I was living in Hawaii. I was pretty much losing my mind. I missed home, my friends, my family, and on a daily basis was doing work that I was not proud of. It’s funny, looking back now, on what a great opportunity I was blessed with. But sometimes it’s just hard to see what’s right in front of you. Especially when you are constantly looking so far ahead. As an actor, you try to always stay in the moment, but I suppose that doesn’t always translate to life.

Val and I had decided to start our production class and I wanted new material for the students to work on, so I began to write. With no story in mind, I just started with a speech. Never in my life did I just sit down and write without at least some idea of where I was heading. This speech, which was really an extended version of a theater joke I had heard, inspired me to move forward and write a play called The Performance of Heartbreak.

Every minute of free time I had, I would sit down and just write these characters. Characters that all shared, and went on jags about, one idea or another that was going on in my head at the time. They were all looking for meaning. What are we doing here? What is the point of it all? Even the people in this play that seemed to have figured it out, at one point would realize they knew nothing. There were no rules and no structure being followed. The characters just lived through the play as I wrote them. That was really the exercise. Just to write and see what happened.

When I finished the first draft, I was so excited I’m pretty sure I didn’t even do a spell check before sending it off to my agent in New York. The email heading read simply, “My new play, it’s genius.” A few days later, he called me. After some bullshit pleasantries, we got into it. I want to preface what I’m about to say with the fact that he was not wrong. I mean, sure he was, but technically speaking, no. He didn’t get it. It’s not a play, he said. Maybe if you present it as a night of scenes, he said. It needs an ending, or a beginning, both, and maybe a story. I can’t send this out, he said. I wanted to kill him, but I was 2,500 miles of ocean and an equal amount of land away. I hung up the phone and at first decided I would put the play up, hopefully get some decent reviews, demand he send it to my publisher, and then fire him. Then immediately I realized what the point of writing it in the first place actually was. It was simply for students to work on and play with. It was also an experiment for me.

Rather than flying halfway across the globe to burn my agent’s house down and then trying to force this play somewhere it maybe didn’t belong, I instea decided to continue writing in the exact same way. For the remainder of my time in Hawaii that year, I continued to write without any expectations. No preconceived ideas of where the plays were going and pretty much zero clue of how they would end. Again, just letting the characters write the story as it went on. I wrote an epilogue—called An Epilogue—to The Performance of Hearbreak, then Day In Life, where the only connection to the original piece was the style and head space from which it was written.

I thoroughly enjoyed the time and further enjoyed watching students pick these plays apart, break them down, and give them life—life that I wasn’t even sure existed. I mentioned in my first essay, some of these plays might never be put up in their entirety. Specifically, I meant these. Again, that’s not why they were written. The characters go on and on, sometimes in circles. The stories themselves lack structure, but they are honest. As a whole, there is certainly a beginning, middle, and end, but not in the traditional sense. Additionally, there’s a reality in this collection, but if presented in its entirety—I mean all three of these plays together—it might not work, and/or drive the audience completely crazy. What it may lack in storytelling structure is, hopefully, made up for with truth.

I tried very hard to leave them alone and avoided too much editing. What exists is pretty much what I wrote and never looked back. I once heard that real writing happens in the rewriting. Not with these. Again, there is obviously a danger in writing this way. It’s lazy at the end of the day. It turns out to be more of an exercise in therapy rather than storytelling, but maybe that was the point. Adjusting it or trying to turn it into something else would be a disservice. Some of my favorite stuff is in here and I think it’s worth being printed as is. For actors, my hope is that they can find sections to have fun with and learn from. For readers? Something to understand, enjoy, and hopefully relate to.