June 30, 2013

A long line of mornings when I woke with sense of physical well-being is broken today. Feverish, monstrously loose in the bowels.

Excellent morning in the studio yesterday. I painted joyfully for hours, then left just as others were arriving. Typically I have a quarter of my day before the rest of the world awakes.

Drinks and a light supper with DJ at Magnolias, then over to see C’s play. It had been getting interesting reviews, the kind that hid more than they told, but what they told was that the subject matter of the play was righteous and that a first-time playwright is to be encouraged. Both those things are true, but what the reviews avoided saying (and why Asheville can never in the foreseeable future possess a truly sophisticated art scene) is that the play was awful on a dozen different levels, and the fact that it was both righteous and intelligent made it, curiously, worse. What the playwright intended was beyond her powers, and the part she had written for herself as narrator/Muse/sibyl was the worse calamity I have seen on stage in an age, long on self-congratulation and pointless wordplay, very short on sense, devoid of dramatic necessity, an intrusion and irritation every time it appeared. I’m not a great fan of the “development” process, but did this play have one, and if so with whom? People who hated the playwright and wanted to see her mortified? Even had the play been decently written, the flaw in its politics would be difficult to overcome. The time when a gay playwright can use the sorrows and trials of being gay as her sole subject is thirty years in the past. Yes, each person goes through it in her own way, but the differences between one such story and another may be far less to an onlooker than the writer supposes. What is unique when experienced is not necessarily so when observed. Art is not, finally, merely self-expression. The unmediated sorrows of one’s soul are for whispering over a late table with a good friend. Each gay artist may need to address this life incident before going on to other things, but only the lucky generation at the outset of the new consciousness could expect an audience to find it fully engaging. We in these latter days get it privately out of our systems and go on. We put it in a drawer and thank our lucky stars the wide world never saw it. The abstract struggle of gayness is no longer news. It was never a very good foundation for an entire work of art. The performances could not possibly be good, and weren’t, though you saw good performers struggling courageously against the material. There was one rather lovely scene between a transvestite and a phone sex worker. I wanted to tell C, “This is your play. Start here and explore. Drop the rest.” It was, one would think, the scene farthest from the playwright’s own experience, and thus not freighted with the weight of apologia that brought the rest to the ground.

Our waiter at Magnolias told us in some detail about the antiques store he’s preparing to open in Black Mountain as soon as he retires in so many weeks. There is a play.

Woke in sadness–as well as dyspepsia–for in a dream I had scheduled two obligations at the same time, and couldn’t think of a way to make it right, couldn’t decide whom I wanted to offend.  Leland was one of the people I was going to disappoint, and I was trying to make my excuses to him when I awoke.