Public speaking comes fairly easy to me. Acting on stage does not. But that’s exactly what I’ll be doing at Victory Gardens Zacek McVay Theater in Chicago this Saturday, August 13 at 2:30 pm. Some back story. Earlier this year I attended one of two accessible performances of Too Much Light put on by the […]

The temperature was 90+ degrees in Chicago Wednesday. Our time at a rap concert outside at Grant Park that night was hot — in more ways than one. I wrote a post earlier this week about my quest to understand what young people are listening to these days. If the musicians we heard in the […]

In my playwriting post last week I promised a second post with more details on my failed attempt to memorize and perform a monologue without being able to see the script – or the audience. I wrote my two-minute dog monolog on my talking computer, then listened to it line by line and repeated the […]

After Prince died, I asked the writers in my memoir classes to write a 500-word essay about a celebrity’s death that made them especially sad. We published writer Bob Eisenberg’s essay about Vidal Sassoon here, and it inspired my young friend Tara to publish an essay about Vidal Sassoon on her taraisarockstar blog as well. […]

I’m trying something new this summer, taking this weekly playwriting class at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. Over the course of 10 weekly 3-hour sessions that start on June 4, 2016, students will explore the process of creating a 2-minute play in the Too Much Light style, writing and crafting pieces based on true life […]