Here's the thing about writing plays. When you come to see a play, mine or anyone's, you bring with you a lifetime of stories. Your own stories, so many that the theater is filled to overflowing with them before the first actor enters the stage and the first line is spoken.

And that makes my job simple, really. I try to write words that allow each person in the audience to see and hear, and feel, their own stories. After all, a play only exists because it has an audience … and that's the beauty of it.

Well, enough of that. Here's one of my stories.

I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the shadow of Sandia Mountain. After high school, I attended Colgate University in upstate New York, where I studied Philosophy and Classical Piano. Eventually, I found myself in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I began my career as a typographer and graphic designer. (I have always loved alphabets.) I worked for printers, corporations, design firms, Kaufmann's Department Store, museums, hospitals, and pretty much anyone else that produced printed materials. During my twenty-some-odd years that I spent in Pittsburgh (not counting a two-year intermission in which I was production manager for a small daily newspaper in Holyoke, Massachusetts), I also built two typesetting companies. This, of course, was back in the days when there were such things.

Also in Pittsburgh, I met my wife Penny Lazarus, who at the time was finishing her Ph.D. in Art History and teaching piano. Eventually we decided to leave Western Pennsylvania and we came to Newburyport, Massachusetts. Penny built a very successful music teaching practice and I continued my work in page composition production, in time becoming a consultant... and I also took up playwriting at the urging of our next-door neighbors Leslie Powell and Ron Pullins, both accomplished playwrights themselves. I studied with Gregory Moss (currently at Brown University) and now luxuriate in the vibrant and nurturing Newburyport theater community, to whom I owe so much.

I should also mention that Penny and I have two sons: Adlai (a fellow playwright) and Max. In a nod to full disclosure, my other interests include baseball (watching) and golf (playing badly), cooking, and avoiding yardwork. (Penny is a master gardener, so I am not so successful at that last item.)

Finally … thanks to Missy Chabot, a wonderful playwright and actress, who built this website. You can find her at www.chabotwebdesign.com.