Journey To Dan
When I first met Aunt Dan on the page, it was clear to me that she is passionate and bold, and that she lived her life with an almost violent intensity.  I absolutely fell in love with her free spirit—with her Victorian blouses and nineteenth century men’s caps—and I was drawn in by her worldliness and non-conformance to societal rules.  Aunt Dan seems to let every moment of her life on earth have its richness.  I knew upon my introduction to Aunt Dan that getting to know her w

Risk and Reward, Part 1
My least favorite course in business school was Investments. My professor was a lunatic: a paranoid, condescending, insulting lunatic. True story: he once tried to get a stranger arrested for standing in the back of the lecture hall and watching, convinced the stranger was trying to steal secrets worth millions… from an intro investments course. While he does still teach investments in Chicagoland, it is not at my school. I pity those poor kids to the north, though. Despite Professor Lunatic, I did learn a few things, especially about the definition of risk. Most people in the finance

Aunt Dan and Lemon: Stepping Into The Dark.
I admit with a certain amount of professional anxiety that I am about to embark upon a theatrical journey that scares the life out of me.  Here I am, sitting at my desk just hours before the first read-through of Aunt Dan and Lemon, nursing the feeling that already, this play has executed a kind of preemptive strike upon my artistic sensibilities and has, to a certain degree, prevailed. It is very disconcerting for a director to stare at a script that he has read a zillion times over and still have so many damned unanswered questions. When they are staged, Wallace Shawn’s rarely-produced plays tend to garner a lot of critical praise, but John Simon, critic for New York Mag