Creative endeavors: writing music, writing plays, writing novels, writing screenplay, and producing 

My music, theater, and movie activities started with Operation Kosovo and my having begun piano lessons. 

I'd been interested in music since I was 12 years old. When I was in junior high school, I started playing the clarinet and was active in the Tuscaloosa Junior High School band, often as first or second chair clarinet, based on playoff competitions we regularly had. After I graduated, I joined the Tuscaloosa High School band and marched with it at football games and for the inauguration of John Patterson as governor of Alabama. When I transferred to Birmingham University School as a sophomore, I was reluctant to give up the music experience. We organized a group of five or six of us who played instruments, and practiced a few times, but we were horrible, and the school was really too small to support any serious music effort.

I wanted to learn to play the piano, but that didn't fit in with my other activities until after I had completed my term as Dean and had run for office. Then I started taking piano lessons. From the beginning I made it clear to my very Russian and gruff piano teacher, Sophia Gorodetskaya, that I wanted to learn music theory. As I learned a bits about chord construction and progressions, the twelve-tone scale, and that sort of thing, I tried my hand at writing a few songs.

When I got into songwriting more seriously, I could not play the piano well enough actually to play anything that I wrote. So I would sit at the piano and pick out the notes of a melodic theme. Then I would try out chords that might go with it, and then go to my computer and do the rest of the work on the sophisticated notation program called Sibelius. When I finished something—or got it sketched out so that it seemed like music, I would ask Sophia to play and make suggestions. Then I always would take it in to Tim for one of our Friday sessions to refine it. The more I did this, the better I got. I still was a bit limited, however, putting all the melody in the right hand on the treble clef and all the chords in the left-hand on the base cleft. I also had an overly square structure with a series of four beat measures, 16 measures to the verse, 16 to the chorus, with an 8 to 16 measure bridge in between

My regular companion was a rhyming dictionary. I had already done so much writing that I was pretty good with the English language and had an extensive vocabulary. I almost always worked out the lyrics first, then designed a melodic motif and then worked on writing music with the motif around the lyrics.

Later, on that same trip, I met with Ramush Haradinaj and asked him whether he thought a book about the KLA would be a good idea. He said yes.

I asked, “Do you think it's too soon?”

“No,” he said

“What do you think should write it?” I asked.

“You,” he said. Later that same day, I met with Hashim Thaci, then the Prime Minister of Kosova, and he supported the idea as well.

I started interviewing as many young KLA soldiers as I could find. Thaci and, particularly, Haradinaj provided them and their commanders. All were eager to help. Their stories were riveting. On one of my trips back from Kosovo, I got to thinking, on the airplane, about their stories and started sketching out lyrics for a song that would express them.

Meanwhile, I had been taking piano lessons for about a year and was eager to use them as an entry point for learning more about music theory. One of my students, Andrew Strong, who had eagerly volunteered to be part of Operation Kosovo, had been a rock musician for a while before he came to law school. Andrew and I were spending lots of time together, and I asked him all kinds of music theory questions. At one point he said, “The best way to learn music theory is to write songs.”

I said, “I don't know how to write a song, and I don't sing very well.”

“Anyone can sing,” he said, “and you'll learn a lot by trying to write a song. The KLA soldiers’ stories were in my head, and so there was no real question that my first song should be about the KLA. I worked up some very rough verses and choruses and looked for someone to sing them. My student and teaching assistant at the time, Matt Topic played the trumpet professionally before law school, and so I went to see him. He recommended Tim Sandusky, a young music engineer and producer, who also performed. I met with Tim. Tim provided feedback and valuable assistance and reworking what became You Took Away My Flag and sang it. I took the recorded results back to Kosovo, and it was a real hit – not so much because of its physical quality but because in American had written a song about the KLA.

I had the bug and I liked working with Tim, who was very talented, and so we did a 12-song album called Wind Will Fill the Sails, which included the You Took Away My Flag song and others, such as It’s Time for a Skunk. We finished it and released it in September 2007. We were roll, and so would we did a second album with another 12 songs, called They Have To Be Watching You, which we finished in the spring of 2008.

Tim and I assumed that we would do a third album together, and I wrote a couple songs for it. I thought Phillip would be ideal to sing one of them, and so when Phillip was in town, I scheduled him in the studio and we recorded his vocals for the song. In directing his performance, I realized that I was bringing to bear some of what I knew about the theory of acting from having read Stanislavsky’s books, taking acting lessons in Philadelphia, and having been on the board of the small theater company in Philadelphia.

After we wrapped Phillip’s recording session, he and Tim and I were chatting and talking about what else would be on the next album. Tim said, Maybe you should write a musical.”

“Yeah!” I said. “Maybe I should.” The gratification of having played theater director a little bit for Phillip’s singing was still active. I said to Tim. “I know one thing: It's gonna be a sung-through musical, like Les Miz. Spoken lyrics in a musical are a crutch, used when the playwright can't think of any good music to carry the story along.”

Phillip and I were quite revved up about the idea. We fanned one another’s flames over lunch, and then I went home and started writing lyrics for the musical.

Because the KLA book was done by then, I knew what the story was, and I invented characters there were composites of the most charismatic young men I had talked to. Within about 10 days, I knew what the plot was, I knew the names of the major songs to carry it along, and had a good start on the lyrics for each of them. I continued my practice of spending every Friday morning in the studio with Tim, and we started working on the songs.

I knew my limitations as a composer. Tim and I agreed that I should try to recruit some professional arrangers. I put out some Craigslist notices, and couldn't decide between the two finalists, Alex Rowney, and Myron Silberstein. Alex was a classical pianist from Northwestern; Myron was a more popular pianist and accompanist. I hired Alex as the music director and Myron is the “music supervisor,” rehearsal accompanist, and backup arranger. Alex did great work, though I had to fight to prevent the songs from becoming his creations more than mine, but he obviously was not going to finish with them in time for our performances. So I threw Myron into the breach and he wrote the songs that Alex had not gotten to. Alex, of course, found Myron's work inferior and so he began rewriting Myron songs. Between the two of them we got the 37 songs written.

I really didn't know how to produce a musical. I didn't know much about auditions, rehearsals, or the support staff, so I used a combination of Craigslist notices and law school contacts to help me pull things together. My colleague, Felice Batlan, had been a dancer on Broadway briefly,  two of my law students Nick McIntyre and Gwen Xact's, and Sophia Gorodetskaya, my Russian piano teacher, to put together some auditions, which we did in Theater Building Chicago. We had a pretty good response to the notices, but the candidates were mostly – entirely – young actors who had never sung, or young singers who had never acted. Sophia was a bear in the auditions, telling some of the most nervous young performers, “You don't know how to sing!” She also, oddly enough, wouldn't keep a steady tempo in accompanying them.

We got a cast together and started rehearsals in the upstairs space at Straw Dog Theater my two leads, for Arian and Fahri, Northwestern students. They were pretty good, but completely unreliable. After they repeatedly just did not show up at rehearsals,  I realized I had to recast those two roles. I took a big chance with a French undergraduate actor from Depaul, whom I had cast as a member of the ensemble, and cast him as Arian. He had a pretty face and had good acting chops. He promised that he would work on subduing his pronounced French-accented English. I recruited a young theater student from UIC, Tyler Condon, who had directed indie movies but never a stage play. Nick and Gwynn were stage managers, as much as they could be, considering their law student responsibilities. Felice did one or two dance choreography rehearsals.

Rehearsing was a great bonding experience. We went far end of the night, and I always bought beer and soft drinks for the cast to enjoy afterwards. It was almost like a college fraternity. Tim pulled together some of the musicians he and 

I had worked with on my albums and provided live music for the performances

We did four performances in the Straw Dog black box theater space, which held about 75 seats. The house was filled for every performance, and we had to negotiate to put in extra chairs without violating the fire code. I'll never forget the sensation of being backstage when the music for my first song came up, started thumping its heavy beat, and the lights came up on the stage.

Tim's music performances rather overwhelmed the inexperienced actors—the musicians were rock musicians, after all. But everyone was very positive about the whole thing.

Coming off the success of this first production, I thought, not irrationally, what if I did another production with a professional cast and crew with higher-level technical facilities?

We received a lot of publicity for the first production of YTAMF, front page of the Daily Reader, two 30-minute interviews by the NPR station, at least two local TV station appearances, and the story in the American Bar Association Journal. That only fueled my optimism about what we could achieve in the next round.

So I reserved space and in a 120-seat theater in Theater Building Chicago, and began working with Allan Chambers, the very helpful Theatre Building Chicago Artistic Director on a budget. We made assumptions that Allan thought were reasonable about ticket prices ($41), average house (53%), theater rental, actor salaries, and so on. I was determined from the beginning of the first production not to shortchange the young actors. I knew tha storefront theaters in Chicago regularly took advantage of them, and I was determined that I would pay them fairly – rather a bit more than they were used to being paid for similar productions. Come what may, they would get their promised compensation.

Based on these assumptions, we figured out how many performances we would need. And we came up with 51, 3 or 4 per week for 12 weeks. I put out notices on the audition and cast-recruitment sites – about which I knew more than I had for the first production, and found Keith Harrison and Jessica Reddish, who claimed to be interested. Jessica was a fairly well-known indie theater director just coming off a play in Highland Park. Keith Harrison was a rather effeminate musician that Jessica had worked with and recommended. I met with them, negotiated terms, gave them the script and all the music, and made sure the contracts committed them to take both the script and the music more or less as it then existed. In October 2009 we begin auditions and picked the cast who eventually acted in the Theater Building Chicago production, led by Jordan Phelps as Arian. As we were conducting auditions, however, I began to worry that Keith, Jessica, and I had not talked about the songs, neither the lyrics nor the music. So after a two-week trip to Kosovo, I insisted that we get together, in late November or early December, 2009.

I discovered to my astonishment that either one of them had read the script and that they were surprised and dismayed to hear that Arian and Fahri were meant to have an implied gay relationship. Keith said he wanted to show me how he had arranged one of the songs. He went to my the piano, sat down, and began to play it. It was a completely different song.

We had some further desultory discussion in which both Keith and Jessica made it clear that they were far more interested in their views about what YTAMF should be rather than mine. I stewed over the whole matter quite a bit, lost sleep, thought about nothing else on my morning runs, and finally emailed both of them and said I'm sure you could write a better play than I can, but this is my play. You either need to commit to direct my material, or we better part company. They quit.

Then, I was in a complete panic. I had a cast, I'd raised $30,000 or $40,000 from my friends toward the budget of $107,000, and I had no director or music director. I frantically put out feelers and posted more notices everywhere I could think of.

During YTAMF’s development, I was going Kosovo three or four times a year, for a week to ten days on each trip.  Each time, I would take recordings and sheet music for the songs and distribute them widely to my contacts in Kosovo, ranging from the Prime Minister and Minister of culture to Alban and the real Fahri. I did not get much useful feedback on the content from the Kosovars but they were hugely enthusiastic about the fact that I was doing it, or so they said. The Minister of Culture promised possible support, and I was besieged by groups of completely incompetent theater directors and actors who claimed they could put up a performance in Pristina, an idea that I liked, but which they were completely incapable of doing.

The Kosovars had some reservations on the story, however. As the Chicago Reader said, in a June 12, 2009, story, “Kosovo: the Musical:

“Perritt wanted to pay tribute to the KLA struggle, and hopes to get the show performed in Kosovo. There's no tradition of musical theater there, he says, but so what? A bigger problem, he thinks, will be the star-crossed interethnic romance he put at the center of the story. His Romeo and Juliet-esque plot, in which Vjosa, an Albanian girl, falls for Dragan, a young Serbian policeman, hasn't played well with the Kosovars he's run it past so far. ‘When I was over there last year and showed them the script, they wanted me to take it out.’ Of course, he says, ‘I couldn't.’ As for intimations that Vjosa's younger brother Arian is involved in a gay relationship, ‘it's a minor subplot. Not everybody notices.’“

Losing Jessica and Keith turned out to be a blessing in disguise. By the end of December, I had signed up George Cederquist as the director and Jeremy Ramey as the music director. Both were enthusiastic about the production and willing to work with my music and story. George had a number of creative ideas about staging, including the red Albanian theme set off against the black of the Albanian flag, which made the staging visually impressive. We were able to implement them without great cost. He although thought that the music should never stop. So I wrote 12-15 additional little songs to carry what had been spoken narration in the first production.

I went to every rehearsal, but was careful to respect George's control of the rehearsal process. We had a few relatively minor disagreements but worked them out. He won about half and I won about half. Jeremy was a craftsman and, with three other musicians he recruited and adroit use of synthesizers to supplement acoustic instruments, did a nice job on performing the music. The music meshed well with the vocals of the cast.

The cast was wonderful. Jordan Phelps, particularly, was an unusual combination of a phenomenal actor and a phenomenal singer. And this was his first major production.

I was very pleased with everything when we opened.

It was all downhill from there. We filled about half the house for opening night, and it dribbled down to nothing soon thereafter. The reviews were mixed, a couple quite negative. The negative ones complained about the density of the lyrics and the difficulty in understanding them. “Take away all these words!” one was headlined.

Before long, the publicist, Tony Boylan, the swing, and I were the only ones in the theater. But I went to every performance. The cast acted and sang their hearts out for every performance, and we soldiered on doing everything we can think of to try to build audiences. Nothing really worked. A little after the midpoint, Allan, the TDC public relations guy, Tony, and I sat down to figure out what we should do. Allan said, “Ordinarily, at this point, the producer would close it.”

I said, “But I'm going to pay the actors to the end of the scheduled 42 performances anyway. What about the theater rent?”

“You would have to pay all of that anyway, even if you close it,” he said.

“So what's the point, economically, in closing it?” I asked. I decided to take a week off and rework the show a bit and see if that would help build audiences for the last few weeks. 

George said, “You can’t do that with a musical. It’s never done.”

I said, “I don't care. It's my musical and, at this point, I'm paying for everything that happens, myself.”

So I cut about 25% of it, we rehearsed the revised version, and put it back up again. We still could couldn't get anybody to come

The stage manager, Rose Kruger, later Rose Freeman, was terrific. She was just the right kind of “Nazi” to be a stage manager, and she was a great collaborator in trying to figure out how to work through the difficulties we had.

Ultimately I realized – learned – several things:

First, all the publicity for the first production was about me, not about the musical.

Second, the subject matter of the musical had a limited audience in Chicago. We had soaked the audience up with the first production, and people saw no reason to come to the second one.

Third, the press and media thought they had already covered YTAMF, and were not interested in providing more coverage for what seemed like an extension of a run, given that it occurred so soon.

Fourth. My principal limitation as a playwright for the musical was that I crammed too many words into the songs, trying to make sure I told the story for the KLA. That made the songs hard to understand. That's why so many musicals have spoken lines interspersed by songs

The music,  the joint results of Tim, Alex, Jeremy, and me, actually was pretty good, and the reviewers said so.

Happily, the cast also got some good kudos and the reviews. The negativity was reserved for the play.

I went around and made sure to have at least a one-hour postmortem with every member of the cast and crew.

During the rewrite interlude, I brought everybody into Tim’s studio, and we made a cast recording of a very good quality. I also got a videographer come in and shoot the show on stage. I packaged the cast recording and video onto DVDs and gave it out that whoever wanted it.

The show was a financial disaster. The budget was $107,000 we spent about $130,000 because we increased advertising expenditures, took in maybe $20,000 or $25,000 exhausted my investors $40,000, and I paid the rest out of my own pocket.

I sure as hell learned a lot though, and it was emotionally a very satisfying experience. I loved the cast, and they – in a little musical tribute they wrote for me and performed after YTAMF closed-- gave me credit for “treating them like Broadway stars.” I stayed in touch with about half of them and regularly went to their shows around Chicagoland for a few years after that.

I had by that time, become candidate board member at Strawdog Theatre Company, but abandoned my application after sitting for the first half of an absolutely horrible improv show called phone book and then leaving rather than suffer through the second half. Earlier, I had written Kathy Scambiaterra at the Artistic Home Theater praising a production that Peggy, Dana, Jonathan, and I had seen one Saturday when, on the spur of the moment, we decided to see what was playing in Chicago’s black box theaters. Kathy took her own sweet time answering my letter, but the result was I that served on her board for about two years.

Initially, I was a candidate board member, but then Kathy came up to me before one performance and welcomed me to the full board. My early protestations that I did not want to assert myself when I was the new kid were brushed aside. "We need your assertiveness," Kathy and the others said.

The finances of the organization were a mess, and not just because it spent way more than it took in. No controls or financial accounting system worth the name were in place. A volunteer “treasurer," constantly complained that Kathy wouldn't give her the information she needed to post to the accounts. I had lunch with Kathy a couple times and laid out a plan to straighten things out. She seemed not only agreeable but enthusiastic about it. One part of the plan was that she was going to stop writing checks personally and not recording them.

I also argued to the board meetings that we should get some interns to help reduce the backlog. The other board members said we would never be able to get interns. I got approval to try. I lined up two University of Illinois students within a day after I posted on Craigslist.  The interns worked hard and effectively to bring things up to date, but the treasurer felt threatened by their activities and efficiency, and Kathy really did not want to stop running things out of her hip pocket. So the organization reverted to the financial mess, regularly walking out on theater contracts and waiting to get sued. I provided some pro bono lawyer help, but finally got a bit sick of it.

Here is how a later flyer described it:

“Richard Ginsburg's life is falling apart. He no longer has the business he built from scratch. He is estranged from his son. He has become obsessed with a special airline frequent-flyer program that lets him fly first class anywhere in the world whenever he wants. The program has become the focus of his existence. And now the airline has cancelled his privileges.

“Brendan Scope is on the fast track. He is a handsome former college athlete, now practicing law with some significant litigation victories to his credit. Nothing can get in his way, not even some painful disasters from his past that he has managed to bury.

“Not even the fact that he is gay. 

“Then Richard becomes his client.“

My service on the Artistic Home board provided an opportunity to do some serious workshopping of Airline Miles. That’s where we did table readings and a concert reading.

Even as we started, I had no doubt that I wanted to cast Jordan Phelps in the lead. Kathy suggested Peter Connor to direct the play. I had seen Brandon Thompson in an Artistic Home production and was eager to cast him. He agreed. Kathy, I think, recommended Gary Houston, an older actor, for the third role. Peter and I talk to him and he agreed as well. Casting for this production was easy. Peter had some great ideas for character development. Brandon’s character in Airline Miles is gay; Brandon, himself, is not. So, based on Peter’s suggestion, we arranged for Brandon to spend some time with a gay lawyer in a big Chicago law firm, just chatting about what it was like to be a successful gay lawyer in a big law firm. The script called for some photographs of the Bobby and Brendan characters to be projected, and so we did some green screen photography. It also called for the Bobby character to be narrating a sports cast of a crew race, and so we shot some video of a Chicago rowing team on which one of my students was a member.

Peter was tough and sharp-edged, but he was a good director and was committed to the play. More than once we clashed at rehearsals, probably more than we should have, in front of the cast. I have trouble, when someone “gets in my face,” not to respond in kind, to make it clear that I am not intimidated.

We did a reading at The Artistic Home, on 16 May 2011, and a workshop production at The Artistic Home on 13 November 2011.

The plan, I thought, was for the Artistic Home to put the play up, but Kathy, while talented and charming, never takes her commitments seriously. She had a sidekick through whom she always passed bad news and renegs on commitments. 

When it became clear that the Artistic Home was not going to put Airline Miles up anytime soon, I set a date, rented a theater, and started putting up posters. So Airline Miles was performed at Second Stage Theater in Chicago, 3 August 2012 through 12 August 2012.

Our stage manager and technical director were weak. They constantly fumbled the technology necessary to show the slides and videos, and neither added much to the production. Very poor, in comparison to Rose Kruger.

When Airline Miles went up, however, it was great. We had good houses and pretty good reviews. Houston, who made it pretty clear that he was a real actor and the rest of us were just dabbling, couldn’t learn his lines and then, in the preview or opening, screwed up his lines so badly that a major reveal occurred several scenes early.

But Houston had been around Chicago theatre for a while, and I expect that his reputation helped fill the house, even if he thought that the production and the rest of us were beneath him, and even if his acting chops were beneath us.

After our short run, we talked periodically about turning Airline Miles into a movie, and I even worked with Dylan Jost (about whom later) on a movie script for it, but nothing came of it.

I financed Airline Miles myself, through Modofac Productions, LLC. It lost a a bit of money, but only a few thousand dollars, and was well worth the investment, to me.

As we were producing Airline Miles, I had gotten to know Jim Lynch, the volunteer development director of the Artistic Home. Peter already knew him. Jim had written a play, himself, called “CCX,” a gritty play about Chicago police, as described on the flyer:

“A gritty Chicago police drama that gets inside the skins of a young black suspect accused of murder, a seen-it-all black detective, his young white partner, and a flirtatious witness.“

Jim was an assistant state’s attorney and knew the subject matter. CCX had been workshopped by the Artistic Home, and Kathy, in her usual way, was dangling the possibility of producing it. I thought the play was good, and told Jim and Kathy so. To prod it along, I agreed with Jim and Kathy to co-produce it, between my production company, Modofac Productions, and the Artistic Home. Kathy, through her german shepherd, was erecting one hurdle after another. One hurdle was that I was insisting on paying the actors too much.

When Kathy  continued to evade interviews with director candidates, Jim and I went ahead and hired Patrick Thornton as director, without Kathy’s participation. That blew up the joint venture, and Modofac Productions put up CCX by itself.

Thornton was somewhat difficult in rehearsals, but perhaps no more so than the average director. He certainly did a good job of shaping the show up for going on stage.

The play was great, the houses were good, and the reviews were positive.  We performed CCX in Rivendell theater. I financed it through Modofac Productions. The loss was maybe $11,000 or $12,000. Modofac Productions, LLC took an interest in the property.

During the interval between the two productions of YTAMF, I acted in a little play put together in cooperation with the DuPage County Bar Association to allow people to earn CLE credit by watching the play and participating in a a discussion afterwards. The play involved the murder on a Washington street of Francis Barton Key, the nephew of Francis Scott Key, by Congressman Dan Sickles. The Congressman pleaded temporary insanity, induced by the unfaithfulness of his wife with Key. I played the judge, and had only a brief appearance on stage wite a few lines. The playwright directed it herself, and she liked to come to rehearsals having had more than a few cocktails. The whole process was completely chaotic, but it was fun. The Bar Association turned out its members, and we had a full house, in the basement of a northside church.

The Sickles play also gave me an idea for third play. The Artistic Home was in constant financial straits, and board meetings were consumed with nonsensical ideas for nickel-and-dime fundraisers like raffles. I told them about the Dupage Bar Association play and suggested we might do something similar in co-operation with the Chicago Bar Association. Jim Lynch was the only other lawyer in the leadership of the enterprise and was enthusiastic about the idea. So were Kathy and the rest of the board, as they they got big dollar signs in their eyes.

I volunteered to write a play in collaboration with one of the other ensemble members. I forget his name now, and he fell by the wayside early on, never having written the word. I rather liked the idea of taking it on my myself and was determined to be faithful to my commitment to have a gay theme in it somewhere. (The commitment was to never write a word of fiction that did not have a gay theme or character.) Jim Lynch thought that was a terrible idea. I asked around pretty extensively and everyone I talked to disagreed with Jim, so I went ahead with protagonists who were gay, continuing to involve him, Kathy, her guard dog, and others in the development process. In the story of Giving Ground, the boyfriend of a gay lawyer had been murdered, apparently in connection with his duties as an assistant state attorney. The surviving young lawyer and his friends set about to solve the murder, which ultimately involved a Chicago alderman and a conspiracy to launder drug money through a foundation allegedly dedicated to preserving like Michigan.

Kathy directed it, and we cast it about half with Artistic Home ensemble members, with a few other fillins we got through open auditions. We did several readings, including a staged reading in the Artistic Home space.

One of the Artistic Home supporters had connections with the management of the Illinois State Building, a big office building in the Chicago Loop, and he suggested that we could get a good deal on the auditorium there as the performance space. The space was not particularly good because it did not have theater lighting, and the management was a disaster: rude, demanding, and obstructionist at every turn. They ordered us to remove all the set pieces between the final rehearsal and the performance, telling me that only after all the cast and crew had left for the night. I was delighted some years later to learn that the decision of been made to tear down the building. I hope the staff was displaced and went homeless as a result of the decision to tear down the building.

We felt good about the play and the performance. Kathy did not take it seriously as art; she viewed it simply as a fundraiser. But I thought it was a pretty good story and that the actors did a good job. I was proud of it.

The Chicago Bar Association was quite sluggish in promoting it, however. I had obtained buy-in from the chairman of the requisite committees of the Association but apparently the Bar Association staff thought they had more important things to do than to promote the CLE program built around a play.

For whatever reason, the house was much smaller than we expected, maybe 20 or 30 people. The legal discussions during intermission's were interesting and had good participation, and the feedback from the participants was good, but it did not make nearly as much money as Kathy and the Artistic Home board expected – and their expectations had been growing exponentially since we first talked about it.

It seemed to me it was a good concept. I had attended a couple of mandatory CLE programs that the Illinois State Bar Association sponsored that involved watching movies and then having a discussion about the legal issues presented. They were terrific and oversubscribed.

I thought, if we did it again and promoted it better, we could get much better results. But this time I wanted to control the advertising and promotion and I didn't want to have to carry Kathy's unreliability and gameplaying on my back. Chicago-Kent had a terrific continuing legal education manager at the time, Deb Villa. Deb had been enthusiastic about Giving Ground from the beginning and had done more, actually, than either the Artistic Home or the Chicago Bar Association to promote it. She was eager for us to take on a new production of Giving Ground ourselves, in the name of the law school.

I had stayed in touch with Rose Kruger and knew that, as good as stage manager as she was, she wanted to direct. I also thought I was ready to try my hand at directing. So I got Rose to agree that she and I would co-direct the second run of Giving Ground.

By now, I knew how to do casting, and so we put up audition notices and had auditions at the law school. We saw some good young actors, and put it up with a solid cast, led by Dylan Jost, whose audition performances were impressive. Rehearsals went fine. Rose and I got crosswise a few times on artistic matters but got through those conflicts with respect and civility.

My directing highlight occurred with respect to one scene in which Dylan's character is being cross-examined by the police, who suspect that he was the one who murdered his boyfriend. The scene was okay as they were performing it, more or less, and Rose was ready to pass on to the next scene. But I thought it lacked the intensity it needed. So I insisted that we stop things. I took five minutes privately with Dylan. I kneeled down and earnestly whispered to him. “You killed Bryan. You are the one. You know that, but you want to throw off police suspicion.” I repeated the same idea four times, with as much vehemence as I could muster. “Now, I said,” standing up. “Go back and let's do it again.”

Dylan is a very good actor, and with that alteration and motivation, he made the scene really spark with electricity.