Scott Caan's "Vanity"

On August 30, 2014 the Martha Otero Gallery in Los Angeles held a showing of photographs from Scott Caan’s most recent book, “Vanity.”

It was an absolute treat to be able to view some of the actual photographs from the book. For those who are curious, I’ll include a list of the photographs on display at the end of this piece.

I have always been drawn to black and white photography, which is partly why I enjoy Caan’s photography. The other part is what he chooses to shoot. It’s not surprising, really, that the majority of Caan’s pictures are of people. As both a writer and an actor, I would imagine that people must fascinate him, and Caan’s portraits certainly fascinate me.  

One of the photographs included in the gallery was “Joanna in the pool at the Oakstone, 2007.” Joanna is in the water, her back against the edge of the pool, staring straight at the camera. The camera’s focus is entirely on her, her eyes the focal point of the picture, the physical background a blur. Her gaze is unflinching. Her eyes capture mine, hold mine, and yet she is unreadable, despite how desperately I want to know what has put that look in her eye, the set to her lips, the tension in her shoulders. The photograph is a story, every detail a piece in a puzzle, the answer to which is tantalizingly unknowable.

It’s easy to forget the photographer in this equation, that the subject of the photograph is actually sharing a gaze with the person taking the picture, filtered through a camera’s lens.  Quite a few of the people in Caan’s collection are staring straight at the camera, just like Joanna. Their faces are a study in diversity, young and old, wrinkled and smooth, smiling and resolute. The number of times I find myself staring straight into their eyes reminds me of how often in life I don’t.

To meet another person’s gaze is to risk vulnerability, of opening a door and inviting communication. Acknowledging someone else’s existence or by contrast, having your existence acknowledged is not always a safe or comfortable space. You may not like what you see or the attention you might get. There is power in a gaze: Even that brief exchange of glances is laden with cultural assumptions and expectation. We are taught that staring is rude. We learn the hard way that it can be confrontational.  But by staring at the ground instead of sharing a glance with each other, we miss too much of the life that is constantly swirling around us.

That Caan’s subjects feel safe enough to share that gaze with their photographer ensures that his photographs never feel voyeuristic. Caan does not shrink from his subject’s gazes and they don’t shrink from him. Caan does not demand they smile for the camera, and it’s not just traditional ideals of beauty that catch his eye. His photographs are not slick or artificial. They are intimate sketches of humanity.

On page 105 is a picture titled “Medicine 6^th and San Jacinto LA 2007.” It’s a photograph of a man sitting on a sidewalk, staring at the camera, as he shoots a needle into his arm (of what I’m assuming is heroin or some other drug).  His expression is resolute, and like Joanna, unflinching. It makes me wonder so many things. How Caan inspired this man’s trust to allow him to shoot it in the first place. And by allowing to have his picture taken, what did this man want us to see? What is his story? What happened that placed him on that street corner and drove him to put that needle in his arm?  When I look at that picture, my eyes keep coming back to his eyes, to his face, and thus to a reminder that his life is big and complex and that one moment in time, captured for eternity in that photograph, is only one small piece of it and even that one moment, I cannot fully know. 

The beauty of “Vanity” is the way each photograph, each captured piece of time, invites you to linger, invites you to marvel at another person’s existence, and invites you to fail at guessing who they really are.

I marvel, too, at Caan’s abilities with the camera, especially considering the way he explained his process to interviewer Mac Sandefur:  “I dig the idea of not knowing what I got and hoping it’s good. I got 36 chances with a roll. If I’m out and about running and shooting on the street, if I get one picture out of that I’m like, ‘I got something. We got a good photograph.’ That whole thing is rewarding.”

In this digital age, it’s eye opening to remember that when shooting film, you don’t know what you’ve captured until after you develop it. What a wild dance it must be to see something that catches your attention, to snap a photo or thirty, and then only after the moment is long gone do you know whether you really had something…or nothing.  Photography is life in 20/20 hindsight, and one that can only be appreciated when it is no longer anything but a memory.

As for the opening itself: it was small and intimate, populated largely, from what I could tell, with family and friends.  I’ve seen a lot of book signings in my day, and I’ve seen many when the numbers of friends the authors expect to come don’t show up. Scott Caan’s friends showed up. And that says a lot. In fact, in my book, it pretty much says everything.

List of Photographs:

Page 7: Christiana and Leopard at the Oakstone, 2009

Pages 12/13: Liz and heater at the Chateau, 2008

Page 24: Amsterdam Red Light Walk Alley tho, 2004

Page 26: Clear Port going somewhere

Page 27: Shallow Lane Museumplein Amsterdam, 2004

Page 33: Eight Hours Straight Prague, 2006

Pages 38/39: Jefe El Salvador, 2006

Pages 52/53: Going to California, 2012

Pages 60/61: Joanna in the pool at the Oakstone, 2007

Page 62: Mickey Avalon The Viper Room, 2007

Page 81: Camping Trip

Page 83: Steve Rudy Bagel Ford P16, 2010

Page 90: Lake Bird Chateau Hollywood, 2009

Page 117: Cloney Shoot Melrose Alley 2011

Pages 118/119: Duane Peters 80s Contest, 2010

Pages 130/131: Bird shoot in the Belushi Suit, 2009

Page 147: The one that got away on her Nikon, 2005

Page 153: Last Frame Ipanema Beach Rio, 2008

Pages 154/155: Atlantic Ocean 2005

Pages 158/159: Back lot super sport, 2008

Pages 166/167: Trailer Park Jacksonville, 2005

(My apologies to Mr. Caan for any errors in my very non-photographic memory of the photographs on the walls that night.)

Scott Caan's "Word Faithful"

I’ve had the privilege of seeing three of Scott Caan’s full length plays produced on stage and as I’ve come to expect, the latest, “Word Faithful,” is populated with characters struggling to find their place in the world both individually and romantically.

The play is predominantly devoted to Jake and Samantha, ex lovers who at the beginning of the play are both with other partners.  But from the moment we see Samantha applying last minute makeup in front of a mirror, adjusting the armor of her appearance, so to speak, as she prepares to let Jake into her apartment, and back into her life, we know that whatever is between the two of them is far from over.

It would have been easy, expected even, to make Jake and Samantha lighthearted and likeable characters. A madcap story of how these two zany people ultimately discover they’re made for each other. But this is why Caan’s writing packs an emotional punch. He never chooses the easy route.

Early on in the play, in an extremely unsettling sequence, Jake reveals a desire to smash his current girlfriend in the face to get her to shut up. This is followed by an expression of rage so deep (set off by the simple act of finding eggshells in the food she prepares for him) that he wants to kill her. He then goes on to describe how driving devolves into an internal argument with himself over whether or not to plunge his car headlong into a tree.

I think it would be fair to say that anger is culturally understood as a negative emotion, ugly in nature, confined to dark and demonized spaces. The inability to manage anger blamed for anything from road rage to mass shootings. But it is also impossible to speak about anger without considering the intersectionalities of gender, race and class and how these three things have to impact our interpretation.

Male rage, particularly white male rage, is often inseparable from an expression of entitlement and privilege, driven by a desperate need to assert both. That rage has all too often manifested itself in physical violence upon the bodies of women. It is physical abuse. It is rape. It is sexist, but it is also all too often homophobic for it is rooted in gender essentialism. Men not deemed “masculine” become targets of it too. The extreme is Eliot Rodger, killing seven people in a shooting spree in Santa Barbara earlier this year because he felt rejected by women. Or Marc Lepine who killed 14 women in 1989 in Canada because he hated feminists. But it also exists in every legislative attempt to remove women’s agency from decisions pertaining to their own bodies. To many women, male anger is terrifying and the avoidance of incurring it is a daily navigation.

Jake is fucked up, but not that fucked up that he doesn’t understand his abusive and suicidal impulses are deeply disturbed. Samantha tells him he sounds like a crazy person, but what Jake is expressing is far too normative to be dismissed as a fringe emotion. And while Jake is more than a little terrifying and off putting in that moment, his conscious awareness of what he’s saying, his sense of wrongness, is actually a step in the right direction. Because alongside the history of violence against women goes a history of society’s refusal to acknowledge it or do anything about it.

Samantha, however, shows no such control. After she and Jake sleep together and he tries to sneak out, she is enraged. She tells him flat out if he invokes the name of a friend to lie to her she will douse him with water and punch him in the face. And when he does, she follows through. But though Jake is angered by it, he does not punch her back. He does not mishandle her in any physical way. But he is quite rightfully upset at her actions and he calls her out. For all of Samantha’s reliance on self help seminars to teach her to tamp down her emotions, they can’t be contained. In fact, her anger is exacerbated by her attempts to stifle it and when it does finally surface, it is explosive. But where Jake truly seemed horrified by his violent urges, and upset at Samantha’s physical attack, Samantha herself seemed unfazed.

And that’s not a surprise. Culturally speaking, we don’t view female anger as dangerous. In the case of Jake and Samantha, Jake towers over her. At no point would you consider him to be in actual danger. And while male anger is often (rightfully) demonized, female anger is dismissed. It’s not taken seriously. It’s the stuff of mockery and jokes.

As Jake and Samantha demonstrate, anger and violence have become almost synonymous. Violence has become an extension of anger. And so anger has become a taboo emotion. One that is not utilized, but quashed.

But anger is also clarifying. Because while Samantha is wrong to strike out physically at Jake, her anger is justified. It is righteous. And it is her anger, ultimately, that strikes a chord with Jake and helps to change his behavior by the end of the play. And this is where issues of race, gender, and class are most relevant to the issue of anger. Because anger is often the voice of the oppressed. And to render anger unequivocally as wrong and dangerous and violent is an oppressive act in itself. In the face of a case like the police execution of Mike Brown, to keep calm and chill out is to be complicit in tyranny.

But if there’s anyone who would seem to understand the righteousness of anger, it’s Brian, the cuckolded lover who would appear to have the most justification to lose it. In fact, physical violence is exactly what Jake expects when Brian shows up at the apartment. Because history shows us that violence is how the fate of women gets decided:  Jake and Brian fight and winner gets the prize.

But there is no fight for two reasons. Jake runs away the second he opens the door, and as it turns out, Brian is better at the whole human being thing than either Jake or Samantha. While Brian is hurt, and rightfully upset, he never heaps guilt or shame upon Samantha. He never indicates that she owes him anything. Not for being nice to her. Not for loving her. He loves her regardless and he respects her choice, even when it’s not him.  While Jake simply expects physical violence to be the only choice when confronted by his “competition," Brian frames the incident through a different lens. Samantha’s own agency. To Brian, Samantha’s choice is the only thing that matters. Brian isn’t overcome with anger because in his mind, he never had a right to it in the first place.

(Please note that this is by no means a comprehensive discussion on anger and violence. These are merely the wanderings of my own thoughts as sparked by the content of the play.)

Random Comments and Observations

The entire play is hilariously funny.

The set design was gorgeous, the attention to detail enhancing the written words of the play. From all the decorative pithy boxes to the (I actually don’t know what they’re called) little soothing zen plant and sand that Mia Serafino kept using to show Samantha tamping down her emotions.

An enraged Mia Serafino is a thing of beauty. I will never get the image of her breaking the “Keep Calm and Chill Out” decorative box, tossing around all the little sticks from her zen plant, and throwing the sheet over her head in a fit. Serafino has a tremendous sense of timing and is a gifted physical actor.

I can’t even begin to describe the gloriousness of the mockery of male posturing that took place through a closed door between Jake and Brian. Seriously almost died laughing.

The way Jake kept calling Brian different names throughout the play, even to Brian himself, culminating in Samantha calling him by the wrong name. So. Fucking. Funny. I was in tears.

The donuts and coke hidden in the potted plant. OMG. Again. Tears.

Seriously felt so sorry for Brian when Samantha told him that while she loved him, she loved Jake more. Brian was awesome!

Loved Samantha reading Patti Smith’s “Kids” at the beginning of the fourth scene.

Loved the black and white photography they used in the set design for the fourth scene. Wondering if any of the pieces were Scott’s…

Mia Serafino, Danny Barclay, and Jim Nieb are the real deal. All three are gifted actors. The quality of work coming out of Playhouse West is truly stellar.

Going into a funny rom com and coming out talking about anger and how amazed you are at the lack of shaming heaped on Samantha. But that's Scott Caan for you. You're always going to walk out of his plays thinking a little bit harder about something.

Play Synopsis:

Scene One brings Jake back into Samantha’s life after a two year absence. She’s with Brian. He’s with Kim. Brian is a 37 year old horse trainer. Kim is a 19 year old who can’t cook. Neither Jake or Samantha is happy. Jake is pretty honest about that. Samantha is in deep denial. Samantha claims she called Jake to show him her brand new beautiful apartment (complete with “Peace” “Love” “Keep Calm and Chill Out” “Ride a Cowboy” decorative boxes), along with her brand new beautiful “self” formulated through Self Help books and Tony Robbins seminars. But Jake guesses that her real intention was to make herself feel better by seeing how fucked up he still is. The attraction between the two of them is undeniable, and the scene ends with the two of them making love on the living room floor.

Scene Two begins with Jake engaging in some serious gymnastics to wriggle his way out from under Samantha without waking her up. He’s just heading for the door when she catches him. And she loses her mind. She is absolutely furious that Jake would sneak out, leaving her to wake up alone with the future of her relationships with both Jake and Brian completely in doubt.  Samantha desperately tries to make sense of what happened, but ultimately, even though both of them are miserable and obviously still deeply in love with each other, Jake ends up leaving.

Scene Three takes place several days later and opens with Samantha packing. We quickly learn she is moving in with Brian and he’s on his way to help her take some boxes to his place. And that’s when Jake reappears. With a ring box. Samantha’s elation turns to rage when she opens the ring box only to find it empty. Samantha orders Jake to get out, but before she can get rid of him, Brian arrives. After some failed male posturing on Jake’s part, Jake finally leaves after Brian asks Samantha which man she wants to be with and she indicates Brian. However, after Samantha confesses she and Jake recently slept together, Brian finally gets her to admit that while she loves him and knows she should want to be with him, her love for Jake surpasses anything she’s ever felt before. Brian kisses her on the head and leaves.

Scene Four opens several months later. Samantha’s apartment has a new décor. Gone are the Self Help platitudes. In their place are several black and white photographs. Jake arrives. This time he called her. He tells her all the reasons they belong together, are stuck together, in fact, and once more produces the ring box. Which is still empty. Samantha orders him out, telling him words are intangible without something solid to hinge them on. Jake smiles. Reaches into his pocket and produces a ring. The happy couple kisses, even though the success of their relationship in the future is far from assured.

Philosophical Musings on Scott Caan's "Minor Conversations: A Night of Vignettes"

Continuing in the tradition of last year’s “A Night of Scenes,” Scott Caan’s “Minor Conversations” is a collection of eight vignettes loosely tied together thematically.  Each scene is a pairing of characters. Some hooking up. Some breaking up. Some trying desperately to figure out how to stay together. What struck me most though was how desperately at least one party in the conversation wanted the other person to listen to them.

Identity has always played greatly in Caan’s work, especially as it relates to characters’ attempts to communicate. “Minor Conversations” adds one more layer to this: listening. Listening might seem implicit in any discussion of communication, but as all eight of these scenes points out, listening is harder than it looks.

People tell you things you don’t want to hear. They tell you things that will blow your life apart. They tell you things you don’t understand but you desperately try to pretend that you do. They tell you stupid things and goofball things and things that reveal what an asshole they are.

Listening requires constant navigation. Through bias and perception and bullshit and lies.

Casey tells June that for men, the act of sex barely even requires a woman. It’s really just masturbation and her vagina happens to be there. Women are in essence a living, breathing mindless doll. They don’t participate. In fact, their participation, their pleasure, isn’t even a consideration.

Tony tries to convince Jack (as Tony rocks his daughter back and forth in her baby stroller no less) that “settling” down is not for him. Not yet. That might come (as unhappily as Tony himself accepted that “fact” and joined the marriage/baby train) but first, Jack owes it to himself to let that penis loose and treat himself to the best time of his sexual life, in essence, to all the fuckable babes he can get his hands on.

The question for how you wend your way through those piles of sexist bullshit is really what’s at stake. Because it isn’t a lie. Not about what is, necessarily. These are fairly well entrenched tropes about male sexuality. The argument you’re having is about what ought to be. It’s about recognizing that simply because something is and always has been, doesn’t mean it has to remain that way forever.

What I found quite interesting is how desperately both men in the above scenes needed their counterparts to not only listen to them, but to believe what they were saying is true. Acceptance of that narrative of male entitlement is exactly what gives it dominance. It’s for this reason that as much at first as I wanted June to tell Casey that women could have just as much meaningless sex as men (and in fact do), fuck you very much, I’m glad she didn’t. Because that would have meant that she was still framing female sexual identity around a male fantasy.

What I absolutely love about those scenes is the way Caan does not pull punches with Casey and Tony’s complete dickishness. They are assholes. Period. There is no attempt to make them likeable in their assholishness and there is no attempt to rationalize their behavior. In fact, one of the audience members was literally yelling “stop talking” at Casey at some point in that scene.

My roommate pointed out later that talking itself drowned out the ability to listen, that the characters were so focused on their own point of view, on making the other person listen to what they had to say, they, themselves, completely lost the ability to hear someone else.

Sometimes the voice we need to listen to the most comes in the form of niggling doubts about our own behavior and beliefs. 

Lucy spends her scene trying to figure out how she landed in the role of nagging/suspicious girlfriend/wife. It’s especially puzzling to her because she remembers as a child having complete clarity on how idiotic it was for her mother to be demanding to know where her father had been even as he was standing there with proof of his hunting activities dead in his arms.

But before she knew it there she was, asking her father and then her boyfriend the exact same question, fully internalizing the fear that the men in her life were biologically destined to be unfaithful.

Cultural tropes are the loudest voices we will ever hear. They demand our attention. They demand we listen to them and accept their point of view. It’s difficult to live a fully conscious life. It’s difficult to attempt to reshape your identity when the call of societal norms is so strong, when the punishment for breaking them can be swift and violent.

This brings me to the scenes that bookend “Minor Conversations.” The first scene takes place in a waiting room. An hourglass sits on the table between them. Jed is trying to get Trish to leave with him, but she’s hesitant. There are rules, she says. And even as she stands, it takes every bit of resolve to get herself to move. But they do make a break for it, Trish and Jed.

The final scene takes place in a restaurant, and we witness the end of a relationship. Kelly wants to make it work. She knows exactly what they have to do, what Sean has to do, how she has to change. But Sean likes things as they are. She doesn’t want to change. And so she walks away.

While there are those who will challenge and speak up against oppressive societal “rules” there are always those who benefit from them and their entitlement is not something they are going to willingly give up.

“Minor Conversations” is steeped in Caan’s trademark humor and populated with characters who are absolute wrecks. Some are holding on to and opining their beliefs for dear life, some are questioning them, and some are hiding out in pills, booze or weed. But all of them help shine a light on the choices we make every day.

A few random observations:

*All the performers were wonderful, and to my layman’s eye seemed to be having a blast bringing their characters to life.

Robyn Cohen was simply sublime, standing out in both scenes in which she appeared. From tough talking New York accented trying to get up the courage to run Trish in Scene One to Sean, loving and warm and heartbroken even as she left her girlfriend sitting alone at the table in Scene Eight.

Mia Serafino was equally as wonderful, bringing some lovely nuances to each of her three characters that made each one of them her own woman. I was especially touched by her scene with Cohen, probably my favorite scene of the night.

I’ve seen Joseph Pease in several of Caan’s productions and he is a major talent. I’ll never forget his performance in “100 Days of Yesterday” and I now look forward to seeing him on stage, even when he’s playing an asshole J

Danny Barclay also stood out, doing a great job capturing the voice and malaise of male entitlement.

*Some favorite moments:

Ashley Osborne as Rest Room Attendant Carrie using towels to hoist Tara Conner’s drugged out self involved Deb up by her armpits and toss her out of the bathroom.

Danny Barclay’s Ted wrapping the belt of his robe around his neck like a noose as Mia Serafino’s Sloan tells him things he doesn’t want to hear. The follow up of Sloan pulling the belt tight around his neck and nearly choking the life out of Ted in frustration.

Danny Barclay’s Tony chopping away at a bunch of baby carrots with a pair of shears.

Will McMahon’s Buddy overtly checking out Anton Narinsky’s “Man” in the locker room. His cute pride in his own body then undercut by how completely ripped and gorgeous the other man is. Buddy’s eager attempts to pretend he knows what the hell “Man” is talking about because mostly he just desperately wants to keep the conversation going. That the room cheered when the two finally kissed.

*The introduction of two gay couples. One hilarious, the other heartbreaking, treated no differently for their sexuality from the het couples in the play. Their sexuality was in fact the least interesting thing about them.

*My absolute desire and wish that someone would film these productions and put them on youtube where fans across the globe could have the same amazing experience that I did.

Scott Caan's "A Night of Scenes"

On August 24, 2013, Scott Caan and Val Lauren in association with Playhouse West put on “A Night of Scenes,” a collection of excerpts from eight plays Caan wrote between 1999/2000 and 2013. According to Lauren, back when they were both students at Playhouse West, Caan began writing plays out of a deep frustration at a lack of material for he and his friends to perform and produce. The productions that came out of Caan’s foray into writing they called “Scene Night,” and “A Night of Scenes” was conceived as a resurrection of that original idea.

Thus, “A Night of Scenes” is not one cohesive play, but is rather, as Lauren explains, a collection of  “excerpts from various plays written by Scott. They have been cut down for time and are out of context from the plays [from] which they have been derived.” Audience members were “encourage[d] to enjoy them as they are – glimpses into [Caan’s] works and the characters that live in them.”

If there’s one thing you can be sure of it’s that Scott Caan’s work always comes down to characters and the tensions between them as they try, sometimes succeeding, oftentimes failing, to understand each other.  Caan’s characters yell and talk and ramble and order each other to speak, to communicate. They are seeking connections, struggling to understand themselves, their relation to other people, and their place in the world. They are intensely human. They are imperfect and neurotic. They can be selfish and obtuse. And despite all that, or perhaps because of it, they are utterly endearing.

In “No Way Around But Through” Holly (Laura Azevedo) says of her on again off again boyfriend Jacob, “he makes me forget I hate people,” and goes on to add of her best friend Rachel (Eva Lauren) “that’s partially why I love you too.”

And in “Two Wrongs,” Shelly (Jennifer Cadena) hysterically recounts in horror the physical vulgarity of two of her former dates to her therapist Julian (Jim Nieb):

            Shelly: He did not just burp. He blew. Burped and blew. Sideways he blew. It was the
            motion of his body. It was the way he shifted in his seat as the air left his face. Unacceptable.
            In a restaurant no less. It was disgusting and I will never look at him the same.

            Julian: … It sounds mysteriously similar to the salad dressing guy…

            Shelly: Oh God. The ranch dressing. He was an animal.

            Julian: He had a little salad dressing in the corners of his mouth.

            Shelly: Did I use the word little? I never said little. And it wasn't just dressing. It was ranch.
            Ranch is thick, white and has texture...A large portion of thick, white, and textured salad
            dressing, cascading down from the corner of his job.

Both of these scenes, as is much of Caan’s work, are driven by a wickedly sharp sense of humor that reveals a simple truth: people are hard to love. And this, for me, is the larger appeal of Caan’s writing. His characters feel real and they are hilariously unsure about the worthiness of the rest of the human race. But underneath it all, they are fragile, often in emotional pain and facing a difficult choice: embrace that pain and work through it (and by doing so develop meaningful relationships with other people) or run away and numb themselves to life and any joy other people might bring them.

I want to give a little more attention to “9/11.” I’d known of this play from a short scene featuring Val Lauren that has made its way around the Internet. It’s even more powerful live on the stage and all three actors, Danny Barclay, Gabriel Grier, and Anton Narinskiy were absolutely compelling.

There really is no way to watch the scene of the two brothers and their friend arguing in a coffee shop about prejudice, discrimination and violence without calling back memories of the days following 9/11/2001. The nationalistic fervor.  The militaristic jingoism. The racism. The us versus them, you’re with us or against us philosophy that was the hallmark of the Dubyah Bush years and still infuses so much of American culture.

It’s an ugly scene. One friend has pulled another friend off of a Muslim man he’s beating the crap out of, who he would have happily pounded to death had he not been stopped.  A man whose dress and language has become cultural code for danger and threat, the identity of Muslim synonymous with the identity of terrorist.

What follows is a discourse on difference and ignorance as that friend explains to the two brothers that he’s been hiding his own Iranian heritage to avoid hatred and fear. But through listening to him speak, by hearing him relate his experience, the brothers have their eyes opened beyond the stereotypes the media is so quick to feed its audiences. And its audiences are so quick to devour.

What I love about this scene is its absolute imperative of the necessity and importance of representation.  Of the necessity and importance of not just listening to the experiences of others, but of truly hearing it. Of opening yourself up to the words of others and allowing them to shift the tectonic plates of your own identity. 

To me, this is the craft, and perhaps even the mandate, of art: to poke at and reveal the seams of identity, to show that what is woven by culture can be unraveled and re-sewn.

Identity, and the search for it, is the cornerstone of Caan’s writing, and one of the reasons I believe Caan is doing interesting and significant work.  I hope one day I’ll have the chance to see all the scenes performed that night in their entirety and look forward to Caan’s next writing project.

Full Play List (in order of appearance):

“Two Wrongs” (published through Dramatist Play Service)

“They Meet”

“Word Faithful”

“9/11”

“No Way Around but Through” (published through Dramatis Play Service)

“Performance of Heartbreak”

“The End”

“100 Days of Yesterday”