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MYSELF AND HOW I GOT INTO THE THEATRE
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Well, I didn’t expect to be understood, and I quickly realized that I’d never be able to “make my living” as a writer of plays (assuming as I did, without ever thinking about it, that my “living” obviously had to include at least the minimum of bourgeois amenities—telephones, heating, “good food,” etc.).
Clearly it was an odd position. There was a certain ghostliness, one might very well say, about writing for people who probably wouldn’t be interested. And that sense of a flat landscape stretching out forever was heightened by the fact that, as a writer for the theatre, I was not joining an artistic community committed to any particular struggle or agenda. The cafés of the Impressionists and the bars of the Abstract Expressionists had no equivalents on the streets I traveled. I didn’t live in a world like Renaissance Florence, in which sculptors vied for the honor of putting their particular subtly different vision of a hero or a god in a public square, because as far as I could see there were no types or models toward which I ought to strive, no public squares, and, in a way, no public.
No one would reward me, and no one would punish me, if I followed the conventions of nineteenth-century theatre or rejected them, if I wrote in a more naturalistic style or in a more surrealistic style. In writing a play, should I draw my inspiration from George Balanchine’s ballets? Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries? The verses of James Merrill, Fra Angelico’s frescoes, the songs on the radio, the day’s newspaper, my own life? No one cared.
In the corner of the universe where I’d be writing, there’d been a breakdown in the system of rewards and punishments that behaviorists would consider the only possible system for teaching a dog or a writer how to do a task well. And yet the breakdown meant I was totally free.
Well then, what was the outcome? Was the game lost or won? Were the plays worthwhile and valuable, or weren’t they? Regrettably, I may never know. Freedom and self-confidence enabled me to write ambitious plays. I amused myself, and then I died, I suppose, with the results of the experiment still undetermined.
Well, I didn’t expect to be understood, and I quickly realized that I’d never be able to “make my living” as a writer of plays (assuming as I did, without ever thinking about it, that my “living” obviously had to include at least the minimum of bourgeois amenities—telephones, heating, “good food,” etc.).
Clearly it was an odd position. There was a certain ghostliness, one might very well say, about writing for people who probably wouldn’t be interested. And that sense of a flat landscape stretching out forever was heightened by the fact that, as a writer for the theatre, I was not joining an artistic community committed to any particular struggle or agenda. The cafés of the Impressionists and the bars of the Abstract Expressionists had no equivalents on the streets I traveled. I didn’t live in a world like Renaissance Florence, in which sculptors vied for the honor of putting their particular subtly different vision of a hero or a god in a public square, because as far as I could see there were no types or models toward which I ought to strive, no public squares, and, in a way, no public.
No one would reward me, and no one would punish me, if I followed the conventions of nineteenth-century theatre or rejected them, if I wrote in a more naturalistic style or in a more surrealistic style. In writing a play, should I draw my inspiration from George Balanchine’s ballets? Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries? The verses of James Merrill, Fra Angelico’s frescoes, the songs on the radio, the day’s newspaper, my own life? No one cared.
In the corner of the universe where I’d be writing, there’d been a breakdown in the system of rewards and punishments that behaviorists would consider the only possible system for teaching a dog or a writer how to do a task well. And yet the breakdown meant I was totally free.
Well then, what was the outcome? Was the game lost or won? Were the plays worthwhile and valuable, or weren’t they? Regrettably, I may never know. Freedom and self-confidence enabled me to write ambitious plays. I amused myself, and then I died, I suppose, with the results of the experiment still undetermined.