Mookie’s Plays & Screenplays
An anthology spanning multiple years and genres
Background
I rarely get jelly, instead eager to celebrate the success of others, especially in the arts. A former colleague in NYC might have a book deal this season, and I’m cheering him on from the sidelines; I got to hang out with and get to know the boy band AJR, and for years I’ve applauded the bros on their journey from Village obscurity through their dream of playing MSG.
But just the other day I read how the Broadway play Job was blowing everyone’s mind, and felt envious of playwright Max Wolf Friedlich. Personally I don’t know the guy, and as such he could drop dead in five minutes or fuck supermodels on the International Space Station for all either would impact my life, yet I admire and wanna be like this Max guy.
Well, not be him, but to get the plays I’m posting here produced. Comparing these with my far more voluminous output of novellas, short stories, roman à clef blogs, and ope-ed pieces, I feel writing and directing plays is the shiz. That’s because no other form of storytelling comes close to the impact made by live people, on a live stage, in front of a live audience.
Second only to playwriting is screenwriting, in structure if not finalized product essentially the same. Boundaries are powerful for writers, and the inherent limitations of the craft in terms of limiting output to descriptions of what’s actually happening on stage and on screen, interspersed with dialogue, create a dramatic essence often muddled by free flowing prose.
Socrates was suspicious of the written word, and the Greeks of course created the archetype of drama, so I could go on and on about the early history of theatre to Nietzsche’s Apollionian vs Dionysisan Birth of Tragedy, but I won’t. That shit is tired, and I’m emotionally tied to the stage for reasons that transcend rational explanations, especially ad hoc ones.
Suffice to say I feel a sense of wonder and magic seeing live theatre, and especially writing it. All this begs the question of why I haven’t dedicated myself to becoming a practicing playwright, but I got close as a theatre critic in Chicago, and continue to worship the art form. Since childhood I’ve been bad at playing with others — maybe I’ll bust out some day.
That all said, I keep typing and sharing, and just yesterday posted my very favorite one in this bunch, Ross Edwards. That in turn inspired me to present this archive, with summaries of each, and convenient links for anyone interested to check them out. Writing is keeping a diary, and these plays are windows into the many lives I’ve lived, and want to live anew.
Here goes…
First of many collaborations, I wrote this back in the early 90s with a guy who literally had my same name — suggesting, not surprisingly, a key plot element. What was surprising is how, during the course of trying to get it produced, the two Mike Spitz’s from Chicago might have influenced a classic Coen Brothers movie. Can you get which one? Give it a whirl…
Writing is good when it comes from the heart, and speaks the truth. Writing is taken to the next level when the story’s hero is on a personal journey, with goals and obstacles analogous to one’s own, and during the course of their adventure the author also experiences catharsis. That happened while writing this play, lessons relived every time I read it:
Whether they succeed or fail, adaptations are interesting because they showcase the inherent connection between form and content. For years I was obsessed with “Interactive Fiction,” an early and fascinating form of dynamic storytelling from when computers had limited memory and processing power, and couldn’t handle graphics well. My favorite!
Visiting my sister and her family in Venezuela after our mother’s death triggered numerous emotions, one of them being the cultural differences between continents. At the time, Caracas seemed like an otherworldly mash up of old and new, young and old, Conquistador and indigenous native, these juxtapositions inspiring this sci-fi oddity…
Into transgender relationships and rights before transgendered people got cool — and politically and culturally formidable — I extrapolated on personal experiences and the weird zeitgeist of the 90s with this play, a testament to a world in transition between systemic racism, misogyny, and homophobia, and the evolving rights of gender and sexual minorities:
Arguably the best and most controversial play I’ve ever written — likely the best and most controversial anything I’ve ever written — I stand by this self-proclaimed masterpiece as the most vital of the decade. I’d pitch it now as a powerful period piece that reveals the underbelly of a minority community that reflected the worst of the society ostracizing them:
A chance find in a used bookstore placed this relic of the civil rights dark ages into my hands in the mid-90s, and I was fascinated to the point of adapting it into an unpublished or produced screenplay. Capturing many of the themes of my prior several plays and scripts, this story was fun to write, and like the bar drama seems even more relevant now than last century:
The Trump era has annihilated outrage, making “scandals” like the Clinton/Lewinsky affair seem trite. Our moral baseline below the basement these days, once outrageous satires like this one have become milquetoast in comparison to today’s headline news. If nothing else, Pincushion might make us nostalgic for things still considered shocking…
Nothing screams bullshit like American corporate bullshit, an Orwellian word salad of ridiculous platitudes meant only to obfuscate the everyday savagery of Darwinian capitalism. Having endured my own share of this obnoxious propaganda, writing this Ionesco-style absurdist satire was a joyful catharsis, and one gloriously written while on the job:
“Mr. Lawrence, the Sky’s Gone Out!”
A satire of corporate America in three acts
mookiespitz.medium.com
Few passions are more solitary than writing, making collaboration a tricky and often frustrating shitshow. After several creative partnerships had failed, I was thrilled to meet and partner up with Rusty, an artist I met in 2007. Here’s our first project, which has since evolved into a series of illustrated satirical novels, the next installment out this holiday:
Having had such a joyful time with Super Santa, Rusty and I leaped into our next screenplay, an unrepentantly sentimental adventure about loyalty, vengeance, love, and redemption. Still whimsical, sad, and funny after all these years, we’re excited to adapt this script, too, and turn it into a bedtime-worthy novel for kids, that series launching in early 2025:
Gazing back, several themes emerge, with new ones popping into my head and warming my heart all the time. As fresh plays and screenplays are written I’ll post them here and on my website, a luxurious indulgence never even imaged when I wrote most of these over the past few decades. As the AI bots take over, they’ll need content— feed on these!
