August 11, 2014

Waking in the truly impressive quiet (in comparison to 46th Street) of my home. Maud has just now lain down on my feet, forgiving me for my absence. Before, she huddled far across the room, glaring. Flight home two hours late, but I suppose that a minimal inconvenience. Between JFK and Charlotte, an attendant calling herself “the Luggage Nazi” stood at the door berating and exiling those who came in with more than two pieces of carry-on. Necessary, I suppose, since luggage charges make everyone try to carry everything on, and the overheads fill before the last couple zones are even called. I sprung for first class, so, cruelly, I didn’t care. If you had three she made you leave the plane until you combined them or discarded one. She took no excuses. Like all purists, she made self-righteous mistakes. If a mother were carrying her children’s bags, she would be stopped and those bags had to be distributed to the babies to carry on, lest anyone thing someone was let on with more than the limit. A woman carrying the bag of her disabled friend was not even allowed to say that, as the attendant kept shouting “I know, I know, everyone’s special, but you have to leave the plane until you–“ The crippled woman finally staggered out of her seat to retrieve her bag. The Luggage Nazi was a most fiercely attentive hostess throughout the flight. A coronary has her in its sights.

Some things didn’t get said before I left the City. Watching Adam’s Twelfth Night was a joy to me for reasons outside the quality of the production. It was exactly the theater I want to make, and have made, and there it was, triumphant. It was affirmation. I have been right about theater, about art, the whole time and, rage and despair and futility notwithstanding, I have never left the path. I am that son in the bible who defies his father’s authority but does his father’s will. The play must be the best thing in the production. It must be so unassailably great that the cast says, “How can we possibly live up to this?” rather than, which is far more usual, “how can we make this mess live?” No new play I have seen on Broadway has really been worth the effort. Several I have seen off or off-off have. The professional stage is afraid of greatness, if frantically in love with familiarity. It all made me contemplate “professionalism,” so called. I have to think of a better name for this, but I’ll use “professionalism” now to indicate the luster that goes onto things when they have passed through the “process,” when they have been “developed,” when the show is “tight,” when everyone hits his mark with the correct angle of cheat toward the audience, the right warble in the right place on the high note, the brave smile, the actor’s posture, the shimmer-in the-eye of the Professional Stage. Is “professionalism” really what one must do to cover up the inadequacy of the material? Not one glimmer of “professionalism” in Twelfth Night: they had a tiger and they ran joyfully beside it.  “Professionalism” is part of what made Atomic even creepier in its failure (being so good and so bad at once), and what has made for my last dozen Broadway disappointments. I don’t want to hear myself praise sloppiness or bad preparation, for that makes crap too, but I want for the material to be up to the level of the actors doing it, and if it isn’t, ask them why they bother. A slob in a silk shirt is still a slob. (Broadway! You should stop dating slobs!) In production, I want the grip to be loosened a little, for that which dares accidents and mistakes allows visitation and inspiration. I want the word “holy” to replace “professional” as the thing a company aims for, and if that is harder, then it is harder, though I expect that in some ways it is easier, and consists of getting out of the way of your own best impulses. I’ve dwelt on actors, but producers and directors are the worse perpetrators of “professionalism,” and after them, playwrights, who (often rightly) imitate what we see. I am old and tired. If this is a challenge I am meant to take up in any degree exceeding what is already the case, the Almighty is going to need to intervene. More energy, more money, more tolerance for the glad-handing I know is so necessary but which I could never bring myself to do.  More insight into the souls of the, say, two students a decade who really hear what is being said.