100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (9 page)

What does it mean for the painter to shrug off life as a model, to see life studies as merely that, studies, preparation for the blazing light of the internal landscape? And what is that model in comparison with a playwright throwing off the solipsism of youth, an inner world of symbols, masks, and the private interior, in favor of a detailed rendering of other characters later in life? Chekhov said that being a doctor made him see the world more objectively. Is objectivity possible in the theater? Did O’Neill’s sight become more objective, and do we care?

68. Confessions of a twelve-year-old has-been

I recently came upon a diary I’d written when I was twelve. I wrote in despair, concerned that I had reached my literary peak, that I’d written the best stories I would ever write. This diary, of course, will be summarily destroyed. I am not sure what I thought my literary peak was—possibly my unproduced courtroom drama about landmasses, written in the fourth grade, in which an isthmus spoke. But the point is that even then I seemed concerned about the lack of linear progress in the writing life; that every blank page presented one with the same conundrum, the same terrifying newness, and then, after completion, the downward spiral.

We in America seem to tire of our literary heroes faster than they do in other countries; think of Arthur Miller peddling his plays to England in his twilight years because they weren’t produced in the States. Perhaps it is a condition of the twenty-four-hour news cycle in this country, a preternatural hunger for the new. We are still essentially a new country, in relative terms, culturally in our adolescence. We tire of things as soon as we feel we know them. Is that the culture of democracy? A kind of unrelenting aesthetic restlessness?

And so, if one is interested in longevity as a writer in the theater, and also wants to live in this country, how does one respond to the cultural obsession with newness? Or to the sinking and perhaps paranoid feeling that women writers in particular, as soon as they are no longer perceived as potentially seducible daughters but instead as repulsive, dry menopausal mothers in need of lubrication—wait, Virginia Woolf said that Charlotte Brontë wrote badly when she was angry. Let me rephrase. Sometimes it seems to me that the young woman writer is less threatening culturally than the older woman writer because of her newness, her virginity. Her contours are unknown, her language is unknown, she is a mystery. When she grows up … What happens when she grows up?

What I mean to ask is: how to have longevity as a writer? How does one preserve one’s unknowability in a culture where surfaces are digested immediately and constantly? A culture in which the talk about the art often takes up more time than the experience of the art? Is the answer: to refuse to know oneself? And yet isn’t knowing oneself the first principle?

The sense of being a “has-been” is somewhat tautological; one is always a has-been in that one has always just-been … so that if ever one is not in the present moment, then one is perpetually a “has-been,” or a “will-be.” Is it better to be a will-be than a has-been? And why is there no word for being in a state of being, an is-being? How to cultivate the state of being an is-being? Must one be a horse led through a fire with blinders on?

69. Is there an ethics of comedy, and is it bad when comedies make people laugh?

Tragedy has a long history of ethical inquiry, but does comedy have its own ethics? That is to say, ancient philosophers have philosophized about what it means to identify with a character in a tragedy and how such an identification refines us morally. In terms of moral identification and cleansing, comedy seems to be more philosophically virginal terrain. Comedy isn’t, as we all know, serious. Or is it? I had a dream last night in which I was giving a radio address on the ethics of comedy. What did I say? I cannot remember.

Perhaps serious-minded people dismiss comedies because they are not thought to be as morally instructive as tragedies. But the ethical comedy might teach us to embrace ordinary efforts to overcome folly over and above the tragic impulse, and to laugh at ourselves even as we weep for others.

Still, people sometimes dismiss comedies precisely because of laughter. The laughter was cheap, they say, or of the wrong quality. “It was like a sitcom” is one of the most feared criticisms of a “serious” comedy on Broadway.

My worry is that if plays (in order to be high art) ought not to be too funny, or not funny in a certain way, because it cheapens their aesthetic status, then theater is relegated to the mode of ballet or opera—neither of which is funny, and both of which are historical.

If plays have their roots in vaudeville as much as they have their roots in Passion plays, then their roots are cut off when laughter is viewed as cheap. We theater lovers have lost ground, if television is now the only sacred province of dumb jokes.

70. On writing plays for audiences who do not speak English

I was both troubled and intrigued to be told recently that the majority of ticket buyers to shows on Broadway do not speak English. They are visitors from other countries. I was not troubled that people who do not speak English come to our theater. On the contrary! How wonderful that theater transcends language! But what kind of theater transcends language? And what does this mean for the future of the straight play on Broadway?

It is odd work to be a playwright. You are writing a thing in words that is supposed to transcend words. The language is the icing on the cake. But you are making the cake with words. How is that possible? To make something out of words and ultimately the words don’t matter? You are writing language that will not be remembered; most likely, it will be a visual moment that is remembered. You are writing language that eats itself. You are writing for an audience that might not speak your language.

I once began a play with a joke in a language that I thought most of my audience would not understand, in this case, Portuguese. I wanted to see if a joke could be funny in another language. I remember telling this idea to Maria Irene Fornes, and she laughed at me and said, “But that is ridiculous! Jokes are only funny if you understand them!”

Will audiences of many languages but not of the English language take pleasure in plays on Broadway that are preoccupied with the English language? Or is the future of Broadway only in spectacle and song?

71. The age of commentary

Once I went to the Tony Awards. I was breast-feeding twins at the time, so I was distracted by how I would pull my gown down and pump in the bathroom and zip myself back up during the breaks. There were many breaks in the show, and I was struck by what the live audience did while the television audience was watching the commercials. You might think that such a lively teeming mass of gifted performers and producers might be laughing, gossiping, dancing in the aisles, looking over their fans at one another’s décolletage. What were these rarefied creatures doing? They were texting. And I thought, The age of experience is truly over; we are entering the age of commentary. Everyone at the event was busy texting everyone else at the event, and a general lack of presence was the consequence. What will constitute the quality of an event in the theater in the future, and how can we hope to enter eventness in the age of commentary?

We are now supposed to have opinions before we have experiences. We are supposed to blog about our likes and dislikes before a piece of art is over.

Will we evolve out of the ability to make art? Will events need to have more violence for audiences to enter them purely, to compete with the gaze of commentary? Or will everything become commentary? Will the country of children be the only country before commentary? Before we can talk? Before we can spell?

72. Writing and waiting

I like to look at people’s faces when they are waiting. Do they look bored, rude, thoughtful, do they have a look of forbearance on their faces? The look of forbearance—one sees that look more often on non-American faces, or on faces that have waited in line for bread. Forbearance, cousin of dignity, sister of patience … Patience is no longer a virtue in this country, I’m afraid. We’ve made it into a vice. And I’m worried that the elimination of waiting will make us monstrous. Things we used to wait for: the news, mercury in a thermometer to rise, letters from overseas, boats to come in from whaling expeditions, the fifth act, the fifth course, a turkey to roast in the oven, a pig to roast on a spit, the phone to ring, a tape to rewind, bread to rise, tea to brew, grapes to ferment …

And if waiting is lost, then will all the unconscious processes that take place during waiting get lost? And then might we see the death of the unconscious and the death of culture?

Do you remember being a child and waiting, waiting for your father to mix paint at the hardware store, waiting for school to be over, waiting for summer to come, waiting for the curtain to go up, the sweetness of waiting? The waiting of adulthood is perhaps not so sweet … the small degradations of waiting, the petty horror of waiting, the real terror of waiting in the “waiting room,” the waiting in hospitals, the waiting for death, which perhaps only forbearance prepares us for. Do all world religions mainly teach us about waiting, waiting for deliverance, waiting for the coming of the Lord, waiting for the present moment to pass, because in pure waiting is the diminution of suffering?

Does learning to wait forestall violence? Is plot violence? Is the desire for story and more story a kind of narrative violence? I remember seeing a Robert Wilson piece in which a nail almost went into a hand, over and over very slowly, never getting there, and the violent desire it incited in my breast for the nail to puncture the hand.

Can the theater teach us to wait? To forestall our satisfaction? Poems teach us how to wait. The natural world makes us wait. Erik Satie teaches us how to wait. And so does much music. Will YouTube teach us how to wait? Will YouTube teach us how to die?

73. Theater as a preparation for death

When a beloved person dies, a whole world dies with that person. A world of relation—of not knowing how the beloved will respond. What is left is memory—knowing how the beloved
did
respond. The self must be remade without the relation to the beloved. The world itself must be remade. And so with the theater: every night when a curtain comes down, a world dies. The world of present relation dies, and one mourns the end by applauding.

Perhaps that is why Noh theater makers thought theater was the proper place for ghosts. The basic structure of Noh drama is: a person meets a ghost, dances with a ghost, recognizes the ghost. The ghost leaves. The End. It is difficult for Westerners to see this as deep structure. But from a Buddhist perspective, it is
the
structure. To recognize impermanence, to see the self as an illusion, to grapple with leave-taking—this is one of the structural alternatives to the Crucifixion, to the wound at the center, the scapegoat.

Have you ever seen a Tibetan monk make a butter sculpture? The monks sculpt flowers and temples with colored butter, intricate and lovely, knowing they will melt, knowing that eventually they will feed the sculpture to the monkeys. I think of this on the eve of striking a set, which we do with very little ceremony. We do not have a parade and take the set and float it into the sea, as a Tibetan monk would take a sand mandala to the sea to watch it disappear, and reflect on impermanence.

Many Western traditions pin the arts against mortality; we try to make something that will abide, something made of stone, not butter. And yet theater has at the core of its practice the repetition of transience. We take something intricate and lovely and feed it not to the monkeys, but to each other.

74. Watching my mother die on stage

I first saw my mother die on stage in Flannery O’Connor’s
Everything That Rises Must Converge
. I most recently saw her die in
Dolly West’s Kitchen
. (My mother is an actress.) When one frequently, as a child, sees one’s mother die on stage, one naturally makes a separation between theatricality and reality. The child who sees her mother die on stage prefers to think of theater as make-believe rather than as mimesis.

My mother recently called me because she got the role of the maid in
Hedda Gabler
. She was considering not taking it because it was a small role (I believe she calculated that she’d only be on stage 18 percent of the time), but then she reasoned that at least she started the play and ended it, and at least she would find Hedda dead. I remember when I was a child seeing her react to a dead Juliet on stage when she played the nurse. I was horrified by her grief. A child is not supposed to see the mother in grief; the mother is supposed to die before the child dies.

I remember my grandmother walking into the hospital and seeing my father almost dead, and the sound that came out of her mouth. The sound of age grieving for dead youth, the sound of age not having gone first. The sound came from deep in the belly, and it was almost an animal sound, and it knocked around the clean hospital walls, making the hospital smell less like soap and more like ritual oil. And then my grandmother backed out into the hallway again.

Part Four

On Making Plays with Other People: Designers, Dramaturgs, Directors, and Children

75. On lice

Lice is the great equalizer. Like death, it comes to everyone. Regardless of hygiene, race, or class, if you have children and they play with other children, eventually they get lice.

In urban centers like New York, nearly every domestic enterprise may be outsourced. Even the eradication of head lice. I combed my daughter’s head for two days, proud of my method and dedication, but on the third day, unsuccessful, I gave up and called the lice lady.

The lice ladies of Brooklyn live in Ditmas Park. They are a large family of Orthodox Jews. I find their house comforting. Three babies crawl on the floor, and two men read the Talmud. Extended family comes in and out of the kitchen, here grabbing an apple, there dropping off a child. In the kitchen I plunk down my children to get combed out.