Rodger Jacobs writes me:
It’s based on my collection of L.A. Stories shorts. I’m assembling a cast now and will look for a venue soon. I’ll probably be doing it as a charity production, most likely for Project Angel Food, as a two-to-four day preview in late September, early October. Once we have our charity in place we’ll be needing an Angel – fund-raising parlance, as you know, for an investor – to help defray small costs, just a few thousand, tax deductible, so if you know of anyone let me know. Here’s the foreword to the play:
This collection of short stories adapted for the stage represents a tangential trip into the mind of a Los Angeles writer – which is not to imply that the inner and exterior life of a left coast scribe is any different from that of, say, a New York writer with one obvious exception: geography does indeed shape and inform the writer’s work.
A casual glance through these tales reveals one glaring and deliberate omission: gone are the references to earthquakes, mud slides, brush fires, congested freeways, celebrity murder trials, psychoanalysis, the Chateau Marmont, male hustlers on Santa Monica Boulevard, and all the other subjects that tend to preoccupy writers of L.A. regional fiction. What we get here instead are credit dentists, celebrity stalkers, Oklahoma transplants, unhinged actresses, disaffected bartenders, fast food restaurant poltergeists, Iranian porn stars, Shannen Doherty on a good day, and scrap metal thieves, among others.
The stories contained in this body of work are slice-of-life melodramas that, for the most part, could have occurred in any city on any continent in the world. They just happen to have occurred in L.A. because that’s where I live. Some of the tales are completely autobiographical, others are expansions of strange episodes I either read about in the newspaper or in the daily crime blotter of the Los Angeles Police Department.
In the words of Randy Newman, I Love L.A.
