100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (2 page)

2. Umbrellas on stage

Why are umbrellas so pleasing to watch on stage? The illusion of being outside and being under the eternal sky is created by a real object. A metaphor of limitlessness is created by the very real limit of an actual umbrella indoors. Cosmology is brought low by the temporary shelter of the individual against water. The sight of an umbrella makes us want to feel both wet and dry: the presence of rain, and the dryness of shelter. The umbrella is real on stage, and the rain is a fiction. Even if there are drops of water produced by the stage manager, we know that it won’t really rain on us, and therein lies the total pleasure of theater. A real thing that creates a world of illusory things.

I have an umbrella with a picture of the sky inside. My daughter Anna said, when she was three and underneath it, “We have two skies, the umbrella sky and the real sky.” When I went out with her in the rain recently without an umbrella, she said, “It’s all right, Mama. I will be your umbrella.” And she put her arms over my head.

3. On the loss of sword fights

We lost sword fights sometime when we lost swords. But our primal bloodlust still seems to require a good fight on stage. It’s one thing to fight with our bodies and swords (it requires skill) and another to merely bicker. The gunfight on stage will not do; it will not do because it has no virtuosity and because we all know guns are fake on stage, so there is no real fear. Conversely, swords have a reality on stage even if they are fake. Fake swords make a better sound than fake guns for one thing; the sounds come from the object itself rather than a sound cue.

Shakespearean sword fights became in the nineteenth century Hedda having to bicker with her husband and shoot herself off stage. Theatrical death by gun trumped death by language; gun wounds are final, they do not inspire soliloquies. As for the duel … fake swords are mano a mano, whereas fake guns are merely, Did you remember to bring your gun or didn’t you? Of course there is the matter of the quickness of the draw, but that is better captured on film than on the stage.

Perhaps people go to the movies instead of theaters today because their bloodlust is more accurately satisfied at the movies. Movie gunfights really do inspire fear and anxiety—as do car chases. But large-scale gunfights and car chases are no good on stage. Should actors then be trained in karate or some other fighting art? Should they be trained in physical fighting rather than in the art of the verbal duel? And if all actors were trained combatants, how would it affect our writing? Would our writing grow more teeth? More muscle? More blood?

4. On titles—comedy and tragedy

Tragedy is often named for the tragic person—
King Lear
,
Hamlet
,
Julius Caesar
—whereas comedies draw from the world at large—
As You Like It
,
The Comedy of Errors
,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Tragedy has proper nouns, and comedy has regular old nouns that signify the world and the structure of the world over and above the individual. Is this because tragedies are about the loss of one individual soul? The tragic perspective privileges one person over the continuity of the system, whereas comedies (which often end in marriage) use linguistic structures that describe life in general persisting after the play is over. You can still “like it” after
As You Like It
, but after
Hamlet
, Hamlet is dead forever, keeps dying, keeps on being dead.

5. On titles with participles

Many titles of plays, movies, and novels these days use participles or gerunds. For example,
Leaving Las Vegas
,
Remembering Ernest Hemingway
. It would be crass for me merely to say that I have a prejudice against these participle titles, even though it would be true. It is perhaps more interesting to think about why we are in a land of the perpetual present, with no action having happened or about to happen. It is happening, unfolding, all the time, with no subject! What of these alternative titles: “I Left Las Vegas” or “I Remember Ernest Hemingway” or quite simply “Las Vegas.”
I Remember Mama
would now be called “Remembering Mama.”
As You Like It
would be “Liking It.” Was Beckett the first participle giant with
Waiting for Godot
? But Beckett was specifically looking at the act of the participle, the act of waiting; it was not incidental, or in vogue. Plus it is in French, and doesn’t that make all the difference? In French you have that little “
En
”—“
In
Waiting for Godot.” If we are “in” waiting as opposed to just waiting, we are at least located. More nouns and fewer participles! More event and more nouns, and less becoming out of time.

6. On titles and paintings

I often long to call my plays something like “Untitled #3” or “Red #4.” I tend to feel neutral and utilitarian about titles, favoring nouns. However, theater is a different medium from painting, and we don’t call our plays “Untitled.” How is painting different from theater, and why does theater require that titles have content instead of numbers? Is a nameless play somehow not a play? Beckett occasionally called his plays things like “Rough for Theater 1” and “Rough for Theater 2.” Sonnets we often call “Sonnet.” Dances can be similarly untitled. In the theater do we object to the idea that a playwright might be working on a series? Or are titles simply devices to try to get people to come to the theater, in which case “Untitled” does not help? And what titles make people want to come to the theater and why do people want to come to the theater anyway and would people come to untitled works or would they be too hard to list in the newspaper? A lack of a title implies a lack of a decision and I suppose a lack of drama insofar as drama requires decisiveness. I would be interested in seeing a short series of plays, all called “Untitled.” So that the eye might be redirected and the play might become ever more interior and private, with no recourse to a title that might restrict meaning. Titles by their nature imply that the play’s architecture is like a bull’s-eye (and some are) with the point being in the center. Sometimes the point is in the margins, or in the experience of throwing the dart.

7. On Andy Goldsworthy, theatrical structure, and the male orgasm

I am inspired by Andy Goldsworthy’s outdoor sculptures. Like a playwright, he spends his time structuring decay. In his case, the natural world destroys the form, whereas in the theater, time itself and the audience’s movement through time destroy the form. Structure implies subtraction or repression; without the taking away or the hiding, there is everything, or formlessness. Goldsworthy documents how already structured nature is by using subtraction and repetition. He complicates what is natural and what is artifice by pointing to already existing natural forms.

Different plays have different shapes—spheres, rectangles, wavy lines, and of course the ever-discussed and ubiquitous arc. How will we find our own natural forms in the sense of the elemental, and when should we be suspicious of the word
natural
? The playwright Mac Wellman has his students draw the structure of their plays, encouraging them to draw wiggly lines, circles, or vases, as the structure demands. Aristotle thought form was natural, but he thought the natural form was always an arc.

I remember once hearing a young male student describe the structure of his play. He said, “Well, first it starts out, then it speeds up, and it’s going and it’s going, and then bam, it’s over.” And I thought, Do we think the arc is a natural structure because of the structure of the male orgasm?

8. Don’t send your characters to reform school

Sometimes I think that American dramaturgy is based not on Aristotle’s
Poetics
but instead on
The Pilgrim’s Progress
 … that is to say, what has your character
learned
, how has she
changed
, what is her
journey
? All of these questions belong to a morality play. I love medieval morality plays because they are undisguised. And yet realism in the grips of a morality play is a strange genre to me—a morality play disguised as realism seems fake.

The pilgrims who founded our country
hated
the theater. (Have you ever wondered why Boston does not have a reputation for being a theater town? Which is perhaps not fair.) The pilgrim view of theater is that its only function is moral purgation.

But try applying the generic question “How complete is his or her journey?” or “What did Godot learn from having waited?” to Beckett. The questions fall short of illuminating the play.

And so I say: don’t make your play into a reform school. Don’t send your characters away.

9. Should characters have last names?

The act of naming a character is sacred and mysterious. In some countries (Tibet, for example) people do not necessarily have last names. The state of having a first and last name is a cultural practice closely aligned to patriarchy, land rights, and the individuation of the self, some would say the illusion of the self. So before giving one’s character a first name and a last name, one must consider whether the world one is creating on stage is a world of first and last names.

I remember once the people in a props department asked me the last name of a character in
The Clean House
. They wanted to make a hospital badge for her. I said, “You can’t make a hospital badge for her because she doesn’t have a last name.” And they said, “Can’t you make up a last name?” And I said, “No because she doesn’t have a last name.”

10. People in plays

The first choice any playwright must make is whether to people the play with people, as opposed to puppets, gods, voices, or inanimate objects—teacups, eggs, spoons. Mostly, this all-important choice goes unremarked upon, as it is by and large assumed that plays will have people. I suppose the choice goes unwrestled with because actors will be in our plays and we assume that actors would prefer to play people rather than stones or snails. But this is not always the case.

The finest actors, those actors with a true calling and a humble nature, might prefer to play stones or snails, or at least be willing. But it is true that some very fine actors
do
prefer to be people (rather than trees or gods or seagulls), and it is also true that many playwrights live to please actors (actors are so beautiful and have such disarmingly lovely voices, and we’d always hoped to be them, and if not to be them, then to love them from a short distance in the dark). So we want to please them, and we hope to give them the gift of people, if it is people that they want.

When I hear complaints about this writer or that writer becoming less avant-garde and more commercial, I often think that such writers actually have no active interest in the marketplace, but they do, after a time, want to please the very fine actors they work with, and they increasingly try to give such actors satisfying roles, which influences the writer’s aesthetic over time, like the steady lapping of water over a rock.

And so it might be worth going back to first principles once in a while and wondering, sitting before the blank page, if one wants to people one’s play with people … or with devils, fairies, furies, and stones.

11. An essay in praise of smallness

I admire minimalism.

12. Plays of ideas

What are plays of ideas and do they have big words in them?

The mastery of the longer-syllabled words in the English language is no doubt admirable but is not equivalent to thinking. And I do believe that thinking is an overrated medium for achieving thought.

I believe that there is often an idiomatic confusion in the phrase
play of ideas
. I think what people mean when they say a “play of ideas” is a play in which people
talk
about ideas. A talking-ideas play is different from a play where the idea is embedded in the form rather than in the conversation. It is a similar idiomatic confusion when plays are called language-driven that are actually driven by the use of large words. Some language-driven plays might use small words sparingly (Churchill or Fornes or Beckett) as the rhythm of the language is as important as the rarity or length of the words themselves. These playwrights use smallness in the service of bigness.

Small, forthright words, used in the service of condensing experience, might have an idea buried in them as large as the most expansive work that wears its intellectualism on its sleeve. The unshed tears of the deeply felt are akin to the unused large words in the service of a thought.

13. The drama of the sentence

If it is true that there is nothing new under the sun and that there are only two or three basic human stories worth telling, then the contribution of the playwright is not necessarily the story itself but the way the story is told, word for word. So that there is a drama in the linguistic progression: what word will follow what word? I might call this the drama of the sentence, how it will unfold, how it will go up and down, how it will stop.

And this drama of the sentence, of the phrase, has been largely robbed from playwrights in a culture that loves movies more than it loves poetry. In the Hollywood model (which influences the world of playwriting more and more) every person appears to be an expert of stories and shares his or her opinion with writers about how the story should go. But a writer’s special purview and intimate power is how a word follows a word. And the cultural dependence on stories has slowly deprived playwrights of their province—to be the only person in the room who should know which word should follow which word, or (in Virginia Woolf’s words) how a voice answers a voice. Instead, playwrights are viewed mainly as storytellers whose stories might have flaws that can be fixed by experts.