Paper Gun

So it’s an extremely exciting time. It’s like 2:30 in the morning. I finished the farm night shift. I’m looking at the stars. I’m realizing how close I am to something that’s like a dream — to have such a project, such a collection of work, which you have to have tremendous energy to perform. But I know that it’s the right thing. I know that it touches people very, very deeply (see video below). I want to say that, because people are coming for a long concert — which people do when it’s, well, when it’s good enough.

I spent all my time on my own up at the farm doing the night shift, preparing the concert — these original works. And I realized that had I not been put at this distance, I would never have been able to do it.

I had been enjoying the development of my performance work very much, and it was receiving heartfelt feedback. But there is an inescapable reality: however good you are as a performing artist, performing other people’s work — even with your own songs occasionally woven in, but without a larger context — is unlikely to take you where you want to go. I needed an entirely original piece.

The idea of putting together a musical, though, was not appealing at all. I had tried something along those lines decades earlier and it had not worked, and I had little appetite for repeating the experience.

Then, on Purim in 2026, I looked at the pieces I had been developing live — independently of any ambition — and saw a far stronger thread running through them than I had realized. They were not simply a collection of songs and ideas. There was a story, a theatrical world, and a connection between them I had not seen, and I found myself compelled to discover what was taking shape.

Not realizing what the effort was going to be, I set about putting it together — to make it coherent, to pull every aspect of the presentation into one shape, and then to find a way to get it out there and secure the first performances. Still less did I know what it would take out of, and give to, me personally.

What happens on stage

It isn’t a reading. It’s a fully performed show, in which I play three characters — the narrator, and the two voices of the man — and at times speak as myself. No costume, except for a hat — and sometimes a shirt split black and white. No props, but a series of poster boards that help to create location and mood. The rest is up to me: to make the characters vivid and real.

And it has social content that is very, very pertinent today, throughout the world — the whole question of resentment and blame, and all the psychology that sits under it.