We miss the missing. It’s a simple enough concept, I suppose—when someone has made an impact in or on our lives and then they’re gone, we long for them and what it was that made them special, all the little things about them that are now absent. There remains a hole in our minds and hearts where that person once was, and we spend a part of our lives remembering them and/or looking for someone or something to fill that void. I get that.
In the world of dramatic literature, however, it is often this character that is of great interest and fascination to us for a different reason, for the simple fact that we know so little about them but we want to know more. What was it about them that created such drama in the lives we watch play out in front of us, what did they look like, why aren’t they here now, etc.? In fact, these missing persons draw us in through their non-existence and limited available details in a way that they may not have had they been on stage and a part of the story at hand.
I’m speaking of an interesting little group here: people like King Laius and Vanya’s sister and Godot, as well as that absent son in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The less I know the more I want to know, if the author’s done it right. If Godot ever did show up he’d probably be a self-important windbag who would bore us to tears within ten minutes but by being the elusive character that he is, constantly promising to show himself and then denying us the pleasure (or sending a young boy in his place), he keeps us in a constant state of desire—not unlike our two waiting protagonists—and even when we declare we can’t go on we usually then decide we must go on, and so we do.
It’s a simple but hugely effective theatrical conceit, this idea of a main character that never materializes on stage and I suppose it’s the same idea that “faith” is built around in any of your organized religions—God is out there, he or she just hasn’t decided to fully reveal themselves quite yet. This is a plot device as ancient as the Old Testament itself and, in the right hands, we just keep coming back for more. In fact, the promise of a prophet—the son of God himself—keeps us reading through all the floods and locusts and endless paragraphs of who begat whom. In the end, he doesn’t show up until the sequel and then as quickly as you can turn some water into vino, he’s gone again (leaving equal parts amazement and disaster in his wake.) On paper, Jesus Christ is only around for a handful of pages but we haven’t stopped talking about him since. It’s quite a trick.
There’s a missing person at the heart of this play as well, a person we never meet but only hear about. I don’t know that I would like him if I met him but because I don’t, because he is only described and alluded to throughout, he compels me in a way he probably never would if he appeared on the page or in the theater. We never hear his name or even catch a glimpse of him but this “second year senior” hovers over In a Forest, Dark and Deep like a spectre nevertheless. The growing details of the man himself and the way he has interacted with one of the main characters beg my attention and therefore he is, for my money, the best kind of fictional person that I can render: one who is interesting. Not good, not bad, just someone who has done or said enough to keep me in my seat and leaning forward, asking that most basic of questions, “And?” That is my job, that is what I should be compelled to do as an author every time out. I need to make my audience want to know what happens next, to sit there together in the dark and wait to find out the next detail, the next twist of the plot, the next revelation of character. This is the contract I sign with them as either reader or audience member: that I will do my absolute best to take them on a journey, whether familiar or strange, by a new and surprising route that challenges and enchants and provokes. No one wants to take the same old path through the woods each time, otherwise there’s no sense of ever setting out on an adventure in the first place.
With this play, I’ve written once again about siblings in a dark place in the woods. An earlier work of mine, In a Dark Dark House, examined the lives of two brothers who slowly pick their way through the minefield of their emotional past; here it is a brother and sister who must negotiate the wreckage of their lives and try to find a ray of light in the darkness. They are a modern-day Hansel and Gretel, drawn to a spot that promises many dangers and secrets but also a kind of resting place where they will finally be able to force themselves and each other to tell the truth for once. If only this once.
And why siblings? I guess because there’s no family connection quite like it. Nearly equal footing in age and stature, yet the possibilities for difference are endless. It’s just plain fascinating how two people, so close in many ways can also be so different. For a writer, there’s gold in those hills and there’s nothing I like more than a good crawl through the deep, dark shafts of other people’s lives. It fun and thrilling and frightening and it’s also a great way to avoid reality. Reality or that other truly nasty space, the most dangerous of all our undiscovered countries: the truth.
That’s perhaps the scariest place of all for me, not just as a writer but as a person—the truth. I grew up in a house near the woods and as scary as those trees were, I felt much safer out in them than I did at my own dinner table. I grew up around a father who was essentially a missing person yet there he sat, staring at us. Day after day after day. My dad was handsome and mysterious and could be, by turns, terrifying or hilarious in almost equal measure. Truth was a currency that was traded like gold in our household, and I still keep my heart buried deep under a layer of jokes and irony and silence. The old man taught me well. But I also know what the sun feels like on your face, so warm and inviting, and I know how good it feels to free yourself of your past and the weight of deception. That’s why I write, I suppose; to entertain but to also be free, to give my audience a joy ride unlike any other while I scamper away from the wolves I hear in the darkness. Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m running toward the safety of the forest’s edge or deeper into its center. Most times, if I run fast and far enough, it doesn’t seem to matter—for now I’ll just keep running.
Neil LaBute