September 25, 2022

Back to the theater last night, the room half empty on the show’s last night. The play was skillfully wrought, dedicated, honest, exactly as interesting as the Hallmark Channel TV program that its audience will watch next time instead of dragging itself to the theater. How to make the point to playwrights that honesty, unalloyed with other virtues, isn’t enough? That if, after years of workshopping and revision you finally capture that precious moment from your past, you have probably not created something anyone will really want to see. Your friends and family will sit there clapping wildly at the wrong places, and the cover of the play will never be opened again. Getting it right isn’t even the beginning. There must be discovery by the playwright or all will be inert. I used to tell my students that if you wrote the play/poem/story you meant to write, you have failed. I met the flashing-eyed, voluptuous playwright, and was grateful she didn’t ask anything substantive. “What’s wrong with my play?” Nothing. Nothing at all. Just that if this is the first play an individual has seen, he will never return to the theater again. 

I was reading over FR, chastizing myself that it isn’t better, and it goes on in two weeks. In my mind it’s flawed and pretentious. Amid the company it keeps, it’s a masterpiece. Somewhere in there is comfort.