Read 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write Online
Authors: Sarah Ruhl
100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (14 page)
When did people start writing “End of Play” rather than “The End”? Of course in the Renaissance they could end their plays “Exeunt” (or rather a typographer did years later), or they could write epilogues in rhyming verse. Years later they wrote “Curtain,” but we don’t generally have curtains or rhymes or epilogues anymore, so we have to write that sad little phrase, “End of Play.” Oh, dear. “End of Play” has me sighing on my pillow. “End of Play” has me never beginning again.
100. On community theater
My mother directed
Enter Laughing
at the Wilmette Community Theater when I was eight years old. I came to every rehearsal, and I was crushed when the run ended. Harry Teinowitz, an awkward young actor with a lisp, played David, the hapless would-be actor, who walks into an audition and, reading literally from the script, says, “Enter laughing.” I found the actress who played Angela Marlowe horribly, painfully glamorous, both on stage and off—the slow way she put on her stockings in her dressing room, and the way she would smoke on her breaks. So I was given this early sense that there was a halo of glamour around theater, even at the Wilmette Community Theater, where dentists played heroes and businessmen played dentists.
I took notes in the back, in the dark of the theater, and gave them to my mother, who often passed my notes on to her actors. (This formative experience might make me trying to directors even now.) I saw almost every performance of
Enter Laughing
, and when I learned that my mother and father were going to closing night and my sister and I were to be left home with a sitter, I felt wretched and betrayed. I cried on the floor of the living room, bereft, as my mother and father walked out the door. Not only had I seen it for the last time, I didn’t know I’d seen it for the last time, so hadn’t properly savored and mourned the final experience.
The second production that was etched into my young mind was of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at Regina Dominican High School, a Catholic school run by nuns, also directed by my mother. She set it in the 1920s; the rustics were gangsters, and the fairies were flappers.
I came to tragedy later.
Romeo and Juliet
at North Shore Community Theater; my mother played the nurse, directed, as I recall, by the grand pooh-bah of North Shore Community Theater, a rotund theatrical man with a beard and a booming voice, named Ron Tobas. Every night my mother howled in grief over the apparently lifeless body of her charge. It was strange to see my mother howl in grief. “My lamb! My lady!” as she collapsed over a body. I had dreams, as a twelve-year-old, that I had to go on as Juliet. And when I cried at the play, I cried for Juliet, but more, I cried for my mother crying for Juliet. Which perhaps gave me a displaced point of view, of who the main character might actually be in a tragedy.
These formative productions weren’t necessarily the best, in the professional sense of the word. They were born of small communities—a high school and a straight-up
community theater
—one of the most detested compound words in the annals of professional theater. But I was affected by seeing work born of people I was related to or knew casually. What is more moving than seeing someone you love on stage, or, better yet, watching someone watch a beloved person on stage? The watcher is lit up, transformed.
Why do people go to plays anyway? Perhaps because they played the angel in their church Nativity play, or because they played Clarence Darrow in high school, or because their mother sewed costumes, as did Peachy Taylor, who made all the costumes for the North Shore Community Theater. And why do we go to community theater? Not because the reviews were good, but because
we have to
—because the person we know who is involved would be
offended
if we didn’t—we go, in other words, because of the social contract. The ticket prices are minimal or nonexistent. The contract that binds the audience to the work is nonmaterial and not terribly aesthetic; it is based on social ties. The play is an occasion to exercise and celebrate social bonds rather than the other way around.
It seems somehow significant to me that after all the beautiful professional productions I’ve seen of Paula Vogel’s work, it was a student production of
The Baltimore Waltz
, inside a black box that used to be a university cafeteria that was later shut down because of asbestos on the ceiling—it was
this
production of her work that still moves me to tears when I think of it. And remembering such productions reminds me that the theater cannot be reduced to once-a-month luxuries for professionals. Play itself is a primary process, not a luxury, not a hobby, but something all children must do to survive into adulthood.
When I watch my children play, and they are at one moment a self-proclaimed mean turtle and then a nice turtle and then a grown man, each fiercely and completely, it reminds me of the primary human hope that identity might in fact be fluid, that we are simultaneously ourselves and the beasts in the field, a donkey, a queen, a starlet, a lover—and that identity might be nothing more than dipping our Heraclitean feet in the river, moment to moment. And if identity is fluid, then we might actually be free. And furthermore, if identity is fluid, then we might actually be connected—in Whitman’s sense—if we can be the leaves of grass and also the masses on the Brooklyn Bridge, then we can leave the ego behind and
be world
for a moment. And this is one reason why we go to theater, either to identify with others, or to
be
others, for the moment; and in what we call community theater, the identification might be stronger, because we are more likely to either play the donkey ourselves or know the donkey intimately.
I do not claim a general preference for community theater over and above professional theater; I spend more time these days in professional theater, which I suppose makes it my community. But what I mean to say is the productions that have had the biggest impact on me—have ferreted their way into the most porous, childlike parts of me, winnowed in, and stayed there—have also been the smallest in scale. Smallness is subversive, because smallness can creep into smaller places and wreak transformation at the most vulnerable, cellular level. In a time when largeness is threatening to topple us, I wish to remember and praise the beauty of smallness, in order to banish the Goliath of loneliness. So thank you, Paula, thank you to my mother and to Shakespeare, thank you to the Ron Tobases, Angela Marlowes, and Peachy Taylors, for making me less lonely in this terribly large world.
Note
89. Gobos, crickets, and false exits: three hobgoblins of false mimesis
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to some early readers of these essays: Kathy Ruhl, John Lahr, Todd London, Bruce Ostler, Lydia Weaver, Julia Cho, and, always, Paula Vogel. To some later readers of the essays: Nicholas Dawidoff, Mark Epstein, Quill Camp, Max Ritvo, Katherine Schultz, Sarah Fulford, Edward Carey, Sherry Mason, André Bishop, and Anne Cattaneo. To Terry Nolan, who thought there was enough here to make a book, I am eternally grateful. To some early audiences of these essays when I read bits of them out loud at Vassar, Franklin & Marshall, University of Scranton, Washington University, University of Colorado, and the Michener Center. To the collaborators who made their way into these essays: Les Waters, Anne Bogart, Mark Wing-Davey, John Doyle, Davis McCallum, Jessica Thebus, Michael Cerveris, Laura Benanti, Maria Dizzia, and Roy Harris. For Martha Karess, who supported me so wonderfully during bed rest. And I am very grateful to Jonathan Galassi; to Mitzi Angel, a brilliant and passionate minimalist; and to Will Wolfslau.
Also, thanks to Tina Howe, who has given me courage in life and art many times over. Tina gave me my first good-luck charm for an opening night when I was twenty-six. When I first had the twins, she visited me and took me out of the house and said, “Sarah, soon they will be in school! I still hear an alarm bell every day at 3:00 p.m., and I stop writing then! But 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. are perfect hours for a writer! And until they are in school, enjoy rolling around the floor with them! It all goes very fast.” And my friend Kathleen Tolan, a brilliant playwright and mother of two, was one of the first people I called when I learned that I was pregnant with twins. I burst into tears on the phone with her, and she said, “Don’t worry! Big families are wonderful! And I will help you!” And so she did.
Perhaps it would hearten me to name some of the playwright mothers who give me inspiration: Julia Cho, Diana Son, Lynn Nottage, Rinne Groff, Theresa Rebeck, Julia Jordan, Jenny Schwartz, Tanya Barfield, Marsha Norman, Amy Herzog, Beth Henley, Kate Marks, Karen Hartman, Bridget Carpenter, Elizabeth Egloff, Quiara Hudes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Caryl Churchill, Adrienne Kennedy, and Karen Zacarías.
To my children, Anna, William, and Hope, who make brief appearances in these essays. And to my husband, always, for making the writing life along with family life possible, and good. To a big-tent circus love.
Also by Sarah Ruhl
Plays
Passion Play: a cycle
The Clean House and Other Plays
Melancholy Play
Late: a cowboy song
Eurydice
Dead Man’s Cell Phone
In the Next Room, or the vibrator play
Orlando
Stage Kiss
Dear Elizabeth: A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again
A Note About the Author
Sarah Ruhl’s plays include
In the Next Room, or the vibrator play
(Pulitzer Prize finalist; Tony Award nominee for best new play);
The Clean House
(Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2005; winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize);
Passion Play: a cycle
(PEN American Award);
Dead Man’s Cell Phone
(Helen Hayes Award); and, most recently,
Stage Kiss
and
Dear Elizabeth
.
Her many plays have been produced on Broadway, off-Broadway, regionally throughout the country, and internationally. They have been translated into more than fifteen languages, including Polish, Russian, Korean, and Arabic.
Originally from Chicago, Ruhl received her M.F.A. from Brown University, where she studied with Paula Vogel. Ruhl has since been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwright Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a mid-career playwright, a Feminist Press’s Forty Under Forty Award, and the 2010 Lilly Award. She is currently on the faculty of the Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Faber and Faber, Inc.
An affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Sarah Ruhl
All rights reserved
First edition, 2014
Some of the essays in this book originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: “Is playwriting teachable?: the example of Paula Vogel” in the September/October 2009 issue of
The Dramatist
and
The Brown Reader
(2014); “On community theater” in
The Play That Changed My Life
(2009); and “On the loss of sword fights” in the September/October 2013 issue of
The Dramatist
.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ruhl, Sarah, 1974– author.
[Essays. Selections]
100 essays I don’t have time to write: on umbrellas and sword fights, parades and dogs, fire alarms, children, and theater / Sarah Ruhl.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-86547-814-5 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71197-9 (e-book)
I. Title.
PS3618.U48 A6 2014
814'.6—dc23
2014008668