Gwydion Suilebhan

Let me start by saying that I have nothing against National Playwriting Month. I think it’s a fine endeavor, and if it inspires people to be more creative, that’s fantastic.

For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, this is the deal: over the course of the month of November, you draft a new play, start to finish, in the virtual company of other playwrights who are ostensibly doing the same thing. Sounds nice, no? I’d almost be willing to join in myself, except for one little thing:

I’ve never in my entire life written an entire draft in just one month, and I probably never will.

The closest I’ve come, in fact, was the first draft of LET X, which I wrote in six weeks. It came out of me lightning-quick, which is probably the only way I could have scripted such a tightly-woven narrative; if I’d stopped to think about what I was doing, I’d probably have suffered from analysis paralysis and never written the thing at all. Still: six weeks. Not a month, but a month and a half, and it came at a point in my life during which I was looking for reasons to avoid being at home and sequester myself at the coffee shop I wrote in. I could never do the same thing now: not with a wife and family who capture my attention so readily and happily.

Let’s break down the challenge, shall we? 30 days of writing. At three pages a day, you’d end up with a solid 90-page script in a month. But no veteran playwright works every day, right? I know I don’t; I take weekends off. (Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I take two days off a week, and sometimes those days are Saturday and Sunday.) That leaves me with (realistically) 20 or so days in the month during which to write. To get to a 90-page script during the month of November, then, I would need to produce 4.5 pages a day.

4.5 pages a day? In any given month, I might get one or two days that productive, period — if I’m lucky. There are also dry stretches during which I never get more than a page or two at most in any given day. And I’m somebody who’s incredibly disciplined. I write all the time, almost every day. I’m at 26 pages in the play I’m currently working on. I could start on page 27 tomorrow and I still wouldn’t finish by the end of November.

So… the task seems impossible to me. I must also admit that it seems unlikely to produce good work as well.

I once knew a playwright who told me she wrote an entire full-length play in a single weekend. My immediate response, which I did not share, is that it had to be crap: nothing good gets written that quickly. While my position on this matter might be a bit more nuanced now — I’m certain there are playwrights of quality who draft more quickly than I do — I remain certain that hyper-speed is not the right pace at which to create a well-honed script.

My former non-fiction professor Joseph Epstein once told me that if I wrote 250 words a day, by the end of a year I’d have a draft of a book. 250 words is approximately two paragraphs, maybe three; it’s one page of writing. That’s the most, he suggested — and I completely concur — that anyone can expect to produce and still be adhering to standards of quality. He was speaking about non-fiction, of course, but I believe the same principle applies to drama. For my mind, I’d set the goal at two pages of dialogue per day… one of which is likely, in the fullness of time, to be cut. At that pace, three months for a first draft makes a great deal more sense.

So it’s a bit misleading to think that at the end of November, one might have a polished piece, and I don’t want young playwrights to assume it’s possible. To be fair, that’s not what the folks holding the event are claiming. They tweeted as much to me the day the event started. They understand the need to refine the first draft for some time after the month is over…

… which makes me wonder why they don’t just plan, say, a six-month event instead? Or better yet, a yearlong event! A month to research, three months to draft, three months to revise, a month to let it go and forget it, a week to hold a reading, two more months to revise, a week-long workshop and reading, a few weeks of vacation here and there, and three weeks to recover at the end of the year. That would be an event that would make sense to me — an event that would resemble the pace I typically keep, and that I think young writers should be encouraged to keep as well.

Having said all that, I don’t want to just be the grumpy Gus I almost certainly sound like. I really am happy for anyone with the focus and stamina to knock out a draft of a play in a month. Go get ‘em, folks. The world absolutely needs more stories, not fewer — so go make ‘em!

I’ve titled this post Thinking About… Annie Baker to keep it consistent with the rest of my Tuesday meditations on artists who have inspired me, but it isn’t Annie Baker’s entire body of work I’ve been wrestling with: it’s CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION. The production in DC — which featured my unendingly gifted friend Jennifer Mendenhall — just closed, or I’d insist you go see it; if it’s playing wherever you live, don’t miss the opportunity. I can’t stop thinking about this play. I can’t seem to figure it out.

At first glance, it’s a rather humble story: five somewhat ordinary lives intersecting over the course of a five-week acting class. The story was so low-key, in fact, that I almost dismissed it outright as a slight venture, overly reliant on meta-theatricality. (A play about acting? Really?) To have done so, however, would have been a grave error. This play is only small in stature in the way that, say, Willa Cather’s work is small in stature: it concerns itself with real, simple, vital human lives, rather than grandiose ideas.

Real, simple, vital human lives: lives bound together in a circle; lives undergoing both minor and momentous transformations; lives in which we see ourselves as if in a mirror. What might seem humble, in other words, becomes essential rather quickly.

But how does Annie Baker do it? How does the play actually function? I’ve been hearing the term “new naturalism” applied to her work, but what does that really mean?

As it happens, a few days after I saw CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION I attended the opening of an excellent production of THE ODD COUPLE. (It’s at Theater J, folks in DC, and a genuinely stellar cast does Simon’s work proud.) Now… when you think of naturalism, new or otherwise, a play like THE ODD COUPLE is probably the first thing that comes to mind. I can assure you, however, that Simon’s play bears only a shallow resemblance to Baker’s.

Where THE ODD COUPLE moves at a rapid clip, one line nipping at the heels of another, CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION is riddled with silences. Annie Baker, I understand, is rather rigid with regard to the lengths of the pauses in her work. The question of whether she’s “directing on the page” I will leave to others; to my mind, what she’s doing is ensuring that audiences have time to settle into her story — to feel each line respond to (rather than simply follow) the one that came before it.

Where THE ODD COUPLE consists entirely of a string of high-pitched moments, each more important than the next, CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION looks a great deal more like… well, like any old Thursday, at least most of the time. It isn’t until the last few scenes (of which there are dozens, by comparison to Simon’s small handful) that the stakes get raised significantly, and even then it only happens in small increments. In that way, I think, CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION is just like life — it’s even more naturalistic, in other words, than what we think of as naturalism.

Oddly, though, there’s a way in which the naturalism of CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION becomes thoroughly symbolic, too. The play’s title is aptly chosen; the story is full of symbolic circles, for example, from a hula hoop to a ring of acting students, not to mention one giant mirror reflecting the audience back upon itself. (I’m assuming the mirror is scripted, not a choice made by the scenic designer of the production I saw.) It’s almost as if by narrowing her focus so minutely, Annie Baker has literally discovered the DNA inside her story. It might even be safe to say that the basic building blocks of which her play is composed — circles, a mirror, and transformations — are the same chromosomes one might find if one trained a microscope on any other play. She’s the dramatic equivalent, almost, of Watson and Crick.

What I can’t figure out, though, is whether what she’s done is just a gimmick. If she does it again, will her work start seem like an imitation of itself? Will the trick get old? Or is this more than a gimmick; is it, instead, a revolution? Has she invented a new genre, of sorts, one that will prove to be especially appropriate to the dramatic demands of the modern age? This, I believe, only time will tell.

About eight years ago, I wrote a 10-minute comedy called RED STUFF that featured two seemingly silly characters named Buggy and Tyler: college friends who, having lost touch, have an unexpected and awkward reunion in a doctor’s office waiting room. The play was produced in DC, where it won a little award, and again (somewhat to my surprise) in Boston. I had a ton of fun with the two of them… but that, I thought, was that.

Some years later, as I was writing my play ABSTRACT NUDE, I had a sudden urge: I needed to bring Buggy back. Before I knew it, there he was, firmly establishing himself in the story… and, in the fullness of time, bringing his buddy Tyler back with him. Their relationship deepened as I worked on the play, but it always stayed funny. In fact, I think their one-on-one scene in that play may be the funniest thing I’ve ever written, if I may be so bold.

And that, I thought, was really that… until I was asked to write a short comedy for a last-minute reading at the Kennedy Center’s Page-to-Stage Festival. What else was I supposed to do under duress? I brought them right back again for a play called CORN. I found I could hear their voices — and write lines for them — instantly and with great ease. The play was only somewhat successful — if I’d had more time, who knows? — but I really liked spending time with them again. They felt like friends, or if not friends, exactly, then welcoming and familiar personalities. People who know my work started to talk about them as a modern Odd Couple. (Buggy is a scat- and pornography-obsessed Oscar with attention deficit disorder and Tyler is a barely-closeted Felix.) Give how much I admire Neil Simon, the comparison made me happy.

And now, amazingly, I find myself in the odd position of having recently brought the boys right back for yet another short play: this time, they meet at a funeral home. (Those guys!) It was tremendous, silly fun to take them there, and I look forward to hearing the play read not long from now. I only wish I could hear it in the voices of my definitive Buggy and Tyler, but both of those actors have moved a good ways away from DC.

Given all the work I’ve done, I’m seriously considering stringing all the scenes together, writing four more, and making some kind of evening out of them. I know it would at least be hysterical; my creative challenge would be to also make it matter somehow.

Am I the only playwright who does this? Have you ever brought characters from one play into another… and another… and another?

Yup: I have to do it again.

– elevation 14,256 feet

Two hundred years ago,
when only natives
knew of the proper path
(which still survives)
to where the difficult ground
quickens one’s breath;

from where, above the woods,
one can out-climb the clouds
or kick down heavy boulders
if one so chooses;
where the land begins to grow
more dangerous as it rises

(like God, or perhaps
like truth); and where in winter
an inhuman depth of snow
erases the world:
two centuries ago
it defied the settlers’ maps.

At first, in search of gold,
prospectors hired guides,
but the guides abandoned
the witless whites
when it grew too cold,
and none was ever found.

Once settled, some surmounted
the Collegiate Range
(by which it is surrounded)
simply for some strange
pleasure, but they were daunted
when, from every angle,

nothing was visible.
Though the air was thin
and water scarce
their minds had not grown dim
nor their eyes weak.
It was Quandary Peak.

Today it still escapes
every casual glance,
its perpetual snow cap
tripling the summer sun’s
brilliance, perpetual rains
blurring its edges.

All of its aspects conspire
to lower the eyes –
precarious rocky ledges,
downshining rays
of light that burn like fire
without the heat,

and native burial stones
that hinder the feet
each with one name engraved.
It is false summit heaped
upon false summit
and it must not be believed,

for in two hundred years more
its spell will not be ended,
nor this truth hid:
Quandary should be knelt before,
never ascended.
I know. I did.

Several weeks ago in the 2amt Twitter stream, Bries Vannon of The Nine asked the following question of playwrights:

“Would you be content if each of your plays had a worldwide lifespan of two to four productions?”

My immediate and enthusiastic answer was yes. I’m of the considered opinion that America would be better off if we produced and watched more new plays, and if plays were made for more specific and local audiences.  The only way this could happen would be if plays were written to be performed no more than a small handful of times.

Actually, what I said exactly what this: “I feel Buddhist about it. Plays should be flowers: they should bloom, beautify the world, and die.”

Two retorts to my perhaps overly clever metaphor caught my eye.  First, Monica Reida suggested that if I was really Buddhist about it, I’d expect plays to be reincarnated, wouldn’t I? Smart question, but no, I don’t think so. What I expect is for memes — the genetic stuff of which plays are made — to be reincarnated, in the same way that genetic information isn’t lost when a person who has children dies.

Next, Travis Bedard suggested that no matter what, we’d still end up with perennials. He might be right at that, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it, or that I think such an inevitability is desirable. Plays that get programmed over and over again are sometimes speaking to universally-important questions across the country, questions we’re all considering in the zeitgeist; chestnuts, however, get programmed and re-programmed for what largely seem to me to be nostalgic and sentimental reasons, and we’d be better off without most of them.

My concern is the urge to very quickly deify a particular story; that sort of thinking has gotten us into great trouble throughout history, time and time again. A culture of new stories appearing all the time would prevent that from happening, or at least make it very, very difficult.

Some objected that setting out to write plays that will be produced a mere handful of times is a very different thing than writing for posterity. Frankly, I think writing for posterity is a rather shallow ambition, and I would be embarrassed to claim it for myself.  Superficiality aside, it’s also probably a fruitless endeavor: in time, the grave of obscurity will even close over Shakespeare himself, I am sure.

Since that’s the case, let’s write for the here and now, for the short-but-bright lifespan of a few years, and not worry about the future. Yes?

I don’t want to make too big a deal about this, but I find it rather perplexing that anyone should still seriously give weight to the prohibition against saying Macbeth in a theater.

Surely we’re all rational and reasonable enough to understand there’s no actual curse… that there’s no cause-and-effect relationship between uttering those syllables and an ill fate befalling a production.

Some have suggested that it’s simply a harmless tradition: fun, in a way, and nothing more than that. Perhaps, and if so… fine, I guess.

To me, however, it seems rather silly. After all, theater has genuine transformational psychological power for practitioners and audiences alike… and to reduce that power to a simple curse seems to diminish it unnecessarily.

The promulgating of a curse, furthermore, puts us at risk of alienating scientifically- and rationally-minded audiences, too, who would be justified in taking us less seriously if we went on about it too much.

Now… I have no interest in insulting anyone, so I don’t go around saying Macbeth just to piss people off… but I just don’t have the mental filter that would keep me from saying Macbeth if the play came up naturally in conversation. The word would come rolling out of my mouth long before I ever thought it might be bothersome.

So if I say Macbeth in your presence, and we’re standing in a theater… forgive me. I’m not going to turn around three times reciting a curse word, leave, and ask permission to come back, but I also don’t mean to raise your hackles. I just can’t really understand why they get raised in the first place, and it never occurs to me that they do.

Given that many of you reading this are probably theater practitioners, I’m guessing the odds are at least slightly low that you’ve never heard of Romare Bearden. A quick primer: a gifted artist and humanist of the Harlem Renaissance, Bearden was diversely talented, though primarily known for his collages, one of which I’ve shared here. I have always been drawn to his work, emotionally and intellectually. The stories told by his collages enchant me. The faces embedded in them speak to me. The symbols make me feel thoughtful and curious.

Lately, however, I’ve been thinking about them in a new way: specifically, I’ve been thinking about the fact that while recognizable as images, his collages do nothing to hide the simple fact of the artifice required to make them. It’s not the least bit hard to imagine Bearden’s hands sifting through scraps, assembling them this way and that, trimming them, composing an image. The human presence of the artist is right there. We are aware at all times, when viewing a Bearden collage, that we are looking at a made thing.

I would like theater to be more like this. So often, when awaiting the first lines of a play, I find myself admiring the verisimilitude of the set… only to become overly conscious, at some inopportune moment later during the action — say, when the tap on a sink clearly isn’t producing water — that the whole thing’s a sham. How superior for the set to have been simply roughed-in, so that I didn’t have any illusions to lose — so that, in fact, I would have to participate in the creation of the play by imagining the details for myself! (How much money might we save, too, for use on actors’ salaries or to lower ticket prices?) In the same vein, consider performances: under-acting always strikes me as vastly more effective than its opposite. Just say the lines, loud and clear enough that I can hear them. I will supply whatever emotion I might find missing in them, if any.

The other thing I’ve always loved about Bearden’s collages is the simplicity of his materials. The scraps with which he assembles his collages are clearly carefully chosen, of course, but they come from everyday sources. These aren’t exotic materials he’s used: bits of wallpaper, newspaper photos, posters, fabric, and even foil. The implication is this: we all have that stuff of art-making sitting at our fingertips, and we can (with the thoughtful application of artistry and genius) lift them up into profundity. We are surrounded by the elements of art.

Again, I want theater to be like this. I want it to make me go running out of the house when the show’s over, inspired to take the stuff of my life and create with it. I want it to fill me with constructive energy, to infuse my surroundings with a sense of possibility. Instead, when I see a well-made show, with everything polished and fit properly, I find myself… deflated. It’s all too nice, too perfect. Pretty to look at, but ultimately lifeless.

Bearden’s work, by contrast, is full of life: character, suffering, agony, narrative, rapture, redemption, heat, movement, music, and so much more. It’s irrepressible and honest and will not quit. For that I really love it.

My dear friend Kate Lovelady — the leader of the largest Ethical Society in the country, which happens to be in St. Louis — visited Maura and I this weekend.  During her visit, she let me know that a podcast of a talk I gave there in June was now online. Given the talk about theater and religion of late, I thought I’d share. Though the core narrative thrust of the talk is the criteria I propose to rely on when choosing reading material with Porter, the real subject matter is the suspension of disbelief.

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.

– by Robert Frost, selected because last weekend’s poem made me think of this one

Read the full poem

Okay: I’m a bit nervous about this, but it’s time for me to weigh in on all the commentary I’ve been seeing about the connections between theater and religion. I know these are dangerous waters, but they’re important to me.

In the main, folks seem to be eager to find ways to connect the two institutions. It’s obvious that there are clear points of similarity between theater and religion; others have written about them in great depth, and I neither can nor want to ignore or disparage them, because they’re real. What’s less clear to me are people’s motivations for making the connection. They seem to have generally positive associations with religion, and as such the comparisons they make are made as compliments. My sense is that they intend the comparison to — in some ways — legitimize theater, if you will. If performances are sacred rituals, after all, that makes them… what, special? Beyond criticism? Valuable? I’m not sure.

As a secular humanist playwright — see that little box over there at the top right? — I’m naturally more than a little bit uncomfortable with the comparison, even if (as I’ve just said) I can see where it comes from. Where others see similarities between theater and religion, I see clear and important differences; where others would like theater to be practiced as a kind of sacred enterprise, I prefer to see it as a secular mode of investigation into the human condition — a clear alternative to what gets offered in (many, but by no means all) churches and synagogues and mosques.

I think it’s probably rather straightforward: whether a person likes or loathes the comparisons between theater and religion seems to hinge, unsurprisingly, on how that person feels about religion. I know I’m not alone among theater practitioners in not feeling so great about things religious… but I’ve never seen anyone take a whack at elucidating the differences, rather than the similarities, between the two institutions. I’d like to do that now.

Before I do, however, I want to do a small bit of scene-setting.

Unlike many other non-believers, I refuse to lump all religious adherents into one ugly negative category. To do so would be to do disservice to my fellow human beings; it would also quite thoroughly undermine my argument. Instead, I will say that I believe there are three predominant modes of religious belief that deserve to be teased apart before we continue.

First, there’s what I call the Fundamentalist Mode, in which the words of sacred texts are interpreted literally and belief is dogmatic and unquestioning. Second, there’s what I call the Moderate Mode, in which the words of sacred texts are interpreted metaphorically and belief is flexible and interpretable. Third, there’s what I call the Spiritual Mode, in which practitioners read and consider multiple sacred texts and ask a great many questions about belief. Quibble, if you will, with my modes — but they’re the modes I’m using as I continue here.

So: my contention is that when most people make the comparison between theater and religion, they have in mind the Spiritual Mode, or perhaps the Moderate Mode. When I see those comparisons, however, I think Fundamentalist Mode all the way… and to my mind theater and the Fundamentalist Mode of religion could not be any more different.

In the Fundamentalist Mode, rituals are performed again and again in specific and detailed ways; that’s what you expect when you go to a church, mosque, or synagogue. In theater, the ritual of performance is slightly different every night, and audiences aren’t expected to see the same play over and over again.

The aim of a great deal of Fundamentalist Mode ritual is to cement postures of belief and obedience in the minds and hearts of believers. The aims of theater are manifold, but cementing obedience is not typically among them. (It’s not why I make theater, anyway.)

Fundamentalist Mode ritual is always in service to a single set of stories taken from a sacred text or set of texts — books or scrolls that are supposed to proscribe morality and behavior.  Theater is about creating new texts and contributing them to the cultural conversation about the world in which we live and how to live and behave morally — stories that are generally inquisitive rather than proscriptive.

Along these lines, Fundamentalist Mode texts are meant to be recited word-for-word as written and interpreted as literally as possible. Theatrical texts are typically meant to be interpreted in any number of ways — not only literally, but also metaphorically, psychologically, symbolically, politically, and so on — and they change, too, throughout the rehearsal process.

The Fundamentalist Mode is focused on dogmatic belief. Theater is the opposite of dogma.

These strike me as very important differences between theater and Fundamentalist Mode religion… the adherents of which, after all, represent approximately 25-40% of the population of the United States, depending on which survey data you believe (versus about 15% of us who are primarily non-believers). I assume they help you understand why I might find commentary noting how theater is just like religion a bit… problematic.

See, when you’re making those comparisons, they work two ways.  It’s one thing, after all, to say that religion should be more like theater: questioning and open and exploratory. That I love. It’s another entirely to say that theater, in turn, should be more deified and religious: by doing so, you open it up to those Fundamentalist Mode impulses that could serve to destroy it. If the Fundamentalist Mode ever got its hands around the neck of theater, after all, we’d have nothing but (for example) the passion play, over and over again.

And that’s why I prefer to pay attention to the ways in which theater and religion are different, rather than similar. I sincerely believe theater is, at its core, a secular practice: in conversation with religion, yes, since religion is part of our culture, but not belonging to it.

Those of you who consider yourselves both theater practitioners AND believers… please know that I’ve tried very hard not to offend in this post, even if I haven’t succeeded. I understand very clearly that there’s a broad middle of the religious spectrum — the 45-60% I didn’t mention above — and that you’re probably somewhere smack dab in that group. I don’t lump you in with your more rigid counterparts; I understand that you have nothing against secular humanism, and that we share the same values in many ways, and that (for the most part) we all like a great variety of of stories, even if you give one particular set of them more weight than I do.

What I want to ask of you, though, is this: Do your identities ever come into conflict? If so, how do you resolve them? Do you see why I might be concerned about the theater-and-religion comparisons? Do you share any of my concerns, or perhaps sympathize with them? I’d like to know.