As I prepared last week for 3 days of work ahead of a reading of my first new play in 15 years, it occurred to me to ask myself a question a mentor of mine used to ask all the time (and still asks often): “What is your intention?” (Not so much related to the public reading of my play as to having written it at all.)
A similar question I ask others who’ve gone and written something is, “What was the initiating impulse?” Because I’m a pretty firm believer in the idea that how things begin shapes what they become: not many artists, couples or teams can beat the odds when it comes to working within the original architecture of any relational process: how things begin is the house and the house usually wins. To get a running start on understanding why I wrote this new play, THE TAILOR, I took a quick look back at a few of my other plays and, attempting to benefit from hindsight, asked why I wrote them, all this with the intention of defogging my creative glasses before I got to work.
I came to believe, doing that defogging, that I have historically written plays for five reasons. 1) To express (in an almost physical way) a four-dimensional sculpture of a process that ends in a unity as yet unarticulated, at least by me. 2) To practice new ways of being a person. 3) To make a mark on the wall I was confronted with as a boy reader-of-writing and watcher-of-plays — to add to the long conversation of human culture, get kind attention, get paid, and maybe make myself proud. 4) To do something with theatrical reality that interests me, that makes me smile or puzzle pleasantly, that is a tricky and evocative thing done with stagecraft I’d like to see. Finally, 5) to make the world a better place: to fill audiences with yearning they can take with them into their own lives, to provoke, with a pageant that demonstrates how new unities are possible in art, a yearning for new unities in their real lives.
Those five reasons for writing can be understood (by me, anyway) as
physical/spiritual
psychological/emotional
social/professional
aesthetic/analytical
ethical/physical
— in other words, what starts as a feeling in the body ends with a force that moves other bodies, or tries to, into more physically pleasing arrangements.
So since my intention was to figure out why I went and wrote THE TAILOR, I looked back at a few plays from the past to prime the self-critical pump.
MOLLY’S DELICIOUS: Working in the shadow of William Inge, I wrote this play about a wildly inspiring pregnant girl in 1965 and how she convinces two very different suitors to join her in the creation of a three-way partnership in order to fantasize about the possibility of a truly romantic polygamous love. I was inspired to begin the play by my experience of a remarkable woman, but as the play got written — and, as Paul Valery has brilliantly said, a writer is always correlating between the thing they intended to write and the thing they are actually writing — it turned out to be an opportunity to give voice to my own anima and resulted in the creation of a character I still super- love.
At one point in MOLLY’S DELICIOUS, Alison says to Alec, a shy mortician who’s shown up with a ring, “Alec, I have more hope and imagination in my little finger than the whole ugly world put together, do you know what that’s like?” He says, “No.” She says, “It’s really lonely!” Well, there it was! I was lonely in my marriage and I was inventing a world where I could be less lonely. But I did it in the nostalgic world of 1950’s kitchen-sink theater (although I moved the sink into an apple orchard, and who wouldn’t, if they could?). I expressed a countercultural theme in a conservative style. That plan appealed to me.
THE PAVILION: This play about a 38-year-old boy who goes to his high-school reunion hoping to reclaim the girl he dumped when she got pregnant was written against TALLEY’S FOLLY, a play by Lanford Wilson that I hated. What I hated about TALLEY’S FOLLY was this: while the play pretended to be about how Matt loved Sally, it was really about how much the playwright loved Matt, and I hated the way it wouldn’t cop to its own bullshit. The play was like a bad parent or a Russian prison doctor, pretending to pretend to care for you while letting you know all the time truth has no place here. So I set out to write a play where the main male character and the play were both in love with the same person: HER. But I had no story until I heard about a real relationship that had gone in such a way that a man showing up to woo a woman made sense — which is how TALLEY’S FOLLY works — and then I was off and running. It was terrible…until I hit upon the idea of having a Thornton Wilder-style narrator also play all the other people at the reunion and then the play expanded all at once like one of those origami projects that doesn’t become recognizably itself until you blow in it. My attack on TALLEY’S FOLLY, structured like a reunion, turned out to be about moving forward alone.
(Let’s stop and notice the progression from fantasizing about connection to making peace with loneliness. THE PAVILION ends with the line, “Of course my heart’s broken, but all in all I’m very happy because life’s been good.”)
ORANGE FLOWER WATER: This was another play that was conceived as an assault on pre-existing artifacts: all those 1970’s novels, movies, plays about divorce that never seemed to pay enough attention to the plight of the kids. What made the play interesting to me was how the set was just a bed and the four characters had to act their two-person scenes in front of the others. The play was thus, stylistically, a model of transparency. It was also written as a dress rehearsal for ending my first marriage: for me testing my own waters for how plausible hurting my son by leaving his mother would be. I used to explain to actors playing David (whose letter to his new baby, the result of an affair and initiating impulse of yet another flawed marriage, ends the play) — “You experience the beauty of your child, of her innocent life and its potential for good, as a judgment.” There’s only one character in OFW that I love and he’s the most abrasive, moral, most romantic member of the quartet: Brad.
There were other plays (RECENT TRAGIC EVENTS, LADY, GRACE, MISTAKES WERE MADE) and other reasons for having written them, but all my thinking about all these plays (and the way a certain line, during the reading of THE TAILOR last Saturday night, seemed to shine with a special light) led me to conclude that I started THE TAILOR — a play about a hit man and the tailor who makes his suits — in order to make peace, having finally achieved some sort of happiness in life, with having to die. The line that caught my attention (and that of a few others) was: “There’s something so awful about an old person who’s scared to die; it just makes the whole world seem impossible.” When I go into rehearsal for the play this year or the next, that idea will be at the forefront of my mind. Until a more fertile one comes along, anyway.
Despite all the professional challenges I face as a writer these days: being old and in the way, easily replaced by younger humans or machines made by very smart humans, I still find the process necessary. H.L. Mencken once said he didn’t want to be one of those people who didn’t know what they think until they see what they said and it used to hurt my feelings, because I am one of those people; but it doesn’t hurt my feelings any more. I lately image the work of writing as mining, as scraping word by word into unknown stone, drawing the dust and occasional nuggets to the surface, arranging them into patterns in time and space and then heating them into admittedly artificial gems.
I still write with a yearning for unity, a yearning to create new unities, to remind myself every day that if it can be done here, on the page, it may be possible to do it out there, as beautifully or more so, with others.