[The third installment of Sarah Ruhl's garland of essays. See the "essays" category on the left for previous posts.]

7. Hungry Ghosts, Gardens, and Doing Plays in New York

The ideal audience is either wise or innocent; the know-it-alls are not the ideal audience. This makes New York a tricky place for a new play. Another thing that makes New York tricky is the hungry ghosts. Hungry ghosts in Buddhist thought can never fill themselves up. It is not: we will put up the play for 4 weeks and see who comes. It is: what of the reviews? Will it extend? Will it move? Will it run forever? Feed me! Says the hungry ghost. And if a play were to run forever, could it properly be called theater anymore? Instead it would be an ossified strange thing, dangling half-way between live theater, a parade, and an amusement park ride. Think of the longest running plays…what happens to them…what do they become….restaurants and plays should not be open for longer than the half-life of a chef, because they are about living consumable items.

I was talking to a group of theater donors in a city other than New York and they spoke at length about their gardens. Where the bamboo grew. Where not to plant bamboo, and where to plant it. This particular theater audience seemed to come to the theater to have fun. I thought: oh my, they get what they need from their gardens at home in their gardens. And they get other pleasures from the theater. In New York because we do not most of us have gardens, we come to the theater for what we might properly get from our gardens. And because you cannot get exactly from theater what you can get from a garden, we come to the theater anxious, vengeful, cranky, and with blood on our teeth. In a perfect world the virtues of theater are similar to those of cultivating a garden—something living, something patient, something always growing. Perhaps it is in those cities where people learn these virtues that they come to a theater hoping to nurture the lifespan of a theatrical company, rather than wanting to devour or spit out one show at a time.

Again, I am no innocent, nor do I exempt myself. I speak only of virtues that I myself might imitate. Where do I live? New York. Why? Because I love it here. Why? Because I love the people here. Do I have a garden? No. Would I be good at gardening if I had a garden? I don’t know.

8. Subtext Is to the Left of the Work Not Underneath the Work

If you are acting in play of mine, and I say this full of love for you, please, if you will, don’t think one thing and then say another thing. Think the thing you are saying. Do not think of the language of the play as a cover or deception for your actual true hidden feelings which you’ve invented yourself as a backstory. Don’t create a bridge between you and the impulse for the language—erase the boundary between the two. Think of subtext as to the left of the language and not underneath it. There is no deception or ulterior motive or “cover” about the language. There are, instead, vast gulfs of silence and the unsayable to the left or to the right or even above the language. The unsayable transcendent in an ideal world hovers above the language. The word hover over and above the word cover.

9. On Theater as an Inaccessible Art Form

I was speaking to a young playwright the other day, he was seventeen, and he asked me how I felt about writing in such an inaccessible art form, in an art form that no longer meant much to most people. I thought this was true, and also untrue, and sad. Because there is no art form that is more accessible than theater at its roots. Nothing is required but people and space. Theater is the child’s first art form, when the child first imitates. A child clearly knows that all that is required for a play is some people to watch, and some people to do, and a place in which to do it. Perhaps we now live in a world in which real people and real space is at an odd premium. It is objects that seem accessible, because they are consumable.

I felt the non-objectness of theater keenly when trying to “move” a play of mine that had been in two different cities and now was in a third city. Because you cannot actually “move” the invisible. You cannot load the invisible onto a truck. You cannot goad it. You cannot control or demand the invisible. This is why we are superstitious in the theater. This non-materiality of a material medium—something you cannot hold, cannot buy, cannot move…it is vexing, but I would argue, it is deeply accessible, precisely because its conditions are so simple and direct. Some might argue: how is it that you can say the invisible world is more accessible than the visible world? And if I can see a play, how then, is it invisible? I do not know, I do not know…I cannot say…

Film is bigger than us—it flickers, like Plato’s cave, always out of reach. Do we like a thing that seems out of reach but we can actually buy?  Celebrities seem out of reach but it seems almost as if we can buy them. As opposed to the thing—a stage—with real actors–that is almost within reach—one can almost touch it, can almost touch them–but we can never never buy it, never buy them? In fact theater is the most radically accessible art form we have, and if we could forget about the rent on 42nd street and forget about ticket prices and forget about subscriber audiences…could we? Could we forget? Could we? Could we forget and could we go down into the basement with a flashlight and a bucket of water and a pulley made of string and could we slip into the garage with a broken old hat and our grandmother’s wedding dress and could we forget and could we…

10. Don’t Send Your Characters to Reform School

American dramaturgy is not actually based on Aristotle’s Poetics, it is based subliminally on Pilgrim’s Progress…that is to say: what has your character learned, how has she changed, what is her journey? Which is all a subset of a morality play. But I love morality plays because they are undisguised. It is instead realism in the grips of a morality play that is a strange genre to me—a morality play disguised as realism that I find to be untrue.

And as we know, the pilgrims who founded our country hated the theater, because they hated sex and the irrational. (Have you ever wondered why Boston is not a theater town?)

Try applying the generic question: “how complete is his or her journey?” to Beckett, to Shakespeare, and watch the question fall way short of the mark of what is illuminating about the play. It is not enough to know only one question and apply it to all plays.

And so I say: don’t make your play into a reform school to send your characters to.

11. Is There an Ethics of Comedy? In the Way That There Is an Ethics of Tragedy?

I had a dream last night in which I was giving a radio address on the ethics of comedy. What did I say? I cannot remember.

12. William Hazlitt and the Function of Theater Criticism in an Age of Digital Reproduction

William Hazlitt used to write theater criticism that made you feel as though you were actually there, to experience Bernhardt or whoever it was on stage, who would only be on stage for that moment only. Now theater criticism has (in general) become more of a thumbs up/thumbs down affair. But in the age of mechanical reproduction, when theater is one of the few unreproducable mediums, it becomes even more important for critics to be able to write that old kind of criticism, the kind of criticism that says, I WAS THERE, I was a thinking feeling I full of my perceptions in that moment and that moment alone. Because a camera really cannot capture theater’s essence but sometimes a pen can if the pen wants to. And then audiences could go to the theater and think, I am having the same experience as that highly sensitive critic or I am not—but the short and long of it is not merely that they were banished from the theater or encouraged to come. Instead there is a dialogue of souls about the invisible, and the critic becomes a bridge between one century and the next—so that when the next century wants to know—what was it actually like to see Vanessa Redgrave on stage live, someone can tell them, because a camera isn’t able to capture the atmospheric pipeline that runs between the stage and the audience.

[To be continued. Up next: The Scary, Musicals, Gobos, and Audiences.]

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.