Keen-eyed readers will note that the last month or so has seen somewhat light posting here: more articles from the archive than usual (though, to paraphrase a promotional slogan from the era of summer reruns, “If you haven’t read it, it’s new to you”), blurbs for upcoming productions that have struck my fancy. Part of this is the result of winter doldrums — by blaming Seasonal Affective Disorder, I can rationalize my minor depression by chalking it up to the season — and part the demands of work and family.

I have been trying to keep the neurons sparking, though. Over the last few weeks I’ve read The Comedy of Errors, Glengarry Glen Ross, and La Ronde; I’m in the midst of Jonathan Kalb’s fine Great Lengths (and parenthetical congratulations to him for winning, for the second time, the George Jean Nathan Award last month) and David Luft’s thought-provoking Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer. I often don’t know exactly what I think of a play or a book until I write about it, so closely married are written language and my critical instincts. I simply haven’t had the time.

So those keen-eyed readers who have nonetheless stayed with me will I hope be rewarded in the next few weeks as I gear up for 2013. Now that the holidays are over and something resembling a predictable schedule becomes possible, I hope to get to the theatre more as well. There’s a lot of intriguing work coming up and I will try to see and write about it. So far as my own playwriting goes — well, I’m still well on the way to my goal of becoming America’s oldest emerging dramatist; inquiries and commissions always welcome. It’s the theatre, you know, and as with the Mafia, you can’t entirely retire from it. As Michael Corleone said, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”