Sometimes it just happens
The other night I told a playwright friend over dinner that I felt “pregnant with play.” It’s a repulsive metaphor, but better than the alternatives that seem somehow equally right: that a play is going to burst out of me like an alien through my chest; that a play is going to pop like a pus-filled blister; and so forth. Whatever the appropriateness of the image, she knew what I meant: Sometimes you feel like you have a play coming on, and this was one of those times. I had thought I was going to puzzle out the missing section of act two of the play I’ve been writing, and which I told my wife I wanted to drive to Omaha and back (rather than fly) in order to be able to write.
Instead, it turns out it’s a new play. One that just came to me earlier today while driving with my college-student son back to Los Angeles from San Francisco. We were listening to an album by a band he likes. He said, “Do you like this?” “No,” I said. When it came to the end, though, I told him to leave it on so we could listen to it again. Because by then I was writing a play in my head, and this was the soundtrack. Eventually I pulled onto an embankment off the interstate, dug out my journal, and wrote down everything I knew about this play while my son looked around in the passenger’s seat, unsure what to do with himself. Later I had him fish me out a napkin from the glove box so I could scribble down two new notes: the name of a made-up song in the play, and the last line of the play. This sort of thing kept happening. There was the realization that “Oh my God, I know the last line of this play….” And actually I could envision the last scene, completely staged. Then I could see the transitions between time periods — and this is not the sort of thing that I’m very good at. I quickly scrapped the first scene, set at the protagonist’s home, because I never wanted the action to go there, because I didn’t know how to go back there once the play moved on. Then I realized that I could have one actor play two roles in two time periods. Then I had the back story — of how the protagonist and the third main character came to meet again in the present.
This went on in my head for hours.
So now I have to write it, and I think that starts tonight. This is a good time to start it — a few days before I go off to a theatre conference, and then off to visit my mother on the East coast. In the next three weeks I’ll have more available time than I usually have, and as I told my friend the other night, “I’m a clumper.” I write plays in clumps.
After I put the pen back in the unashed ashtray of my car, I heard myself say this to my son: “I don’t particularly want to be a playwright. I just am one.” Because plays have just come to me this way.
May 23rd, 2010 at 6:48 am
This so matches with my own experience it’s scary. One of my first plays came to me when I was writing postcards to a friend in NYC from Europe. She was living in an illegal sublet, so I had to address the postcards to the legal occupant, someone named Oscar. I addressed the postcard, and realized I had to write “Dear Oscar” in the salutation. Without thought I wrote a postcard to “Oscar” from someone named “Tanya.” It was total nonsense. I wrote postcards from Tanya to Oscar all across Europe. They got more and more involved as this fictional relationship grew and took shape. I started buying over-sized postcards so I could cram in 150 or more words. In a London hotel room I found myself writing five- and six-page letters from Oscar to Tanya. I realized eventually I was writing a play – OSCAR AND TANYA — a play I was never able to make work as well as I wanted, but which had a life for a while. Another play — NAKED BY THE RIVER — far more successful, took fire when I was walking in NYC. I suddenly envisioned a man and a woman facing each other in an office. He said to her “Where’d you get the scar?” I could feel the play jump into life in that instant and, like Lee, I went looking for a piece of paper to start writing it. And the funny thing is, that line no longer appears in the play in any form whatsoever.
After more than 20 years of doing this it is still all a mystery to me– where plays come from, what their purpose is. Are they still in any way really a commercial endeavor and — if so — is that purely accidental? Or are they really an instrument for personal growth, divorced from whatever impact they may have on the world beyond ourselves? Most days I think they’re both — like light being both a particle and a wave, depending on how you measure it.
I, too, do not want to be a playwright. It totally sucks to be one today. But it seems to be a life sentence. My only victory over this compulsion is that I have not allowed it to totally overrun my life.
May 24th, 2010 at 12:25 pm
There’s a line in THE MOON & SIXPENCE about the compulsion to be an artist: “If you’re thrown in the water you swim. It doesn’t matter if you swim well or swim badly. You swim because you must.”
May 25th, 2010 at 9:25 am
What I love about the movie Ed Wood — it says “if you’re a real artist you have to create art. It doesn’t matter if you’re any good or not — you’ve just got to do it.”
May 26th, 2010 at 3:55 pm
[…] As I said the other day, they just come to me. […]
October 10th, 2010 at 1:17 pm
[…] the opening sound effect, and I even had a tenuous grasp on the ending. None of this was unusual. I’ve written about it here before: Usually, the play just comes. The less thinking about it, the […]