Hello! This is the official substack of me, Daniel O'Brien, four-time Emmy-winning Senior Writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, author of How to Fight Presidents and its adaptation Your Presidential Fantasy Dream Team, Head Writer for the Cracked De-textbook and editor and contributing author for You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News (a New York Times Bestseller), co-host of the popular nothing podcast Quick Question with Soren and Daniel and sole host of the less popular podcast Dead Presidents. I co-created, co-wrote and co-starred in Cracked After Hours, which is easily the most popular thing I've ever done. As a proud member of the Writers Guild of America, I am currently on strike because the studios refuse to meet with our Union to negotiate a fair contract. This is the fifth installment(?) of my substack, a thing you signed up for on purpose.
Once a month I will send an email with:
-Three-to-five book recommendations;
-Updates on whatever I'm working on, if applicable;
-That's really it!
I hadn't planned on taking a month off from this newsletter, but I did. June ended up being occupied by lots of travel and lots of breaking-my-damn-foot. Sorry about that, but also, it's a free newsletter and you're not the one with a broken foot, so. Shut it. Anyway, this month's books are…
3 BOOKS THAT ARE ACTUALLY PLAYS
If it wasn't already obvious enough from my Everything, I was a Theater Kid in high school, and while my broad thoughts on my experience are complicated and nuanced (high school theater is a cult), there's one aspect of my high school theater life that sticks with me: all the plays I read. Devotees will recall that I've already talked about the deep library of plays my high school maintained, way back in issue 1 of this newsletter. Still, "library" is generous; there was a large cabinet full of plays in our drama teacher's office, and I went in there and took whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. One year I read a different play every single week, hiding the little play books inside the larger textbooks I was supposed to be reading in class. Think I'm reading about history, teach? Guess again; I'm reading Shakespeare, you fucking idiot, joke's on you.
(I don't know what happened in my life at an early age that made me think reading in school was a cool act of rebellion, but I'm really thankful for it and I hope my eventual nerd children are similarly cursed.)
The Pillowman (Martin McDonagh): Martin McDonagh drives me crazy. Recently, he's been either the writer or the writer/director behind Banshees of Inisherin, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing Missouri, Seven Psychopaths and In Bruges. It's an incredible track record in an annoyingly short amount of time, but in the middle of making all of these Oscar-magnets, he'll occasionally take a pause to briefly write another play, something he does incredibly well and incredibly quickly. If I ever got to meet him, my first two questions would be "How" and "How dare you". The Pillowman is the first McDonagh I read; I was lucky enough to see it on Broadway and then immediately bought the script to read it ten million times. The dialogue feels natural and weird, and the show is surprising and dark and really, really funny. Sometimes I’ll watch different productions of it on YouTube, because it’s really fun to see how different productions handle the characters.
Moonchildren (Michael Weller): I've been (gently and correctly) mocked by my old Cracked directors because most of my shows and sketches were not written to be visually dynamic; everything I wrote was basically "People in a Room Talking to Each Other." (Have you heard of my show After Hours?) And boy howdy, Moonchildren sure is People in a Room Talking to Each Other, and maybe that's why I gravitate towards it? I don't know. This play was assigned in the one theater class I took in college and, for reasons I've never investigated, I've re-read it so many times that the play itself has been completely ripped and read to shreds. It's about a group of college students who live together in the 60s, just at the tail-end of graduation, and despite reading it a million times I don't even know that I could say what it's about, necessarily. Not that it's hard to decipher or anything, it just feels more like a very specific snapshot in time and not necessarily "about" any one thing. For a show written during and about the 60s, it feels shockingly contemporary. Sometimes works written during a very specific time where there’s just one thing on everyone’s mind-- in this case, the Vietnam War-- don't totally hold up, which is understandable. Some aren't accessible 50 years later because you as a reader can't really tap into that particular mindset.* Moonchildren isn't one of those shows. It's timeless enough that a 21-year-old in 2007 could read about 21-year-olds in the 1960s and think "Yes, our concerns are exactly the same."
*A brief, half-baked tangent about this. I think a hundred years from now future archivists will look at shows like Succession, White Lotus and Righteous Gemstones and wonder "Geez, why was everyone so hungry for shows where rich people are very sad and bad things happen to them?" Let me tell ya, future archivists, it's because my generation watched a small group of dead-eyed lunatics become richer than anyone's ever been before while the American middle class crumbled. We had a president whose biggest claim to fame was that he was really rich, and he bummed us all out and scared us. Hope that helped/will help!
City of Angels (Larry Gelbart, Cy Coleman): Is this my favorite musical of all time? Possibly! This show bounces back and forth between two timelines, telling two stories at once; a classic, noir detective story full of murder and betrayal AND the story about the writer writing that story. The detective stuff is lit and costumed in a way that makes it look black and white, to distinguish the events from the ones happening in the "real" world. (If it sounds hard to wrap your head around, it's not, I'm just bad at explaining the concept.) There was a stretch of time when I read this musical cover to cover several times a week, and while one reason for doing that was because I was in the show and needed to memorize lines, another part of it was pure joy, because it's such a layered and densely funny show. Lots of musicals are funny, that's in fact part of the job for most musicals; you're playing in front of a big, mixed audience and doing a (forgive me) fairly broad performance, so you're going to need to get some big crowd-pleasing laughs. A lot of the jokes in City of Angels, however, aren't broad, almost as if the show was designed to be read as much as it was designed to be seen. It's so god damned clever and funny and features the two things that every comedy writer I've ever met in my life loves; pulpy, noir detective stories and stories about how writers are Good and Right and studio hacks who tell writers what to do are Bad and Wrong. (And also sometimes that Being Good at Writing is the same as Being Nuclear-Grade Fuckable.)
And that's it! That's the fifth episode(?) of this thing. Read books, run, volunteer at your local food pantry and call your parents. Tell the studios to come back to the table to negotiate, or else there won’t be shows anymore. Bye.
I'm actually seeing the Pillowman in London next weekend. I've heard mixed reports about this one, but I saw it in Dublin a few years ago and loved it.
There seems to be a run of at least one of his plays each year in Dublin and I was always curious how the plays set in the west of Ireland were received outside Ireland. Though I'm guessing they work fine, given the success of Banshees.