Essays

I would love to say something useful about my plays. Unfortunately, the only thing that really seems to connect them is the fact that “I” wrote them—and I’ve always had a very very hard time trying to define or understand the word “I” and the concept of the self. If the self is defined as the personality, then it seems relevant to say that the plays I’ve written don’t particularly seem to reflect the person I know myself to be (or think myself to be)—except perhaps insofar as I may have decided to rearrange myself to conform to them after the fact. But if I’m going to say something about how my plays came to have the particular qualities they have, where else can I begin but with some biographical hints?

I grew up in New York City, and as I suppose anyone can tell in two seconds if they meet me, I am what people call a “child of privilege.” This is the defining fact about me, and it always will be, and if I live to be two hundred years old, I’ll never be able to erase the traces of it. Like everyone else who comes from that particular tribe, the children of the privileged, I was brought up to believe in the central belief of the tribe: that there’s a certain (large) quantity of the world’s fruits that is the appropriate portion of the children of the privileged. But I came from a family that was a “liberal” family, so, rather confusingly, I was encouraged to feel that for every dollar I took from the world, I really ought (for some reason) to “give back” a penny, at least a penny’s worth of something. The unspoken and (in the case of my parents, certainly) un-thought belief of the liberal privileged group was that one was supposed to be ready to rob and murder in order to secure one’s appropriate portion, but as one rode off from the conquest one was always to remember to toss back to the victims a small offering, a small scrap torn off from what one had just taken.

Our family was privileged, but it was carefully explained to me that we were not rich, only “middle class,” and so, oddly, I would need to “work for my living” rather than just receiving it automatically—in other words, the little package that was the life I’d inevitably possess would be waiting for me in the baggage room with my name written on it, but, annoyingly, it wouldn’t be delivered to the house, I’d have to get into a taxi and go get it.

Despite this, I grew up lazy, and I’ve stayed lazy. I’ve always liked to eat ice cream and cake, and the line of least resistance for me has always been close to the border of sleep. When I was nine or ten, I kept an enormous mound of comic books on the floor of my bedroom, and my favorite thing was to burrow into my mound, find myself a comfortable position there, and in this wonderful swamp, which was also readable, I would reach a state that fell exactly midway between reading and napping.

As far as my connection to other people went, I was usually affectionate. I was usually fond of the people I met: the privileged. And I’m still fond of them. I know them well. It’s easy for me to see them not as others might see them, as a group of people who fundamentally are all the same, because as holders of privilege they all play fundamentally the same social role, but as they see themselves: as remarkably distinct individuals with different opinions, thoughts, and characteristics. I know very well that they suffer, I know that they’re lonely, they’re lost, they’re desperate, whatever.

I’ve always loved making things, shaping things. I’ve always loved colored pencils and puppets and imaginary landscapes. The experience of inventing people and places, thinking about which phrase best expresses a thought, is more than enough to fill a lifetime for me. But occasionally my absorption in these voluptuous pleasures is interrupted by what one might compare in some ways to the pain of the amputee’s severed limb—a weird memory of the people to whom I seem to have no current connections: the poor and the oppressed. Perhaps it was my father, who taught me to love art, who also in some way nourished these perverse “memories.” I remember once, when I was a ten or so, I was riding with him in a taxi and I drew his attention to an overweight, bizarre, rather miserable-looking boy whom we were passing in the street. I found the boy funny and was merrily laughing away at him when I turned around and was shocked to discover that my poor father had burst into tears. The sight of the boy hadn’t struck him as funny, apparently, and my response to the boy had also, apparently, not made him happy.

Well, I guess you can see that a young man can’t go too long without writing about his father. In any case, I will tell you about mine that he happened to be, of all things, an editor, a kind and beloved mentor to writers, and at the same time a highly respected judge of literature; and whenever my father was discussed, and it was really very often, it was always said that he had “high standards.” (I mean, other people said it; God knows he never would have, because it would have seemed to him horribly pompous, and because he would have found the metaphor ridiculous and incoherent—one pictures with difficulty someone measuring something somehow with some odd device while standing on a ladder.) Unfortunately, in contrast to my father, I never really comprehended the whole concept of measuring in the first place. If I listened to a piece of music, saw a film, or read a book—well, I seemed to go through it all from moment to moment, somehow. I was enlightened or confused, indifferent or thrilled, and certain things were offered to me that I needed, or didn’t, and then it was over, and I couldn’t really remember the piece of work as a whole, much less pass judgment on it. In a way I didn’t see the piece of work at all—I just lived inside it for a while or something. So when people said that the music or the book or the film was “good” or “bad,” I usually felt that I just didn’t know what they were talking about.

At the liberal schools to which my parents had sent me, judgment was not part of the daily routine. The schools proudly boasted that they gave no grades or marks, and so we ourselves were never judged or condemned; there was no “good” or “bad,” the point was just to do what interested you, and that was something I could understand well. All the same, my father, at home, gentle as he was, would sometimes say of some piece of writing that had crossed his desk that it “hadn’t worked out”; and yes, he even described certain people’s attempts as “mistakes.” And how was I supposed to deal with that? Well, I must say I didn’t like the sound of those comments at all. No, it made me feel quite uncomfortable to hear comments like that, particularly as I began to feel that I might someday become a writer myself. After all, it was clear enough even to me that, just as a dancer might fall down during a performance, or a pianist might hit a bunch of wrong notes in a difficult passage, well, there were certain things in the field of poetry, say, certain things that an ignorant apprentice might very well write, which an accomplished master would not write, and there were people who actually could tell the difference, and my father was one of them. I couldn’t simply dismiss the sorts of judgments my father passed. On the other hand, I honestly couldn’t face being subjected to them.

Which brings me to the question of how I got into writing for the theatre. Well, it was not just that theatre happened to be the only branch of literature that my father personally stayed entirely away from; it was more that I could easily sense in some half-conscious way—and in New York in the late ’60s, when I first started writing, it was particularly easy to sense this—I could sense that the whole field of theatre was really a strange sort of non-field, in which the whole business of “standards” just didn’t apply. Theatre was a kind of void, a blank, an undefined emptiness. Because, I mean, what is theatre, really?

Is theatre an “art form”? Is drama an “art”? Poetry is an art. Painting is an art. But can a play seriously be compared to a poem or a painting? Can you seriously claim that a play can be compared to a string quartet? Well, certain playwrights have actually believed that theatre is an artistic field: Maeterlinck, for example, whose works I always loved, created aesthetically satisfying self-contained worlds, entirely distinct from the world we live in. Robert Wilson created textless but formally beautiful compositions on stage, giving time a shape as a composer might.

Should a playwright be compared to a pastry chef in an expensive restaurant—one of those whose role it is to lighten the burden of an elite class by serving it agreeable and evanescent miniature delights? Or to a prostitute who soothes and comforts a client according to the client’s specific desires? Is a playwright like an orator in the marketplace rousing people to action, or a preacher offering a sermon in church, or a friend who speaks at a dinner table?

By way of comparison, one could look at the field of music and observe a somewhat different situation. The goal and intention of certain musical performances could, for example, actually be discerned, relatively speaking, and critical judgments therefore were, relatively speaking, possible to make. People could give their views, for example, on all sorts of singers in all sorts of categories—on classical singers and folk singers, rock singers and jazz singers—and a degree of consensus could even be reached, because critics and audiences shared with the artists an understanding of what some of the criteria were in each category. Within the different categories, different rules were applied, because each one was aiming at something different, and this was a situation that caused no confusion. Everyone knew that Elly Ameling couldn’t do what Billie Holiday did, but the point was, she could do something else. And everyone knew where the boundaries were. It was understood that a rock singer might scream, because it was appropriate to rock, while a folk singer might strive for a purity of tone that would be inappropriate to opera or to jazz. Particular music lovers might perhaps have been interested only in opera, but they wouldn’t have ridiculed Billie Holiday.

People did not go to concert halls to hear something called “singing.” The fact that human beings have the need to hear different sorts of singing, that the appetite for opera cannot be satisfied at a concert of folk music, was recognized in the musical world by the invention of categories. Different sorts of singing even took place in different buildings, with different critics in attendance. But in theatre, obviously, and most particularly in my country, there were no generally accepted categories of plays, there were only “plays.” People still had different sorts of appetites for plays, but they didn’t know how to find what they wanted. There was a high frustration level and no way to remedy it, as if restaurants had been forbidden by law from announcing the type of food they served, and spaghetti-seekers had no choice but to try every restaurant in town until they hit on one with an Italian chef. And so there was a kind of critical chaos or critical vacuum. Individual audience members and individual critics each expressed and asserted their individual drives and feelings, their incoherent longings, as they made their way from play to play, and what resulted was like a bizarre sort of imitation of criticism, in which any criteria at all could be applied to any play at all—a “dream play” in the tradition of Strindberg could be angrily denounced because it lacked the qualities of a Broadway musical, or Thornton Wilder could be excoriated because he didn’t write like Eugene O’Neill—and so no sort of consensus could ever be reached on anything, each “opinion” was canceled out by another, and no opinion could be taken seriously.

(Of course, if you’re actually interested to know all this, you can imagine that it was all, naturally, an unconscious process, and as is probably always the case with choices like this, my decision to get involved with “theatre” was heavily overdetermined, and among the factors were all the usual ones—inclinations, experiences, schools, teachers, for all I know genetic predispositions. From the inside it all felt simply like a matter of instinct: I’d always loved seeing plays and, as a boy, putting on shows of different kinds; when I was twenty-four, I wrote my first full-length, grown-up play, I didn’t know why; I found it very exciting, and I never stopped.)

And of course it all turned out to be awfully silly in a way, as one might have predicted. The plays I wrote were, after a few years, actually performed, and I felt very fortunate; but, to my surprise, whenever I ventured out to see one of my own plays, I was always seized by the very strong suspicion that three quarters of the audience were actually sitting there under some awful misapprehension, wondering when the bears on bicycles were going to appear. And they never appeared, and so it was all rather painful and depressing for everybody. In the rather bluntly named little universe of “non-profit” theatre in which I dwelled, people would sign up at different theatres a year in advance to see a “season” of plays, and then they would sign up year after year, and so it seemed to be always the same sad individuals wandering into my plays, again and again, hoping, hoping, hoping for something, then gradually falling into a familiar disappointment, their sadness growing heavier moment by moment, before it all somehow ended and they miserably walked away ... I wasn’t a sadist, so I didn’t enjoy this. And what kind of people, I’d wonder, would insist on going through something like that, night after night? Decades passed, and there they still were. The theatre-goers.

I had decided I wanted to write for the theatre, and that meant that the people who would ultimately hear what I had to say were the theatre-goers. And who were the theatre-goers? In my country they were a small group, altogether, because theatre in the United States has simply never caught on in the way it has in England or on the European continent, for example. Those enormous respectable crowds had never gathered in the United States, the way they had in so many European cities, to watch the plays of Ibsen or Racine. The habit simply had never been formed. For most people in the United States, the issue of theatre just didn’t arise. And as for those who, somehow, had gone so far as to see a play or two—well, the experience had left most of them rather nonplussed. Having been exposed extensively to the rival storytelling mediums of television and film, most of my fellow-countrymen found it frankly rather peculiar to pay extra money to attend an event in which the faces of the actors could barely be seen, and where you had to strain to hear what on earth they were saying (despite the fact that they never stopped shouting, even when standing right next to each other). Theatre obviously was embarrassing. It was embarrassing from the first moment, because the actors were trying so hard to fool you, but you never were fooled. You never believed what they seemed to be begging you to believe. Despite the heavy frock coats and the funny hats under which you imagined them sweating, despite the recorded sounds of horses’ hooves, sleighbells, and the cracking of the whip, when the actors walked off the stage, you never believed they were going to Kharkhov.

So the theatre-goers in the United States—the loyal followers of theatre, the ones who, despite everything, loved the theatre—the theatre-goers were an odd little circle, a funny old group. Not the sophisticates, one would have to say. Not people who listened to Hugo Wolf or George Crumb or Charlie Parker on their evenings off from the theatre. Not the aesthetes, with their well-worn copies of Kawabata and George Herbert. And, of course, not anyone who was poor or desperate or hungry or oppressed, because theatre is only for the middle class. (People frequently insist, and I suppose I believe it, that in their own times the plays of Shakespeare and Sophocles were part of the life of rich and poor alike, but times have changed, and we have to say that theatre today is very definitely not for everyone. Music is for everyone. Everyone, from the richest of the rich to the poorest of the poor, listens to music. But theatre is only for the middle class.) And in a way these sad wanderers, the lovers of theatre, doggedly attached to a form from the past, for all sorts of reasons unable to take pleasure in the loud, glittering forms of the present, were “my people,” to use that phrase that nationalists and tribalists sometimes employ—they were “my people” in that I too loved to sit in a theatre and watch actors act, to follow the story, to listen to the dialogue; I too loved the darkened auditorium, the moment of ecstasy before the play begins; I adored it all, every bit of it. I shared with the group an addiction, a taste, a fetish, a need. It was only in the matter of our preferred “content” that we sometimes parted company. Because I was only mildly drawn to the prewar archetype of bourgeois theatre—elegant aristocrats winking at each other in evening dress—and even less fascinated by the postwar type—animalistic louts roaring and bellowing like wounded beasts. Those worlds on stage didn’t really interest me that much. I mean, the aristocrats or the louts would have interested me a lot in real life, or, if I’d seen a documentary about them, I would have been utterly engrossed. It was the fantasies that didn’t mean very much to me. They were not my fantasies.

Now, if you write with the expectation that what you say will be heard and understood, then you and your audience are actually involved in a common endeavor, and while you’re writing, they’re sitting there beside you, helping you to know how best to reach them. And this help is a wonderful thing. If you’re writing to “make your living” as well, a further valuable discipline asserts itself, because the more successful you are in speaking to your audience directly and clearly, the nicer the life you’ll be able to lead. This is called the discipline of the market, and it can indeed drive people to accomplish things they couldn’t have accomplished without it.

Clearly it was an odd position. There was a certain ghostliness, one might very well say, about writing for people who probably wouldn’t be interested. And that sense of a flat landscape stretching out forever was heightened by the fact that, as a writer for the theatre, I was not joining an artistic community committed to any particular struggle or agenda. The cafés of the Impressionists and the bars of the Abstract Expressionists had no equivalents on the streets I traveled. I didn’t live in a world like Renaissance Florence, in which sculptors vied for the honor of putting their particular subtly different vision of a hero or a god in a public square, because as far as I could see there were no types or models toward which I ought to strive, no public squares, and, in a way, no public.

No one would reward me, and no one would punish me, if I followed the conventions of nineteenth-century theatre or rejected them, if I wrote in a more naturalistic style or in a more surrealistic style. In writing a play, should I draw my inspiration from George Balanchine’s ballets? Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries? The verses of James Merrill, Fra Angelico’s frescoes, the songs on the radio, the day’s newspaper, my own life? No one cared.