TONY TACCONE

I  was born on July 4, 1951 in Queens, New York to Frank Ceasar Taccone (an original Italian Stallion) and Sybil Ramirez (a Puerto Rican rhumba queen).    Like his father before him, my dad became a professional photographer and subsequently turned to painting.   He fused both passions by creating what he calls "photo paintings",  using a computer to marry hyper-realism and impressionism.   The effect is astonishing.   At age 89, he still works every day.   For her part, my mother believes that life is the art of having all your organs in constant motion.   My parents believe that art is the highest aspiration of mankind, which explains why all three of their children went into the arts.  

 

I was a born a short kid with a speech impediment.    Took me until my late teens to grapple with both.   Of course, your weaknesses are married to your strengths, and because I couldn't speak very well I fell in love with language.   Of every kind.   And humor.   Humor as a survival tool.    Keep 'em laughing.   Keep the tall bullies at bay and the stammering demons asleep.   (At least until nighttime.  Then, of course, all bets are off.)

 

So it makes perfect sense that I became an English major.  Couldn't cram enough words into my head.   They flowed so perfectly there...

I overcame my terror of speaking by participating in poetry readings, which led to performance art;  some really, really terrible performace art (my kids can corroborate just how bad it was...they've seen videos).   The upside is that I stumbled into acting, which had the transcendent effect of taking me out of my body.   No stammer!  Didn't matter if I was any good.   The theatre basically saved me from the abyss of terminal insecurity.   I could talk onstage and be funny at the same time.   During my stunninly short-lived career as an actor, the producer of a school tour I was on suddenly asked me to fill in for a director who had gone AWOL.    Within 30 minutes of my first rehearsal it became blindlingly clear that I was much better at directing than acting.   It felt as if parts of my being that had been dormant suddenly woke up.   I literally felt more alive.    I started to direct plays in earnest and 40 years later I'm still plying my trade.  

 

During those years I'd often think about writing but never actually write.   It was more fun to flirt with the idea of being a writer than to stare at that blank page, filled, as it was, with potential failures of every kind.   Mt romantic fantasy, on the other hand, never let me down.  There I was re-defining genres, receiving awards, leading some other, blissful life.  Why would I give that up?  Plus, writing required solitude, which scared me, and time, which I was in short supply of.    And having worked with some astonishing playwtrights I saw how damn hard it was.    

 

And then one day a few years ago I finally got fed up with flirting with myself.