The A-Mazing Yamashita the Millennial Gold-diggers
 
This one-act play is staged as a magic show. Yamashita, the female magician, promises us an evening of entertainment, where she will personally escort her audience “through the secret tunnels and nubiferous passageways of a post-colonialist, global economic maze, more hidden than King Solomon’s Tomb, more baffling than the riddle of the Sphinx, and more impenetrable than the Great Pyramid of Khufu.”
 
The play incorporates three stunts traditionally associated with the genre: levitating a woman, sawing a woman in half, and causing a woman to vanish inside a magic cabinet. These become explicit metaphors for the wholesale drugging of a generation of young women, the dissociation (splitting) of women through traumatic sexualization and objectification of our bodies, and the disappearing of millions of girls and women through trafficking. Professor Yessir, lending her authority to the proceedings, illustrates the intellectual idiocy and moral complicity of academic theorists, including Lacan, Foucault, Butler, and Kristeva. This is a harrowing play that shatters the fourth wall with a variety of audience plants.  The finale of the performance relies on an improvised recruitment of the audience to stage a protest strong enough to stop the escalating onstage atrocities.

Hermeneutic Circlejerk
Subtitled “The Founding of Post-Modern Theory,” this slapstick farce features two clowns, Michel-Henri and Jacques-Pierre. Few people are aware that Foucault and Derrida were pro-pedophilia activists who publicly lobbied the French Parliament to abolish (not just lower, but abolish!) the age-of-consent for children. In my farce, the two clown characters purport to found a school of knowledge with its own secret and self-referential language—a language that will effectively deconstruct everything except itself. The ultimate goal of all this initiation and deconstruction is the decriminalizing of their child rapes.

The Ladies’ Room
 
The Ladies Room enacts the collision of queer theory with radical feminism in the space of six minutes. This short-short play takes place outside a ladies’ room in a shopping mall. A teenage lesbian couple is struggling with the fact that someone has reported the butch for being in a women’s bathroom. The butch is on a rant about gender policing, while her girlfriend argues in support of vigilance about male presence in women’s spaces. During the course of the conflict, the girlfriend’s rape narrative emerges, radically altering the direction of the play.

Bite My Thumb
 
In the one-act, Bite My Thumb, the conflict between queer theory and lesbian feminism gets down and dirty with a series of on-stage sword fights. Two “gangs” from rival Off-Off Broadway productions of Romeo and Juliet meet in an alley to rumble, sixteenth-century style. A trans man from a mainstream theatre takes on a lesbian butch from an all-women theatre company, with the two combatants hurling accusations at each other, while the members of their respective companies end up firing them both for sex and gender non-conformity. The play ends with the protagonists’ begrudging acknowledgement of the need to forge an alliance.

Planchette
 
Planchette is a historical play about two fourteen-year old females in 1879. One of them is gender-conforming and attracted to women, while the other is non-conforming, with deep gender dysphoria. I wanted to explore issues of sexual orientation and gender identity in an era when there was no culture, language, or model for anything except heterosexuality and patriarchal gender representation and roles. In the play, Jude struggles to articulate an identity, settling on a fantastical description of girls who grow up to be men. The stage directions never apply gendered pronouns for Jude, leaving the actors and audience to speculate whether today Jude would be a trans man or a lesbian butch. In addition, both of the characters have survived traumatic events, which inform and complicate their identities.

 
Head in the Game
 
Head in the Game was inspired by an interview with prostitution survivor and abolitionist Rachel Moran. She gave a very simple analogy to help liberal feminists understand prostitution as abuse. She explained how paying someone money in exchange for their allowing themselves to be slapped in the face does not in any way keep the slap from hurting. She points out that there is harm every time a woman has sex that is unwelcome and unwanted, and the fact that money is exchanged for the act does not alter the fact that it is unwanted. As she says, “Money is not magic.”
 
I took her analogy and ran with it in the play, positing a franchise of “Boxing Girls Gyms,” where men pay money to “box” with “sparring partners”—except that the “sparring partners” (all female) are not allowed to hit back, and in fact, the only person “boxing” is the client. In the play, the batterer attempts to kill the “boxing girl,” who manages to call the police. What we see is the difficulty in naming abuse when the entire nature of the so-called enterprise is paid abuse.

Valerie Solanas at Matteawan
 
In this play, I wanted to call out both queer activists and radical feminists for their ignorance of trauma studies.
 
In the play, two radical lesbian feminists are visiting Solanas in the state mental hospital shortly after her shooting Andy Warhol. Enamored with her iconic SCUM Manifesto, they are hoping to recruit her as a spokeswoman for the rising Women’s Liberation Movement. The two activists are shocked and disillusioned to find that Solanas is only interested in performing her play Up Your Ass.
 
Up Your Ass, written in the 1960’s, is actually very post-modern in its reification of patriarchal butch-femme roles and its representation of prostitution as an ennobling act of resistance. Solanas frames her internalized misogyny as empowering, while her visitors frame it as an enemy action. I depict it as a testament of an unrecovered incest survivor, challenging the audience to consider whether trauma literacy might open up common ground between queer theorists and radical feminists.
 
I invite queer-identified artists to engage with this work, to move away from the blanket dismissal of butch identity, and especially to interrogate the lack of feminist archetypes of lesbian survivors in the canon of queer work.

 PROLOGUE
 
As a child, I collected Classic Illustrated Comics, and every time there would be a new release, I would pester my mother to buy it for me. I remember the day in 1967 when the comic book adaptation of  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” appeared on the drugstore shelf.  As usual, I asked my mother to buy the latest comic. When she saw the title, she suddenly became very frightened and, lowering her voice, she explained that it was a story that was very popular in the North, but that it was hated in the South. Born in Connecticut, my mother had fallen in love with a Southern sailor on leave in New York, married him, and moved to Virginia after the war.  Pegged as a Yankee, she had initially been viewed with suspicion and snubbed socially. Apparently, my mother was afraid that someone might see her now, twenty years later, buying a children’s comic book, and that this could destroy her hard-won acceptance into Richmond society.
 
Fast-forward nearly forty years. The university theatre department in the city where I live is in an uproar. There had been a public reading of the dramatic adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a collaboration between a drama lit class and a pop culture class. Some of the students felt that they had been compromised, because they had not been adequately informed about the historical context and controversy of the work before agreeing to participate.
 
I saw that reading… and here, as a playwright and an activist, is my reaction: 

Preaching to the choir is not a bad choice for a playwright. In fact, it can be a radical act if one is writing for a marginalized community who rarely see representations of themselves or their lives in the mainstream.
 
But what if a playwright wants to preach beyond the choir, to write a play for an audience that may actually be hostile to the message or paradigm being presented?
 
To answer that question, I am going to look at a play that is more than a hundred and fifty years old and still requires a trigger warning: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe and adapted by George L. Aiken.
 
Yes, I know that this play is considered the fountainhead of toxic stereotypes of African Americans that have poisoned the well of American drama and continue to seep into plays and films. I know that these stereotypes are so prevalent and so pernicious that the titular character’s name has become synonymous with “an epithet for a person who is slavish and excessively subservient to perceived authority figures, particularly a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people; or any person perceived to be complicit in the oppression of their own group.”

But, as a dramatist who attempts to effect social change, I cannot ignore the fact that this abolitionist play was being performed somewhere every single night, continuously, from 1852 until 1933-- by both African American and white theatres.  As a dramatist, I cannot ignore the fact that it was seen by three million people, ten times the number of the book’s first-year sales. Most of all, I can’t ignore that President Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” is supposed to have said, upon meeting Stowe, “Is this the little woman who made the great war?”

Apocryphal or not, the play Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its forty-two translations and four-generation track record, put the subject of abolition at the heart of the popular culture of its day.
 
Here is the irony: The very same dramaturgical strategies that enabled the play, back in the day, to preach so effectively beyond the choir are the reason why the play is vilified today.
 
African American writer and activist Toni Cade Bambara wrote, “The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.” She did not say that the job of the writer was to make sure that whatever strategies she employed in this work would remain revolutionary two hundred years later.
 
Stowe and Aikins managed to make sabotage, destruction of property, escape, armed resistance, and passive resistance irresistible to a population that would be the targets of these actions. They made revolution irresistible.
 
How?

Let’s break it down by the categories:
 
1) Escaping. This is the least confrontational response, and therefore the one least threatening to white audiences. Stowe maximized this potential for identification by having her escapees legally married and light-skinned enough to pass. In other words, these characters would look like her audience. The couple has an infant son, and the family is threatened with forcible separation at a slave auction. The wife will be forced to submit to repeated rapes. Something we may forget today is that, up until the twentieth century, white audiences banned any representation of serious love between dark-skinned characters—just as they rejected the presence of Black actors in classical dramas. The denial of romantic or family ties was an ideology critical to the logistics of the slave auctions. This romantic, committed relationship at the heart of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was revolutionary in 1852. Stowe got away with it, only because she scripted it for light-skinned actors.
 
There is an adage in theatre that there is no right or wrong; there is only "boring" or "compelling." Aikins put Eliza’s flight across the semi-frozen Ohio River on the stage. With her pursuers and their dogs close behind, the distraught mother clutches her infant to her breast as she leaps to freedom from one chunk of ice to the next. Irresistible.

2) Sabotage and destruction of property. This was going to be a tough sell for anyone with servants—not just the enslavers. Clearly Stowe was going to need a different strategy than the one she used for escape. Audiences will not identify with the perpetrator of these actions, but they may be compelled to laugh with her. Stowe created a comedic character that today is considered one of the noxious stereotypes: Topsy.
 
Topsy is a wild child. She is paired with a racist, “Miss Grundy,” white, spinster stereotype. Her scenes are comprised of stock vaudevillian turns, where the working-class, down-to-earth stock character puts one over on their prissy and clueless, supposed “betters.” Topsy lies, cheats, steals, and intentionally destroys property… and audiences roar with delight every time she does. She gets an ovation for her standard defense: “I’m wicked, I guess.”
 
Topsy can be seen as a white fantasy of the unchristian savage, untamed and untameable, justifying the harsh abuse of enslavers. Both book and play, however,  derail that interpretation by making explicit that Topsy was sold away from her parents as an infant, “raised by a speculator, with lots of others.” If Topsy has no loyalties except to herself, it is her enslavers who are to blame. Audiences are not allowed to forget that she has intentionally been deprived of any intellectual or moral instruction, and subjected to emotional, physical, and mostly likely sexual abuse.

3) Armed resistance. Southerners, even non-enslavers, lived in terror of uprisings by captives. It was going to take more than skin shades or vaudeville to sell this to a national audience. In the book, Stowe resolves the issue by having the escaping husband push one of his pursuers off a cliff and then, with his wife’s urging, take the man for medical treatment to a Quaker settlement. Aikins must have realized that, if he built the scene effectively, the errand-of-mercy turnaround would give his audiences dramaturgical whiplash. Wisely, he departed from Stowe’s text.
 
Aikins pairs the escaping husband up with Phineas Fletcher, a white, working-class man who has recently converted to Quakerism in order to please his Quaker fiancée. Phineas is in the tradition of Shakespeare’s “rude mechanicals,” and his struggle to follow the pacifist teachings of the Quakers is a source of ongoing mirth for the audience.  In the course of aiding George’s escape, the two men set up an ambush for their pursuers. George shoots one of his enemies, but audiences never know if the wound is fatal, because Phineas wrestles the man off the edge of a cliff. The killing is scripted as a moment of high comedy, because Phineas, mindful of his new religion, remembers to call out, “Friend, thee is not wanted here!” even as he heaves his enemy off the brink. White audiences roar their approbation.
 
What Aikins did was brilliant: The escaping captive shoots his enslaver, and does it onstage. The coup de grâce, however,  is delivered by a white man sworn to a life of non-violence. The audience can choose where to put their focus. It doesn’t hurt that the scene, set in a mountain pass, is staged like a Western melodrama.

4) Civil disobedience. This actually posed a greater threat to the enslavers than armed resistance, as Gandhi and King would have understood. Civil disobedience goes to the root of oppression, challenging the legitimacy of white supremacist doctrine and entitlement, and because of this, it would be the toughest sell of all.
 
Civil disobedience is no laughing matter, and so Stowe and Aikins turned to pathos. And hence the genesis of one of the most hated stereotypes in American drama: Uncle Tom.
 
Stowe and Eakins took pains to depict Tom as an enslaved man whose conversion to Christian ideals of loyalty, forgiveness, and meekness is absolute. His enslaver boasts that he can send Tom on errands to free states and count on him to return.  Tom appears to be the ultimate white fantasy of an utterly subservient person of color.
 
But what people forget today is that, for all his over-the-top deference and humility, Tom is murdered for defying orders in the name of  loyalty to a higher law. His first act of civil disobedience is refusing an order to whip an enslaved woman who is resisting the sexual advances of her enslaver. As a result, Tom is tortured. His second act is refusing to betray the escape plans of another enslaved woman who is faced with being sold away from her child. This time Tom is murdered. White notions of chivalry and Christian morality are pitted against audience members’ identification with being law-abiding citizens. When they approve of Tom’s defiance, they are assured that his disobedience is not motivated by self-interest or even disrespect. They are assured of this by the extravagant lengths to which Stowe went in characterizing Tom as a living saint.

The stereotype of Uncle Tom that has come down to us is a corruption of the original trope. Tom gave up his life to stand in solidarity with enslaved women of color whose oppressions were specific to their sex. 
 
The horrific sexual violation of African American women is the engine that drives the play. From Eliza’s flight to Topsy’s wildness to the actions that precipitate Tom’s murder, the book and play portray rape and women’s subsequent lack of ownership of their children as the great evils underlying the institution of enslavement. Too often the abuse of African American women has been entered as an historical footnote to the Black Freedom Movement, if entered at all.

2011 saw the publication of  Danielle L. McGuire’s book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. For the first time, there was a history book that wrote this violation back into the record. Few know that long before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, she was engaged in advocating for social justice for black women who were the victims of sexual violence at the hands of white men. The previously unwritten history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott is a story of horrendous, ongoing sexual harassment and assault of Black women in these public conveyances.
 
Was this focus on women a passion of Stowe’s, a plea for historical accuracy, or a strategic device for recruiting audience outrage?
 
As a playwright, I come away from a study of this play with a different perspective on it, with a better idea of what it takes to preach beyond the choir, and the sobering realization that this preaching must engage with stereotypes and caricatures borne of my audience’s prejudice--in the risky hope of transforming them. This appears to be the price of making revolution irresistible.

Dear Local Theatre Company (and I know you know who you are),

If your audience demographic is anything like the national one, then women comprise 69 percent of your ticket buyers and 63 percent of your audience members. Hold that thought.

I see from your latest bulletin that your upcoming season has a lineup of all-male playwrights, with the exception of one play by a female novelist who has never written a play before in her life. (I daresay she has never formally studied playwriting or worked professionally in the theatre… but does that matter, really, since all women playwrights appear to be amateurs and novices anyway?)

So here’s a suggestion for you: Since you have never yet in your long history pulled together a season that even remotely reflects the gender demographics of your audience, why not tailor your audience to your season?  That would mean 86% of next season’s audience would be males. And the 14% who are women would be folks who have never attended the theatre before in their lives… because surely the fact that they have chosen never to see a play can have no possible correlation to their ability to appreciate the experience.

“Where is the love in this scene?”

This is a question familiar to many acting students. Novice performers who tear into a scene filled with dramatic conflict are brought up short by the criticism that all their effort is coming across as just so much sound and fury signifying nothing… because the audience is unable to discover the love between the combatants. “But it’s not there! They’re enemies!” I remember arguing. To which the response is, “Then you must find a way to put it there.”

Yesterday, I found out that my mentor in theatre had died. I had not seen him in thirty years, and I was surprised by the emotions that arose for me.

My relationship with Jack had been intense and transformative. For four undergraduate and graduate years I had tried to win his attention and his approval, and I had consistently failed. He had been the professor to please. The other professors were academics, but Jack had worked on Broadway for fifteen years. He had been choreographed by Balanchine, danced with Judy Garland and Ethel Merman. Jack had studied with Uta Hagen and taken classes at the Herbert Berghof Studio. He was carrying the DNA of Stanislavsky, the Group Theatre… and he had learned from the masters themselves the secrets of “the Method.” We all were competing to inherit the legacy.

Jack cast me in a lead role of a play that went on to win regional and state competitions, touring eventually to the Kennedy Center for the prestigious annual American College Theatre Festival. I remember the rehearsal we had the night before we flew out. Jack was giving little touch-up notes to the cast. When he got to me, he stopped, and then he said, “And as for you, I don't know what to say.” It was a devastating note. He had done it in front of everyone. I was, apparently, beyond help. My performance was hopeless. I was going to doom all of us to failure. I was the Jonah on board, but it was too late to throw me overboard.

Today, as a director, I know that, if an actor is truly that hopeless, giving a note like that can only assure an even more abysmal performance. When I think of that moment, I realize that Jack’s animosity toward me and his need to humiliate me were so great, he was willing to compromise his professionalism to indulge them.

In spite of the fact he had cast me in the leading female role, Jack gave the final curtain call to the supporting actress. This insult was emblematic of our dynamic for four years. He could not ignore my ability, but he could and did take every occasion to withhold acknowledgement of it.

Jack was my adviser for my directing thesis project, but I could not get him to come see the play until right before it opened. When he finally did attend, he gave me a list of changes that were too sweeping to implement at such a late date, but that left me with the understanding that the production was terrible.

I was on the verge of coming out as a lesbian and  I was twenty years younger than Jack. I had come of age in the era of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Jack had fled the oppressive Midwest with its suffocating 1950’s homophobia. His liberation had been the Broadway world of musical theatre, a world dominated by gay men. His heyday had been the era of post-war misogyny… the work of Miller, Williams, Albee. He either could not understand my restlessness as a woman wanting to be front and center, or maybe he understood it all too well for what it was: an assault on his refuge .

Jack and I finally came to a breaking point. It was close to the time of my graduation. I cannot remember the issue… it may have been one of my final attempts to get him to view my thesis work. What I remember was being in his office and breaking down in tears of rage and frustration. I remember Jack was appalled. It was if I had vomited on him. He didn’t know what to do, and I was beyond caring. I just sat there and cried.

Directly after this, I remember I went to a playwriting class. I was still crying, still sobbing. This is an odd memory, because I was normally a very reserved person. Whatever was happening to me that day was so momentous, I had become oblivious to my surroundings.

Jack personified the world of commercial theatre, and even though he had left it in the early 1960’s, and even though it was now the 1980’s, little had changed for women. In fact, today, thirty years later, there has still been little change for women. My experience with Jack, bitter as it was, turned out to be a blessing. It spared me years, maybe decades, of searching for a toehold in a male dominated industry that had a particular aversion to ambitious feminists. When I remember that afternoon with the out-of-control crying--which was a mystery to me at the time--I believe it signified my letting go of all my dreams of a career in theatre. I believe that I was understanding that there was no strategy that was ever going to gain me membership in this boys’ club of boys’ clubs, and that what I was experiencing with all those tears was grief, but also relief.

For thirty years I would struggle with the limited resources, the obscurity, and the internalized oppression of working in lesbian communities, but I was spared the dance of femininity and appeasement that engaged and exhausted the best energies of so many of my peers. I would never lend my talents to a “ladies’ auxiliary” in theatre. I would luxuriate in the freedom to write without compromise or censorship, and for a population of lesbians, feminists, girls, and especially survivors of sexual abuse whose stories are routinely appropriated, distorted, or erased in so-called “universal” drama of mainstream theatre.

So, Jack… I missed your memorial service.  I would have liked to have gone. And if there had been an occasion to speak, I would have made “Where is the love?” my text. I know where the love was for you. It was theatre, and good acting . It was the honesty of a scene, the integrity of the action. And I know from your obituaries that the love was also in the volunteer work of your post-retirement years. You worked as a counselor on a substance abuse hotline, an ombudsperson for eldercare, and as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for neglected and abused children.

And where was the love for me, in my experience as your student? Well, I will just  have to put it there.

Thinking about my craft…

I just finished a wonderful book, The Lost Carving by David Esterly. The author is a woodcarver who specializes in ornamental fruits and flowers. He was commissioned to replace some remarkable work by eighteenth-century carver Grinling Gibbons that was destroyed in a fire at Hampton Court. The author takes us on a saunter into another era, without losing sight of the contemporary political skirmishes surrounding British heritage restoration work (being done by an American!)… along with meditations on the art of woodcarving, as well as bucolic commentary on the seasons in his rural workshop.

But the reason why I am writing about David Esterly’s book is that it set me to thinking about my own craft. The subtitle is “A Journey to the Heart of Making,” and I found myself applying many of his observations to my own work as a playwright.

“I’ve discovered the principle of dramatic tension that’s at the heart of the act of woodcarving.” He is talking about the way he holds the tools. The rear hand provides the propulsion, while the front hand resists the momentum. This results in precision and power.

In my playwriting, that propulsion is always the personal compulsion to tell a story that in some way answers a need of my own: the reclamation of the history of my lesbian foremothers that I so desperately need, the validation of other incest survivors who bear witness, the heroines who have dared to challenge the patriarchy. What is it that checks this evangelical or propagandistic momentum?  The rigid format required for telling a good story on the stage. The scenes that open and close the acts, the building of suspense and momentum, the deft handling of exposition (a major challenge with historical material), the subplots, the comic relief, and so on. And out of that tension, enhanced focus, economy of dialogue…  precision.

Esterly discovered something else. That there is third dynamic in play: The heel of the restraining hand must rest on a stable surface. Ah ha. The audience. The audience grounds the passion of the artist and the cleverness of the craftswoman. Always the audience. What do they see? How long can they sit? Can they tolerate a shock or will it alienate them? What are the limits of their “suspension of disbelief.”  In the words of Esterly, “It’s a beginner’s error that you can operate while floating above the world, in some ether of strength and desire and inspiration.” In fact, I may be mistaken about the audience being the grounding. Perhaps, for the playwright, the heel of our metaphorical hand rests, for better or worse, on box office revenue.

“These days I tell anyone who’ll listen that if you carve a leaf with holographic accuracy it looks like a wooden leaf. You need to introduce a series of selective exaggerations, which acknowledge the wood medium and render the leaf in that new language.”  Exactly. Yes, in real life, people do mumble, and they do stumble, and they certainly do not face in one direction for the whole of their time on earth. “Selective exaggerations.” Like projecting one’s voice to the back wall of a 500-seat house, even when whispering. Yes, this is a play. This is not real life. What is the point of a real whisper if the audience can’t hear it? “Selective exaggerations.” The high points. That was what Aristotle was after with his twenty-four-hour rule. Compression. Or as Samuel Goldwyn Mayer said, “Start with an earthquake and build from there.” Back to Esterly again: “Hyperbole in the service of naturalism.” His conclusion: Don’t copy nature; copy art. Indeed.

And along similar lines:  “If the viewer is truly deceived, then the effect of the art object is no different from that of the actual object.” He was talking about painting wood carvings to simulate the real thing. And then he goes on to describe something called the “valley effect.” A Japanese scientist found that the closer he designed robots to resemble humans, the more repellent people found them. (The “valley” is the dip in acceptance levels.) Esterly notes, “Simulacra are disturbing. We want to know where we stand with a thing. We want the terms to be clear.”

I  have always felt that it is important to visibly pull one’s punches in staged violence. I want the audience to stay in the world of the play. If the violence appears too real, they come out of the play to wonder if the actor is hurt or, if not, then they want to know why not. Worse, some audience members are triggered into a post-traumatic stress response. At that point, they aren’t even in the theatre in real time and space, much less the world of the play!

And I feel the same way about sex in the theatre. If the actors are going at it, the audience becomes curious about how they deal with it every night. If the actress is taking all her clothing off, the audience again leaves the world of the play to speculate about the performer and her boundaries. Is she dissociating? Has the production resulted in her being stalked? Is she cold? Simulacra are disturbing. And, as Esterly notes, “We want reassuring differences.” In film, these are not necessary, because we are looking at dots on a screen, projections of a thing that happened often a long time ago and in another location. Not so for live theatre. We need those reassuring differences.

“Structural weakness thereby produces formal opulence.” Esterly is talking about the stems of flowers… too delicate in woodcarving to support the head of a flower. The solution? Doubling or tripling the stems, or else anchoring the flower to half-hidden leaves or flowers below them. In the work of Grinling Gibbons, this translates to an abundance of cascading flowers, fruit, braids and sheaves.

The structural weakness of theatre as a medium? The platform, the one-hundred-and-twenty minutes. The need for a break after sixty minutes. These are the fragile stems upon which the playwright hopes to hang her weighty themes and life-changing drama. And she does it by exquisite compression, in both time and space. She has a captive audience, as opposed to a novelist or even, these days, a viewer of film, who can rent the DVD at home. Those audiences can set the book down or hit pause if they need a bathroom break. The playwright has to respect the captive nature of her audience. She has to work to hold interest and be responsive to the needs. The break must either be comic relief, or an intermission. The structural weakness of theatre produces the formal opulence of compelling dramatic content and masterful storytelling.

“Somewhere I read of a study that identified not optimism or happiness or serenity or  sociability as the psychological trait most predictive of longevity, but a more homespun one: conscientiousness.”  Esterly is talking about the zealotry of Gibbons in carving out forms where they would never been seen. He referenced pious cathedral sculptors who would finish the backs of their statues, because God can see everything.

Esterly made the discovery that fifty percent of the effort will achieve ninety percent of the effect. I immediately thought of all the amateur actors I had known who would learn their lines a few days before the performance, of the tech weeks where the sets, costumes, and lights come together for the first time on opening night. But Esterly goes on to observe, “If you allow yourself to stop at that ninety percent, then the carving can never succeed, never really succeed.” And there it is. Why I love Chekhov. Why I always choose Chekhov when coaching an audition piece. Chekhovian dialogue is always the tip of the iceberg, and if the actor has not studied the nonverbal submerged aspects of the character, the words are unactable. In other words, there is no ninety percent with Chekhov. The silences, the shadows, the thoughts—self-censored by the character—should scream across the footlights.

But here’s the rub: It takes another fifty percent to achieve that final ten percent. It may not be missed by the masses. Certainly, not by folks who are paying for your time. I have worked with many an actor who balked at doubling their effort for such a diminished return, failing to recognize that, in the words of Esterly, that last ten percent is “everything.”

“What makes handwork inimitable is what will allow it to survive.” Esterly is talking about the invention of computed numerical controlled (CNC) machine tools that can be controlled by computer-aided design or computer-aided manufacture (CAD or CAM) programs. Obviously, these programs are far cheaper and more efficient than hiring a woodcarver, and Esterly advises against competing with them. But there are things they cannot do: “Carving’s redoubt is the mountain fastness where it thrives best, the overhanging peaks, sharp arêtes, and shaded hollows that defy the geometrics of machine tools.” He quotes Herodotus, “Better to live in a rugged land and rule, than to farm a soft plain and be slaves.”

I think of film. On location. Jump cuts, narration, voice-over, multiple camera angles, the opportunity to edit, close-ups, green screens, computer-generated imagery (CGI). Live theatre cannot hope to compete with the special effects or the realism of film… or the control over final product that an editor wields. Why does theatre spend so much money on a lighting system that can accommodate thousands of light cues, or sets that are sumptuously fanciful or meticulously realistic? These were trends that reached their apotheosis at the turn of the century, just before film began to poach our audiences. As film advances, why didn’t theatre head for our “redoubt of mountain fastness”… the thing that film can never replicate. The immediacy, the contemporaneity of real flesh-and-blood enactment before one’s very eyes. The stage performer’s skillset should be very different from that of a film actor. The stage performer must establish a rapport with an audience, a real relationship in real time and space.

Theatrical speeches, those verbal arias building in argument and intensity, used to carry audiences into such raptures they would halt the play for multiple rounds of ovations. Today, producers consider this kind of writing an embarrassment, a mark of amateurism. The playscript is expected to ape the screenplay, with dialogue consisting of one or two lines. This is like hiring a woodcarver to imitate work done by CAD/CAM. I have never understood why, except that film costs more and usually makes more money than live theatre, and on this basis alone, the presumption is made that it should be the touchstone for all the performing arts. Film is a visual medium, where stage is aural. Film is cool; live theatre smokin’ hot. If theatre is becoming obsolete in the age of electronic media, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

“A carver begins as a god and ends as a slave.” Or, as Esterly explicates, the balance of power progressively shifts from the maker to the made. “You start as a godlike creator, imposing ideas on a passive medium, and you end up grounded in the life of this world, taking instructions from the thing in front of you.”

A good play is about something, and a great play is about something significant… and the great playwrights choose to write about significant issues that are on their own edge. In other words, the higher the stakes for the playwright, the more she is incentivized to go for that extra ten percent. Starting out with a lofty thesis, the playwright is quickly brought down to earth by the constraints of the physical stage and performing within a two-hour span. As the play develops, the characters themselves begin to dictate their own dialogue. Then there is the need for scene sequences that will allow audiences the time to assimilate the emotions from the previous scene. The further along into the process, the fewer the options. Eventually, for me, the process of invention has turned into one of discovery… petition even. Will this work? Will the characters accept this? Can an audience go along with that? Can this be staged… and within a budget?

Esterly, who expected that his replication work would be haunted by the ghost of Grinling Gibbon, found that he was merely a fellow traveler: “The objects were telling me what they’d told him. They were defining the possibilities of their modeling.”  Esterly began to question who was in charge, and his answer emerged as he worked: “an embryonic carving intent on being born.” In other words, what he was making had begun to participate in its making.

This is as apt a description of playwriting as I have ever read. A play may appear to be the brainchild of the writer that is then painstakingly brought to life through the collaborative effort of dozens of artists. But my experience is more aligned with that of the sculptor Rodin who said, “I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.” There is an idea… story, or theme, or character—or a combination of the three. I begin to chip away the obviously extraneous elements, and as I do this the work begins to define possibilities for me. The godlike imposing of my vision on the medium begins to morph slowly into a listening-and-response. There is an embryonic drama intent on being born.

“There’s no waiting, then, for the muse to descend.” The creativity is not something separate from the making. Esterly quotes the aphorism, “Inspiration is for amateurs.” Of all the times when I approach drafts and edits, I would say only one or two of those approaches were motivated by a burning desire to create or express. Either habit or discipline account for the majority. And behind that habit and that discipline lies a sense of devotion to the craft: servitude.

Because Esterly was attempting to recreate the work of another sculptor, he felt a kinship with the carvers in Gibbons’ workshop. Were they fabricators for a conceptualist? Looking at the finished work, he concluded, “They seem to have carved as if it were their own composition. Sincerity shines out from the work, sincerity that seems inseparable from skill.” Sincerity inseparable from skill. In this commodified world, who would make that connection? “The daunting technical demands of the work appear only to have deepened their engagement. Its difficulty was their honor.”

Working for three decades as a lesbian playwright in a culture where lesbians neither own theatres nor have a historical affinity for them, I recognize the truth of Esterly’s insight into the craftspeople who worked for Gibbons. The demands of telling a lesbian and feminist story in such a labor-intensive and transitory medium, which has historically been profoundly hostile to women of non-traditional appearance and resistance to female gender roles, have been daunting. And those daunting demands did deepen my engagement. The difficulty drove me to write a book on how to produce and direct lesbian theatre, as well as publish a collection of scenes and monologues with lesbian content. And then there are the sixty-five plays in seven collections... all self-published. The difficulty of the work is my challenge, and when I take it up, it does become my honor.