The bungalow that started it all.

Michael R. Jackson graduates from New York University with a degree in playwriting … and doesn’t know what kind of work he can get with that. He applies to random jobs, including one as a security guard (which he doesn’t get). “I was very scared and uncertain,” he recalls,

“and I just needed something to try to make sense of things and my place in the world.” So while living in an apartment in Jamaica, Queens, where rent was

$400 a month, Jackson writes a monologue called “Why I Can’t Get Work.”