After many years of working in the Theatre, in virtually every other capacity, feeling the growing weight of dissatisfaction with scripts which did not really engage me, and projects in which I believed less and less, it occurred to me that I should write my own material. I had never had trouble imagining plays, but it would be ten years before I would actually put pen to paper.
 
Finally, working one summer in Indianapolis, I had been hired to create some stunts for a production of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, and when the star declined to perform them, I was asked to double him. The first trick was a long slide on a cable across the proscenium opening. It began at a great height, and one of the stage hands, who was a rigger, was assigned to oversee the harness that was hidden under my cape.
 
Night after night we followed a ritual of checking the harness, fastening it into the rigging, retying my costume and then waiting for the cue which would send me hurtling across the opening.
 

I respected his considerable skill, and he clearly admired the reckless abandon I have always shown in situations like that one. We were from opposite sides of the lights, though, so, despite the inevitable intimacy born of our mutual task in the dark rigging above the stage, despite the fact that we were two men who liked one another quite a bit, we never found a way to acknowledge the connection; we lacked some essential piece of common vocabulary. I once asked him where he hung out, and he told me the name of the place, and added that he liked to drink until he 'punched one of his buddies in the face'.
 
I wondered at the difference between our worlds, and the difficulty we had in bridging the gap between them. It engendered considerable speculation upon the ways in which men struggle to communicate with one another; I finally understood that hiring him as a rigger was the only formula we had.
 
 The first version of RED DOG MOON was born of those speculations, it's narrative framework was a job interview; it was about hiring a rigger, but wherever it began, the process of writing it took on a life of its own, a logic, and all my attempts to impose some sort of 'meaning' on it were essentially unsuccessful. Over a period of three years and upwards of ten versions of the script, various thematic considerations rushed forward like waves, only to recede again.
 

There has always been a murder, sometimes more than one; early on, CROW was a crafty serial killer who could only be caught by one of his own (Send a thief to catch a thief).. There has always been a struggle for domination. There has always been a father figure who was killed off along the way. There has always been a second story hidden in the first.
 
 A playwright may allow the play to coalesce in it own way, but the director's first question is always, "What is the play about?" It's still about two men struggling to deal with one another; it's still about the mentor/protégé relationship, though not the pale modern version.
 
It is about justice; even if you are an outrider, even if the social models don't fit, and you must construct models of your own, there are laws which supersede those puny whinings of human society. RED DOG MOON is about taking responsibility for who you are and what you do no matter what that is, if you break the chain and step out of your place in the order of things, it must be made right; it's about violence and retribution; it's about accepting the ghost. "Don't do the crime, if you can't do the time."
 
This version of the script happened in three days, although I had been thinking about it for some time, and had plenty of notes on hand. When Larry Bryan called me, out of the blue, very little was down on paper. Larry had worked with me on physical theatre during the summer of '87, and had dislocated a shoulder doing a handspring on the last day of our working. My memory of him was colored by the guilt which I felt at his injury, and I had not seen him in the seven years since. In that time. I had exhausted the Chicago theatre scene for myself, learned much less than I had hoped, been utterly unsuccessful at finding the sort of theatre that I wanted to work in, and left in disgust. I had put aside the plays and was writing S & M erotica.
 
I was surprised to hear from him, and flattered that he wanted to work with me again, particularly as he expressed an interest in my directing one of my own scripts, but finally I remained unconvinced of my stated willingness to return to Chicago, and of his depth of commitment; everyone in Chicago is planning to start a company, everyone wants to put on a play. I told him that I'd send a script in a couple of weeks, and then blew him off.

Two weeks later, to the day, he called again, to ask after the script which I had not sent. I realized then that he was serious, and intent on pursuing the project; I sat down and knocked out the first draft of this version of RED DOG MOON in those three days and sent it to him on the fourth. By the time we talked about it, I had revised it significantly, and in the process had intoxicated myself with the possibility of putting it on its feet.
 
At the same time, he was negotiating a space for his theatre company, the obligatory store-front, but with a significant twist. Hidden behind the grubby store-front was a large ballroom, formerly a speak-easy where deals were reportedly struck between corrupt police and politicians and the hoods who greased them.
 
He had succeeded in capturing my imagination. The whole thing seemed completely improbable, and irresistible. Nothing was in place, everything was happening at once, and too fast; Larry was paddling as fast as he could, just keeping his head above water. There was an incredible energy there, and determination, and anger.
 
There were no scruples about where the money was going to come from, or how it was all to be accomplished. His apartment was the circus come to town, an endless parade of characters, unlikely combinations, at all hours of the day and night, a shifting mosaic, a raggedy patchwork. The phone never stopped ringing, nor the door bell, and in the center ring, Larry, in his element, mercurial, personality shifting at a dizzying rate, a little something for everyone. He kept a big red dog standing guard; his girlfriend had a Rottweiller. There were constant negotiations in the shadowed hallway, people coming and going, whispering in the dark, women, dogs, beer. It was perfect for me.
 
I had had a year to think about the kind of theatre world that I wanted to work in, and had come to some definite conclusions: dangerous theatre, outlaw theatre, 'out-there' theatre, an experience, for God's sake, an event, not another of these tepid revivals of mainstream theatre from two generations ago, more like a graduate school exercise than anything else, which are so beloved of the silly cunts who comment on the theatre scene in Chicago; not the vastly expensive meaningless spectacles to which I had been party in the regional theatres. Eliade theorizes about ritual events transforming profane time into sacred time, Sacred Time.
 
I saw gypsies in Spain huddled in doorways, begging, with skinny children lying limp in their laps (I heard that they fed the children bread soaked in wine to make them lie there like that.) Their dark faces were twisted into masks of pathos, lips quivering, hands held out; it was real theatre, theatre in it's most elemental form, the eloquent gesture. I had seen the same children running and playing happily a half-hour earlier. I can't remember being that carefree, and have often felt oppressed by the weight of this wandering life, but it is my life, it claimed me long ago, and however much I might treasure the thought of home, and dream of being there, it is never long before I am gone again, on the road, someplace else. I am drawn away, kin to the rootless, the ones whose place is not defined by walls, but by dreams, longing, the ephemera of human interaction, the hucksters, palm readers and prostitutes, blowing into town in an old tits-and-feathers wagon, putting on a show that scares 'em, and carrying off the ones who have that look in their eye.
 
I have always wanted to live among the people who spin stories, and plumb the mysterious depths of the human heart, singing the secret songs, and stepping the dark dances there, people who understand how close are magic and madness, and dare to summon them both. The ancient celebrants were denied burial in hallowed ground.
 

I believe that the temple has been usurped by the accountants, though, and their ass-lickers; there are burghers where there should be visionaries, murderers and madmen. I continue to believe that the life of the artist is the last true revolutionary life, but I had come to a dead end in my search for a theatre that fit me, something that wasn't just another form of country club. Where did the idea come from that you could have a life in the theatre, and then get into a station wagon and drive home to the suburbs.
 
Larry called then. Something about the phone call sounded right, and then he promised to put me up and buy my beer, so I threw some jeans in a canvas duffel bag, and came back to Chicago to work on RED DOG MOON in his speak-easy theatre. He had not exaggerated the life, the power in that hidden room.
 
Michael Sokoloff