“Life is pretty damn good and we should appreciate it more.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that that is the key takeaway from the author of “The Road,” the novel more than any other in the past year (perhaps in the past 10 years) that I’ve been thinking about, talking about, dwelling on, and recommending to friends, in his interview today by Oprah Winfrey. The bleakness of the post-apocalyptic “Road” is a reminder and an inspiration to recognize the value of what’s here now (and, with luck, to preserve that value). I remember in the immediate weeks after reading it thinking throughout every day that nothing I would face that day could be truly troubling by comparison. And isn’t that the strength of literature: to make you feel life anew?

I should also take a moment to profess my abject love of Oprah. This is probably only the third time I’ve watched her show, but every time I’ve been struck by her obvious genuine interest in the interviewee and the subject. (Want to see the exact opposite? Check out a man named David Letterman.) Some years ago I saw her interviewing a man who had written a book called “No Bad Boys,” about helping troubled youth; this author (and psychologist) was saying that he didn’t believe in “bad boys,” but in boys who needed help. As I watched that profile and his work with some of these boys and Oprah’s questioning, at one point I was reduced to tears. Sentimental? Sure. Heartfelt? Absolutely. I don’t believe in bad boys either, and I was glad to know that someone out there was doing something about that.

Maybe part of my love for Oprah, even given my limited exposure, is her determination to fix little corners of the universe. I too think things are fixable, or at least improvable. Oprah has no room for cynicism, and neither do I. She loves books and wants to talk about them with their authors. In a mainstream way, who has done this since Johnny Carson a long, long, long time ago? No one. It’s fashionably cynical to dismiss Oprah as a sentimentalist, but like her or not, she’s creating new readers for writers like Cormac McCarthy.

In this interview, McCarthy responds in style. He’s not a press hound — this is his first television interview ever, and one of very, very few interviews in his career — and that self-protectiveness may have contributed to his simple, matter-of-fact humility and wisdom, present throughout this interview. With regard to his seemingly odd punctuation style, which some have slammed as an affectation, he says, “I believe in periods and capitals and occasional commas. That’s it.” That style, he says, is “to make it easier to read, not harder.” Disagree if you will, but his books are beautifully written and quickly read.

If you missed the interview, it’s online at Oprah’s website. Here’s the link. If you’d like to see a talented contemporary novelist untrammeled by his recent success and wealth, one who acknowledges debts to forebears remembered (Faulkner, Joyce) and forgotten, watch this. To do so you’ll have to join Oprah’s free online book club (which you can later quit if you like), but is that so much to ask? You can always quit later, and all she’s trying to do is share her love for books she admires. Just like the rest of us.

Another reminder to the would-have-been self-centered that there are other people in the world:

Today I was one of what turned out to be quite a large group of playwrights who received an email from the very nice man in England who maintains one of the world’s foremost databases of playwrights, www.doollee.com. Here’s what it said:

I am celebrating – the 20,000th Playwright has just been recorded on www.doollee.com, together with 67,189 of their plays.

Are your plays, bio, picture, agent etc etc, all as you want them?

A template is attached – your individual page should contain the information YOU want for now and posterity!!

Listing your work is a pleasure, thank you.

All good things
Julian

ps Have you entered the new competition? – http://www.doollee.com/Publishers/x-competitions.html

Julian Oddy
48 Dorchester Road
Weymouth
Dorset  DT4 7JZ
UK

[both www.doollee.com and google appreciate reciprocal website links]

www.doollee.com receives over 12,000 individual hits per day (4.5 million/year) – your information is important to many people from all over the world.

I read this email aloud to my wife, never feeling less special in my life now that I know that I’m one of 20,000 produced playwrights listed on this site (and who knows how many more aren’t listed?). Even one of 19,000 would have been better. At least I’ve got about 30 plays that have been staged, far more than the average  (although only three are currently listed on Doollee – I guess in my copious spare time I should ask Julian to update the listing).

This brought to mind something Stephen Dunn said over dinner once when I studied writing with him in the 1980’s. He said, “There are only 40 real poets in the country and we all know each other.” I’ve always kept this in mind because even though I’ve had poetry published I’m quite aware I’m not one of those 40 real poets. In grad school I used to wonder how many real playwrights there are — at the time I estimated 200. Now I know:  20,000. Plus.

Today’s LA Daily News has a nice piece by Evan Henerson (who for years has kept theatre coverage an important part of the paper) profiling David Henry Hwang and his new play, which I keep raving about. You can read the profile here.

And Gregory Rodriguez’ op ed in today’s LA Times remarks upon how the context of the play has changed in the 17 years since the events that shaped it. Well worth reading.

Elie Wiesel regrets his early bad writing.

Don’t we all?

Yesterday in my email newsletter I wrote a piece with advice on how to become a produced playwright, which some people have emailed to thank me for. If you missed it, click here. In a nutshell, here’s the advice:  be diligent and persistent.

Just today, the graduate writing program I teach in at USC uploaded a podcast that advocates the same mindset, but adds the perspective of fiction writers and screenwriters. I find it fascinating watching friends and colleagues share war stories that sound so very, very familiar. (Click here if you’d like to see it.) One of the speakers is novelist and dramatist Chris Meeks. (A good guy and a good writer.) If you’d like to check out his own email newsletter, here’s the archive.

Almost everyone who has met with any success as a writer has pretty much the same story. They tried harder.

The other night I saw what I thought was the most remarkable play I’ve seen in perhaps 10 years. (Since I saw the premiere production of “How I Learned to Drive,” a play I now teach.) It was “Yellow Face,” by David Henry Hwang, now playing at the Mark Taper Forum here in Los Angeles. Even though I had to get up at the inconceivable time of 5 a.m. the next morning for USC commencement, there I was at 11 p.m. on the plaza of the Music Center declaiming the wonders of the play for Dorinne Kondo, the friend/colleague who invited me, and Tim Dang, artistic director of co-producing company East West Players. I’m going to write more about this play when I have more time, but let’s put it this way:  I wondered aloud how long it would be before “Yellow Face” is published, because I’d like to read it and I might put it into the syllabus of one of my classes.

Today I had lunch with another colleague, a playwright whose work I respect. She’s smart and talented. She wanted to know if I’d seen “Fat Pig” at the Geffen. (Answer: Not yet.) I brought up “Yellow Face,” preparing to launch into full shared excitement. Her reaction:  She left at intermission. “I don’t like plays about writers writing about writing,” she said.  That line was especially ironic to me because in 1992 I wrote a play that specifically satirized a form of novels I loathe:  writers writing about writers who write about writers. (The specific novel that first got me on this rant was “The Dean’s December” by Saul Bellow.) To me, “Yellow Face” was about many different wonderful things, interwoven and unified. To her, it was a play about the playwright writing this play (which, granted, it is on the surface). We saw the same play (well, she saw only half) and arrived at completely different conclusions.

I’ve grown used to having disagreements about art. (And even higher forms, like comic books.) But “Yellow Face”  is precisely the sort of play I go to the theatre hoping to come across — surprising, funny, moving, troubling; something that makes me challenge my own notions of what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior. To me it seems so ambitious, and so successful on its own terms, and so important, that it is unequivocally great. But after listening to my friend this afternoon, I suspect that my dread that night — that the critics are going to reject it as either self-serving or badly constructed — is exactly what’s going to happen.

I hope not.

And I’m going to advise everyone I know to see this show.

I’m of two minds about critic Charles McNulty’s piece in today’s LA Times in which he bemoans — but not quite — David Lindsay-Abaire’s upset win of a Pulitzer for “Rabbit Hole.”

McNulty wishes there were more support for cutting-edge theatre. Me, I wish there were more support for good plays, whether they’re cutting edge or not. I also think that Mr. Lindsay-Abaire was, until recently and with this play, somewhat edgy, at least in the eyes of most. Here’s how Wikipedia valiantly summarizes “Fuddy Meers,” a play I greatly enjoyed in a terrific production at the Colony Theatre a couple of years ago:

Fuddy Meers is an American play by David Lindsay-Abaire. It tells the story of an amnesiac, Claire, who awakens each morning as a blank slate on which her husband and teenage son must imprint the facts of her life. One morning Claire is abducted by a limping, lisping man who claims her husband wants to kill her. The audience views the ensuing mayhem through the kaleidoscope of Claire’s world. The play culminates in a cacophony of revelations, proving that everything is not what it appears to be.

Among his influences, Lindsay-Abaire lists playwrights John Guare, Edward Albee, Georges Feydeau, Eugène Ionesco, and George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, 1930s screwball comedy films My Man Godfrey, Twentieth Century, and “anything by Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, the Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello.” Walking a fine line between grave reality and joyous lunacy, the world of his plays is often dark, funny, blithe, enigmatic, hopeful, ironic, and somewhat cockeyed. “My plays tend to be peopled with outsiders in search of clarity.”

I’m willing to bet that that list of influences would lure most of us into the theatre. It just sounds like fun. Quality fun.

“Rabbit Hole,” which concerns a family struggling to recover from the death of a child, is not in the same vein. In addition to his obvious talents, it turns out that Lindsay-Abaire has range.  He’s been quoted as saying he doesn’t care how he won the Pulitzer (in a decision that overruled the panel recommendations), he’s just glad he won.

McNulty seemingly wants us to support playwrights because they are daring.  I have seen those sorts of plays — lots of them — and their unconventionality often translates into a conventional dullness. I became a playwright because of the lure of theatre of the absurd, but somehow experimentation led to an alternative theatre movement split largely between “language plays” that are ironically devoid of meaning, and camp theatre revolving solely around one meaning. Neither provides the shock of the new.

There are theatres (mostly small ones) doing new plays that shock and entertain; he’s listed a few of them. I hope that if any of those playwrights goes on to write a good, strong play that happens to win a Pulitzer, we don’t condemn it for being too conventional.

This seven-minute clip seems to be from a documentary I haven’t seen (yet).

Vonnegut’s mordant humor is well-served by his wry reading voice.

I really miss this guy.

Actually, I’m not sure that’s possible. You could imitate him, but not be him, nor would you want to. (Especially because he’s dead.)

But if you want some useful writing tips from Vonnegut himself, click here. I can’t guarantee your writing will come unstuck, though.

You will notice in reading his advice, by the way, that much of it is oriented toward helping the reader. I love him for that. (Just as playwrights who bore the audience infuriate me.)

Several people today have emailed me with links to the plays of Cho Seung Hui, the student behind the Virginia Tech massacre. Click here if you’d like to read them yourself.

They don’t tell us much beyond this: Mr. Cho was a very bad playwright. Really bad. The dialogue is forced and expositional, the staging doesn’t work, and characters such as the stepfather are set up as paper tigers for other characters to express their viewpoints. In fact, the only thing I like is the stepfather character’s name, Richard McBeef, but then only for a play in the style of Alfred Jarry.

Here’s the statement that these plays do not — repeat, do not — make: that because these are dark, troubled plays, Cho was clearly a dark, troubled person, someone who was going to be a murderer. No. These are dark, troubled plays that happen to be by someone who turned out to be a dark, troubled person who happened to turn out to be a murderer.

It always troubles me when people confuse the unattractive character in a play with its creator. Just because you’ve written racists, pederasts, murderers, and even Republicans into your play doesn’t mean you are one. It means that you are writing about them. Ian Fleming was in no way James Bond, Edgar Rice Burroughs was not raised by apes, and Harriet Beecher Stowe did not have an uncle named Tom.

These things may seem obvious to most of us reading this. Yet all across the net tonight people are reading the plays of Cho Seung Hui and deciding that someone “should have known.” If Cho gave other signs of mental distress, that’s one thing. But the writing in these plays tells us only that he had no future as a playwright.

Except — and here’s an irony — I guarantee that some enterprising director or producer somewhere is right now printing out those plays and getting ready to produce them. Remember, you read it here first.