Look! I won Best Table Topics Speaker at our last meeting of West Hollywood Toastmasters. I was asked to speak spontaneously about a song that had impacted me. I chose Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ ’bout a Revolution” and recalled being part of a standing-room-only crowd to hear her sing it at Carnegie Hall the year her debut album came out. That was the same year I backed Jesse Jackson in the early presidential primaries. I felt I was part of Tracy’s revolution! And, as young people often do, I also thought I knew everything. Suffice it to say that the song now makes me feel nostalgic more than anything else.
Richard Willett
Richard Willett is the author of the plays Triptych, Random Harvest, The Flid Show, and Tiny Bubbles, presented off-off-Broadway and across the country. Honors include an Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship. His play 9/10 premiered off-off-Broadway in September 2024 and won four Broadway World Awards including Best Play; Grief at High Tide (first prize, Capital Rep Next Act! New Play Summit) premiered at Vivid Stage in Summit, NJ, in October 2024; and A Terminal Event (Julie Harris Award winner and Woodward/Newman finalist) premiered in 2022 at the Victory Theatre in Burbank, with Stage Raw naming it one of the best L.A. plays that year. Richard is developing a one-woman show about Ingrid Bergman with actress Annemette Andersen and director Henning Hegland, premiering in 2025 in Iceland. He was a finalist last year for the Dramatists Guild National Fellows Program and as an optioned, working screenwriter has twice been in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Nicholl Top 50 and a finalist for the Sundance Labs. He was also a finalist for the Cynosure Diversity Screenwriting Awards, the Stage 32 Diverse Voices Springboard, and won the Lonely Seal Film Festival award for the best script with a disabled lead. His novel A Friend of Dorothy’s, set during the height of the AIDS crisis in New York City in the late 1980s, was in June 2025.