June 9, 2010

The hummingbirds cannily come when I am lost in the interior of the house, but the level of sugar water drops in the jar, so I know they have returned, if not quite forgiven.

Other people, who see an untamed jungle, which might look to them casual even to the point of neglect, do not realize how happy I am with my yard. Walking the walk through the backyard is like looking from a plane at the Brazilian rainforest, only the trees are rolling intricacies of violets and cobra lily, with irises and wood poppies and acanthus and the like hidden except for due season. Where the light breaks, the vegetation becomes tall and crowned with white. The front yard begins with the cloud of blue hydrangea, and spreads out over –well, all the flowers I have mentioned time and again, and some I have unaccountably passed over but love when I see them all the same. The Time of the Towers begins, with hollyhocks shooting up higher than I can reach with my outstretched arm, and the great mulleins gathering themselves to shoot even higher. I could pull weeds every day and not be caught up, and a month away instills a sense of despair in the regard, but also the untrained eye might not see that much difference between weeds and flowers not in flower, for I favor the big horsey ones which might be weeds anyway.

Gave up with the rewrite of Timothy Liberty, recognizing in it the first fault I had to overcome as a playwright, cropping up again like a fever caught from a corpse. Back in the day, I was amazed at how fast my first plays went. They were quick, easy, and pretty good, and won prizes the first time out. But what I recognized almost at once was that I was writing that kind of absurdist play whose full weight rests on the wise line, the bright-edged non-or-semi-sequitur. One can write wise lines all day, and think oneself a success, so long as the question of meaning never arises. TL has meaning, but you have to wade through a lot of gratuitous wit to get to it. Sea’s Edge has meaning, but you have to know The Tempest, to which it is a wise-ass sophomoric commentary, lyrical and self-protective. Smart line suggests smart line, allusion suggests allusion, and soon you have a smart play that can’t move anyone very much, except to a kind of admiration. My students–the best of them–find this mode fast. It delivers a kind of success very quickly, producing something stageworthy and engaging, and which showcases their late-won ease with the ironies of the world. It’s hard to talk them out of it because it’s so good. You say, “It’s all wit and no heart,” and they wonder if you mean that as a negative criticism or not. And they have before them the awful example of Beckett, who at the very first raised free-floating irony and rapier non-sequitur to a level so high they almost sound like drama. That Beckett’s plays aren’t about anything is a hard conclusion to accept, because they are so damn good. Beckett gets a seat on Olympus by being so cagey one is never sure whether he’s a fraud or a prophet so burdened with prophesy he can’t get the full sentence out. In the midst of playing Estragon, I realized it was the first, but the work of the master forger is still a masterwork, so one keeps silent. I aspired to that sort of skill through maybe three plays. Then I wrote worse for a while in order to write better, for the exposed heart is always harder than mockery, which, now that I think of it, is the easiest thing in the world. Now I develop subterfuges to shorten the way for my students, to make them see they really don’t want to be, out of the panoply of choices before an artist, clever.

Most of the original plays one sees hereabouts are clever. The ones which are not clever are generally bad, though the minds of the playwrights who wrote them are just as good as, or better than, the wiseacres’. This is the dilemma. Take the low road and you get a kind of result very fast, a result tailored to the variety show and No-Shame stage, where people laugh and say how witty you are and in five minutes it is gone. Take the high road and– well, take the high road in any case. It’s a way to open yourself to (and sometimes to deserve) mockery, but it is also the only way to excellence.