. And yet, as I worked on the film over those two years I let the feeling creep in again, came to trust it, and by the end, even though, and just as, I had drained the resources and patience of our investor dry, I started making the same kind of irrational decisions Jay and I had made over and over for ten years waiting for Y’all to hit big. I used credit cards to pay for the final edit, color correction, sound mix and edit, marketing; I accepted funds and in-kind donations from friends; promised deferred payment to collaborators who’d already put more time and work into the project than I had any right to expect of them. I never considered any other way except to plow through to the end knowing that when we signed our deal with HBO everybody would get paid and then some.

And we finished it, and it was really really good. We all knew it. Festival audiences loved it. We got lots of excellent, perceptive, and generous reviews, the attorney representing the film had meeting after meeting with distributors, cable networks, and we tried so hard to sell the film, kept trying for years. But it didn’t happen.

Life in a Box was the last time I had that sense of inevitability. It was the last time I allowed myself to have it. Not only is the disappointment painful and unnecessary, but all the emotional and psychic energy put into it is a distraction from the work.

Who knows why it didn’t happen, but I have theories:

* The film premiered in the San Francisco Int’l Film Festival in 2005. There were two scheduled screenings. The first one was lightly attended, but it started some buzz and the line for the second showing was long and excited. Just before the scheduled time, someone from the festival came out and said that the power had gone out in the theater and the screening was cancelled. Who knows who was there to see it and didn’t?

* We entered the film in the San Francisco Int’l Film Festival, and also Frameline, the long running San Francisco lesbian and gay festival. The SFIFF contacted me first, offering us a premiere. I was thrilled but we all thought the more high-profile premiere for a gay film would be Frameline. We tried to get an answer from them but they wouldn’t commit, so, not wanting to end up with neither, we said yes to SFIFF. Soon after, Frameline said yes, but they gave us terrible time slots in a theater across town, ignored me—the organizer of the festival looked at me and then turned his back to me at the welcome meet and greet events. Maybe he was miffed that SFIFF got the premiere? I don’t know, but it was weird. Then, and I don’t know if this was connected, but both Newfest and Outfest (the New York and Los Angeles LGBT festivals) rejected the film. (But it screened in maybe 10 or 12 other queer festivals all over the U.S. and Europe and every single one treated the filmmakers with kindness and enthusiasm.)

* The old saw that always worked against the act itself. The perception that gay audiences don’t like folky old-time country music and people who like folky old-time country music don’t lke gay people. It’s a myth we literally shattered in our career and in the film over and over, but

* I suspect most people who screen films for distributors, or festivals, or cable channels, or media don’t watch more than the first 5 or 10 minutes of anything. Life in a Box doesn’t tell you everything at the very beginning (personally I hate films that do, but I understand why filmmakers do that, and novelists, and artists who make any kind of art with duration).

* The song contains a big chunk of the Johnny Cash song I Walk the Line. I anguished over the decision to use that footage, but I knew it was perfect for the story, so I trusted that it would work out. Cash’s catalog was (maybe still is?) administered by the family, so it wasn’t hard to get someone on the phone to ask. The person I spoke with was extremely skeptical. I sent him stuff about the film, the edited scene that contained the song (it’s just us in the camper practicing and arguing), talked to him three or four times. I literally begged. I felt at the time like he was pretty horrid, though it’s likely I was oversensitive in a hard business. I actually cried on the last phone call, and I think that’s what got the guy to grant me a limited festival license. I’m not sure the presence of the song was what gave distributors pause, but it’s possible.

More than likely the reason is more pedestrian, and also unknowable. Some combination of all those possible reasons and also dumb luck. Anyway. It’s a massive disappointment in my life, but I’m extremely proud of the work. And I’m happy it touched a few thousand people before it disappeared, which is pretty much the same way I feel about Y’all. Maybe some young person 50 or 100 years from now will dig it up in the University of Minnesota library and give it another life.

The New Year.

I’m not big on resolutions but I do want to buckle down this January. The six months between my residency at Yaddo, where I accomplished so much, and the end of the year, were so full of things besides writing. I keep thinking I’m close to the end of this book and then I’m not.

I admit that my biggest obstacle here is a lack of personal discipline. It’s a lifelong challenge, one that I’m more or less friends with at this late age. But the more acute problem lately is that I’ve been struggling mightily with my vision.

I’ve had strabismus since I was a little kid, maybe it’s congenital?, a weak eye muscle. (They used to call this “lazy eye.”) I don’t remember it bothering me until I was a teenager and started getting bad headaches and seeing double and my optometrist prescribed lenses with a prism, which corrected the problem. Sometime in my twenties, though, it started to get worse. I didn’t have health insurance, and I couldn’t really afford much for my eyes beyond cheap glasses, so I lived with the headaches for years.

The first time I had health insurance as an adult was in 1990 when, after temping as a legal proofreader for a couple years, I took a full-time position at Mayer Brown & Platt. My insurance was an HMO called HIP. I don’t think it exists anymore. At that point, I was seeing double and feeling nauseous pretty much all the time, worse at night. My doctor referred me to an eye muscle surgeon at Beth Israel. As I remember, it all went pretty smoothly and the surgery completely corrected the double vision. The nausea and headaches disappeared overnight.

About 20 years later I started seeing double again, especially in the later part of the day if I was tired or had had a drink or if I was watching TV. With some effort I could bring the images together. Most people don’t consider how much of their vision is handled by their brain. Your eyes capture a certain amount of data but your brain synthesizes and completes the picture so you see one coherent image (or series of images). Giving my eye muscles and my brain both a serious workout, I could manage to see pretty well for a while, but eventually, with each eye delivering increasingly different images, it becomes too difficult for your eyes and brain to pull them together.

I had lost my insurance when I left the law firm job and New York for Nashville and then life on the road, so I was uninsured through my 40s. But in 2011, Chan and I registered as domestic partners in New York, and I got insurance through his firm. My ophthalmologist connected me with another eye muscle surgeon (incidentally, my primary care doctor, my ophthalmologist, and my eye muscle surgeon were all named Dr. Cohen).

This time the process felt more protracted, maybe because I was older, maybe I’d forgotten the first one, but the preparation, all the tests and measurements, seemed much more strenuous and intense, and recovery from the surgery took longer. The surgeon this time attached the muscle with an adjustable suture that, several days after the operation, had to be tugged back and forth to get my eye aligned. What’s weird though is that none of that process was based on an objective “right” or “wrong” position because the whole time the doctor was moving my eye around, my brain was compensating for the misalignment. Beyond the nausea it causes, it’s just kind of a nightmare to have your eye pulled all over the place.

Anyway, it worked again. The surgery, in short, involves cutting a small piece out of the muscle at the side of one eye and then sewing the two ends together to shorten the muscle, which pulls the eye in the direction of the shorter muscle. So, though you can see better within most of the field of vision in front of you that you use for most purposes, your eye no longer has full mobility, making it difficult or impossible to focus on those quadrants of your field of vision that one eye can’t get to because the short muscle prevents it from moving far enough. (For me, that quadrant is the left, especially below left. I’m constantly misjudging distances there, running into counters or dropping things, or setting them down too hard.)

Here we are now, only 14 years later this time, and the problem is back. I get nauseous headaches and just plain exhausted after reading (or writing) for more than a few minutes at a time. TV, or anything that takes sustained focus, is also fatiguing. (For some reason, big screen movies are not quite as difficult; maybe it’s because I can move my head around to see different parts of the screen?)

I’m not sure if I can have the surgery again. There’s only so much flesh they can cut out of that muscle. But medicine tends to advance, so maybe there’s something new now? A pig muscle?

I’m dreading finding out what my options are, if I have any. When I was 29, and even when I was 49, things like surgery didn’t phase me, but now it’s of a piece with my encroaching (and, to be honest, unexpected) anxiety about aging and decrepitude. It’s not just a problem that needs to be addressed, it’s my body falling apart and turning into worm food. (My back and hips and knees. I always said and believed that living in the city, walking everywhere, I was getting enough exercise, keeping fit, staying youthful. But I didn’t consider the wear and tear on my knees and hips from walking on pavement every day.)

And then. I’ve decided to scrap most of the work I’ve done on the autobiographical musical I was writing. I want to go back to the songs and write a solo show with monologue and songs, which was how the thing was conceived to begin with. I’d like to record the songs first and make an album, keeping in mind that the main lesson of making an album is that more than likely nobody wants an album of my songs. But at least now it’s all streaming and no physical object to manufacture, so I won’t have to take boxes of 500 unwrapped CDs and toss them in a dumpster five years later.

My New York Theater 2024.

Theater has gotten so much more expensive that I think we saw less this year than in previous years. Still, we saw a lot. These were my favorites:

Musicals:

Titanic (Encores! staged reading at City Center). I didn’t know this show at all, and I was enthralled. The production was huge, huge cast, huge orchestra, lots of huge choral ensemble singing. It’s an odd show, the main character is kind of the ship, and it’s unabashedly a history lesson kind of play, but the music is so stirring, so gorgeous. I fell in love.

And then Titanique, same ship, very different show. It’s a parody of sorts of the James Cameron film, but also a parody of Celine Dion and a hundred other things.  It’s crazy funny, a wild ride.

Death Becomes Her. Go see this. In a year of very funny theater, this is one of the funniest and best and most entertaining. The songs are so packed with jokes sometimes I could hardly catch my breath. Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard should both get that Tony.

My favorite new musical this year was Dead Outlaw, by David Yazbek and Itamar Moses, who wrote The Band’s Visit. Very presentational, a band plays songs that tell the story, which at times bursts out into more conventional book scenes. Odd, full of surprises, great tunes.

And my favorite plays:

Oh Mary! is the funniest play I’ve ever seen, very gay, very camp, sort of but not really in the style of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Genius.

The new Jez Butterworth play, The Hills Of California, a big old-school family reunion drama, gripping, beautifully written and acted. It’s not a musical but there’s lots of music in it. (Incidentally, it’s nearly the same story as Gypsy, but in England.)

Our Class, by Polish playwright Tadeusz Sł0bodzianek, directed by Ukrainian Jewish director Igor Golyak, experimental in style, a story of five classmates and a pogrom in a Polish village in 1941. Devastating and legitimately shocking. Great theater.

Also among my favorites this year were This Is My Favorite Song (Francesa D’Uva) and Magnificent Bird (Gabriel Kahane), both at Playwrights Horizons, both solo shows with songs, both emanating from events occurring during the pandemic, and both wonderful.

And I guess I have to say something about Gypsy. This production was the first time I’ve seen this musical on stage—but I’ve seen lots of video of previous Broadway revivals as well as clips of Ethel Merman singing the songs. I resist weighing in on the great debate about Audra McDonald’s voice, mostly because she’s so good and is delivering a powerfully moving performance, and who am I to say what’s right or wrong? My opinion regarding “to belt or not to belt” is that, aside from the fact that the songs were written for ur-Broadway belter Ethel Merman, they are meant to evoke the vaudeville tunes from the era in which the show is set. Those performers shouted those tunes. The setting is not the only dramaturgical reason for the style of singing. That gale-force voice is the embodiment of Rose’s personality, the charisma, the authority that makes her not only intensely compelling to everyone around her, but also terrifying.  Aside from the technical question, though, I couldn’t stop thinking that this Rose was soft, compared to, Merman, or, say, Tyne Daly, or Lupone. I saw a short interview clip with McDonald’s husband, Will Swenson, where he was saying that everything Rose does is motivated by her love for her children, which is sweet because they are parents themselves, but I think wrong and crucially so for the story, which doesn’t, to my mind, turn on whether or not Rose loves her children. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t, but I don’t think Rose shows even a hint of vulnerability until the final song, Rose’s Turn, which reveals her motivation (and it isn’t love), where the armor cracks and you see her pain, but not for long and she barrels right through it. A loving Rose throws the story out of balance. That’s my opinion, anyway. Please go see it for yourself. It’s a great production of a great musical, very moving and immensely entertaining. It looks and sounds amazing. The cast is across the board stellar, especially all those kids. I criticize because this stuff is really important to me. But, ultimately, I loved it.

And finally: probably the less I say about this new revival of Cabaret the better. It’s a crime against art and humanity. This is the first production of the stage musical I’ve seen, and I regret that. I wish I didn’t have it in my head. I hated it a lot.

Here's the whole list (as near as I can reconstruct) of plays and musicals my husband and I saw this year: 

Jonah (Roundabout)
Prayer for the French Republic (MTC)
Oh Mary!
Doubt (Roundabout)
Job
Dead Outlaw
Tommy
Mother Play (2nd Stage)
Home (Roundabout)
Cabaret
Our Class (CSC)
In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot (Playwrights Horizons)
The Counter (Roundabout)
Titanic (City Center, Encores)
Titanique
Death Becomes Her
The Hills Of California
Yellowface (Roundabout)
Walden (2nd Stage)
This Is My Favorite Song (Playwrights Horizons)
Magnificent Bird (Playwrights Horizons)
Gypsy 

<<shudder>>

The anxiety of the last few years is ratcheting up like crazy now. These days leading up to Election Day feel almost unbearable. Though I’ve been very aware of how the anxiety has affected me—changes in my temperament, sleep, work habits, concentration, the effect of stress on my body, etc.—I think I’ve been fairly good at calming my mind from time to time, at finding a bit of equanimity, at least intermittently. Pushing through.

But something happened this week that has me truly shaken. Someone I know, not a close friend, but someone I’ve worked with pretty closely, went full-bore glassy-eyed MAGA cult. Like true believer “I’ve seen the light and let me tell you the good news!”

For the most part, my take on MAGA, even with all the insanity since 2016, has been that they’re a version of the same fearful, small-minded faction of Republicans and religious fanatics we’ve been fighting off my whole life; they’re feeling their power, and they’ve gotten a lot louder, but they’re nothing new. But this person’s conversion seems to signal something novel and uniquely sinister. This is not someone who lives in the exurbs of Ohio and is afraid of drag queens, this person is someone squarely in MY world. I’m having trouble letting it go and moving on.

Things I Think About While Reading the Paper on Saturday Morning.

This brings up so many thoughts.

When Y’all moved to Nashville in 1998, we got a lot of attention and got to work and play with some astoundingly great musicians, but there was no festival hosted by John Waters. I think Y’all may have gotten lost if there was, we would’ve been maybe too on the nose. But it’s hard to compare Y’all to an artist like Orville Peck, who is also drawing heavily from traditional country but is, in the end, a singer singing songs. Y’all’s music was, in its sort of homemade way, legit, but we were always more, and less, than a queer country act. Still, we would’ve killed at this festival.

It’s a pretty regular occurrence, the feeling an article like this arouses.

It’s the feeling I get when LIZZIE is (regularly) compared to—and often positioned (ahistorically) as influenced by—shows that it prefigured: Rent, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Spring Awakening, Six … and on and on, it’s a very long list, and of course now musicals set in a historical era with a rock score are commonplace. I’m proud to be on that list with some great musicals. I’m also proud of LIZZIE’s roots in downtown experimental theater, and thrilled that our show has bubbled up into the mainstream. That’s what experimental art does, and is kind of for, if you’re lucky. (I also acknowledge how LIZZIE has changed over the many years, how it exists now in a kind of dialogue with those later shows, and has been influenced by them.)

Y’all, too, grew out of the 80s/90s downtown New York theater scene that spawned LIZZIE. Y’all got a lot of love when Jay and I moved to Nashville in the late 90s because Nashville is tradition-minded when it comes to music and Jay and I were doing something, at heart, very traditional. Our act was a kind of cheeky reclamation of a tradition we loved, and very much a tribute.

The bands and home recording I was a part of in the 1980s were maybe arguably a little more situated in their time. It was one part emulating artists we liked and one part “what’ll it sound like if we do this?” making stuff up as we went along, but you can see how the type of experiments we were doing evolved into bands and movements that got a lot more attention than we ever did.  

I’m not claiming I was some genius always ahead of my time. I just never wanted to do what other people were doing, I wanted to do what I wanted to do, I didn’t care if I didn’t know how, and in fact I saw that as a bulwark against inauthenticity. And trying to define or locate a “cutting edge” is a slippery undertaking. Just because you’re working outside the mainstream doesn’t mean you’re not following in others’ footsteps, they’re just different footsteps, combined in different, possibly new ways. LIZZIE stands on the shoulders of the Wooster Group and Lita Ford. The Woods stood on the shoulders of Jackie DeShannon and Eno and Steeleye Span and the Raincoats. With Y’all it was Minnie Pearl and Ellen DeGeneres and the Louvin Brothers and John Denver. But standing on shoulders is probably the wrong metaphor here. It sounds too, I don’t know, heroic. The process is more like picking up threads or dipping into a stream.

These are just musings on a Saturday morning. I reserve the right to retract or contradict any or all of it!

Who?

Facebook memories had me thinking this morning about my various name changes and nicknames over the years (Jack Cheslik, S.J. Cheslik, Steven Cheslik, SteChe, Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, etc.), there have been a LOT, but I’d completely forgotten about one of them.

In 1994, when HERE revived LIZZIE (née Lizzie Borden: An American Musical) and we lengthened it with a handful of new songs, I was deep in the thick of Y’all. I was touring a lot then, so I wasn't in the LIZZIE rehearsal room much, if at all. I wrote the songs wherever I was, recorded them on cassette, bare-bones, just me and a guitar with a fuzz pedal and I think maybe a little Casio keyboard, and I sent them to Tim and the band. There was no written music or M.D., everything was much more DIY indie then than now.

By 1994, Jay and I were starting to tour with Y’all a lot and build a non-New York fan base, most of whom seemed to believe our fictional stage identities were real, or they wanted them to be real. (The psychology of the Y'all fandom is still a mystery to me.) So we decided, a la Pee Wee Herman, that we would let them believe it and never admit otherwise. All our press materials had the fake bios, and, even with the most surreal elements of Y'all, we never let a crack show. (I used to get very confused about how old I was because Y’all Steven was much younger.)

So, when LIZZIE returned, I didn’t want to blow the whole thing up by having it credited to Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, so I made up a pseudonym, and the 1994 version of LIZZIE -- which contained the new songs, House of Borden, Sweet Little Sister, Will You Stay?, Why Are All These Heads Off?, Mercury Rising, and Watchmen for the Morning -- was credited to Stephen Streuber. That seems insane to me now, but at the time I thought it was absolutely necessary.

Thirty years ago we weren’t very good about documenting and archiving, and I’ve never been able to find anything online showing that name, but I know it happened!

Covid, Day 4.

Day 4 of Covid. I don’t know why it comes up so much more now than ever before, maybe because I have friends who have kids?, but this notion of concern for the well-being of people in the world when I am no longer in it is, to be honest, a concern I don’t find as urgent or important or even real as most people seem to. Like, why?

I don’t generally share these thoughts because I think people think they’re monstrous, but I just don’t get as worked up as I guess I should about things like population rate decline and climate change. I practice thrift and the “three R’s” but that’s because I believe we all share the world and its resources and it’s immoral to waste stuff. But all the railing at oil companies—the oil companies have sins to account for, absolutely, but producing oil is not the worst of them. Our world requires massive amounts of energy to function, and you can’t just radically change that overnight without causing more harm than climate change is causing. The population anxiety is genuinely puzzling to me: why, if people are so worried about the planet are they not thrilled to see the population decline? At any rate, it doesn’t feel like a good use of my limited sanity to be in a constant panic about climate change. Implementing global measures big enough to reverse it—a project that requires the buy-in of some 8 billion people—doesn’t seem realistic.

Maybe it’s partly my on and off Buddhist training (“Abandon any hope of fruition” or, as a dear friend of mine, who, like me, tends to worry, says, “Is it happening now?”) but that’s not all. I think I’m just temperamentally disinclined to take the far future all that seriously. (When I was much younger, late teens and twenties, I seriously believed I would die young. It wasn’t like a fear, it was just something I knew. Obviously, that didn’t happen.) 

But the last few days, feeling very sick and very angry to be sick, I have been thinking about it. The status quo now, apparently, is that we have to get regular Covid vaccines in order to hold the virus at bay just enough so that we don’t die, but, fairly regularly, we get very sick. I’ve had every vaccine available as soon as it was available, and I’ve had Covid twice. Two years ago, my case was much worse than this one (I could barely move for a couple days), but this one is pretty fucking bad.

Don’t construe this to mean I’m a vaccine denier or anything like that. I will get vaccinated because I don’t want to die yet, and I certainly don’t want to die with a tube down my throat. But it’s depressing to imagine this situation projecting into the future. I only have 20-25 years left if I’m lucky so I can put up with it, but kids now who have many decades of their lives in which this pattern of alternating vaccines and illness is just what you have to do? And how many more similar viruses will take the same shape? Maybe it’s just the sore throat talking (seriously, there is no sore throat more painful than a Covid sore throat) but that’s just bleak. So I guess Covid has unearthed something in me I didn’t believe was there.

I see the contradictions in my attitude here. Just the fact that I worry a lot betrays a concern for the future, but that kind of fretting about possibly bad outcomes doesn’t project out very far, no more than a few months, usually a day or two. But much more telling: I’ve just placed the Y’all archives, and plan to place my own personal and professional archives eventually, in a research library because I want future scholars to have access to them. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.

P.S. While I’m feeling justified in my crankiness: what is the deal with everyone raving about Japanese egg sandwiches? Who hurt you? Did your mother never make you an egg salad sandwich for lunch and cut the crust off? Just because you call it “Japanese” doesn’t make it new. Jesus, people.

Dad, Beethoven, etc.

My Dad for the most part expresses very little emotion. He can be extremely hard to get a fix on. But I was thinking this morning that his favorite music, the classical pieces he loved and that I grew up hearing in the house, was the most frankly emotional stuff in the canon: Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Rachmaninoff No. 2, Chopin, lots of Beethoven. It’s like my father’s emotional life has always been in plain sight, but invisible to me. More and more as I get older, I see that so many things I thought he was withholding from me—expressions of love being the big one—he was actually broadcasting loud and clear, but I was oblivious. Sometimes I think wisdom is wasted on the old. This bit of insight would have been more useful to me at, say, 12.