Pat Perrin's Blog

Let none admireThat riches grow in Hell: that soil may bestDeserve the precious bane.—John Milton, Paradise Lost “Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.”—Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island We godless devils want the treasure map;you good and godly fellows want to live.It’s fair straightforward bart’ring, Cap’n Smollett,with not much elbow room for give nor take.We’ll […]

Wim is grateful to editor Nolcha Fox for including five of his poems—including this one—in Chewers by Masticadores. The Purloined X A poem should not mean   But be.—Archibald MacLeish Tomorrow’s assignment(Mr. Fritz told us,lo, those many years ago),is to find the poem’s meaningand bring it to class,in cuffs if it resists,sedated if necessary. To find its […]

I just finished writing a new two-character play: “The Rake’s Visit: A One-Act Capriccio on a Theme from Don Giovanni.” It is a revisionist take on Mozart’s opera, his wife Constanze, and especially the notorious adventurer Giacomo Casanova. You can download the entire play by clicking here. Here’s a synopsis: Prague, 1787: It is the […]

Characters: Adolf Hitler Wernher von Braun The scene is Adolf Hitler’s vast office in the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin, December 1944. Downstage, an imaginary window in the “fourth wall” looks out into the night. Hitler is seated at his desk. Wearing an SS uniform, Wernher von Braun enters and salutes. VON BRAUN. Sieg Heil, […]

I see this meme pop up from time to time. And yes, I too feel a certain pang about the Library of Alexandria. Even so, I can’t help but wonder if our grief might be a tad misplaced. For one thing, just which of the four fabled destructions of the Library of Alexandria is supposed to […]

Reaching my 90th birthday seems to be important, but in another sense, this is just another day in a life full of a lot to think about and usually too much to do. There’s an unfinished fiber piece hanging on the wall that I haven’t gotten back to in months. There are art supplies ordered […]

It’s been almost five years since I posted some thoughts about Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and how it relates to our times. Revisiting those thoughts today, those thoughts seem even more sadly apt than they were back then. A Connecticut Yankee is mysterious and disturbing book, so unlike its reputation […]

Just as an individual, subjected to certain inner pressures beyond his endurance, will suddenly go mad and destroy himself or those around him, so too, apparently, can a segment of society take leave of its senses and deliver itself to the forces of destruction. —Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror These words written about the […]

Wim’s new play Wiser than the Night is a witty and sweeping drama of ideas that asks a trenchant question about democracy: “What went wrong?” Set in 1981 in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s election, Wiser than the Night brings together events of the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalinist tyranny, Russian folklore, and American history and politics. It […]

Here is the prologue to my full-length play The Mad Scene, which has been aptly described as “an Our Town about the French Reign of Terror.” It was developed during 2020-21 as part of the Theatre at St. John’s Cyber Salon, hosted by Mark Erson. The parts were read by Everett Quinton, Jenne Vath, Sally […]