1. Now that I have you here
Now that I have you here, I have to figure out what this is going to be.
The question, of course, is how I have you here.
Picturing each of you opening this email is like a far less profound version of Adrienne Rich’s “Dedications” —
I know you are reading this sandwiched between your car insurance statement and an ad for a holiday sale, having chosen after a brief hesitation of the cursor which one to read first;
I know you are reading this having salvaged it from your Promotions tab, days after it was sent;
I know you are reading this after responding to a work email and before getting on a zoom call, scrolling with one hand while the other hand is sticky with snack;
I know you are reading this in the middle of a zoom call, camera off and someone droning in the background, listening with one ear for your agenda item to be called;
I know you are reading this in a small sliver of time you have to fill, seeking a small pleasure, in a day that has been perhaps lacking in pleasure, or filled with other small pleasures that have not satiated; I know you have skimmed this far and now, despite feeling mildly interested, you pause inexplicably in the middle of this sentence to toggle back to instagram and gaze briefly at one,
two,
three images before returning,
here,
to me.
I don’t say this with judgement. If anything, it’s autobiographical. I read almost all my emails in sandwiched moments, in a state of half attention, with the hum of infinity that is the internet buzzing behind my eyes. The mode here — here on the world wide web — is bopping. I am bopping around, and I am always on some level deciding whether to finish reading the thing I am reading or abandon it and move on to the next.
So it is quite interesting to find myself deciding to try and make, if not art, at least something thoughtful to be delivered via email. You have to understand, the medium I usually write for is a sensory deprivation chamber compared to the internet. Sure, it is difficult to get people to the theatre, but once you have them there, you really have them. Their options are to attend to what you’ve put on stage, or retreat into their own thoughts. That’s all. Getting them there is the ordeal, not keeping them.
It’s not just the possibility for distractions that that’s unfamiliar to me here. It’s also the realization that I am not making something that will unfold for us all the same temporally. For example, that hyperlink above. If you click it, will you do so upon reading the word “Dedications,” or after reading the following italicized text? And if you click it, will you see that what I’m referencing is another entire piece of writing, and feel imperceptibly overwhelmed, and skim half of it before returning to this window? Will you return to the hyperlink later and read its contents more slowly? Will you leave the hyperlinked page open in a separate tab for days, forgetting about it, and then read it two weeks from now?
[I briefly get lost here considering how I would stage a hyperlink. Most simply, I could depict someone beginning to engage with the second text, deciding against it, and the returning to it, curiosity renewed. Or what if the hyperlink has a mind of its own, and once opened, refuses to stop speaking? This competing energy captures something of the internet that option one leaves out. Or maybe — this one is the least literal, but I like it best — the two become a conversation. Here the story seems to be that the reader already knows the poem I’m referencing, so the reference can interact with the words on this page as they’re being read.]
So yes. I feel somewhat untethered here by my lack of control. But I also feel the ease of these lowered stakes. It’s a lot of pressure, having someone’s full attention; and after the ordeal of getting to the theatre, if the experience disappoints (which it often does, which so much art often does), you are less likely to return. In theatre, we get fewer chances. It is quite a luxury to know that even if this email disappoints, you will probably open the one I send next month.
One of the other affordances of this new format is the unlikely group I have been able to gather. It’s a pretty even split between fellow artists and people I know from other contexts. Several of you have never seen a play I’ve made; several others of you spend most of your waking hours thinking about theatre making. I feel a bit concerned about this, actually — as names of subscribers started rolling in I thought, have I advertised too broadly? Who is the main audience? I pushed this thought aside, reminding myself that the point was to do something fast and loose and maybe make a few bucks in the meantime, not carefully curate an audience.
But, as is usually the case with me, I continued to be concerned. And as is usually the case with making things, the more I thought about the potential problem the more I began to see it as the key to the whole thing. [Number one rule of writing: the thing you keep trying to solve in order to finish the play isn’t meant to be solved, it is the play. Reorient around it.] Here in one circle of chairs we have people I’ve made plays with and people whose plays intimidate me in their brilliance and people who think about plays roughly once a year, when they see me at a holiday gathering. We have people who work in other forms that they would never call theatre, and people who make theatre but would kind of like to get out of this dying form and make something else. I think I know what a newsletter series aimed at any one of these subsets would look like, but I don’t know what it looks like to write to you all at once. And why would I want to write something if I already know what it looks like?
Hang on, you say. Can we just pause, non-temporally, and check in about something? You’re using the word “theatre” a lot. Is this going to be all about theatre? Because I don’t know if I…
I mean, I’m a little curious about what you…
but I’m not all that interested in…
Yes. This is going to be all about theatre. But maybe we need to talk about what I mean by theatre.
[People often ask me if I write things other than plays. In fact, now that I am out of academia and back into tending bar for my living, I’ve been reminded that it doesn’t occur to a lot of people that plays are still being written. I’m becoming reacquainted with the pause that happens after I mention I’m a playwright, where the person searches for a clarifying question. In moments of insecurity, I follow up by saying that maybe someday I’ll write for tv (something I have no desire to do). This usually puts them at ease — ah yes! waiting for your big break in Hollywood! After recontextualizing theatre as a stepping stone to more modern forms of entertainment, they are back on their footing. They will now ask me about the Palace Theatre here in town, and whether I have tried to produce one of my plays there. What I know about the Palace Theatre is that a few years ago they produced a show called the Muttcracker, ie the Nutcracker with dogs, which I deeply regret not seeing.]
Sometimes artists speak grandly about art as world-building — writing into existence the world you want to see, etc, etc. I relate to that idea much more in terms of form than in terms of content. It is hard sometimes to feel that the world needs more stories. But more art that unfolds in the physical world, in shared time and space, and the unfolding itself is the experience? Yes. I do think the world needs more of that. So when I say theatre, all I really mean is that I am most driven by the desire to make containers for shared unfolding. More than language or story, this sits at the center of the creative impulse for me.
So what does that mean for this email thread, whose readers share neither time nor space? Why profess my dedication to art in the physical world in a digital, non-temporal container?
Sometimes making theatre, especially good theatre, where the original impulse for the play is still alive on stage after all the steps in between, is so materially difficult as to not feel worth it. I have no plans to give up on theatre, and I know theatre’s inconveniences are actually an embodiment of values I long for in other parts of my life. But the question is, how can those inconveniences become generative, rather than exhausting? I am interested in sidestepping theatre’s inconveniences here, in the digital sphere, and taking on an entirely different set of problems, as a way of testing the limits of my craft. What have I been stubbornly assuming about language, about gatherings, about what shape my work could take? What can we receive through ones and zeroes, and what can’t we?
Before I go, I am going to place Adrienne Rich’s poem here, and I am going to wonder whether, when you arrive at it, you will have already read it earlier in this email, or earlier in life, and whether, when placed here, you will read it again. It’s not that I’m hoping you will read it, once or even twice; time is limited and it is big inside the infinite hum and you have to choose. No, I am just curious: how is your body folded right now, and where are your hands and are they cold. Can you feel yourself breathing as you read this or have you forgotten at the moment about being a body. What are you doing now, as I type this, and what will I be doing when you read it. Will I be impatiently skimming someone else’s publication. Will I be staring out the window at the live oak tree. Will my head be itchy. Are we here together at the end of the page. Or is one of us already gone.
XIII (Dedications)
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a gray day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
As the underground train loses momentum and before
running up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something,
torn between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing
else left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
—Adrienne Rich