I walked into a church on Alder Street in Portland yesterday, to check out the architecture, and felt like I’d walked inside a beautiful, varnished, giant log, or a religious incarnation of the Colossus rollercoaster at 6 Flags. If there’s one thing this town has, it’s lots of lumber.

I also got introduced to the production folks at PCS yesterday, and am meeting with the costume designer today. Research is taking me to the public library, to the Oregon Historical Society, and, no doubt, to the trees.

Last night I went to the season announcement, too – a packed mainstage full of people heard the PCS artistic director announce his plans for 08-09. I was very happy to hear that they included Nancy Keystone’s next installment of APOLLO.

In other news, through a great effort of will, and after consulting every single member of my family who I could get on the phone, I decided not to turn in another application for a directing program which would have taken place this late spring / early summer. It was a hard decision to make, but the right one, I think, since I want to have time to work on these scripts in progress.

I’ve never before in my life had the luxury of two different composers excited to work on two different scripts, and it seems just wrong to disregard their free time by filling up every single second with directing jobs. I have to trust that working more in playwriting can only help my self and my career, and that these directing gigs will be there, to come back to, if writing doesn’t work out.

It’s hard to do, though, because I remember vividly that one year ago, I couldn’t even have been a candidate for these gigs. Now I’m in a position to turn them down, or to not consider them – to think that there are other things more important to do. My life changes so quickly.

After I had decided it, I talked to the composer for 13 WAYS, Chris F., and found out that the dates of this program were the exact ones in which both of our schedules left us free! He said to me, “If you can’t believe that you did something, it’s probably the right thing.”

Another sign came from the oracles later that evening. At the season announcement, the artistic director offhandedly joked: “The first play this season is a Greek tragedy…where everyone dies…Just kidding! No one would come!” He then announced that it was GUYS AND DOLLS.

I think that I and CF have a chance of bridging that perception gap between Greek plays as boring and full of death, and musicals.

Because the Greek plays are musicals – musical dramas with choruses in them – and if we could bring those two worlds together, maybe the Greek plays could be as popular as they once were, and as musicalized. If we can enliven the choruses, the plays will be irresistible again. It’s a huge undertaking of translation and adaptation, and of new composition, but I think that in CF I’ve found someone with as much hubris as myself. And we’re going to take it on.