The Los Angeles Times called me a writer of little consequence. Not that I paid attention to that. Or — thought enough about it to bring it up twenty two years later. Or — begin this whole newsletter by sharing that fact. Nah. I’m not that shallow.
The play in question was called Binky’s Place. And it was to be my first foray into professional theater, post-college. It would be easy to translate my self-described wunderkind, enfant-terrible status and take the theatrical world by storm. Hollywood would never be the same.
The plot, if there was one, followed the downward spiral of a fool-for-hire named Binky who couldn’t be funny unless he was twisted or tooting and/or a combination there of. For those unfamiliar, the phrases “tooting” and “twisted” denote habitual drug use in urban parlance.
On paper, Binky’s Place was a rise-and-fall tale of a self-destructive comedian. In reality, it was a cry for help under a thinly masked artifice of art stuff. “Art,” at that point in my life, was the great methadone to keep me from going completely off the rails.
Spoiler alert: Binky may have not made it, but I did. That's a whole tale long in the telling, too long to unpack in one e-mail newsletter, but suffice it to say — I had to kill Binky for me to live. Or something like that.
It is no coincidence that relatively shortly after Binky and Co. got picked up for an extended run, I got off my own personal Titanic and started my long journey back to shore. Being young, insecure, under-developed, overly confident and high as fuck most of the time, I had not yet developed the insight to look inward. But — Binky allowed me to catch the tiniest glimpse of what I was doing in the magic mirror of creation, and paint the nightmare in its totality. It was too much to see (let alone accept) in reality, but I could see the outline of my shadow if I put in on stage under the lights.
Maybe that was why the review cut so bad at the time. Because even though I was making people laugh, I was privately dying inside. Much like the hero on stage my friend Logan was playing. It was hard enough on me, it must have been near impossible for all the friends I kidnapped to take all this on. To call Binky’s spiral of little consequence was to call me and the things I was struggling with the same. No wonder it was many years before I would let my work be seen on stage again.
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