I wrote for the theatre for over fifty years. My first professional play went up in a 45-seat store-front theatre with a pole in the middle of the stage in Los Angeles a year after I graduated from college. A director on a visit from the East Coast happened to see the play and took it to the Circle Repertory in New York, where he put up his own production, and I was off and running as a playwright. But I ended up doing many other things as a writer in the coming years, like adapting 33 musicals for the Encores series in New York and producing three Y.A. novels, among other things. For a quick overview of what I’ve done, just click on CV. 

Most of my plays are available from the usual sources, like Broadway Licensing. So on this site you will find plays that you may not know, along with other, non-theatrical items. That’s more or less the purpose of this website, which brings together, not things I’m known for, but out-of-the-way odds and ends I’ve produced over the years. 

In SOME ARTICLES you’ll find a piece I wrote about my long collaboration with Stephen Sondheim on his final musical, Here We Are, along with reviews, prefaces to some of my published plays, and some humor pieces I wrote for the New York Times when they were trying to be funny or for Spy in the glory days of that great magazine. “A Ghost On Broadway” was my attempt to solve a decades-long theatre mystery. Under SOME STORIES you’ll find some stories and under SOME POEMS you’ll find some poems, while under THE PHOBIA CLINIC you’ll find a verse novella that I spent 10 years writing, along with the verse play that I turned it into (another ten years).

NOTEBOOKS gathers a selection of entries from writing notebooks I’ve kept since my mid-20’s: random ideas jotted down for later use, bits of overheard dialogue, people and places I’ve glimpsed or encountered, experiences I wanted to remember, bad puns, dreams, odd facts and quotations I liked. A sort of combination writer’s diary, commonplace book and covert autobiography.

As for my actual biography, it’s simply told: I was born on July 11, 1950 in Chicago, Illinois, to Polish-American parents, first generation on my father’s side, second on my mother’s. My father was a machinist at Standard Oil; my mother worked in various office jobs, usually at night. I attended Catholic grammar schools and an all-boys Catholic seminary through 12th grade. After studying English lit at Northwestern I got married, lived for some months in Regensburg, Germany, lived in Los Angeles, lived in Boston, changed my name because no one could spell or remember the Polish original, lived in New York, got divorced, worked at various odd jobs that included a significant stint at Foreign Affairs magazine, lived in New Haven while at Yale Drama School, lived in New York, lived in San Francisco, lived in New York, got married (happily) to Martha Stoberock, retired from the madness of theatre and set up this website.

Welcome.