There they sit.  The scripts.  The entrants to festivals for three different theatres.  Each resembles a rampike, the remains of a standing dead tree, a stump.

I look at them.  I try to imagine the writers actually composing them, sitting at typewriter or computer or jackhammer, lovingly setting down the words (typos and misspellings so lovingly preserved) in funky mutations of the standard playwriting form (surely a sign of independence and outside-the-boxness, yes?), highlighted by food leavings and orbital rings of coffee and -- I'm not sure -- line after line drilling into the mysteries of relationships, and dysfunctional families, and -- relationships and -- dysfunctional families, and -- ah, here's one on -- dysfunctional relationships within a family --

All right, all right, put them to one side, get another cup of coffee, huff and puff, raise a clemency appeal to Sophocles et. al., and drop myself back into the chair.  And as I finish, I am finished.  Coffee can only fortify so much.  I crawl away humbled, hobbled, hamstrung, brought low.  Reamed out.

I honor what they've done -- they've attempted, they've chanced, pulsed by art to bring something into the world that had not had existed before, something pulled from what they consider their depths and dreams.  How can that not have honor?

But mein Gott in Himmel! What gets loosed on the page!  And before long I'm thrumming my internal rant about the emptyheadness of the writing and the blandness of the thinking and the thinness of the language, and the -- and the -- and the --  And I realize (though I also always knew this) -- just as a luffa sponge salesman can hang out a shingle without having the least knowledge about gourds and compost, so can anyone write what looks like a play and dub himself or herself a playwright.

Not all playwrights who call themselves playwrights should call themselves playwrights.

Is that an elitist thing to say?  I don't know. But based on what's come over the transom into my hands, I keep wondering if, say, the Dramatists Guild should develop an entrance exam, and only if you pass that and then go through a rigorous boot-camp purging you of all melodrama and confection do you get a certificate that allows you to append "playwright" to your name. (And I am not talking about MFA programs in dramatic writing acting as gatekeepers -- they have a vested interest in keeping the "quo" as "status" as possible.) Something like a Royal Academy of Playwrights -- until, of course, that becomes sclerotic and the Bastille needs to be stormed again, but at least, for now, a sieve that would sieve out the big chunks.

Sigh.  I find no comfort in a royalist rant like this. But, like Lenin, I can't help asking the question, "What is to be done?" and for similar revolutionary purposes.  I don't know the ages of the writers I read, but many of them feel young because of the forms they choose in which to cast their material.  Lots of "black-out-sketch" stuff, where things pop and fizz and then disappear -- and whatever positive reactions evaporate along with them so that nothing sticks to the ribs.  Their material exudes the odor of the pedestrian, mired in all the treacly and adrenaline subject matter that provides the compost for major-market television and screenwriting -- theatre as just a suburb of reality, and that "reality" not really reality but a fusion stew of advertising priorities, corporate profits, and narrowed human psychologies called, in the trade, "mental real estate."

But, on the other hand, so what?  Theater is a minor art form anyway in this culture -- no one looks to theatre for guidance or wisdom -- so why worry about upgrading its quality, especially when hardly anyone really looks to art for guidance and wisdom, since in our capitalist culture, art has become anodyne because solace sells better than the discomfort many say they want from art but never really seek out for themselves. Perhaps festivals like the ones I read for are at fault, privileging text over what makes theatre really "theatre" ("no more than three characters, minimal sets, no technical challenges, no props -- now talk" -- I can appreciate why Beckett wrote a play that had only an exhalation in it, just to shut up the chattering onstage that passes for our passing lives).  And, as they say in the movie trade, if "a good movie is one that gets made," perhaps a good play is one that gets produced, regardless of the content of its character.

All right.  I have to write up my evaluations.  Deep breaths, clear the mental decks, take each on its own (de)merits and be honest without rancor.  One more deep breath.  Okay, one more.  Then exhale.