“Who Are Gitelman & Good?”

The teachers who gave us room to bloom.

High school can suck. It can be lonely in ways you don’t even have words for.

I spent my early years in an austere Catholic school in rural Michigan, where I had friends but never felt truly connected or known, like I was growing up in a country where I didn’t quite speak the language. When I transferred to public school, everything got louder and bigger, but not necessarily better. I let old friendships fade and chose solitude, or at least told myself I did. But the quiet longing never left me—that ache for something I couldn’t name, something that felt like home.

Home, as we know, is people. I found mine while wearing a polyester gold-trimmed doublet and a limp ruffled collar, saying words I barely grasped (something about beguiling an old pantaloon...), surrounded by other weird and wonderful kids doing the same.

And what wonderful kids they were. Some high schoolers had sports, some had band, some had–shall we say–hacky sack… This was our space. Planted in soil that was otherwise inhospitable to the growth of these strange and spindly young flowers, we found our pot–a makeshift container yes, but one in which we could bloom.

Bloom we did. It was the first time I felt like myself, like the person I still am today.

I discovered that text is not static, but alive, immediate, with poetry that comes from teeth and tongue. Text exists in space and time. I was taught that language has a heritage…and an evolution. And sometimes, text is insufficient. As Thorton Wilder's Editor Webb—wearing glassless spectacles, hair aged with dye—I discovered that story lives not only in words, but also in the body; that the body itself can become a kind of text. By drinking invisible lemonade and pushing an invisible lawnmower, I generated text out of absence, from the void. Gesture invoked language, and language inscribed itself as text—not on the stage, but in the mind.

Years later, I found myself asking: what if more students had the chance to bloom like that? What if more teachers had the right tools to make it happen? After decades of writing and working in education, I started Gitelman & Good Publishers to help break down the barriers that prevent high schools from producing new, meaningful work for their mainstage shows.

When deciding what to name this company, I named the company after my own high school drama teachers, the very people who gave some knucklehead teenagers a space to figure themselves out: the lamplighters, lodestars, Virgils, shepherds. In other words, I named my company after you.

When deciding which plays I want to publish, it’s the catalog I wish I’d had: work written specifically for high school performers, by writers who take teenagers seriously—plays that meet students where they are and trust them to go further.

If you’re a teacher reading this, you already know how powerful it is when students feel seen, supported, and challenged. My hope is that our plays help you build that space. Bring them the good stuff. Like Mr. Gitelman and Ms. Good did for me, give your students the kind of stories that let them bloom.