I come from a theatrical family.
So there was a lot of “drama” in my upbringing. I was surrounded by larger-than-life characters who were forces of nature. Like many American families we had our share of problems. Unlike many, we also had theater.
My parents met onstage at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York City in 1941, both actors, both singers. After World War II, when they settled in Northern New Jersey, my sisters and I ended up onstage very young, as has my own daughter. While I was growing up, my father created Music Mountain Center for the Performing Arts in the 1960’s, directed musicals, and sang operas. That was my introduction to the magical world of the theater and I’ve never quite been able to shake it.
For 10 years I was a Lecturer in Advanced Writing at the University of Southern California, where I took my Masters.
I should mention that when my parents split up, when I was 12, they shipped me off to boarding school. After attending high school at Blair Academy, a boy’s school (that went co-ed the year after I graduated) I attended Susquehanna, a small church-related university in eastern Pennsylvania. After two years of beer-drinking, panty-raids, a lot of rebellion and a little romance, I ended up back in New Jersey doing community theater.
At 21, I hitch-hiked to California, lived in San Francisco for two years and ended up as a company member of the Firehouse Theatre, a foremost experimental group that specialized in audience participation. At the time I was also seriously writing poetry. In 1972, I moved to a small cabin in Santa Cruz to write a book of poems, self-published in 1973 as The Serpent Child. I moved back East to North Carolina that year and, while working as a carpenter, began to attend night school at UNC in Chapel Hill, appeared in ten or more theatrical productions and published poetry in The Sun and The Cellar Door. I’ve included those poems here.
In 1978 I headed for New York to begin my starving actor phase. After living in many illegally-sublet apartments, studying acting, waiting tables and driving gypsy cabs and performing in more than 30 productions, my acting work can be boiled down to two theatrical credits:
Salome at the San Antonio Theatre Festival 1985 with David McCallum, Harry Hamlin and Blanche Baker.
Study In Scarlet with Alec Baldwin, Tim Daly and Jennifer Van Dyke 1987 at the Willamstown Theatre Festival Free Theatre.
I wrote my first play in 1980, which launched me on an odyssey of creating characters and writing dialogue for actors. I spent years writing and developing plays at various theaters, working with many renowned theater artists, which ultimately led to writing screenplays and finally novels.
After living in just about every neighborhood in New York City for 14 years, in June, 1992, my fiancee and I loaded all our stuff in a truck and drove across the country to settle in Los Angeles. The next year we got married and my wife got pregnant and my daughter’s appearance on the planet has altered in the most profound way everything that came before it, or afterward. She’s now 21, attending DePaul University, and living in Chicago. I feel grateful to have a child to teach me about myself: all my stuff makes a repeat performance within her. And that coming and going is loved and fought over and negotiated–but most of all–blessed.
I’ve tried to make my biography personal, a little entertaining, and even somewhat strange and different. Because I’d like to think that’s the way my writing is. Thank you for joining me here and I hope you return.