How To Become A Category Of One (Interview with Joe Calloway)

The Mysterious Piano Door/When Haiti Became Real

My friend Scott The Playwright says there is a moment in every play when it must become real, or the entire message is lost.  I used to help with fund-raising for his theater company, Oracle Productions, and Scott was adamant we needed the extra money to get real metal swords.  He would say that when the hero and the villain fight, if the swords were to make some plastic "whack" sound, the play would continue to be fake to the audience and it would never have the impact intended.  But when those swords hit with an iron clash, something inside the audience says, "Those are real swords! Someone really could get hurt!"  They become drawn in, they buy in, they believe, and