We know it’s hard for TV writers, both embedded and aspiring, to believe that there’s any other kind of drama to write, but the truth is that TVWriter™ buddy (well, he’s a friend of LB’s, so that makes him our bud too, yeah?) Lee Wochner has found his own slice of heaven: Playwriting.
No notes unless you ask for them!
The writer has the last word!
Directors can’t keep you out of the room while they cast!
As far as this TVWriter™ minion is concerned, nothing could beat any of that. And, all kidding aside, nothing beats Lee Wochner’s writing either. Lee has written at least a couple dozen plays and has been produced in New York, London, Los Angeles, and all around the U.S. He’s also known for his essays, short stories, and poetry.
We’re casually mentioning him here today because his newest play, Triptych, is on the boards at the Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre in Hollywood this month, and we think you should see it, because you get a lot more from that stage than the wormy apples in the pic above.
Here’s what Lee has to say about his latest in the program notes:
As a young man thirty-five years ago, mustering what little money I had, I bought a very pricey print of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch from the Philadelphia Museum of Art and had it very expensively framed, and since then it has hung in every apartment or house where I’ve lived, and where I can look at it every day I’m home.
It is a triptych.
The leftmost panel depicts Jesus, Adam and Eve in Eden. The central panel is filled with people, all of them naked, cavorting with each other against the backdrop of a lush, full paradise. The final panel shows us an awful tableau of sinners being tortured in the most imaginative ways in Hell.
For a painting that seems so straightforward, it contains diabolical levels of mystery. Do the sins of the middle panel lead to the perdition of the third? Or is the middle the ideal state, a Paradise lost, that we are doomed to regret if we cannot attain it? Those, and many other theories about the painting, abound.
I don’t expect to get a definitive explanation – about this, or about many things. But thinking about this, and the many other things, fills me with wonder – about people, and about their unrevealed inner workings.
If you’re in L.A. this month and want to see theater as it should be, adult themes and nudity and all, contact Lee Wochner at
lee@leewochner.com for more info. Or if you want to get even more intimately acquainted, go on over to his blog, because dood’s so absolutely cool about life that he has his genuine phone number posted. Tell him TVWriter™ sentcha!
Adult themes!
Nudity!
What’re you waiting for?