In early December, my friend Joey Merlo and I sat down for coffee to discuss the upcoming remount of his acclaimed play, On Set with Theda Bara, directed by Jack Serio. Originally premiering at the Brick Theater’s Exponential Theater Festival in 2023, it’s the story of a middle-aged detective trying to solve an especially harrowing case: the disappearance of his own kid.

In a delightful scene from Ben Gassman’s unproduced play Haircuts for Men & Boys, written in 2010, a guy walks into a barbershop of Greek ownership in Queens.

I keep seeing Lauren Bakst’s performance work Private Collection: in the gallery space of a Bushwick apartment complex, the sanctuary of St. Mark’s Church, a downtown loft on Broadway.

In 2012, I had the honor of being fully inducted into the BAX community as an artist-in-residence, so profiling the space feels like a bit of a homecoming. I remember it as a thrilling time in my art life. Not since the days of my luxurious collegiate conservatory actor training had I been granted such access to studio space without the gnawing consideration of how I might pay for it alongside the pressure to produce something great.

I met Becca Blackwell eight years ago, at a table read for a play called Pony, by Sylvan Oswald. Becca had bright red hair, wore their masculinity with ease (they/their/them are Becca’s pronouns of choice) and acted like a pro: an inspirational figure for a then-twenty-four-year-old baby butch like myself, new to the downtown theater.

Trish Harnetiaux and I met at Mac Wellman’s School for Degenerates, also known as the playwriting program at Brooklyn College, in the fall of 2007. I immediately took a liking to Trish—her no-bullshit sensibility, pragmatic intelligence, and wry sense of humor.