In Itamar Moses’ Completeness, the lead character wrestles with three things: 1) Love 2) Biology and 3) The Traveling Salesman Problem. I was drawn to this play because, in my past, I have wrestled with those same three things. Love led to my wife. Biology led to my children. But the Traveling Salesman Problem nearly got me killed by gangsters.Here’s how it happened:In 1992, I had despaired of

Here's the tidied up transcript of a phone interview I had with Itamar right after we held our first read-thru for Completeness.  --jwJeremy Wechsler: I know you had this really long development process because I remember you were getting ready for the workshop of Completeness when we met.Itamar Moses:  When was that?2009?Yes, that’s right.  I was working on the play for a few

  One of the central plot points and metaphors for Completeness is a computer science problem called The Travelling Salesman Problem. It's simply stated but currently unsolvable problem in computer science. "Given a series of X points on a graph, what's the most optimal path to visit all the points in the least amount of distance?" The problem is one of complexity, with six points a human can

A Note: I'm in "state of the industry mode", with TCG about to start in a week and our very own Chicago Theater (anti-) Conference coming August 3rd. So if you're bored by numbers and marketing talk, skip this 2,200 word blog post. :) Mortar Theatre recently published an interesting question on their blog, "Where have all the audiences gone?" There has been a lot of conversation in the last 24 hours

This last week a theatre/journalism firestorm erupted when This American Life retracted a rebroadcast they did of Mike Daisey's monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. TAL discovered that not all of the events described by Mike had actually happened to him. When questioned by the factcheckers, Mike then lied about a number of the specifics. TAL then broadcast an hour-long retraction, which