Brie and Ritz crackers

 

July 11, 2023

The Mark Taper Forum closes, the news announcer foretelling the death of “original” theater. Broadway is a Disney ride. New plays have roughly the same market as pamphlets on quantum physics. And I dedicated the middle of my productive years to writing play after play, the quality of which turns out to be, for the most part, irrelevant. S soldiers on brilliantly, gallantly, agonizingly; M soldiers on wearing motley and playing kazoos (yet soldiers on; that’s the main thing) but there are fifty new plays for every production slot. I might as well have become a priest of Isis if I so aspired to irrelevancy. Many venues that accept new work want new plays that have the same effect on audiences as the old ones. Or they solve the problem of selection by cleaving to the latest social issue: thus the dozen recent calls for Trans plays or plays by people “identifying” as thus and so. If only I were Polynesian or mixed race. . . Offerings at M have been, by and large, preposterous, but you can’t complain, because they are, at least, new. Should bad plays get an airing? The argument is “how else do they get good?” but in the meantime, a fraction of the disappointed and already tiny audience is sheared away. I’ve never been associated with a large and prospering company for more than a single production at a time, so I only guess how matters proceed day by day. This was a fault. I should have paid more, or different, dues. I remember distinctly the moment I chose not to be a Theater Major. All was grubby and chaotic in the theater at college. For every person doing his best there were four there to smoke weed and get drunk after rehearsal. Nobody cared about the script, in any case. My university was by levels of magnitude worse, a hive of dilettantes and ever-fearful mediocrities seeking, for the most part, to avoid blame. Not the students, who were charming: the faculty. When I sought collaboration, they looked for every motivation I might have except the making of new, sturdy theater, and turned and hid in their holes. Black Swan was a success artistically and not a failure financially, but we started anew each time, and it was not the best use of my energy even when I had more of it.  Why did I not go to New York and dive in? The easy answer is “I didn’t want to.” I thought that in some grand division of labor writing the play would be enough. I didn’t recognize that in every endeavor I attempted– poetry, fiction, theater, painting-- salesmanship is equal to craftsmanship. I don’t resent this; I just didn’t discover it in time. Why didn’t I go to New York? I wanted a garden. Flip, but true. In the time left I need to travel more, see more. Perspective gets hemmed in by these mountains. When I imagine the billion dollars falling from heaven with which I build my ideal theater, I, now, run up against the question of limited energy. Maybe when I was 30 it would have been OK, but the idea of hiring the right people and separating warring factions and hammering out schedules and making sure everybody’s creativity is honored and arguing that aesthetics are Platonic realities, daunts even an imaginary situation. Did I have fun writing these works? Yes. Is that enough? I’ll know at the end. 

Learning lines for my August appearance at M. As I depend on actors to play my parts, I must return the favor. I wonder if Yeats ever appeared on stage in a role? I don’t actually miss the stage, but neither am I dreading the next round of it. The play is not inept. Clever, actually, though you wonder if all the “I mean”’s and “like”s are an effort at contemporary speech patterns or solecism. Of course this is a festival of 10 minute pieces, the form which has all but swept other modes of theatrical expression away. 

Sent in my check for the banquet at our 55th high school reunion. Our ranks diminish. We will have to wear name tags to recognize one another’s ravaged visages. 

Discovered that I can work all day at the computer if I put sunglasses over my glasses to cut the glare. There must be a screen dimmer, but I can’t find it. 

In the larder are brie and Ritz crackers.