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nce more: good art slaps us in the face.
Good art puts a thumb in our eye, a spike in our ear, a knife 'twixt ribs five and six.
Good art does not ease our pain but makes us see that that pain comes to us a gift, one that scrapes off the crud of the sob stuff we've
been told by our lords of trade to call "life" and puts in its place in our mouths the clear, clean bite of death.
We can feel its sting on our tongues and this makes us fear a thing that can feel so sharp and cold and seems to not have a care for who we are or what we dream.
All this time we have taught our hearts that gifts should be sweet, gifts should raise us up and soothe us and blunt what we know is true in
life -- how short life is, how dense life is with fog and craze and foul-up and pain.
We have not let our hearts know in full what they know in full: that death gives life its "life." We do want this truth -- we kick and scream
when it sits down with us and we work hard, hard, hard to dull its edge, but we know -- we know --
So we chew, we gulp down -- and at once suck up like roots the sleek sap that will feed us for the long run, so starved are we (more starved
than we knew) for what does not lie to us, does not numb us, and lets us live shorn of the balms of hope, God, "saved," sense.
This is hard to do.
What else is there to do?
These reflections come out of another round of volunteer script-reading for a theatre, this time for full-lengths submitted for a competition. (I go for the long stuff -- none of that weenie ten-minute
crap!)
So regulated are the plots that drive these scripts that, by page 10 or so, one can pretty much guess where the script will end emotionally if
not in exact plot detail: lovers overcome obstacles to unite in frolic, death comes and rids us of egotism, all confusions are resolved, all
opacities are made clear, and so on. These scripts become wish-fulfillments, a kind of magical thinking that has little or no connection
to the lives people (not stage characters) lead from sun-up to sun-up. They follow a playwriting formula that I found hammered into us when I worked in the NYU Dramatic Writing Program: the hook needed
at the end of Act I, the reveals/reversals that constantly need to ratchet up "the stakes," the crisis/climax where all comes to a head
and either explodes or implodes, the aftermath, and so on.
So strong is The Formula, especially in the movies, and so saturated have we become with it over the past century or so that we fault life
for not following The Formula and will rewrite life to make it "fit." I see this happen, oddly enough, on the local news channels, where the
"facts" of a story are shoe-horned into mini-parables about redemption, "good guys" versus "bad guys," and a world where the
heart is always available to do good if it can just be "reached." This even comes into the weather reports, where days are rated as good
or bad based on sunshine or rain, as if the weather should accommodate us as opposed to the truth which is that we always have to fit ourselves into the weather.
This constant Procrustean revising gets tedious.
I don't have an antidote. I don't have a manifesto. I just have three suggestions to writers. First, cut against the grain of your
expectations about characters. The first way to do this is to stop writing character descriptions in the script. Don't do this. I have read
scripts that have given me lengthy "biographies" of the characters, and I always ignore them, preferring to get a name and an age and
maybe a skin color (and usually a name is just fine). I ignore them because, first, I won't remember them as I read the script, and,
second, those traits better be in the words and actions of the script. I would prefer it if a playwright simply gave me the name of the
character and, perhaps, a one-phrase description of the role: "GRIG, a clown." If Grig has a club-foot and likes to say "Quark" whenever
anybody uses the letter "W" followed by a hissing sound, then that better come out in the script. No need to lard it in at the beginning.
Why do I suggest this? Because it keeps the playwright from "locking in" and thus flattening the characters, because once they've been
locked in (that is, given their marching orders or had their moral map coordinates logged), there's little room for the playwright to fold, bend
, staple, and mutilate them, and thus make them surprising and less-than-predictable and perhaps even interestingly unmanageable.
Second, just as characters should not get distilled into a biography (after all, a stage character is not a person -- it's an artifact, a tool
, means to an end), the plot/action should not be hard-mapped along the cartography of The Formula because The Formula is not life, it is
only a series of narrow principles about crafting stories -- or, to say it another way, it is a method of torquing reality to fit the deep-rooted
romanticized story prejudices of the masses (i.e., all of us). Or, to say it yet another way, "reality" (however defined) has a lot more
weirdness and wildness in it than we allow in to our neatened narratives.
This means not lashing the horses of the narrative to get to where the story "needs" to go -- the narrative never "needs" to go anywhere, it
just needs to spin itself out according the energies of the characters pursuing whatever they are pursuing (which may also change as the characters either do or don't accomplish what they've set out to get).
Third, and to me most important, bring back death. We know that everything in our lives happens with death as the ground and
backdrop of our being -- it is the great underliner, the thing that gives life any emphasis it has. But we've pretty much taken death out of the
theatre, which means that we've taken out tragedy as well, and once tragedy is rejected for sentimentality and bathos, we've lost a way to be honest with ourselves about ourselves.
All right -- 'nuff said. Back to the pages and summary sheets -- still sifting, waiting for surprise to dawn. I am sure it will happen. Turn the page -- onward.
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