100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (8 page)

Is the situation to be reversed, and is it even desirable that we love our audience, or is it better for the art that we occupy positions of mutual mistrust, insofar as art is seduction and mistrust is helpful in the act of seduction?

I am not sure that art is or should be seduction, and I am not sure what can be done given the current economic situation in theater and the fact that we do much of our rehearsing in front of a paying audience well into previews. All I know is that when I am in this situation of mutual mistrust, I think back to my very first beloved audience member. She is Pat Watkins, and she is a retired African-American librarian in Madison, Wisconsin. I met her after an early preview of
Eurydice
at Madison Repertory Theatre, and we talked of Beckett, and then we wrote letters back and forth for years. During previews in New York, if the audience seems hostile, or if I’m too terrified to look, I will picture Pat’s face instead. Her face is kind. She came to be pleased, and she came to be challenged. Her letters are in my desk. She came with love.

55. Hungry ghosts, gardens, and doing plays in New York

The ideal audience is either wise or innocent; know-it-alls are not ideal. This can sometimes make New York a tricky place for a new play. Another thing that makes New York tricky is the hungry ghosts. Hungry ghosts in Buddhist thought can never fill themselves up.
Will it extend? Will it move? Will it run forever? Feed me!
says the hungry ghost. And if a play were to run forever, could it properly be called theater anymore? Instead, it would be an ossified, strange thing, dangling halfway between live theater, a parade, and an amusement park ride. Think of the longest-running plays … What happens to them? What do they become? Restaurants and plays should not be open for longer than the half-life of a chef. I mistrust restaurants that have been open for fifty years and plays that have been running for fifteen years. Can food stay alive that long? Both restaurants and theaters must offer up living food.

I was talking to a group of theater donors in a city other than New York, and they spoke at length about their gardens. Where not to plant bamboo, and where to plant it. This audience seemed to come to the theater to have fun. I thought, Oh my, they get what they need essentially from their gardens. And they get other pleasures from the theater. Perhaps when we don’t have gardens, we come to the theater anxious, vengeful, cranky, with blood on our teeth. In a perfect world the virtues of theater are similar to those of cultivating a garden—something living, something patient, something always growing. Perhaps in cities where people learn these virtues, they come to the theater hoping to nurture the life span of a theatrical company, rather than wanting to devour or eviscerate one show at a time.

56. Advice to dead playwrights from contemporary experts

To Ionesco: “I can’t track the rhinoceros’s journey.”

To Shakespeare: “You should cut that long monologue. I hate direct address. Also ‘To be or not to be,’ it’s confusing and it doesn’t advance the story.”

To Sophocles: “I don’t get enough information about Oedipus’s backstory in the first act.”

To Shakespeare: “It is too sudden when the lovers fall in love with each other in the forest. Couldn’t they get to know each other a little better first?”

What can a living playwright learn from this? Canonical plays are weird. Being dead is the most airtight defense of one’s own aesthetic.

57. What of aesthetic hatred, and is it useful?

What is the nature of aesthetic hatred, and is it at all useful? Is it possible that the people who hate my work the most, experience the most bile rising in their throats—are these people in fact my greatest treasures because their experience of the work is the most visceral and profound?

And what of petty, eviscerating theatrical gossip, and is it at all useful? I recently went to see the Dalai Lama speak, and he inveighed against senseless gossip, and I thought, I am doomed. Because my profession requires large doses of senseless gossip. It is how we cast, how we choose our collaborators, and how we relax at parties. But what is the difference between senseless gossip and true dialogue about an object, an object that meant to please but in fact gave no pleasure?

Are we to believe with William Hazlitt that there is a pleasure in hating? Otherwise, why would we go to the theater, knowing that we will hate with as much frequency as we will love? Does so-called senseless gossip advance the art form? Why do we experience anger when a piece of art gives no pleasure, though it was intended to give pleasure? How is it that we feel harmed? People think that in order to save the theater we need more good plays. Perhaps we need more bad plays.

58. More failure and more bad plays

The contemporary theater is afraid of failure. That is one reason why we have a culture of endlessly developing plays rather than doing them.

But failure loosens the mind. Perfection stills the heart.

If perfection were even possible.

Perhaps we would have more sublime plays if we had more tolerance for and interest in imperfect plays. Because perfect plays are not sublime plays. Shakespeare’s plays are weird and wonky and oddly shaped and wonderfully imperfect but sublime. They are as untidy-sublime as nature is. Contemporary playwrights are often encouraged to make tidy plays rather than plays with cliffs and torrents.

In Elizabethan times, when they did not program “old” plays, there must have been many new “bad” plays and a certain pleasure taken in their badness. My God, the pleasure in throwing a tomato at a curtain call. Not to be believed! The soft tomato, perhaps slightly rotten, hitting with soft ripeness the ankle of a beautiful boy actor. Perhaps we have lost our pleasure in bad plays. Certainly we have, as a culture, lost no pleasure in watching bad television. It can be equally fun to the average American to watch something considered “bad” on television as something considered “good.” (Failure loosens the mind; perfection stills the heart.) Perhaps subscription audiences feel that by subscribing, they have been inoculated against failure. Perhaps theater is just by and large too expensive to tolerate failure. Perhaps we no longer believe in the sublime; we only believe in the tidy.

More failure! More demand for failure! More bad plays! Less perfection! More ugliness! More grace!

59. It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it

Recently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on television: “It’s beautiful but I don’t like it.” And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of such a distinction?
It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it.
Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I don’t like it, so it’s not beautiful. What would it mean to separate those two impressions for art making and for art criticism?

60. Is there an objective standard of taste?

No.

61. Why I hate the word
whimsy.
And why I hate the word
quirky.

Whimsy
was an etymological cousin in 1520 to the word
whim-wham
(a decidedly superior word), which had to do with fluttering the eyelids or letting the eyes wander. It is, then, a way of making feminine and therefore trivial a whole school of aesthetic fabulation. We do not tend to call Shakespeare whimsical, although his fairies flew and his witches chanted. A male artist following his whims is daring, manly, and original. A woman artist following her whims is womanly, capricious, and trivial; her eyelids flutter, her heart palpitates, her eyes wander, and her hands rise and fall in her lap.

The word
quirky
is so much more loathed than the word
whimsy
that it does not bear the time it would require to dissect its horrors. The choice to have a perceptible aesthetic at all is often called a quirk. The word
quirky
suggests that in a homogenized culture, difference has to be immediately defined, sequestered, and formally quarantined while being gently patted on the head.

62. A scholarly treatise on the parents of writers

It has been my observation that playwrights’ mothers are most often histrionic; the fathers of poets are either brutish or absent; and most fiction writers have very nice parents, but they think said parents are absolutely horrific.

(For evidence of this deeply researched thesis, you can readily look to Tennessee Williams for the histrionic mother, Sylvia Plath for the brutish father, and I cannot reveal my weighty evidence for the fiction writers as it’s private information, but I can reveal that they all grew up in pleasant suburbs and their parents are very proud of their work. I know, they send me clippings.)

63. William Hazlitt in an age of digital reproduction

William Hazlitt used to write theater criticism that made you feel as though you were actually there, to experience Bernhardt for that moment only. Now people despair that theater criticism has become (with notable exceptions) more of a thumbs-up, thumbs-down affair. But in the age of mechanical reproduction, when theater is one of the few unreproducible mediums, it becomes even more important for critics to be able to write the kind of criticism that says,
I was there
. A camera cannot capture theater’s essence, because its essence is invisible; a pen can. The critic then becomes an indispensable bridge between one century and the next.

64. The strange case of
Cats

This summer my daughter made me watch the video of the musical
Cats
over and over again. I have heard that
Cats
is a very long-running successful musical. If we are to believe the dictums we read in playwriting books, that one must have a clear protagonist and a clear conflict, what are we to make of the strange, uncanny success of
Cats
? If we were contemporary Aristotles, trying to make generalizations about the nature of drama from contemporary successful works, we would deduce a poetics from
Cats
that eschewed reversal, recognition, and the tragic flaw, in favor of cat makeup, bodysuits, and feline leg warmers. Aristotle made general deductions based on particulars, whereas the particular goodness of every play is particular, rather than a function of its general features. If one surveyed the six most successful plays of the last century, one would have a difficult time generalizing about what features a play ought to have.

Whatever one feels about
Cats
(see essay number 60 about whether there is an objective standard of taste), it derives its power from poetry and spectacle, and from the group mind or chorus on stage, rather than from backstories or protagonists or inciting incidents. And in so doing, it makes an end run around contemporary dramaturgical principles such as there must be a main character, and that character must want something.

One can imagine T. S. Eliot in the afterlife being punished for his sins, watching a DVD of
Cats
over and over again, projected onto some large cloud. Perhaps he would be moved to revise his dictum that he preferred to give pleasure to the one intelligent person in the audience who understood his intentions and in the afterlife become a man of the people. We cannot say with any certainty. We know only that he would be puzzled by the leg warmers.

65. Can you be avant-garde if you’re dead?; or, the strange case of e. e. cummings and Thornton Wilder

How is it that e. e. cummings and Thornton Wilder, who radically challenged form, were transformed by intellectual opinion into treacly sentimentalists for the masses? Is it because they died? Is it because people liked them? When formal newness becomes populist by sheer dint of its ability to communicate broadly in its new form, why is it prosecuted (and found guilty) after death? Will James Joyce’s
Ulysses
always and forever be avant-garde because only a certain kind of literary priesthood enjoys it? How to reclaim the dead and enjoyed-by-many and put them back in their proper place as radicals?

66. The American play as audition for other genres

When American playwrights have had some success in pleasing audiences, the next logical step is for them to write for other genres and disappear from the theater (into film, television, or the musical). When novelists have some success in pleasing audiences, the next logical step is for them to write another novel. When poets have some success in writing poems, they go on to write more poems. I have a fervent wish that audiences would rush the next Pulitzer Prize winner in drama and say, Madam. Sir. It is our fervent wish that you will write another one of those talking plays.

67. O’Neill and Picasso

The long trajectories of Picasso and O’Neill were the opposite; Picasso moved from the representational in his early work into the abstract, while O’Neill moved from early abstract experiments (
The Great God Brown
) to the representational at the end of his life (
Long Day’s Journey into Night
). Would it be true to say that many long-lived twentieth-century painters moved from the representational to the abstract and that many long-lived twentieth-century playwrights moved from the abstract to the representational? You are already thinking of exceptions—Beckett, Ionesco—who never wrote a family drama toward the ends of their lives, to be published after their deaths. So let me undo the generalization and ask instead: is it anything like the opposite when a painter moves from the representational to the abstract and a playwright moves from the abstract to the representational?

When one is faced with an unanswerable question, it is perhaps best to digress. I once wanted to be a portrait painter. I wanted to study the face in general and loved faces in particular. I wanted to commit to memory each line on a face, try to reproduce its exact beauty, and keep it. In the end, I was not skillful enough to make a life doing this. And I was suspicious of myself as a painter of pictures, because I was unable to paint
not
from life. The great painters, I felt, could paint from life but also from nothingness. If I’d lived in the nineteenth century, my inability to paint from nothingness would have presented no conundrum. Everything came from life. But now, life is perhaps suspect in painting.