Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.


"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.


Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall's "smoke pit," but ended up feeling badly about his actions.

Oh, I still take classes, memorize monologues and look at grant applications like they are some beacons of hope that will take me away from all of this office drudgery, but I can’t help but still feel guilty somehow. Like taking the day job and not being the starving artist anymore is somehow doing a disservice to my career. Perhaps what I am missing is this suffering of the starving artist that I used to be. I miss it…it was what I was used to. Everyday, I think about chucking all this stability and going back to my old schedule and am slightly cheered on by the decreasing values of others 401Ks that are dropping all around me.

With the current times, I have to wonder where I am better off. Sure, art does thrive in chaos, but the problem is – my life feels like anything but chaotic anymore. Which feels awesome in some aspects, but definitely weird in others. For example, I can finally afford to see Broadway shows and take that cab all the way to Washington Heights every once in a while if I need to, but the rush and spontaneity of the biz are not as bright and shiny as it used to be. There must be more. I contemplate about having savings and find myself desiring more security in my future. However, I contemplate more about my career in theater and what sacrifices I will have to make to “make it”. It’s a terrible catch-22. Yes, I’m a member of a union, but given my job situation, I am limited in what kind of acting work I can pick up. So I stand on the sidelines near a big pool I want to swim in.

When she was on familiar ground, she perked up, winked at the audience two or three times, and settled with relief into the folksiness that reminds me strangely of the characters in "Fargo."

Palin is best in that persona. You want to smile with her and wink back. But who did she resemble more? Marge Gunderson, whose peppy pleasantries masked a remorseless policewoman's logic? Or Jerry Lundegaard, who knew he didn't have the car on his lot, but smiled when he said, "M'am, I been cooperatin' with ya here." Palin was persuasive. But I felt a brightness that was not always convincing.

(...)

Sometimes during a live performance you can hear an actor "going up." That's actor-speak for forgetting the lines. Laurence Olivier went up on an Oscarcast, after he was awarded an honorary Oscar. Whatever he said (the transcript shows it made no sense), the speech made an enormous impression. In an audience reaction shot, you could lip-read Jon Voight: "Wow." The next morning I went to interview Michael Caine. "Larry called me last night," he said. "He asked what I thought of his speech. I said it was wonderful, but I didn't have the slightest idea what he had said. He said I was exactly right: 'It's like during Shakespeare, when you go up and start blathering about being off to Salisbury on the morn.'"

I sensed that happening during Palin's response to the question about same-sex marriage and civil contracts. She was clear that she opposed same-sex marriage. So was Biden. I have no idea what she said about civil contracts. Neither did Gwen Ifil, apparently, because she concluded that Biden and Palin were in agreement. I knew what McCain (and supposedly Palin) really thought about the subject. I sensed that Palin had gone off to Salisbury.

Q. So the decision to cut it before the Broadway opening was for practical, financial reasons?

A. I don't remember now what made me change it. We cut the underwater scene, but I don't know why I changed the ending. I like the three-act version. I like the ending because it's tougher. There have been several productions of the two-act version that have been too soft. They don't seem to understand that the lizards are constantly threatening and dangerous. They become kind of pets, and that destroys the play.

(...)

Q. Why do you think people choose to see these frightening creatures as fuzzy, friendly dinosaurs?

A. I don't know. Because it's safer and easier.

Q. Is that something you run into fairly often?

A. I'm afraid I do. It reminds me of the situation of the finest American play ever written, which is "Our Town." It gets turned into a Christmas card. But what Wilder wrote was one of the toughest existential dramas ever written. I can't see it without crying, and I'm not sentimental.

Anything free in the atoms economy (traditional economy) must be paid for by something else, which is why so much traditional free feels like bait and switch--it's you paying, one way or another. But free in the bits economy (online) can be really free, with money often taken out of the equation altogether. People are rightly suspicious of free in the atoms economy, and rightly trusting of free in the bits economy. Intuitively, they understand the difference between the two, and why free works so well online.

Today the online world is a country-sized economy built of free. The most interesting business models are in finding ways to make money around free. Sooner or later every company is going to have to figure out how to use free or compete with free, one way or another.

In fact, one senses suddenly that feminism in its pure sense doesn't really mean much to her; for Theresa, feminism - or rather sexual politics - is simply a springboard, a steppingstone, to owning the culture (after Mauritius, she probably imagines she 'owns' American Buffalo). And by God, she is being frustrated in her objective!

Well isn't that too bad - although I have to confess this is where things get a little troubling for me. Because, you see, I don't want Theresa Rebeck to own the culture - in fact I'm very, very glad she doesn't. I could be down with a woman owning the culture in principle - just not Theresa. Because to be honest, I don't think she's a very good playwright - and not because she's a woman, but because she's superficial and derivative (though, I admit, clever and funny and certainly a craftsman - uh, craftsperson - in her way). I suppose she has as much of a right to be on Broadway as Neil Simon did - only I didn't want Neil Simon to be there, either! And I certainly didn't want him to own the culture.

Remember when we talked about the concept of a Broadway to Off-Broadway transfer?

Title of Show is as close to a perfect candidate as you can get for this experimental idea. Shoot, give me 24 hours, a u-haul, and a collaborative team (and unions) and I could have a version of that show up somewhere else in the city.

The one flaw from our original concept is that TOS hasn't benefited from any Tony publicity yet. And then there's the question . . . would they even be eligible if they downsized before the Tonys? Would they be eligible for Off-Broadway and Broadway awards (Broadway shows that have moved from Off-Broadway are eligible for both).

There's more - much, much more. "Passion Play" is lavish with incident, character, and imagery. It's so lavish, in fact, that it feels ungrateful to ask that it also add up to something bigger. But Ruhl, here and elsewhere, has shown herself capable of working theatrical miracles. Is it too much to wish for one more?

Ruhl trades in verbal and visual irony; she uses comedy to draw the audience into her deep speculation about our Christ-haunted civilization. “More and more, it seems to me that the separation between church and state is coming into question in our country,” she writes in the program note. “We are a divided nation. And the more divided we are, the less we talk about what divides us.” Ruhl wants to offer the audience illumination, not distraction. Her terse scenes are studded with startling nuggets of lyricism, and her writing commands a special kind of imaginative attention: full of clarity, poetry, and mystery without psychology. “Passion Play” steers a course between the illusions of faith and the illusions of reason, travelling from a time when citizens felt protected by the benevolent hand of God to the time when (until last week) they felt protected by the benevolent hand of the free market.

Ruhl (whose Clean House also liked to stir things up) tackles many truths here—the unholy marriage of politics and religion, the disconnect between mortals' make-believe and their real motivations, and the self-fulfilling power of a play to alter everyone connected with it. But the overlong, cluttered and scattershot plot, directionless dialogue, quixotic symbol-mongering, kneejerk magic realism, self-indulgent side scenes, and aimless, lazy apostrophes to the audience take a cumulative toll.