For more than half a century, Ed Ballou kept writing plays—even when theatres said no, audiences failed to appear, productions collapsed, computers crashed, and the money ran out.

What The Hell With The Hat? is his candid, funny, and deeply personal record of a playwright’s stubborn creative life. Moving from his first play, written in 1970 on his father’s old typewriter, through productions in San Francisco and New York and decades of new scripts, revisions, auditions, fundraising schemes, disappointments, and small triumphs, Ballou reveals what happens behind the curtain long before opening night.

Interwoven with the diary are generous excerpts from his plays—comic, historical, Gothic, autobiographical, and absurdist—giving readers a rare view of ideas taking shape on the page. By 2024, Ballou had written roughly three dozen plays and was still pursuing the work that had defined his life.

Unpolished in the best sense—direct, self-questioning, irreverent, and persistent—this is less a story about theatrical fame than about why artists keep creating without any guarantee that the world will notice.