Epitaph May 27-June 12 Seattle Public Theater
	Writer-actor Ethan Sandler's Epitaph, which he created with Adrian Wenner, won awards at the HBO and Edinburgh-Fringe festivals. The Mercer Island native now lives in Los Angeles; he comes home for a Seattle Public Theater production of his show. He talked about his life and work in an e-interview.			Seattleplays.com profile: Ethan Sandler
		Sandler's career choice came early, after playing an elephant in a pre-school Channukah play: This was a revolution in my life.  remember thinking "I found something. I actually found something I was looking for."  After that I began taking classes at PONCHO and the Seattle Childrens Theater. I Sandler (no relation to Adam) left Seattle for Chicago's Northwestern University, where he met Wenner. Adrian and I hit it off immediately in college. We performed together in the campus improv and sketch show, "Mee-Ow" for a couple of years. I remember even then that the sketches we wrote together were always a little different, somehow. Stranger. More fun. They re-connected a few years later in Los Angeles, and started on Epitaph:   We started with a basic premise- what would happen if we wrote a show about somebody you NEVER saw. You could hear their voice, but you always just missed them. From there, we decided to make this person the perfect woman. ... . So we constructed Georgia Newman, and then we killed her. The show begins at her funeral. From there, we essentially just followed two men who struggle to let her go. . . .We built the web of characters first. From there we  wrote and wrote (through improv and also just banging away at the computer) until we came up with a very long draft. We brought in the director, Betsy Thomas, and she helped us hone the thing down to a more efficient story. She was brilliant at this task.  Getting into the HBO festival was a long road: We performed the show in Los Angeles, on and off, for almost a year straight. We tweaked and trimmed and rewrote it in front of audiences. Eventually, the festival scouts saw us. From there we had to put up a showcase just for them in their own theater in LA, and, luckily, they said "OKAY. Stop yelling at us. Just come to the festival. God, relax..." Sandler has also done some acting around Hollywood: I was on the very last episode of "Family Law." It was my first job in LA, and I was so excited to be there... And then, the second day, I strut onto the set to find everybody moping around. "We got cancelled..." The rest of my time there was like working in a morgue. A lot of "Hey, Tom, move that light a little to the right, please?" "Why? What does it matter?" With TV and movie writing work, he is figuring out how to balance writing and acting: I think that it's a bit of a circus act to try to balance them both on purpose. I am just trying to stay flexible and to think of myself as a child of two needy parents, acting and directing. I just need to feed both beasts as often as I can. I am lucky to have such a formidable partner as Adrian. It makes the whole thing far easier. We wrote, every day, all day, in complete obsurity, for almost two years straight. I would do my temp job (from home, thank God) in the morning and then go over to Adrian's and we would write all day. So, now that we're working for actual, wait, what's that called again? Oh, right, money.... Now that it's our actual job to write, I think we both feel like we need to give this its due. So, if for now acting takes a back seat, so be it. Eventually, I think that pendulam will swing the other way. Wait, I mean to say that I PRAY the pendulam swings the other way...