Here I am, the humble playwright with just a few weeks before my reading of “Exposed To Strangers” at the Strand on Harford Road — and me without a single actor onboard. Not a one. “What to do” is right. My efforts have been thwarted at every turn. Folks too busy, folks not available, folks just yaddayaddayadda…..

It’s a conspiracy! On a grand scale! Or, maybe it’s just….the world of theater. It doesn’t get easier as you get….shall we say, more “mature”. There’s no getting around the fact that the more sought after playwrights are “up-and-coming” playwrights. Playwrights saturated in the glow of youth. Same with actors and all those other artists out there trying to ply their trades. I’d venture to say that similar regulations apply to their particular crafts, or plays, or songs or orchestrations or painting or ideas. Those regulations that prescribe to art or artists that don’t share a degree of “legitimate wokeness” would eventually slide whoever the offending non-woke artist — right into oblivion. Who needs your bourgeois individual creativity, give us something that reflects the collective outrage of our times!

I don’t need to apply an actual melodramatic emoji to that last sentence, but believe me it’s there. But plough on we must, c’nest pas?