I’m thinking of doing an adaptation featuring E.W. Hornung’s characters, Raffles the master jewel thief and Bunny Manders, his sidekick. The stories are clever and elegant, and there’s a sly critique of the class system built into each one. The Raffles stories were written at the same time as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and were a kind …
The Bystander Effect is a Lie
In 1964 Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old woman, was raped and murdered in Queens, New York. A New York Times reporter, using police interviews, wrote that 37 people witnessed the attack and refused to call the police or intervene in any way. Thus the “bystander effect” became popular in pop culture, even making its way into social psychology. The New York …
On Mass Gun Violence
My latest play, Bystanders, takes place in the aftermath of a horrific act of gun violence. It’s a two-hander exploring an intimate story dealing with guns in America. This is a tough topic that was not consciously on my radar. The play presented itself to me almost completely fully-formed, with a number of clear reversals inside its tight, 75-minute, real-time …