Went to the Warehouse Theatre’s production of Neil Simon’s “Laughter On The 23^rd Floor”. Loved it!

The play is a fictionalized view of Neil Simon’s days as a comedy writer on Cid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” at the dawn of TV in the early 1950’s.  Neil Simon worked with other newbies in the new biz like Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, and so on. From these and others, he lovingly and hilariously drew the play’s characters.

The play takes place in the writer’s room of the hit “Max Prince Show”. The action is in the combustible mix of talents. Being creative in the corporate world is tough. Creating comedy on demand for weekly live TV takes its toll. Genius may be in the results but life tends to leak out around the edges. Creating corporate comedy isn’t funny. But watching it being created is. That’s the point of the play.

As a kid, all I wanted to do was be an artist. It’s all I could do. It’s what I had to do. For most of my career I’ve been a designer where I’ve had to try being creative in the corporate world. The corporate world isn’t just the higgledy-piggledy pell-mell race for big—or all too often, not so big—bucks. It’s also the corporate world of the writer’s room. Or art room. It’s in the combustible mix of talents. Being creative in the corporate world means finding ways to create spaces where your ideas can play nicely with the ideas of others who (how can I put this?) lack the commitment to ideas you have.

Take the poster for the play shown above. I helped design it.  It’s not my original idea. Something else was wanted. So I came up with another idea. Not quite it. We brought in a talented illustrator who came up with another idea. Nope. Finally, everyone agreed on the above iteration. Now, we didn’t go through the hilariously contentious mental gymnastics of a Neil Simon play. It was all very civil. Creating stuff, corporately or individually, is often a messy. But you don’t have to make a mess.  It’s all just a matter of working through the creative process.

It’s a funny business.