Got a lot and next to nothing done at the same time today. Now I’m feeling like it’s 10 a.m. Eyes are wide open. Had a good reading at EST tonight for Eric Conger’s play. It was great finally chatting with everyone after it was over. It’s the kind of thing where you meet for one rehearsal and apart from saying your name and who you will be playing quickly around the circle, you won’t know anyone until after it’s done. Sort of like a one-night stand with a bunch of people. So a one-night stand for Caligula.

We were on the 6th floor of EST, which is a treat for those who like to climb stairs. If I could do that without running up them I wouldn’t be so darn out of breath by the time I get up them. It was steamy before the reading too so my forehead was making that sweat chowder. During the first act, I could see the lightening flashes over the Hudson. The rain started coming down seriously after intermission.

I’ve been writing a new solo show called Green to go up at the Metropolitan Playhouse in February. It’s going to be one-third social satire and two-thirds sci-fi comedy adventure. How? I don’t know completely yet. The theme for the season at MP is “stereotypes” so I thought going off into space to touch on the foibles of humans would be good.

I feel like a lot of what is going on right now is this weird racism that’s bubbling up. People are expressing themselves in crazy ways and we have what’s tantamount to several layers of slavery through our financial system. The ones at the top with the super computers doing the faster than the speed of light stock trading are the ones with the whips. Gone are the days when traders use hand signals and one held a stock for an amount of time to see if it will mature. Now there are machines and stocks are turned over in less time than it takes to reheat your coffee in the microwave.

My show won’t be about that. Well, greed is a great motivator but I don’t want to do a sci-fi show about microtrading. This will be my first new solo in 3 years. I guess that’s a decent rhythm. Gives me enough time to forget about how to make one so I don’t get complacent. I really do feel like I’m starting from scratch. At the same time, I’m telling myself there are certain avenues I don’t want to go down for fear of repeating what I’ve done before.

I am only giving myself one real rule about this piece: it must be the silliest thing I’ve ever done. It should hopefully have a few things to say and go to some interesting places, but I really want it to be enjoyable from beginning to end. And I want people to walk out and be able to easily describe what it was about to other people. I think people have the darndest time being able to describe what happens in my shows.

And it’ll be 75 minutes or less. I don’t want to kill people. It might just be 60. Not sure. I’ll let it tell what it wants to be. And then cut 10 minutes.