We had a writer's reading of The Hypochondriac for the producers this past Thursday. It's been tricky business whipping the adaptation of Moliere's play from 300-plus years ago into shape. So much of it is just changing words or syntax but a good chunk deals with the big issues of character and plot through dialogue.

Between the 4 of us, there are many ideas that come and go. Surprisingly, no one's thrown a punch or burst into tears during these sessions.

The reading was a mixed bag. Shira said all of her actor insecurites came up during that read. Mind you, this is someone who knows the script really well from working on the adaptation. I felt a bit of that too. 3 of the cast were in previous versions so they were giving polished performances. I had my actor hat as well as my writer hat on at the same time. The trick to doing that is not having one fall off or looking weird from trying to have 2 heads.

A couple actors didn't know the play and were feeling their way through the script. I'm kind of bad about pacing myself through that. I race ahead only to find my acting muscles are cramping from lack of oxygen and endurance. I was shaking off what the guy who played the part last (he was cast back-to-back in 2 shows at The Mint off-Broadway) to find my own thing. The rhythms and relationships are important. Also, I have to let go any notions of being the funniest one in this show. That contest has already been won by Kyle so I'll need to work on more levels of Argan.

I'm a good 10 to 15 years too young for this part and will be shaving my head tomorrow to have time for the underbelly-color skin on my cranium to even out. I hope I don't find anything weird my nearly purposeless, baby-fine hair has been hiding. You will probably not be seeing me as I will be hiding under the couch until it looks somewhat normal.

I looked over the script again today. There are a handful of changes I'd like to make. Hopefully, we'll get this ironed out and have the script a week before rehearsals. Then I can wear 1 hat on my shaved head.

For those who couldn’t make it, here’s my piece from the One-Minute Play Festival at HERE tonight. It got a decent response. Big thanks to Toby Knops and Dominic D’Andrea for putting this on. Incredible writing from the other writers, sharp direction, and pretty amazing acting. The night flew by and was really satisfying. Check it out next year, if you missed it.

Another Day in the Equity Lounge
By Chris Harcum

ACTRESS
And that is why I haven’t talked to him to this day.

(She lowers her head for a brief moment and then raises it and looks at the Casting Director.)

Thank you.

CASTING DIRECTOR
What? Oh, yes. Thank you. Let me just, uh, take a look at your resume before you…oh, I see you went to—

ACTRESS
—We went to the same school, yes. I was a couple years behind you. You don’t remember me. That’s ok.

CASTING DIRECTOR
No, I was just trying to place—

ACTRESS
—We did three shows together. You used to make fun of me in the dressing room mirror when I looked down. Can I ask what you were doing?

CASTING DIRECTOR
I don’t remember.

ACTRESS
No, not back then. Fuck back then. I know what you were doing back then. You were undermining my chances of getting Lysistrata. That’s fine. Water under the bridge. I meant now.

CASTING DIRECTOR
I was looking at your—

ACTRESS
—No. During my audition. You were tweeting, weren’t you?

CASTING DIRECTOR
No, why would I do that?

ACTRESS
Because you’re a bitch. Was it my hair? My outfit? My monologue choice? Doesn’t matter. Why? Because that cute guy who directed Lysistrata, he’s my husband now. And the whole department had a Dark Days Are Over Party in your honor after you left. Three of the faculty came and danced for hours. No one would cough up a good recommendation for you so that’s why you’re sitting over there instead of standing up here. In fact, your name is evoked in audition technique classes to this day as a prime example of how not to do ANYTHING. So write about how much you’ve fucked up your life in under a hundred and forty characters and see if anyone cares. And thank you for your time.

The 3rd Annual New York One-Minute Play Festival

September 12th and 13th 2009, 8:30PM at HERE Arts Center

145 6th Ave, (between Spring & Broome, enter on Dominick)

Tickets are $15 dollars. For tickets: Visit http://www.here.org or call 212-352-3101.

Molière is my hero. One of them anyway. If I were asked outside of a grad school application what my main artistic goal is, I’d have to say to be the Eddie Van Halen of theater. Whatever I do, I want it to be kick-ass dynamic, full of energy and feeling, have tasty chops, and fun. And it better rock or why are we there?

I wound up working with this guy named Matt. Sometimes I call him A.J. or Dude. He’s a big Molière freak. He was hired to direct a production of the Imaginary Invalid out in Queens. The actor playing Argan had a shit fit after the first week and decided to check out of the show. I don’t know the details but I think it was bad news. I wound up boppin’ down to audition to replace him and after 2 hours of reading got the role. I read entire sections of the play 100% cold, ten to fifteen pages at a time. The plan was to rehearse 6 days and go up totally off-book to close out the last week.

I asked the director to request an emergency Equity showcase code for this. They asked if he had rights to this version of the play and it turned out that the producer didn’t bother, even though he said he had. The next night, I went to a wake at the local Irish pub rather than a rehearsal and stayed until the last cast member left.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and A.J. gets with his producing partner, Greg Tito and they approach the Cell Theatre on 23rd. It’s a gallery-cum-performance space. It hits me to just go ahead and write a new adaptation. A.J. takes the lead on that with his wife, Shira. I put in several rolls of my two cents. It goes up with a more age-appropriate Argan and is a hit. Nice write-up in nytheatre. Overflow audience turned away at the door. And the Cell decides to pick it back up in November to fill in a hole in their schedule. Lucky us because it’s a great space in an even greater location.

In the meantime, A.J. or Matt or Dude has me working on a new adaptation of Scapin. Ideally, we will put this up in the spring and I’ll be Scapin. The Molière role. The Van Halen in that concert. I feel like I need to get into shape for it. More mentally than physically. He made comedy that’s precise and built to last. I wanted to be on Saturday Night Live or in something like Monty Python growing up but this goes to a place beyond that. Sometimes it gets dark and serious. It says things about the way the world works that’s kind of chilling. But it’s also hilarious.

And you gotta respect the guy. He went to jail because of his first theater’s debts. I don’t know if he was the first indie theater guy but he sure sounds like it. Then he fell on stage, coughing and hemorrhaging, and died shorty after his last performance of Argan in Imaginary Invalid. I’ve heard of actors passing kidney stones on stage or being so sick they run off to puke in a bucket close by, but Molière takes the cake. At age 51, he died. But his work keeps going.

Since we’re doing more with the script, it’s going to be called The Hypochondriac and it will have lots of nudges to the current health care fiasco. The big thing is trimming it down to a good running time. It was a little fat last time. Like 30 minutes fat. It will happen. For me this has been an exercise in working on a bigger canvas and making all the moments worthwhile.

Scapin has me stumped.

One of my goals this year was to become better friends with my Blackberry. It is far from a perfect system but over the weekend I connected my email, social networking sites and my BB. My Twitter account forwards to my Facebook account. Facebook and Twitberry are loaded onto the BB, where all of my email accounts are also synched. I can blog via email. That blog is connected to Facebook. This means my thoughts can go viral whenever I like.

Now I need to make sure they’re worth reading.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we talk to each other. Communication is a wacky thing. A friend pointed out recently that mental health is a spectrum. I suppose this is true of lots of things: success, contentment, taste, education, openness. I don’t know how it is for you but I find I go through periods where people are just barking at me. Maybe I have too much Vitamin D in my system and they have a bad reaction to that.

Putting any combination of people in close proximity is always an experiment. Things trigger other things in people and you might not be aware of it. Or you’re reacting out of nowhere about something and the other person is caught off guard. Or it’s all fine and no one’s upset about anything.

Dealing with people is a messy thing and you either embrace that or fight against it. There’s also a lot about what happens when ego gets in the middle of things. There’s a lot of craziness in theater because of the nature of the beast. Things go well out of randomness like it’s at the behest of the gods. Someone rockets into fame who has less skill or talent than someone else. A show is a smash because it touches on something at the moment that no one might care about 6 months in either direction. One style comes in or out, depending on X factors out of anyone’s control. An actress friend told me the other day about 30 years she’s spent in the business and how 1/6 of them were great years work-wise. What no one seems to get is that is doing really well in this.

People admire and then envy success if attained from hard work. We are suspicious of it achieved in other ways. We love a comeback and we want to destroy anything doing better than us for too long. I don’t know if it’s Caveman Brain or what but we can’t have someone be on top more than 6 seasons. South Park had a pretty brilliant episode in which Britney Spears was sacrificed to make the corn grow more heartily in the fields.

I think the times when I’ve caused the most trouble due to the rumbling tectonic plates inside is when I’ve felt ripped off because of my bruised ego and some out of control sense of entitlement. “What?! I can’t believe so-and-so got that part over me. I’ll show them!!” Then I act out in some weird way. It’s why I had to back off auditioning for a good while. It started becoming about something it wasn’t.

And that’s the big troublemaker when dealing with other people. Is the problem really about the situation at hand or is it about your stuff, my stuff, or the moon cycle? Once that is parsed out, you can deal with things with less hassle.

I spent years trying to practice good communication and positive assertiveness. I’ve tried to come to conclusions where both sides receive mutual benefits. People seem to take that as disingenuous. So now I make the best of something until it seems futile, I let myself feel disappointment, hurt, or anger and then I tell myself it’s time to detach.

There’s some religious teaching that uses the metaphor of eating at a table full of guests. As the food is passed around, you should pass the food to everyone else first and be thankful and happy for what you have left. If there’s nothing on the dish when it comes back you, you should be pleased that everyone else is content and nourished. Then there’s the religious teaching that says if you don’t care for yourself first, you won’t be able to care for others.

I’m very fortunate I have many good people in my life with whom I enjoy creating. I have an artistic agenda that keeps growing. I feel a small door to many new possibilities has been opened.