“Starlight” was an elaborate “chamber extravaganza,” which I put together back in San Francisco in 1980.  I had been creating performance pieces by assembling found materials linked in associative structures; this was the most elaborate manifestation.  It used music, props, slides of drawings, and dialogues; all circling around the twin mystics Thomas and Henry Vaughan.  […]

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For Virginia Matthews’s dance “Check Mate,” I provided piano music (severe, contrapuntal, and diatonic), a spoken text (scrambled chess instructions), and chess pieces with bells in them.  This was all back in 1980, in San Francisco.

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“Warburton’s Cook” is a one-act play based on the melancholy literary anecdote of John Warburton, a collector of rare manuscripts, who discovered that his cook had used many of them to line her pie tins. The cast was a treat; and I enjoyed tailoring the script to their talents.  

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In 1989, Jim Turner and I traveled out to San Francisco to put on a Christmas show. It was a cavalcade of bits, none having to do with Christmas, and must have perplexed the San Franciscans. One interesting bit of trivia: the show was produced by Bill Talen, before he entered his chrysalis and emerged […]

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On November 17, 2011, I joined Bill Irwin and the cast of King Lear, then at the Public Theater, at Joe’s Pub.  The show was called Late Night Fools; Bill and I reprised some of our old material, and I sang some of my songs.  We also resurrected the song “Home in Pasadena,” which I […]

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In 2002, the nice people at the Fortean Times invited me to give a couple of talks at their annual UnConvention.  I gave one on John Keel and the Mothman, tying in with the film that was just released; and the other on the scientific method.  At Keel’s request, I introduced a talking frog puppet […]

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In 2003, The Signature Theatre presented a series of three productions by Bill Irwin; I wrote the music for two of them.  The Regard Evening was the second.  The first half was a shortened version of our old show, The Regard of Flight; the second a sequel, showing the characters twenty years later.  We were […]

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In 2003, the Signature Theatre in NYC presented a series of three productions by Bill Irwin; I wrote the music for two of them.  The Harlequin Studies was the first.  I called on two fine musicians to join me: David Gold on violin and viola, and Sean McMorris on drums.  The score included short cues […]

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“Eddie Unchained” was the most elaborate appearance I ever devised for my dummy, Eddie Gray. He was the star of this musical, supported by me, my other dummy Lloyd, the fine actress Ivy Austin (replacing Alice Playten on short notice), and a fine string quartet (Robert Zubrycki, Cenovia Cummins, Carol Benner, and Benjamin Whittenburg). I […]

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On December 11, 2010, I joined Bill Irwin at the Westport Country Playhouse, in Connecticut, for a show called The Clowns and Mr. Beckett.  Bill performed a couple of Beckett monologues; we read some passages from the novels; and, somehow, also worked in some of our own solo and duo material.  I also sang a […]

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