100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (3 page)

The insidious result is that young playwrights often become unsure of how their stories should unfold, and they are not told that the way their sentences unfold might determine the course of their stories. It is a different kind of listening, to listen to how the phrase unfolds as opposed to listening only to how the story unfolds. Surely stories are important—just as having a subject is crucial for the painter. But playwriting will no longer be considered an art form if we are deprived of the paint—that is to say, our language.

14. Investing in the character

The language of “investing in the character” is the language of capitalism. One might go further and say that investing in the character because we have secret information about the character is the language of insider trading (which is immoral even to the most ardent capitalist). Rather than
investing
in characters, might we
feel
something about characters because they too feel? In life, when eyebrows are raised or yawns are yawned, we raise our eyebrows and yawn right back. Emotional identification, neurologists might argue, comes from mirror neurons rather than from “knowing” information. Some might argue the more you know, the more you identify. However, the reverse is sometimes the case; the more one knows about the mysterious lady in the black hat, the less one identifies with her.

I suppose I’m suggesting that the body and mind of the actor do a great deal of work that is beyond information. The phrase
investing in the character
is related in kind to the phrase
tracking the main character’s journey
. Tracking a journey makes us into bloodhounds, following protagonist-beasts that have left footsteps for us to follow. And yet adding
information
to help us
track the journey
can often be like trying to sharpen a knife with the wrong tool, making it oddly dull. The journey of an animal tracker, if it is to be dramatic, must involve surprising changes of weather, missed footsteps, wrong turns. Rather than neatly distributed footprints.

In some works of art, what the audience is actually following is not the protagonist’s journey but rather the hidden emotional logic of the artist, which the artist covers with all his or her might. Beckett wrote in the margins of his plays “vaguen” so that the author’s footprints were covered with snow.

15. The future, storytelling, and secrets

Narrative is an accumulation of knowledge about the future. We begin in the present and end in the present, and in the middle is an accumulation of future possibilities. But is it important to know the end or to not know the end? Are we imitating life when we do not know the future? Or, in another sense, are we imitating life when we do know the future—that we will all die one day? And is it important to imitate life?

How do we know what we know as a story unfolds, and when is knowing overrated? In fairy tales the structure is: we know some things and then we know some more and then the story ends. Conversely, in well-made play structure, we know some things and then we know some more and then we know “the real” hidden secret that happened before the play began. The plot structure of this brand of realism has an important hidden reference point that happened before the play began: the secret happened
not on stage
, which, in a sense, makes it more real. In fairy tales there is no real world that precedes the fiction; there is only a fiction that continually unfolds. One might argue that by creating a reality that precedes the fictional world, we actually make the illusion less real because there is less power in the watching of it.

When the well-made play reveals the family secret from the past in the second act, the secret from the past justifies the drama of the present. I believe, however, that very often the drama of the present moment needs no justification, and therefore no recourse to the past. The secret that began before the play puts the audience in the position of being a detective, excavating the past, rather than experiencing the present. The mystery lies elsewhere. In contemporary drama, when the drama hinges on revelation of plot, the secret acquires both more and less significance than it actually has.

16. On Ovid

I grew up on Shakespeare’s romances, in which people become asses, and this brand of theatrical transformation felt normal to me rather than odd. But in the contemporary literary world, things that are “magic” are cordoned off and labeled “magic realism.” Apparently, García Márquez himself disdained the term and said that most of what happened in
Love in the Time of Cholera
actually happened in his village. In the Renaissance, playwrights could not get enough of Ovid, the poet of transformation, and Shakespeare almost seems to have slept with Ovid under his pillow.

Paula Vogel, who was my teacher, teaches that there are six plot forms, and Aristotelian form, or the linear arc, is only one of them. Aristotelian form progresses through a logical series of cause and effect. One thing happens, so the next thing happens, so the next thing happens, so the climax happens, and so on. Vogel explains that alternatives to Aristotelian forms include: circular form (see
La Ronde
), backward form (
Artist Descending a Staircase
or
Betrayal)
, repetitive form (
Waiting for Godot
), associative form (see all of Shakespeare’s work, in particular his romances), and what Vogel calls synthetic fragment, where two different time periods can coexist (
Angels in America
or
Top Girls
).

I would humbly add a seventh form, Ovidian. In Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, he begins, “Let me begin to tell of forms changed.” His emphasis, in terms of story, is on transformation, rather than a scene of conflict or rational cause and effect. Gods become swans, people become trees, people fall in love and die, the supernatural world is permeable. This story structure is reminiscent of fairy tales. Objects have magical properties, people transform, and the natural world is likewise transformative. One thing becomes another thing and then another, and there is no clear moral. If there can be said to be verisimilitude in Ovidian form, it is the sort that imitates dreams or the unconscious.

Perhaps change is all-important in most dramatic forms; in the arc play, change is usually of the moral variety—a lesson learned. But in Ovidian form, the play takes pleasure in change itself, as opposed to pleasure in moral improvement.

We now live in an age where people crave magic and transformation. We need Harry Potter. (One might argue that we need Harry Potter because of political escapism. That is another matter.) Still, I would argue that at the level of the story we crave transformation as much as we crave verisimilitude. Perhaps Ovidian form is not taught at universities as a genuine narrative form because it is very hard to teach the art of transformation. Aristotle lays out his theories in lecture form, easily accessible, whereas Ovid simply flies, and it is difficult to teach the art of flying.

17. Miller and Williams; or, morality and mystery plays

If there are two novelists who divide the world between them (Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the fox and the hedgehog), then there might be said to be two American playwrights who divide the world between them (Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams). I think of Miller and Williams as the architect and the poet: one working in the more objective world of building buildings and seeing whether they stand up, and the other engaged in the more subjective landscape of the soul.

Miller, the architect, builds incredible scaffolds; one climbs them until one reaches the moral: “Attention must be paid.” Or: “They were all my sons.” His plays build to these cries of the heart, and these cries of the heart sit solidly on top of the scaffold of the plot. Whereas Williams redirects our eye to the moment; every moment is emotionally or aesthetically important for its own sake, rather than having an additive effect. The dialectic between the architect and the poet in modern dramaturgy reminds me of the old dialectic between morality and mystery plays. The morality plays had a clear moral for Everyman; the mystery plays (like the Passion) had an emotional effect harder to cognitively capture. Shaw is in the tradition of the morality plays; Beckett in mystery plays.

One could argue that Kushner’s
Angels in America
is the perfect American play because of its seamless equipoise between the morality play and the mystery play. It had a definite moral, one that the nation needed desperately to hear, but also spoke to the metaphysical, irrational world of angels and death. As such, it offered both Miller’s moral imperative and Williams’s emotionality and brought two disparate strands of American dramaturgy together while creating its own form.

18. Calvino and lightness

Italo Calvino has a wonderful essay, “Lightness,” in which he honors lightness as an aesthetic choice and a difficulty, rather than as something to be easily dismissed. You cannot, after all, get something airborne on a mere whim, no—it requires careful patience and some physics to get a plane in the air. When I worked on a translation of
Three Sisters
, I was thrilled to learn that in the original Russian, Olga said quite literally, “I can now remember with some lightness.” So often Chekhov is played by actors who are remembering with some heaviness.

A suspicion that lightness is not deeply serious (but instead whimsical) pervades aesthetic discourse. But what if lightness is a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper the intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor. Lightness is then a philosophical victory over heaviness. A reckoning with the humble and the small and the invisible.

19. Satyr plays inside tragedies

In ancient Greece, comedies used to be appetizers in the form of satyr plays performed before the main course—a tragedy. Now we don’t have daylong festivals of both comedies and tragedies, so now do satyr plays need to be contained inside tragedies? (That is to say, the dark comedy?) I have never had much patience with separating genres into distinct categories. Maybe that is because I long for the time when we sat all day in the sun and laughed for a while, then wept while masked actors wailed, and both the humor and the desperation of life were illuminated on one day.

20. On knowing

I worry that choosing the essay form implies that I know something. Because today (it is, mind you, an extremely hot day) I feel that I know next to nothing. Recently, I met a mathematician who described himself as “the world’s leading expert on absolute and total ignorance.” Today, I stand with the mathematician. But the mathematician, while an expert in ignorance, also believed firmly and enthusiastically in the concept of progress.

I’m not sure that I believe in progress, because I make theater. And theater, by its nature, does not believe in progress. We must constantly go back to go forward. And theater cannot believe in absolute knowledge, because usually two or three characters are talking and they usually believe two or three different things, making knowledge a relative proposition. But increasingly in the American theater we are led to believe that plays are about knowing, or putting forward a thesis.

Today, I stand humbly with the mathematician. I am not the world’s leading expert on absolute and total ignorance. But the importance of knowing nothing is underrated.

21. The necessary

What seems like the least necessary thing in your play might be the most necessary thing. What seems like the most necessary thing in your play might be the least necessary thing. Maurice Maeterlinck elaborates on this point in his essay “The Tragical in Daily Life”: “The only words that count in the play are those that at first seemed useless … Side by side with the necessary dialogue will you almost always find another dialogue that seems superfluous; but examine it carefully, and it will be borne home to you that this is the only one that the soul can listen to … for here alone is it the soul that is being addressed.”

Be suspicious of an expert who tells you to cut a seemingly unnecessary moment out of your play. The soul of your play might reside there, quietly, inconspicuously, glorying in its unnecessariness, shining forth in its lack of necessity to be. The word
expert
was invented after the Renaissance, a time when plays sallied forth in all their beautiful ignorance.

22. Can one stage privacy?

Can one stage privacy, and if one could, would one want to? Is the stage an anti-privacy medium, as opposed to the novel, which is all about interiority? If the novel had its roots in the oral epic, when deeds were sung, and then deeds got written down, and if interiority was only invented in late antiquity, is the theater too ancient a form for the interior? Film has the close-up, but what is theater’s equivalent? The monologue dramatizes privacy, and yet, not really, because one is saying one’s thoughts aloud to the audience, in open admission that there is an audience.

The stage feels to me like an anti-privacy medium, and yet I like plays that make visible the interior. That is to say, the interior of a person rather than the interior of a living room. As our plays culturally become more and more about the indoors—living rooms, bedrooms, and offices—are they also increasingly about the exteriors of people?

23. On neologisms

Shakespeare invented about seventeen hundred neologisms in his plays. Apparently, making up new words is a sign of genius or schizophrenia. (Writing plays is a deeply schizophrenic act on the best of days, because you are hoping that several voices will talk to you in your head.) It is my contention that a play automatically cannot be naturalistic if it contains a neologism. If the playwright concocts a new word, then the play is no longer holding up a mirror to reality. Instead, the play is creating its own reality through language.