100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (11 page)

Their doubleness is overwhelming but also their lack of sequence, that is to say, their constant simultaneity. On a daily basis, for the parent, the eye never rests. The eye is always on two stories, unfolding at once. Two protagonists. One child climbs a chair; one reaches for an electrical outlet. One invents a new word while the other is inventing a new gesture. You cannot watch one story unfolding, then another. You cannot fall in love with one protagonist, and then another. You must fall in love with two protagonists at once. The eye looks everywhere at once, the stories unfold at once, and the heart must expand doubly.

After I gave birth to my twins, the nurse laid them on the gurney and they held hands. Before I held them, they held each other. Together, they are something larger, and different somehow from mere siblings. And yet I resist thinking of them as part of a whole. I dislike the word
multiple
. How can a person be a multiple, a multiple of what?

Every day I insist upon this: to love two as one and one. Not to be terribly interested in their doubleness as curiosity or symbol, but to be interested in their particular and individual natures. Perhaps having children makes one increasingly distrust the symbolic world. Because suddenly nothing is as important as the very real particular.

80. Is playwriting teachable?: the example of Paula Vogel

People often ask me if I think playwriting is teachable. Making a soufflé, tap dancing, changing a tire, and making stained glass are all teachable activities, and making a play is not so different from making a soufflé, tap dancing, changing a tire, and making stained glass all at the same time, but on paper. Why, then, do many see the writing of plays as such a mysterious, unteachable activity? Is it because our culture has such a high regard for individualism that it has such a low regard for teachers? Almost everything in the culture is taught, one way or another, but for originality, which cannot be taught and is therefore judged to have the most value. And yet in most art forms, the originality of the individual is assumed, whereas the form transmitted through history is taught and teachable. For example: this is middle C. This is how to point your toes. This is how to sharpen your pencil (which I don’t take lightly; I remember when a drawing teacher actually showed me how to sharpen my pencil properly when I was twenty and it made all the difference). But is
playwriting
teachable?

Rather than trying to answer the question in an abstract way, I’d like to tell a story. Paula Vogel begins
How I Learned to Drive
, “Sometimes, in order to teach a lesson, you have to tell a story.” And so. I met Paula Vogel at Brown University. I was twenty. I had just taken a leave of absence after my father’s death. I was very close to him, and he’d died of cancer, in Chicago, that summer. The first two years of college had been a blur, spent mainly studying and racing back to Chicago on a plane at the first opportunity to see my father. He was diagnosed with advanced metastatic cancer during Thanksgiving of my freshman year. I thought about transferring to a school in Chicago, but my father would have none of it. He wanted everything to be as “normal” as possible and didn’t want me to live at home among bedpans. Of course nothing was normal, but I tried to be as normal a nineteen-year-old as I knew how, while thinking of death and illness much of the time. Perhaps my father knew somehow that I couldn’t leave Providence before I’d met Paula Vogel, or my future husband.

At any rate, I took a semester off after my father died and spent it at home in Chicago, teaching special education classes by day. At night, my mother and sister and I shared the same house, each in a private house of grief that could not be shared. I came back to Providence that spring and was having trouble concentrating on my studies. It was hard for me to read and hard for me to write. I lived in a blue house on Hope Street. It seemed dark much of the time; the light itself seemed darker, though the seasons were as they always had been in Providence—in winter a damp cold that gets inside the bones, and in spring all flowering trees. Regardless of the trees, it looked dark to me. And then I met Paula Vogel.

What strikes me most when I remember Paula’s teaching is her
presence
as much as the content of her teachings. I think in this country we have an obsession with content and curriculum, all the while devaluing presence and proximity, which are teaching values hard to describe or quantify (or, indeed, teach). Paula has a tremendous gaze, a tremendous listening power, and the most intelligent curiosity of anyone I have ever met. She took me seriously.

And so when I was in her class and told her that I was having trouble writing about the things that mattered most to me, Paula said, “If someone asked me to write a play about my brother Carl, who died of AIDS, I’d never have gotten out of bed. Instead, I wrote about a kindergarten teacher taking a trip through Europe, which became
The Baltimore Waltz
. And I was able to write about my brother.” Then I remember her looking at me with that uncanny penetrating gaze she has, the gaze of a brilliant scientist making a diagnosis, but with a nonscientific, laser-like empathy, and she said, “Write a play in which a dog is the protagonist.” “Okay,” I said. And I did. That was a play called
Dog Play
, and it was the first thing I was able to write after my father died. It viewed his illness and death through the eyes of the family dog.

I found in Paula’s approach to playwriting a great deal of pleasure and a great deal of play. It was almost too pleasurable, too decadent. I always thought I’d be a poet, which gave me a solitary, ascetic kind of pleasure, not the kind that makes you laugh out loud or stay up late into the night with others. And so I thought playwriting was a wonderful diversion.

I went to study in England for a year and came back a little more mended. I wanted to write a senior thesis on “representations of the actress in the Victorian novel,” and I asked Paula to be my thesis adviser. Paula said, “No, I cannot advise that thesis. But if you write a play, I will advise your thesis.” I felt a strangled joy in my chest. I told Paula that I did have an idea for a play. “What is it?” she asked with a characteristic gleam in her eye. I stammered, “This town is playing the Passion play year after year, but the guy who always has to play Pontius Pilate wants to play the role of Jesus, played by his cousin?” I remember that time slowed down as Paula looked at me in her uncanny way and said, “I think you should write that play.”

And so I did write that play, under her guidance. It took me twelve years to finish, and it was called
Passion Play
. Knowing that I began my writing life as a rather retiring poet, Paula treated me with tenderness and guile, sneaking my play into the New Plays Festival at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence. (This is one of Paula’s chosen teaching methods, which she fully admits. She attempts to make students addicted to the dust backstage, that barely there stuff you have to inhale.)

The night of the opening, my mother flew into town from Chicago to see the play. We were driving down the hill toward Trinity Repertory Company when we were blindsided, hit by a car going very fast on Hope Street. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt in the backseat and I hit my head and blacked out. Before I blacked out, I remember thinking, This is how death comes, quickly.

I woke up, and my mother thought maybe we should go to the hospital for an MRI, and I said, “Are you kidding? Let’s go to my play. We’re almost late.” So we went to my play, and I remember feeling an out-of-body sense of rapture seeing the play in three dimensions. I knew then that I would spend my life doing this and not look back. (I got an MRI the following day. It was normal. It did not register the change of vocation.)

When I reflect on all the things Paula taught me—among them, Aristotelian form, non-Aristotelian form, bravery, stick-to-itiveness, how to write a play in forty-eight hours, how to write stage directions that are both impossible to stage and possible to stage—the greatest of these is love. Love for the art form, love for fellow writers, and love for the world.

When I got married, Paula and her wife, the eminent biologist and feminist theorist Anne Fausto-Sterling, got frocked for the day. My husband was a student of Anne’s. It seemed fitting that our teachers, who were both so transformative for each of us, would bind us in front of a community.

After we were married, and as I had my first forays into the professional world, it was always Paula I would call first with personal and theater-related dilemmas. She was one of the first people I called, slightly panicked, when I found out I was pregnant with twins. “Come to Cape Cod for a week,” Paula said. “We’ll take care of you.” On Cape Cod, Paula entertained my big girl, Anna, by making Kleenex into puppets. Anne grilled fish. We swam in ponds. This was the house that Paula had taken me and two other graduate students to years earlier. She had told us to go out on the deck, look at the view of the Atlantic Ocean, and say to ourselves, This is what playwriting can buy.

Now, pregnant with twins and terrified for my writing life, I sat and looked out at the same blue. Anne is a great naturalist and bird-watcher, and a great many birds flew over. In a quiet moment I asked Paula, “Will I ever write again?” She gave me her penetrating gaze, almost a form of hypnosis, a summoning. If I were a soldier, Paula would be a general, coaxing me into battle. She said, “Of course you will.”

We named our twins Hope and William. Hope Street and Williams Street was the intersection in Providence where my husband and I met. And where we grew up. And that is most of my story.

So, back to the abstract question: is playwriting teachable? Of course it’s not teachable. And of course it is teachable. It is as teachable as any other art form, in which we are dependent on a shared history and on our teachers for a sense of form, inspiration, and example; but we are dependent on ourselves alone for our subject matter, our private discipline, our wild fancies, our dreams. The question of whether playwriting is teachable begets other questions, like: is devotion teachable? Is listening teachable? Is a love of art and a willingness to give your life over to art teachable? I believe that these things are teachable mostly by
example
, and in great silences. There is the wondrous noise of the classroom, the content, the liveliness of the teachings themselves, the exchange of knowledge, and then there is the great silence of relation. Of watching how great people live. And of their silently communicating, “You too, with your midwestern reticence, can go out into the great world and write. And when we fail, we’ll have some bourbon, and we’ll laugh.” Teaching is unbounded by the classroom. Just as love is unbounded by time.

81. Bad plays and original sin

According to one pervasive philosophy governing some theaters and new play development models today, the new play is born bad. According to this model, the artistic director is something of a pope, mediating one’s relationship with God (which is, of course, the audience), and the playwright is a sinner.

One goes to confession (one’s meeting with the artistic director or literary manager after the first reading or first preview) and confesses about how bad one’s play is and how one will try to fix it. One can only hope one doesn’t get excommunicated if one likes one’s own play (or one’s own bastard issue) and refuses to “fix” it. In this model dramaturgs become nuns because they are virginal (they’re not required to write or direct plays), they are often powerless in a hierarchical institution, they’re often very badly paid, underappreciated, smart women, and they rap your knuckles with rulers, it’s true, I’ve seen it in the bathroom. (Not really. Not all theaters or dramaturgs are like this, I should say, nor are all priests and nuns—let me here and now exempt Sister Mary Angelita from Davenport, Iowa, who rigged my mom into her flying harness as Peter Pan.)

But to continue with this tiresome metaphor … One’s penances are one’s rewrites. One grips one’s rosary and one’s pencil and hopes for the best. The more rewrites one does, the more perfect and clean is the play in the eyes of the church.

In this model of development, the play is born bad. It exists to be reformed and bettered by the church (the institutional theater). The play is also unclean because it is a bastard child, since it is the issue of a single parent and the imagination, which has no flesh. It needs another parent, the church, to become clean. Baptism will hopefully come from a good review, without which the play is also unclean and destined for Limbo.

Now, if you think this is an anti-Catholic rant, you are mistaken. I only think that original sin is not a good model of new play development. Even if it might be a good model for moral development. Look at me, I’m a picture of mental health. Having been raised Catholic and become a playwright in modern times.

82. A love note to dramaturgs

Dramaturgs are beleaguered. They are bashed, silenced; they are badly paid. And still, they persevere. They are bashed by the very people they have sacrificed their own family lives to defend! Playwrights! Already in these pages I’ve called them nuns. I’ve accused them of sharpening pencils too sharply. Let me honor you, dramaturgs. Let me shower you with love. Playwrights need you. Desperately. We need you to sit next to us at the first rehearsal when we feel as if we were being flayed open and exposed. We need you to sit next to us at the first dress rehearsal and tell us that it’s worth saving, even though we feel worthless and doomed. We need you to sit next to us during the first preview and give us two or three notes that are easily accomplished when we want to leave the theater forever and take up marine biology or nursing or any profession that doesn’t involve public humiliation. We need you to be nice to us when the director, or artistic director, or the audience is being mean to us. We need you to deflect strange questions during audience talk-backs and remind audience members that they are most helpful when they describe their own experience rather than trying to fix the play. Or perhaps we need you to excuse playwrights from coming to talk-backs; dramaturgs are better able to answer questions at talk-backs and then gently relate the audience response to the playwright, who might be hiding upstate or incapacitated in the nearest bathroom. We need you to be publicly articulate about our plays when we feel dumb about them so we can do the more private, blunted, and blind task of writing. We need you to be as articulate about unconventional structure as you are about conventional structure. We need you to fight the mania for clarity and help create a mania for beauty instead. We need you to ask: is the play
too
clear? Is it predictable? Is this play big enough? Is it about something that matters? Conversely, is this play small enough? And if the play’s subject matter is the size of a button, is it written with enough love and formal precision that the button
matters
? We need you to remind audiences that plays are irreducible in meaning, the way that poetry is. To remind audiences that theater is an emotional, bodily, and irreducible experience. We need you to fight for plays at the theater where you work and in the broader culture. We need you to ask us hard questions. We need you to remind us of our own integrity. We need you to remind us to make hard cuts and not fall in love with our own language when our plays are too long. We need you to drink with us if we are drinkers after a horrible first preview and not drink with us if we are abstainers. You might also train as an actor, or a director, or a set designer, because we need you to understand each element fully. We occasionally need you to leave the profession and become critics, because you truly love the theater, have critical and insightful minds, and would write about new plays with love and understanding. I love you, dramaturgs. The very best of you are midwives, therapists, magicians, mothers, rabbinical scholars, Socratic interlocutors, comrades-in-arms, comedians, and friends. I wish there were a better name for what you do than
dramaturg
.