Luckily, other institutions knew what to do with these plays. Lincoln Center produced Nick's play The Coward, in 2010, under the auspices of their new-plays-by-new-playwrights venture. Set in 18th-century England, the play follows the misadventures of a falsettoed coward unwisely committed to a duel. Next Tuesday, January 17th, Joe's Pub will host a staged reading of Nick's latest project, Grizzly Adams, a musical performed by bears which he's writing with the musician Corn Mo. We spoke by phone.

Jaime Green: So how are rehearsals going?

Nick Jones: We had our first read-through on Sunday with the whole cast and with songs, playing through everything. I had rewritten the second act based on a sort of notion I had. There’re a lot of historical figures who show up in the play, and I found out about another animal tamer who worked around the same time, who ended up inheriting Grizzly Adams’ animal menagerie when he died, and who also started out as a shoemaker, like him. There’s all this amazing, weird history that I can’t resist. So I wrote in this new character and a monkey. I was pretty convinced that I had ruined the second act—there’s only so much you can fit into one play—but it seemed to go really well.

How does doing a performance at Joe’s Pub fit into the development trajectory of a piece that’s still in process?

Well, that’s a thing I want to do more of. I worked through Jollyship for years, in all its different iterations, which I think ended up being really useful because we developed our language for the theater that we were making, and we became very good at knowing what would land show to show. It became very easy to create a show that would work. Whereas with some of the other play experiences I’ve had, you work for three weeks in a closed room and then you unveil it, and you’re like, let’s see what happens! And in some cases it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars—or, on a Broadway show, millions of dollars—and it's we’ve all just been in closed rooms, but let’s hope for the best. Why not just do a soft opening? No one’s really paying attention. It’s not going to create bad hype about the show. And I just like the idea of developing a show in front of audiences. It’s more fun, and the pressure we put on ourselves to get the show together for a performance in front of a paying audience is much greater than the last day of a three- to seven-day workshop or whatever. I mean, the show is done now. It’s gonna change, but we have a musical now. And we didn’t have one a few weeks ago.

You had a… not your traditional playwright coming-up experience, right? You were working in circus and puppetry and other… weirder, nonstandard theatrical things?

Yeah, yeah, but I mean, I decided I wanted to be a playwright when I was in college. I had a very loose definition of what that was. I was writing plays that were actually inspired by spoken word poetry and were more performance art than stories with narratives. So then when I came to the city I couldn’t for some years really figure out how to do what I had done in college, and it was during that time that I was working in the circus – helping out with the circus, rather. Raja [Azar, co-creator and bandleader of Jollyship] and we did some puppet shows that people liked, so that was just a foot-hold, of, oh, this is something we can do and develop, and so we did. But I didn't manage to get a non-Jollyship play up anywhere before 2007. I was doing more music and variety arts related things for my first five years in the city.

Were you seeing a lot of plays?

I was not seeing a lot of plays.

Do you see a lot of plays now?

Now I see a lot of plays. I see plays every week, and I think, what was I doing for five years? But no, no regrets.

I thought it was interesting, after your success with Jollyship, all the attention you got for this brilliant, strange thing, that I heard a little while later that you were at Juilliard. Was that about your craft as a writer, or was it a step toward productions and getting people to say, “oh, he’s the pirate puppet rock guy, but he’s at Juilliard”? Or was it about changing how you write?

I mean, why not go? It’s a great, prestigious program. That’s reason enough. I guess I did want to establish myself as someone who could do more than a puppet show. I always thought Jollyship was a particular project, not What I Did, so I did write a couple of things consciously trying to write straight plays. Now I’m sort of more at peace with myself.

If there’s any method to what I do, or the ideas that are appealing to me, I want to do shows that are based on ideas that would be easily be rejected, and it gives me great pride to try to succeed to create a show with bad ideas that transcend the stupidity of themselves. It’s not that formulated; I am actually just writing about the things I’m interested in, but I have very high standards for them, and I do want them to be appealing to as large a group of people as possible, but the seeds of the ideas have nothing to do with the themes or politics that are appealing to most mainstream older white audiences.

Speaking of themes or messages, how did you end up writing a musical about Grizzly Adams? Was it the interest in the historical story, or is it a parable? Are there themes in it, or were you just like, "Grizzly Adams was awesome and insane, I want to write a musical about him?"

Well, I was talking to Corn Mo, the composer, who I actually know from those days working with the circus people, because he’s a circus person—I've known him for ten years, and he’s a great, great musician and I think in a lot of ways he’s a great inspiration to me (and Jollyship—I think he basically taught Raja to play the accordion) and we had been talking about Grizzly Adams. I don’t remember what it started with. I think originally it was going to be a story about Grizzly Adams working for Barnum, and Barnum accidentally opens up a portal to hell and with some ancient relic, and some children who were there for a children's performance get sucked into hell, and Barnum tells Grizzly Adams to go into hell after the children, and there was this whole descent-into-the-underworld thing, with Grizzly Adams wrestling demons. I think that was the paragraph that was the seed of it. But then I started reading about Grizzly Adams, and his life is so insane, the actual facts of his life are much crazier than that.

One thing that was very useful and nice about Jollyship was that the band had a narrative double function as the crew of the ship. There was a nice metaphor there. When the crew was mutinying you also sort of realized that it was a band not getting along. In a very relatable, fantastical way, it brought it down to earth. And with this, the idea that we came upon was that Grizzly Adams could have a band of bears, similarly. And we had a model to work from, with the Country Bear Jamboree show, in Disneyland, which is a bunch of animatronic bears that play country music. I think it’s always nice to have a form to subvert. It’s a way to make the thing seem familiar, yet also exciting at the same time, because you realize that it’s not what it pretends to be.

Anyway, the idea is that it’s like the Country Bear Jamboree, except these bears, in the final incarnation, are gonna look like real, realistic grizzly bears, and they’re not going to speak, and they’re going to go out of control a lot, during the musical numbers. Almost right from the start, the bears go out of control and are attacking Grizzly Adams.

My last question was going to be about bears, because The Awl is kind of obsessed with bears. Any final thoughts on bears?

Well, I’ll give you an anecdote that I love. When Grizzly Adams showed up in New York City, he rode down the Bowery on the backs of his bears.

I wanted all of the musicians in the show to have beards, but I don't think that’s going to happen. But there are going to be a lot of beards on stage.

Interview condensed, edited and lightly reordered.

Jaime Green hopes you'll still take her seriously with as much as she loves puppets.

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Wendy MacLeod is the James E. Michael Playwright-in Residence at Kenyon College. Her play The House Of Yes is a Miramax film. She has been published in the New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Rumpus, NPR’s "All Things Considered" and POETRY magazine. Her new play Find And Sign opens in January. She also must confess that she wrote a play called Apocalyptic Butterflies.

Will Arbery graduated from Kenyon College in May, and now he lives in Brooklyn where he's trying to be a playwright and an adult.

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The Town.

Robert Lepage's Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung.

John Legend and The Roots, Wake Up.

You Lost Me There, Rosecrans Baldwin.

The Azure Ray tour.

Katrin Sigurdardottir at the Met.

The Social Network. (Well? Hated the script, but the trailer is just killing in theaters).

Jack Goes Boating.

Centurion. What? Yup.

Other Desert Cities.

The Vimeo Awards.

Danny Meyer taking over the Whitney cafeteria.

Mockingjay.

Sucker Punch.

Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence.

True Grit.

Nikita. Sorry, we can't say no to the CW's latest iteration! (We're trying to say no to Hellcats but we'll see. Ditto with Running Wilde on Fox.

And let who among us that is unintrigued by Machete cast the first stone.

Experimental Women in Flux at MoMA.

Kanye West taking Twitter down.

Animal Kingdom

Black Swan. ("Supernatural ballet thriller"!)

Ne-Yo, Libra Scale.

Sinatoro, Grant Morrison.

Antony and the Johnsons, Swanlight.

Every single forthcoming Helen Mirren movie, including The Debt and Red, but not so much The Tempest.

The Tree of Life.

Jackass 3D. (I mean, come on.)

Sonny Rollins turning 80 in September.

Listen to This, Alex Ross

Boardwalk Empire.

More than anything: My Prizes, Thomas Bernhard.

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The theme of the set was "nightclub," which didn't have much of anything to do with the actual songs. Performers "entered" and "exited" through a big, pyramidal revolving door and sometimes a chorus member would walk through the door as though to leave only to revolve all the way back onstage. I have no idea whether this was a choreographed move, genuine confusion, or just old people having fun with the fact that younger people have a hard time telling whether they're making a joke or being really senile (exploiting this uncertainty is absolutely the part of being old that I'm most looking forward to).

The other immediately charming thing about the show was that each member of the chorus seems to have been given complete independence w/r/t costume choice. A couple of guys who had originally taken the stage in normal suits re-emerged (for no reason) in bowling shirts somewhere in the show's middle third. One woman carried a doll around for the whole show; the two were dressed exactly alike. Another highlight was Len Fontaine, the 90-year-old who took the verses on Bon Jovi's "It's My Life." He wore a gray zoot suit (some of you may know this as what "pimps" wear) over a shiny orange shirt, and the feather coming out of his fedora was probably a foot and a half long. The line "It's now or never" probably had special resonance for Leon.

Now obviously there's an element of gimmickry to the group's appeal, but it's not like that appeal isn't grounded in cultural history. Rock has been explicitly biased against the aged from the very beginning, to the extent that it's probably our current cultural ageism's most important and influential ancestor. I'm not saying that every rock song feels this way. That would be like saying that every single member of the Tea Party is a racist. But just as white supremacist longing is undeniably a component of that identity, so does pop music loathe and fear people who age and decay. It can't help it.

What I'm trying to get across is that there is something more than a gimmick going on when the singers in Young @ Heart perform songs that just wish they would die already. The group was founded in a Massachusetts nursing home in 1982, and its youngest member is currently 71. Last year, the chorus lost one of its most beloved members, Fred Knittle, who had been singing since 1992. Remember, when imagining the kind of emotional impact this would have, that these people don't exactly have a lot crowding up their schedules. In interviews, some of them are pretty open about the chorus being pretty much all they have.

In the show's second half, a woman named Dora shuffled up to center-front. She is 88, and she looks it. She performed "As Long as I Can See the Light" by Creedence, and the way the song had been arranged had her doing about the first half verse totally unaccompanied. As the piano and bass started to come in, bit by bit, it became uncomfortably clear that she didn't have anything close to the right pitch. I'm pretty sure she knew that something was up, because she tried to adjust a few times, but the distance between where she was and where she needed to be was two or three whole steps.

This seemed like the show's first outright disaster, but somewhere in the instrumental bridge Dora figured things out and recalibrated. She came into the second verse right on tune, and she obviously heard that she had come in on tune because suddenly she began to actually sing. At this point, it became pretty clear that she used to have a terrific voice, or at least a very well-trained one. She was doing the diaphragm-support stuff that anybody with memories of high-school chorus will know about, but she was also pulling off a smooth transition between her chest voice and her head voice, which is more than your basic-level vocal instruction.

The point being: she totally killed the rest of the song, nailed a couple of high notes and runs, and received a nice round of applause. Then she shuffled to the back of the stage, and sat down on a bench, obviously tired, with a big white shawl over her head. I don't think she sang a word for the rest of the show, although it looked like she spent a lot of time locking eyes with the woman who sat back there with her to make sure she was OK. They seemed to be friends.

Is the Young @ Heart chorus inspiring? I think yes, although I may be especially un-inured to the kind of Midwestern sentimentalism and humor that run through a production like "End of the Road." It's obviously not inspiring, in and of itself, for old people to be doing wacky stuff. Old people do that all the time, as anyone with decent grandparents knows well. But this show is a more or less serious attempt to get comfortable with what it means to know that you're going to die soon. I have a grandfather who, after smoking for his entire life, was recently diagnosed with emphysema, as of course you would when you smoke for your entire life. The consequences are the normal ones: very restricted physical activity, no flying without an oxygen tank, etc. And in less than a year I've watched anger and helpless frustration largely consume the person whose bi-annual visits made me nearly insane with happiness as a kid. On Saturday, I watched the Young @ Heart people stand in rows and sing, mid-tempo, "Theologians / They don't know nothing / About my soul;" and it was pretty clear they knew exactly what they were singing about. I remember thinking that I wish my grandfather knew the same things.

Richard Beck is from Wallingford, Pennsylvania.

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These kinds of emotional middle grounds are characteristic of Mendes, who works harder at creating moods than at anything else. He has his own take on whatever the emotion is that has equal parts sadness and hope-it's what you get at the end of a Grey's Anatomy episode or an Allstate commercial (Are you in good hands? I want to be. I think I am?! [cries]). Five films in, his career's iconic moment is still American Beauty's Wes Bentley (late of Ghost Rider) filming the garbage bag swirling around. He has made two movies about how the suburbs are suffocating. So: this is not exactly an ideas guy.

Both of this year's productions can be boring, but both are also lots of fun to watch. BAM's Harvey Theater is attractively dilapidated, and Tom Piper's sets and Catherine Zuber's costumes match: wood, nice muted color palettes, lots of "exposed" stuff. It's a semi-industrialized version of shabby chic, AKA what "Brooklyn" looks like. There's also some great acting by both Brits and Americans (transatlanticism being the point of the Bridge Project). If you have twenty bucks and a free evening, it would be a good idea to go see one. Here's how you might choose.

As You Like It is a satire on the pastoral, a genre that isn't doing too well these days outside of Thomas Kinkade paintings. Its plot is: a bunch of courtiers head into the forest of Arden, where they meet, make fun of and then sometimes fall in love with simple folk. Today we still more or less understand the pastoral's broader outlines-simpler times, trees, unsophisticated honesty-but many of the specifics have been forgotten. So you get the feeling, as you watch people banter, that you're missing things. I mean the play is four hundred years old, after all.

Fortunately you can turn to Rosalind for guidance, because she gets everything. Rosalind, played by Juliet Rylance (who is really good), is the kind of genius-level intelligent character that people who aren't Shakespeare don't write very often. There's a really well-directed moment early on where Touchstone the clown is playing word games with Rosalind and her best friend Celia (if you are anti-pun, you should see another play, and probably steer clear of Shakespeare or fun in general). Touchstone is quick, but Rosalind is quicker, and finishes one of his riddles for him, while Celia looks on blankly.

Rosalind then meets Orlando, who is played by Rylance's real-life husband Christian Camargo. They fall immediately and awkwardly in love, and then each is separately forced to leave Duke Frederick's kingdom. When they meet again in Arden, Orlando is hanging his terrible love poems all over the place, on trees, and Rosalind is disguised as a man.

Now at this point what's supposed to happen is some A-level onstage flirting. Rosalind is in love, but she's smart enough to be suspicious of having gone head over heels so quickly, and she also knows that Orlando is a little immature ("From the east to western Ind / No jewel is like Rosalind," is how one of his tree-poems starts, which seems like a pretty obvious call for concern). So, disguised as Ganymede, she tells Orlando that she will help him snap out of his infatuation. All he has to do is visit her/him every day, pretend that she/he is Rosalind, and try to woo her. This is an awesome plan.

But Carmago ruins things by playing it as though Orlando really can't see the woman he loves underneath the summery blazer and straw fedora. So instead of insane sparks flying all over the place, we get Orlando being genuinely confused about why this short guy in the forest is so into the little role-play they have going. After they kiss, Carmago gets embarrassed at having done a gay thing. I'm not going to quote every line of Orlando's that is obviously flirting, but they are everywhere. It seems impossible to me that Rosalind would fall for someone who was actually that dumb. (As a suitor, Orlando gets especially upstaged by the peasant Silvius, who is played by Aaron Krohn. He tells the woman he loves–who can't stand him, by the way–that he will marry her "though to have her and death were one thing." That, it seems to me, is how you do it.)

The other best thing about As You Like It is the melancholic Jacques (that's "Jay-kwees"). He's played by Stephen Dillane, who is great in almost everything. In the first place, he has the advantage of looking a little like Daniel Day-Lewis, which is a great way for an actor to look. He does a funny Bob Dylan impression in the second act, and he also delivers the "All the world's a stage" speech like it's just something he decided to say, as opposed to the "All the world's a stage" speech. He makes his first appearance by asking a group of musicians to keep singing. They're pretty tired of singing, and somebody's voice is hoarse, but Jacques is insistent: "I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs," he says. I identified hard with that line.

Dillane, as Prospero, is also the best reason to go see The Tempest, although he sometimes drops his voice so low that it's difficult to hear. As the play is set on an explicitly magical island, it also involves more stage tricks, which are gracefully done. The acting is not quite as good, and there are fewer jokes; but if you are interested in monsters with skull-heads, island spirits with scary metallic wings, and reflecting pools, The Tempest is probably what you'll want to see.

Richard Beck is from Wallingford, Pennsylvania.

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Malina met and later married Julian Beck when she was a teen; they ran the Living Theatre, left New York for Europe and returned off and on throughout the 60s and 70s. Malina's memoir, The Enormous Despair, documents the experience of arriving in America in the late 60s, and also meeting Ginsberg, Leary and Dali.

She appeared in Dog Day Afternoon (and played the grandmother in The Addams Family movie in 1991. Beck himself would, in 1986, have a good-sized role in... Poltergeist II, though he had died the year previous.)

And now Malina shows up in When in Rome as a witchy, angry Italian grandmother of a groom, who spits on Kristin Bell. Why wouldn't she? The Living Theater, at 21 Clinton Street, appears to be in some sort of vague yet deep financial trouble. Malina's second husband, the theater's co-artistic director Hanon Reznikov, died in 2008. Malina had signed a ten year lease in 2006. And now, the theater is accepting $10 donations online to stay alive.

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"Excuse me," she said. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Surely," I replied, probably a little over-happy because my life is plainly more enjoyable than Bill Clinton's was when he was president.

"Oh," the woman said, stopping herself. "Are you a New Yorker?"

"Yes," I replied. "Why do you ask?"

"Because your hair is neat and you said 'surely.'"

"Oh. Well, yes, I live in New York. But that wasn't your original question. What's up?" I said, eager to move this subway conversation along.

"Tell me what I am," she said.

I blinked dumbly, even though I was beginning to understand what she was asking me to do. "Go ahead, be brutal," she said. "On a scale from 1 to 10."

With 10 being what, exactly? Deneuve in her prime? And 1 being what? The unemployably disfigured? I did not ask these questions-and I all of a sudden wondered where my train was.

"Six!" I blurted, thinking it a number neither off-the-charts patronizing nor unduly insulting. In all honesty, it was hard to get a read. (Sweats maybe aren't the best choice if you're gonna walk around the city asking to be rated.)

"Oh, that's harsh," she said, stumbling backward toward the stairs as though she'd been struck. "You didn't sugar-coat that six, did you?"

"No," I lied. "You asked me for the truth, and I gave it to you."

"Oh, six," she said, turning to walk up the stairs and out of the station.

While the heterosexual male instinct is to judge any conversation initiated by a woman as a sexual approach-even if it is on the phone and the subject happens to be one's infrequent credit card payments-I had no idea what had happened in that moment, and I still don't.

That is to say, language proved insufficient in defining the contours of our interaction. Banal, maybe, but true. I'd give something of value to have the moment back-to expand or revisit it somehow so that she knew, at the least, that I meant her no harm. (I'd have bumped her up to a 9 if I realized my answer had the potential to make or break her evening.)

I thought about this be-sweatpantsed woman more than a few times during "Lipsynch," Robert Lepage's eight-plus hour theater/video/musical gesamtkunstwerk, which is at BAM this week-and which you still have time to catch in a marathon session on both Saturday and Sunday. Basically, because I think it's worth seeing, I don't want to spoil the narrative for you. It's more consistently engaging than any 8-hour thing has a right to be.

Lepage's stage wizardry features sets that collapse and expand, mid-act, into locales as different as an airplane, the London tube, a film set, a radio studio, a disco. The effect is both technically awesome and, somehow, emotionally communicative about the fluid geography of thoughts and intentions. The piped-in music Lepage has picked ranges from Gorecki's Symphony No. 3 to blah metal (not kidding), and from Joy Division to a couple Bacharach tunes-all of which are employed pretty tastefully. Sometimes the actors are lip-synching to pre-recorded tracks of their lines, and sometimes we're given to understand that this is the case. Other times, it's not totally clear.

The macro story is one common to a lot of fancy-pants filmmaking (think Altman or, guh, Paul Thomas Anderson, if you must). By this I mean we're talking about the contingency and chance of human relationships-how they come together, how they fall apart, who tells whom what (or not) and how/why. We travel, across decades, from pre-Civil War Nicaragua to contemporary London, with stopovers in Germany and Quebec. In each act, the voice (or lack thereof) is undermined in ways that could seem pretentious, I guess, if you're the type for whom pretentiousness is a thing to be guarded against so zealously that enjoying modern things is rather out of the question. Or else if you're the kind of person for whom any new innovation in staging requires light-year advances in explicit meaning, lest the advances show that the artists are all hollow inside-which is how critic Charles Isherwood seemed to suggest you should think of a theatrical work this purposefully diffuse in the Times last week. After noting a) "the flawless acting," b) that Lepage's direction is "abundant in startling moments of fine stagecraft" and c) that "printed words do not go far in conveying the excitements of such imagery onstage," he then decides d) it's not worth it for you to go check out, because its conceptual underpinnings "register lightly and are not fully dramatized." Which is to say, you meet a complex thing, give it the once-over, and then must rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, in terms of whether or not it's worth your time. NEXT!

Or else maybe not, sometimes.

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