"Abundance" by Lizzie Stern

Photo courtesy of Lizzie Stern.

The extended pause in the theater industry brings a new forced perspective: what is life without theater? Who is the writer without the critic? The institution? The playwright’s work is now for no one else. This is a chance to deepen her relationship with herself. To curl up and let creative expression grow without critique or conformity to anyone else’s ideals.  

Trying to write this essay in that spirit, I’ve retreated to a friend’s house outside the city while she’s away. I’m caring for her rooster and ten hens, who sing while they lay their eggs and then reveal them to me in colorful bundles each morning. The youngest is the loudest and my favorite — she belts her egg-song with all the vulnerability and strength of an eleven-o’clock number. I’m making something, she tells the world, and it might not seem like a big deal... but it is.

I’m reading a book about self-expression. It’s called Unforbidden Pleasures by Adam Phillips, and it’s pop psychoanalysis about being happier and sharing yourself with the world authentically, which can be so hard. Phillips says, The artist can be conscious of himself only by forgetting the existence of other people. 

Meanwhile, theaters are turning more and more to the playwright. And not for her product — there is no product right now — but for her guidance. The gesture goes beyond supporting artists in crisis; institutions are in dire need, too, and their survival requires an infusion of creativity and ingenuity that only artists bring.

In September, Soho Rep announced their Number One Program: hiring eight artists on staff with a salary and benefits through June 2021. In a New York Magazinearticle, Helen Shaw describes similar initiatives at other small theaters now embracing an employment model. And in July, a collective of BIPOC artists, to whom institutions are now held accountable, released a 31-page list of demands titled “We See You, White American Theater.” It is a path to greater racial equity in the industry — or, as the playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig puts it elsewhere in this magazine, “the most beautiful document I’ve read since the Green New Deal.”

The evolution of our ecosystem is following a pattern just like any other: conformity, then transformation. We are living through a period of transformation. Of new structures and new moralities that will change the rules that govern us all. Phillips says, The desire for freedom is the desire for new rules. And new rules mean new names for things.

I think we’re looking for a new language. And it is the language of the writer.

***

Vocabulary

I started at Playwrights Horizons in 2015 as the Administrative Assistant and Board Liaison. On my first day, I wore a dress with a collar so tight my personality would have to scream to be heard. “Don’t tell them you’re a playwright,” an industry mentor told me. I got a second opinion. “The staff won’t believe you want to grow there, that you want to become a Literary Manager.” I got a third opinion. “There’s only one Literary Manager in the country who’s also a playwright, and I think he’s about to quit.”

But my crush on Playwrights Horizons was all-consuming and I needed a job. By the time I graduated college, a belief had cemented: a happy life is one of unyielding work fueled by passion and, more importantly, stability. In other words, a freelance writing career is a precarious delusion of grandeur. 

When I finally came out as a writer at Playwrights, it was not the conversation I’d been preparing for. The Literary Manager at the time was Sarah Lunnie, and I can tell you exactly the words she said because, as is typical of Sarah, their impact was more like a tattoo than a conversation:

“You’re allowed to be more than one thing. It is a gift to others to identify yourself the way you want to be seen. Call yourself a writer, and everyone else will too.”

This was a new way of talking. Expansion. Generosity. Self-definition that grows from self-contradiction. This is the vocabulary of the artist.

Phillips writes, Extricate yourself, in so far as you can, from the vocabulary that doesn’t suit you, that doesn’t get you the life you want. The vocabulary of the industry had made the life I wanted seem impossible.

I get it. It hurts more to wonder than to know. But what growth isn’t painful?

Now, the differences between artistic and institutional language are not always clear. The two often blur. They definitely do at Playwrights, as they might at other theaters which, like ours, are run by artists. But they are two different languages; they have different vocabularies and different rules. I’ll explain. 

I’m in a playwriting group called Youngblood at Ensemble Studio Theatre. Everyone in it is under 30. Suspended in a protracted adolescence, we are childlike in our curiosity. We like to play. One of us shares something new each time we meet. We read it aloud and discuss, canvassing its beauty and asking questions. A writer says, The structure of my play is the slow turn of a neck.

We ask about the rules of its curve.

But in other realms — the realm of the critic, the public, and the institution — we speak differently about both the writer and her work. We speak of “discovering her” as if the writer has not been working for years. We speak of “pitching an idea” as if she is an ad campaign for a consumer product. We say a play “doesn’t make sense.” This is the language of prohibitive judgment and commodification. Of knowing, rather than wondering. And I get it. It hurts more to wonder than to know. But what growth isn’t painful? And isn’t the alternative pain — the pain of not growing — worse?

***

Conformity

Here, for example, is what unfolds in my office on West 42nd Street: an early-career writer talks to me as the Literary Manager and speaks not of her rules but of the institution’s. She asks these questions: what makes a play right for Playwrights Horizons? How do I get in your pipeline? How do I write a play that might get produced there?

In 1891, four years before being imprisoned, Oscar Wilde published an essay, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” He envisions an artistic universe without prevailing moralities that are dictated by public opinion or institutions (i.e. as to who an artist is allowed to be and what type of art she is allowed to make). It is, instead, a world self-governed by individualistic aesthetic values, shaped by artists themselves. The alternative, he explains, is deadly both for the artist and for cultural progression:

“Whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped.”

I was texting yesterday with a group of friends, all playwrights. I asked about ‘personal statement’ questions. The type that appear in, for example, applications to writing groups at theaters, or meetings with Literary Staff members. They are intended to be open-ended and generous, but can have the adverse effect of hemming in the writer by inviting her to stereotype herself without meaning to. My friend, the one whose play is the slow turn of a neck, replies to the group thread:

“The question ‘What’s your artistic objective?’”

I pause. The generality of this question seems ideal, right? Maximal freedom for the writer. But it isn't free, not really. Our system has power dynamics: the critic, the public, the institution. And each of these structures, in turn, has power dynamics: white supremacy, patriarchy, scarcity mentality, to name only a few of the more forceful. Perceived neutrality, in the form of openness, is just a way for these existing dynamics to dominate. My friend goes on: 

“Knowing how we think about identity in theater, that question is a set-up to talk about ‘my oppression.’ It’s the idea that the playwright is the play. That each play can be understood through one guiding set of politics. That we’re supposed to ‘get’ a play, not ‘feel’ it. There has to be room for mystery in our field.”

The institution’s invitation to the writer to identify herself on her terms results in the institution identifying her on their terms because she is trying to guess what they would want to hear and then saying that. In a field with so much application and rejection, especially early in the career of an artist, this is painful for everyone involved — not just for the writers, but also for the staff members sifting through piles of rote answers and raking for authenticity. And the art suffers for it. A playwright, in a Youngblood meeting, says:

“The need to articulately describe the thing we are making — before we’ve made it — is inherently in contradiction to making the thing. The point of art is for there to be something in it which other people see, which you the writer didn’t see. That while you’re sitting there writing dialogue, something is moving underneath that you yourself don’t understand.”

I’m writing down every word. She continues:

“A full articulation of one’s own work is the death of good art.”

***

Transformation

If applications or agent-arranged meetings were in the language of the writer, what questions would we ask? My friend in Youngblood said:

“I would love questions that demand spontaneous answers rather than the same reheated ones. It could be about anything, an obsession I have. This book about eels I'm reading? Let’s have a new conversation.”

Embracing the language of the writer — in the many ways we talk about her and about her work — would mean the difference between the writer belonging (i.e. being herself) and fitting in (i.e. changing herself to be accepted). In our current system, the writer and her work must try to fit into the institution. This is the conformity of the artist.

But if institutions were to think more like an artist and less like a critic — i.e. wondering not knowing, impressionable not judgmental — they are afforded greater openness to new thought. This is the transformation of the institution.

This period isn’t about quick answers. It is about growing into who we will become.

It’s a place to start, anyway. A new language is, like any learning, really an unlearning: the old rules no longer apply. And right now that’s just about . . . all we know about our industry. Disaster brings uncertainty, a combination that makes future-planning a paradoxical bind: solutions are necessary (we must bail ourselves out of this), but impossible to execute (what was true yesterday is no longer true today). At best, plans provide structure for necessary action. At worst, they are the foot soldiers of prohibitive thought.

I brought a draft of this essay to a Youngblood meeting for conversation. A playwright said, I am so relieved it doesn’t propose any plans. If we are thinking like the writer, this period isn’t about quick answers. It is about growing into who we will become.

***

Abundance

What is at stake, in our period of transformation, is the progression of our art form. And as the “We See You, White American Theater” initiative reminds us, the only way to nurture its progression is to account for the many impediments to its expression — especially those as persistent as the weather.

This is an arid climate.

I’ll take you back to my office, and back to that early-career writer and her three questions: what makes a play right for Playwrights, how do I get in the pipeline, how do I write a play you might produce?

As unwittingly self-annihilating as these questions may be, they’re also totally understandable. Writers don’t need productions only to realize a vision, to make something meaningful from nothing, or to give our true essence to the collective — we need to make money.

We stretch our income like a worn elastic; there is so much that we want but cannot afford to do.

I talk to a playwright who’s leaving New York. She says, I couldn’t afford theater tickets or my apartment.

In New York’s gig economy and real estate market, financial security is nearly impossible for any artist without independent wealth, so we find work somewhere else. People say it’s the golden age of television, but I think it’s the golden age of playwriting. So many of the most innovative shows are staffed by playwrights who needed health insurance.

I talk to a friend on the artistic staff at a peer theater. He says, We are on a tightrope not knowing when its end will come.

Non-profit theaters are under-resourced and under-funded. With inadequate governmental support and, again, New York’s real estate market, we all rely heavily on philanthropy. This means that, in order to sustain our existence, we must continually advocate for its monetary value — a method of survival which, in our economy, is chronically draining. We stretch our income like a worn elastic; there is so much that we want but cannot afford to do.

And writers know this. We know that if we, say, write a play for 15 actors, opportunities for its development — and, in turn, for our employment — will be more expensive and therefore more unlikely. 

Maybe the writer doesn’t write it.

Or maybe the Literary Manager doesn’t read it for a long time, too long. Because she is overextended. Because our departments are understaffed and, like writers, we love our work so much we forget to take care of ourselves. We eat tupperware dinners at our desks and schlep stacks of plays on vacations we don’t really take.

And writers know this. And Literary Managers know that writers know this. We read the email, I know you have a thousand plays on your pile so I get it if you don’t have time to read this draft.

Maybe the writer doesn’t send it.

If there is virtue in disaster, it might be that it disabuses us of romantic notions. We can see that the playwright’s protracted adolescence is borne not just of the palliative notion of childlike wonder, but of a broken economy in which the trappings of adulthood are a dream delayed. And in the same way that the starving artist is not a bohemian fantasy, scarcity is not the mother of invention — it is an impediment to our art and to our humanity. 

The problem feels insurmountable: as long as we look to material resources to foster progressive work and our basic wellbeing, we will always come up dry because those are resources we cannot expand — certainly not right now, anyway. But we can look elsewhere. 

Phillips says, Any given vocabulary is a secret and not so secret moralizer of experience . . . a form of instruction.

If we change our vocabulary, we can change our form of instruction: our rules of operation, structures, and ways of being. 

I’m thinking about something as fundamental as “rejection letters,” which come in response to, say, a submission to a theater or an application to a writing group. Why do we call them rejection letters? Too often, the reason for a rejection is purely a lack of material resources — the agony of we would if we could but we can't. So if we look past material restriction, “rejection” no longer makes sense as a framework for a response letter. Each exchange of a new play is, actually, generative. When a Literary Manager opens a script, she gets curious. She learns something new, she has a shift in perspective. If the conversation were predicated on those resources — immaterial ones — wouldn’t it be more honest to send a letter of appreciation or, can you imagine, acceptance? 

This is just one example of a larger culture in which scarcity dictates not only what we do, but how we do it. And it doesn’t have to be this way. There is so much abundance. The writer’s language is fertile soil: it yields infinite re-description, ways to create new terms and new rules for ourselves. Curiosity, appreciation, compassion, and care for one another are all essential resources. When we tend to them, when we allow them great power of instruction, they self-replenish plentifully. They keep our ecosystem vital through every stage of evolution.

I know we’re all saying, It feels like we’re staring into the void. I think we really are. And when the writer stares into the void, she sees negative space and the opportunity to fill it. 

‘Personal Statement’ Application Questions from Members of Youngblood

• If you were squatting in a luxury apartment what would you use it for?
• Walk me through your moon landing
• Who have you bullied?
• What will they say at your funeral if it all goes right?
• When did you first know you were the gender you are now?
• Why haven’t you written the play you’ve always wanted to write?
• Would you rather write a perfect play or have a perfect child?
• If your child wrote a better play than you could write would you be proud of her?
• Where in your living space do you write?
• What's a recurring dream you had in your childhood?
• Do you drink enough water?
• Do you have a favorite family member?
• What really offends you?
• What is the cutest thing you have ever seen?
• Should public sex be illegal?
• Write your own obituary
• Is it possible to finish a play?
• Should one ever finish a play?
• What is an actor’s job?
• Please send us a photo of you in a wig
• What music do you listen to while you write and why?
• What’s wrong with you?
• What do you wish you could say on national news?
• Have you ever fallen in love with a character?
• What do you need help with, just fucking be honest here, what do you need help with?
• If you lived alone on an island, what would you talk to the animals about? 
• Please write about celery, anything about celery
• Do you like your work? Be honest.
• Write a short poem called: Anatomy of a Fart
• What are your plans for tomorrow?
• Confess
• If you were a dump truck would you still write?
• What’s the last thing you saw that made you jealous?
• How would your Kindergarten teacher describe you?
• What are you obsessed with today?
• Defend something you don’t believe in