Quick Hits: My Awesome Friends

Some quick mid-February links that I cannot wait to share with you:

• My awesome friend Claire Rice is writing a new play titled English for Beginners and posting it all on her blog. It's been featured on Arena Stage's New Plays Blog and has a significant portion of the San Francisco theater community buzzing. Particularly because English for Beginners is an ensemble comedy-drama about 13 playwrights on a writing retreat in the Marin Headlands. (When Claire told me about this project, my first question was "OK, just how much of a roman à clef is this going to be?") I get super excited whenever I learn that Claire has posted a new scene and I am never disappointed. Of course, part of my enjoyment derives from trying to identify the real-life models for Claire's characters -- if you want an example of that, read the most recent scene (an interlude in which all 13 characters talk about their routines for writing) and then read this blog post of mine from last spring. But I think that any theater person, even if they don't live in the Bay Area, will recognize and identify the characters and situations of English for Beginners. Can't wait for the next installment.

• My equally awesome friend Megan Cohen has just started a blog that's going really big, really fast. She has three posts so far, Tim Bauer (whose own blog has recently undergone a redesign) has linked to all of them, and her latest post just got highlighted by Lifehacker! Megan's friends are fond of saying things like "I wish I could shrink Megan down and put her in my pocket and keep her around all the time to say witty and offbeat and wonderful things."  And now that she has a blog -- it's like you can do just that!

• Ulterior motive in including some quotes about Helen of Troy in my last blog post: San Francisco Theater Pub's February show will be a staged reading of Euripedes' romantic drama Helen. Appropriately enough, it's taking place on Valentine's Day. In the meantime, Stuart Bousel, the hardest-working man in show business, did an erudite series of posts about the myth of Helen for the San Francisco Theater Pub blog, as well as an interview with Kirsten Broadbear, who will play this iconic character. Scheduling conflicts prevented me from acting in the show as originally planned, but I'll be at Theater Pub tomorrow anyway, wrapped in a bedsheet and taking your money. (I'll be handling the box office and wearing a toga.) Happy Valentine's Day!