I cannot tell you how sorry i am to have ignored you for so long. No! Don't look away! Please. Allow me to explain. You see, and don't take this the wrong way, but i'm a little ambivalent about our relationship. No, it's not you. You're beautiful: your wallpaper, your layout, your name, each is perfectly suited to my tastes and proclivities. However, the potential exposure you offer is intimidating, which makes me want to make each post really count. I slave over every verb and punctuation mark and surely that can't be good form for a blogger! A blogger should be impulsive and incendiary not careful and painstaking. Right? It took me three hours to write my last blog!
There's something else that has kept us apart too. You see, for a few weeks i was engaged in a face off with a certain question, put to me by a legendary institution of higher learning. This institution wanted me to state my purpose and each time i sat down to try to do so i felt like Atreyu trying to pass the laser eyed Spinxes.
The power of such a tiny question is impressive. I know without doubt that i want to write plays. I know without question i want to work in the theater. But as soon as i was asked to explain myself my knees buckled and my mind took to flight. After endless hours of procrastination i produced an answer. Tell me what you think.
I write because I have stories to tell. I do not have to hunt for the stories; they permeate the world around me. I find them in images, in songs, in situations. They make themselves at home in my subconscious and set about traversing my imagination. They sing and shout, hum and whisper waiting to be heard, yearning to be explored. They are there even if I never put a single verb or noun to paper. In fact, the only choice I have is whether or not to write them for my imagination is almost constantly occupied with images and conversations, with human relationships in times of conflict and crisis.
I write for the theater because I crave community. For me the wonder of connecting to a global community through the internet and mass media cannot compete or compare with the powerful and life affirming connection generated by the energy of humans gathered together, of audiences and artists communing to conjure collective dreams and nightmares. Theater is where we tell ourselves stories about ourselves in order to explore all the promise and possibility of our lives and to confront every problem and threat we face. No other medium rivals theater’s potential to transport and transform, or tells its stories in a manner as immediate and primal. No other medium comes as close to life in its temporality or in its vitality and danger.
I understand that to be a playwright today I must face a daunting milieu. Today’s theater is one of diminished cultural prominence playing to dwindling, aged audiences. Most of my peers think of theater as something they did in high school; to them it feels irrelevant and inconvenient. Our challenging, thoughtful, pricey art is in competition with myriad facile, cheap, and often thoughtless entertainments cluttering the cultural landscape. After all, how many daily choose a fifty dollar journey to the theater over a free visit to YouTube? Who today opts for a challenge in a world of conveniences?
I have always welcomed a challenge. It is clear to me that to capture the public’s imagination I must write plays which are not only immaculately crafted, but which also tell stories so essential to who we are as humans that they cannot be ignored. I can imagine no greater reward than to surmount such a challenge. For while a theatrical renaissance may be little more than a pipe dream I cannot even conceive of accepting it as such, because I have far too much faith in theater’s power and importance. And, because my yearning for the community it can create is relentless, I also will be relentless in refining my craft and digging to the core of humanity’s struggles. So I will choose to write, not hoping to find solutions, but to relish the questions and the beautiful potential for change and renewal that they present.
