from the field

August 3:

I have the instinct to say I am reporting from the field, since I spend so much time thinking/talking about theater and this week I am doing theater, in New York no less, the place where the only other people I know are people who have also built their lives around theater, the place where, when I’m here, I spend all my free time when not making my own theater seeing other people’s theater. So in that use of the word, yes, I am reporting from the field, and tomorrow I’ll fly home to where I’m quite often in a literal field, observing the progress of Rory’s peanuts or helping with my pet project, the bindweed, which recently began flowering to try and seduce me into saving it but which I will continue to unwind from the corn and sunflowers. I am reporting from this precipice between worlds with the unusually sharp sense that my readership here, like my life, is split between these two fields, and the parts of my life that require explanation or translation are mirror opposites, depending on which field I’m standing in.

My assignment this week (if we are to continue with this reporting metaphor) has been to present a short play at the Concord Theatricals Off-Off Broadway festival, a festival of 30 plays which were chosen, as they flatteringly remind us at every juncture, from roughly 750 submissions. The festival is also a competition; the winning six will be published in their annual anthology. The play I submitted is one I wrote more than five years ago, since I’m no longer really in the business of writing short plays. (Unlike short stories, which remain a form of interest to many mature writers, short plays tend to be something you write in school or in developing writer’s groups and not much after.) I submitted this play because I’ve had it used multiple times by drama teachers for acting or directing classes, which is who I imagine primarily buy and use these anthologies like the one Concord Theatricals will be publishing. The festival just finished last night; I didn’t win.

I didn’t think I cared so much about the festival — it’s all very capital-p Professional in an earnest but also performative (?) way. (See embossed napkin above, and insert a week’s worth of jokes about what else this money could have been spent on, from a room full of writers paying their actors out of their own pockets.) I didn’t care that much and then somehow by the end of the week I was crushed to not win, crushed, I guess, for the obvious reasons — that opportunities are few and far between, that I wanted to go home having something to show for myself — but crushed in a way that also seems to issue directly from the joy and relief I’ve felt at being here this week. What a relief, it turns out, to be back in a place where your work makes sense, where the context for it exists. I’m not sure I knew quite how isolated I’ve been feeling in my work, my lifestyle, my goals.

Since living here briefly during grad school, I’ve become used to certain patterns in my trips back to New York. Conversations circling geography, with friends who are still choosing New York, wholly or ambivalently. A tension in myself, scanning the streets for a shadow Addie, the one who stayed in New York, wondering what she would be doing by now, hoping perversely that she’s broke and miserable. The relief and joy that have visited me this week seem to be available in part because I’m more settled in my decision not to live here. I am not, on some low level, entertaining the “if, then” conversation — if this feels good enough, then should I reconsider — and as so often happens with decisions, when not standing at the tension of the crossroads, so much more feeling is available. I feel it, the loss of everything I’m giving up not being here, and the relief of arriving and slipping back into the stream, and the sharp desire to win a thing, even this random competition, as a way to be told, yes, you still belong here, at least a little bit.

I saw a lot of theater this week and a lot of it was, ironically, set in the midwest. Strange, sitting in these theaters with my relief, thinking about the fascination with elsewhere. Thinking about the writers being from these places. Wondering whether these pieces are being programmed in the summer, in tourist season, to appeal to audiences coming from outside the city.

The last piece I saw was exactly the opposite — situated so fully inside its context of New York experimental theater that it almost shrugged at the idea of being a play. The actors gestured at their tasks — throwing a stick, climbing a cemetery fence — as if to say, “You get it, it’s a play, we don’t really have to do the whole acting thing do we?” Language was the vehicle we were all riding on, so the physical world of the play needed to be loose-limbed, almost sloppy. It needed to keep shifting with the language’s kaleidoscope, click, click, click.

Often, in the elsewhere where I live, I find myself trying to draw the map, to sketch out the breadth of what theater can be, in order to have a conversation about it. No no, I say, that thing you’re pointing to and calling theater is just a small corner of the map, just a city block, it extends — let me try to explain — let me try to draw in at least a few other neighborhoods…

And so, here, the relief: not that any of the plays I saw this week were so perfect or changed my life, but simply that they exist here all at once, and are understood in relation to each other as undertaking different projects inside a broader field. That I don’t have to draw the map to locate myself on it.

August 20.

Back now, in the other field. The jalapeños are ready and the hornworms have to be pulled off the tomatoes and I have to teach at 10am at the residential treatment facility for teenage girls where theater is a summer program mostly comprised of improv games and inventing alternate endings to Disney movies.

I go to see a play in someone’s apartment. I allow myself to hope that it will be mind blowing, because it has the trappings of the kind of cool underground art event that will be either sort of alright or mind blowing, and I am in the mood to be optimistic. It is, in fact, alright. It’s cool to see a living room play, where the characters are laughing and bitching and doing drugs and talking on the phone inches from your face and the faces of the fourteen other spectators crammed into this sweaty living room. It is cool to go to a theater event framed as a party (“come up the back stairs, don’t be fucking late.”) Because I had hoped for something else, something more sophisticated, I struggle to be a good sport, even though I am in favor of this kind of theater energy and want there to be more of it.

I get on zoom for a writer’s group I’m doing this summer. The connections between many of us trace back to Brooklyn College, but the faces in the zoom boxes are beaming in from lots of places. I hate zoom but it’s a kind of utopia, this group — a shared sense of language, and lineage, and our teacher, Agnes, helps us to hold each other’s ideas so gently.

A friend in Brooklyn texts me about an application we’re both submitting. He makes an over-the-top caricature of a zealous applicant banging out their manifesto — what is your practice // how will this opportunity stretch your imagination // how is your work both robust and self-sufficient and also ready to be completely transformed by this developmental opportunity

I talk on the phone with a friend in Denver and the theme of isolation, still echoing in me I guess, comes up. He feels it too, the push and pull between the idea of the local and the reality of it. Questions of enough-ness, of embracing hermitude and also belonging to a dispersed or far-away scene.

I think it’s important to say that I’ve chosen my current elsewhere of my own accord: that though the visible benefits of my life here have a lot to do with family and friends and romantic partnership, I didn’t choose where I am in the context of sacrifice, or at the pressuring or needs of others. I live with the concern that I am sacrificing opportunities, and with the hunch that my work exists in the tension between the fields I occupy: the one I’m sitting in now, and the one depicted in the invisible map I draw, and redraw, and redraw. Though my faith in my own ability wavers, I have an abiding curiosity in the work that might get made, that could be available, the farther you get from the center.

I also have to remind myself not to assign too much to geography: my friends who live in New York are also working low-paying jobs teaching theater to kids, rewriting the ending to Mulan. And frankly, I love it when the teenagers shrug off their shells and jump out of their seats to propose some wildly inappropriate improv. I love it when the staff at the facility, bored with their job of sitting on the sidelines monitoring the girls, decide to get up and participate in the game we’re playing. I remember another thing that theater can be: an alternate reality inside your lousy day-to-day, a moment where you’re suddenly trying to move in unison with 20 other people, and you are transported, briefly, elsewhere.