After tonight’s reading, I officially have no plays in the grapevine from a directing point of view, and no projects, either, except writing projects.

It seems like as good a time as any to announce that I expect this next year to be more about playwriting and poetry than about directing. It’s time to explore choruses through language, not only through staging. I think when I do direct it’ll be events like tonight’s reading – one-time events with new formal innovation within them, concepts I want to beta-test. I also wouldn’t mind continuing to explore choral voice workshops. But even that is a move towards text.

I think what tonight’s reading proves to me is that my instincts for manipulating text chorally have been refined through all these years of directing and assistant directing – and it’s time to trust myself, and write the plays I’ve wanted to write all along.

So, the future. I’m in LA for most of the rest of this month. Then I and the architect for the National Theatre of the United States will be driving from LA to SF at the end of July, using the trip to scout locations in the desert outside of Vegas for our twin ampitheatres (one Greek, one Roman) and the rest of the ten-theater complex.

And then I’m moving to Chicago, where I expect to be based from for at least the next year. I’m going to have an apartment and a home base, maybe even a regular job. This move is predicated on many things, but largely the presence of the Convergers and the excitement of the theater and poetry scenes in that city. Also, the cheap housing prices, and the large number of theaters hiring for next season. And my need to move somewhere – and have that somewhere be somewhere I can work. And my best friend in the world, Eileen, is moving there too. We’re going to be roommates.

I’m excited to think about going to a new city (I’ve never been to Chicago at all – I’m taking Robert and Caitlin’s word for it) and starting a new life there – in terms of writing, location, avocation, and lifestyle. But yield who will to their separation, and all that.

I am aware that it’s going to be first very humid, then very cold. But I would live on a planet without light or oxygen and have my lungs fed air through a tube and take Vitamin D tablets for sun if that was what it took to survive in theater. (It’s often what it feels like during tech!) This is the next step I have to take, so it’ll work out. And there is a lake. And Bree tells me that getting really, truly “snowed in” is more rare than my nightmares suggest.

Putting it up on the blog makes it real. Chicago. I’m excited, and scared, and so ready to live somewhere for longer than six weeks. I think this is the best place for me right now, despite my passing interest in Belfast after doing all that Van Morrison research for Jess.

As Carl Sandburg says, in his poem on my new city,
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.