I got back from my trip to Korea to see My First Time on Monday (the bus was awesome).  Waiting for me in my inbox was a very exciting email from my international agent for My First Time with an update on all the places MFT will go in ’09.  Get this:  after already appearing in Mexico and Korea, the show is now headed for Italy, India, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, France, Greece, Ireland/UK, Moscow, Spain and Israel.

Actually that’s not entirely true.  Israel is on hold.  Here’s a direct quote from my agent’s contact in Israel explaining why:

Beer Sheva was intending to enter
rehearsals soon, but a war broke out down South and Beer Sheva is one of the
cities that is directly affected by it.

Two weeks ago, in the middle of the
ceremony celebrating the grand opening of their new theatre, the first rocket
hit Beer Sheva, and they were forced to stop the ceremony in the middle and to
send everyone home.

Since then, they are not allowed to have any gathering of
more than 100 people in one place. They canceled everything until further
notice, forcing them to put all of their plans on hold.

Once this is over
(hopefully, soon) they will have to reschedule everything.

Producing theater in New York City is hard, but even with our silly work rules and people like Piven, it ain’t that hard.  We’re pretty damn lucky, and we should take a moment today to remember that.

You know what’s amazing?  Read that quote again.  No matter how awful things may be (they literally cannot gather more than 100 people in one place!), they are still optimistic at the end.

And if that’s not what theater is all about, I don’t know what is.

My thoughts today are with the people caught up in conflicts all over the world.