In the theatre as in life, bad work can help you learn to do good work.

DuoLingo reminds me of this all the time, when it responds to my somewhat inept efforts to learn French with a reassuring, “Even when you make mistakes, you’re still learning!”

In 36 years of teaching writing in one place or another, starting at writers conferences, then at different colleges and universities, then in my private playwriting workshop, I’ve advised people to see a lot of plays and to read a lot, because while you can learn a lot from good writing, you can learn a lot from bad writing too.

Recently, I got further verification that just because a well-known and celebrated writer has written something, that doesn’t mean it’s good.

Yes, we already knew this, right? F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, Ray Bradbury, Pinter, Beckett, Edith Wharton, Hemingway — they all had good work but also middling or even bad work.  

I sure love “Tender is the Night” and “The Great Gatsby” and many of his short stories, but  Fitzgerald’s “Pat Hobby” stories are flat-out terrible — written as quickly and as plentifully as possible for ready cash. Years ago, when I was teaching graduate-level writing at the University of Southern California, I flat-out refused to teach from them when requested because I didn’t want students thinking I endorsed them. (And this, from a Fitzgerald fan.)

Harold Pinter was a certifiable genius, and I for sure certify him as such, but “No Man’s Land” is about nothing I can discern except Pinter writing a Pinteresque play that doesn’t actually say anything — it’s the sort of gamesmanship that Pinter had perfected 40 years earlier with “The Birthday Party,” but now made weary and pointless. The only upside:  I can say I saw it Christopher Plummer and Jason Robards perform those leads up close and personal in the 1994 off-Broadway revival.

I could go on in this vein, especially having seen so many David Mamet plays over the past 30 years, the pilot light having long ago gone out on the writer of “American Buffalo” and “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Speed the Plow” and “Oleanna.” “The Old Neighborhood,” seen in New York in 1997, was so disastrous that I spent the viewing time admiring the lighting grid, and the aftershow reassuring two women on the sidewalk outside that, no, they were right and the New York Times was wrong, that it was indeed terrible.

I don’t expect any writer to do consistently great work. For every “Slaughterhouse Five” or “Cat’s Cradle,” there’s a “Slapstick” sitting in the oeuvre. Sometimes (usually) you can’t even tell if your own work is good or bad — that’s what we have audiences and critics for, and even they don’t know. As a teacher, I just try not to be the person who would have laughed “Waiting for Godot” out of the room, or, God forbid, anything by the completely brilliant Eugene Ionesco.

Which brings to mind this:  If you don’t take chances, you don’t grow as an artist. So I applaud writers who take chances. For this reason, I try to be generous about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s execrable children’s stories. Just one of my poor kids had to suffer through these before I realized my mistake. Maybe the author of “The Scarlet Letter” wasn’t the best choice for children’s literature.

This brings us to “Curse of the Starving Class,” a Sam Shepard play I’d never seen before. I’m an admirer of much of Shepard’s work; since the beginning, I’ve taught from “True West,” which features probably the best first line of any play ever (“So, Mom took off to Alaska, huh?”), providing a wealth of exposition while not sound at all expositional. (At one point, I diagnosed 13 different things that simple line tells us about the situation.) “Buried Child” may be an even better play, with a central metaphor that digs deep. I also like some of Shepard’s essays and short stories, and if he’d written a cook book, I’d probably have read that, too.

“Curse of the Starving Class,” meanwhile, seems like an early draft of later plays in which themes related to disaffected and aimless lower-class white people with few options are better explored. It isn’t stylized enough to be outlandishly comic or bizarre, and its premises, setups and outcomes are so paper thin that we can’t emotionally commit to the theoretical plight of any of the characters. When the underage girl tells us she was let out of the local jail because she flirted with the sheriff, or when a man signs a sheet of paper and thereby loses possession of a house it isn’t clear he owns, we just aren’t sure what universe we’re living in. And, when Act One is largely told with just four characters, but by the end of Act Two there are 11, several of them with just one brief appearance or merely a few lines, we have to wonder whether Act Two wasn’t written in a drunken burst over a single night.

I admire the pluck of the community producers who put this on; judging from the program, the young actor playing the girl made a case for the play and was thrilled when it was chosen. Playwrights need their plays to be produced — even from the grave, I like to think. Two of the actors were working pros, and that showed, and most weren’t, and that showed too. But through all that, you could still hear the play and the main problem:  no focus, no overarching theme, not enough of a comedy or a drama, or even a queasy feeling, just living or dying on discrete moments.

So, what can we learn from this example of bad work?

(And, yes, the play in its day won an Obie for Best Play. But that doesn’t mean they’re right.)

We who write plays can learn this:

Seeing a bad play can help us re-evaluate our own work that we’ve struggled and sweated over and say, You know what? It’s good enough:  Send it out.

After all, this got produced.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2026 at 11:28 pm and is filed under Beckett, Samuel, Ionesco, Eugene, On seeing, Pinter, Harold, Playwriting, Theatre, Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.