Recently I wrote here that I’d noticed that most of my back catalog of plays have become period pieces. (That doesn’t mean they can’t be produced — dear producing gods: That doesn’t mean they can’t be produced! — that just means that some of them need to be set in recently passed time periods in order for what I hope is their trenchant wonderfulness to work.)

I’m also discovering that I’m becoming a period piece.

Last night during the welcoming ceremony for the University of Southern California MPW graduate writing program where I teach, I got a look at the incoming masters candidates. As one line that teachers share goes, “I keep getting older but my students stay the same age.” As a faculty member in our program, I’m rather young; as a member of my theatre company I have definitely become a graybeard. But what really caught me by surprise was a man roughly my age, a professor in the Marshall School of Business at USC, who came up to me and said, “Lee, I don’t know if you remember me, but my wife was in one of your plays 20 years ago.”

It took a few minutes of digging through the dusty filing cabinet of my mind, but I did remember him. And his wife.

He said, “My wife and I still really love that play. We have it on videotape and we watch it once in a while. It’s the play about the wires.”

Videotape! When was the last time I watched something on videotape! When was the last time I listened to something on cassette tape? My wife’s next preferred project for me is to digitize all our CDs and get rid of them — so who will need the CD player, either?

“The play about the wires” is my play “Guest for Dinner,” begun when I was an undergrad circa 1984. Among other things, it’s about a shrewdly intelligent man who is so consumed by his hatred of a Springsteen-like rock star with pretensions to being Joe Average that he lures said rock star to his apartment to humiliate and abuse him. “The wires,” the section that everyone who has seen this play in its various productions seems to recall with the greatest clarity, is a speech by our protagonist, “Rick” (rhymes with prick), who assembles electronic components in his day job and laments the way that the wires on the top keep pressing down on the wires on the bottom. It’s a thin metaphor for social inequality, and is just one of the things in the play that the me of almost 25 years later regrets.

When the play was done in LA, a former writing teacher of mine — ironically, from the very same program I now teach in — came to see it. I asked him what he thought, and he said blandly kind words. I then asked him what he really thought. He proceeded to tell me, taking the play apart bit by bit. (Afterward, his wife said to me, “Well, I liked it.” She was being nice; it didn’t matter.) Even at the time, his arguments were hard to refute, and over the course of 20 years I’ve grown more and more toward his opinion.

But as my dean said last night when I told her that the spouse of someone who had once starred in one of my plays came up to me to say hello, “There really is no hiding.” Certainly true, especially in an internet age (and only one reason among many that I’m sure we and our allies know exactly where Osama bin Laden is).

There’s no hiding, and there’s also no changing who you once were. We should honor the work of our younger writer selves, flaws and all, as individual steps on a long journey. Some of my old plays don’t work the way they would if I were to write them now, but most of those plays wouldn’t be written by the writer I am now. The bad science fiction stories and detective stories I started writing and sending off at age 11 haven’t improved with age either. But every one of those failed attempts carried some lesson for the future.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 11:35 am and is filed under On being, 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.