"Eleven Thoughts (In Order)" by Adam Greenfield

Model of the Plan Voisin for Paris by Le Corbusier, displayed at the Nouveau Esprit Pavilion (1925).

1.

It’s October 17, 2020. Playwrights Horizons is marking its fiftieth birthday this year under circumstances that are stranger, more harrowing, and more mysterious than we could have imagined. 

I just learned something interesting from the Old Testament, thanks to my friend Miranda who started going to church: per Leviticus 25, a fiftieth anniversary marks a Year of Jubilee. It says: 

“You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month — on the day of atonement — you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces.” 

And it goes on, commanding that, in the fiftieth year, “You shall not cheat one another,” 
and “If any of your kin fall into difficulty, you shall support them,” 
and “You shall not cheat one another, but you shall fear your God,” 
and “In this year of jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property,” 
and “Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land,” 
and “No one shall rule over the other with harshness,” 
and “The land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and live on it securely.”

This seems worth noting.

2.

For a month, this essay has loomed overhead. I compose sentences in the shower, and while making my morning coffee. But every time I carve out an afternoon, a weekend, a minute to write, the time gets lost to the vortex of Zoom meetings that comprise my life mid-pandemic, and the prose I set down struggles to cohere.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, my hero Jane Jacobs wrote, “There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and be served.” She’s talking about the design of cities, appealing for urban planning that arises from and untethers what’s organic and unpredictable about human patterns, rather than from the attempt to control or restrict them. 

Sometime in May, two-ish months into the pandemic, before my title changed to Artistic Director, I wrote to myself in the margin of my notebook a thought that I keep coming back to, and which must have formed in some relation to Jacobs’ idea: don’t move against the chaos, move with the chaos. In keeping with this, and moving with the moment rather than against it, I’ll just let this essay take the form that it wants to take: thoughts in the order I think them, typed in those moments between, when I have the brain-space to write.

3.

What is a “Year of Jubilee,” if not an invitation to return to formative questions, to challenge assumptions, to confront your practices, and to stare deeply into the mirror and ask, “What do I believe?” In terms of theater, this ritual we usually love but seldom understand why, which is uncannily rendered off-limits in a world of social distancing, some hot questions arise: What are we, when the act of gathering in a room, the very thing that makes theater theater, is neither safe nor legal? Theater, at its essence, is to me as Peter Brook describes it: an actor, a stage, an audience, and — for Playwrights Horizons I feel honor-bound to add — a text. When theater goes digital, are we advocating for our continuance, or our extinction? Are we pleasing the gods? Angering the gods? Or do the gods understand we’re just in a pinch? Facing a massive economic blow, with no clear sense of a timeline for rebuilding, what level of sacrifice should we be prepared to make? How do we undo the systems of inequity and oppression we've upheld in our practices, and how do we reckon with our past? What is your responsibility to the present when you learn that, in the past, what you had thought was progress was in fact anything but? What of the rising ticket prices, edged ever higher by a struggling producing model? What do we need theater to be when we reopen? What do we want theater to be when we reopen? How will this year of collapse affect our psyche in the long run, and what can theaters do in response? What is our role in the city? To nurse wounds? To throw down gauntlets? To raise flags? To numb pain? To inflict pain? To forge paths? 

4.

My train of thought races back to other moments I felt lost, and it stops in March, 2007, when I moved east to New York to join the Playwrights Horizons staff as Literary Manager — a time of profound disorientation. All I had wanted in life was to land here, but when I arrived I became undone. I was overwhelmed, beset, depressed; I was a pig in the city, squinting at Mapquest printouts, prey to every Scientologist who said hello in Port Authority, getting lost on rerouted trains, bumping into literally every person on Bleecker. I was chronically unable to hail a taxi. I figured, “I’ll give the job three years to save face and then escape to Montana to open a food-truck-bookstore-yoga-barn.” The city felt like a giant machine, totally oblivious to my existence, and uncaring, like a Fritz Lang nightmare vision from Metropolis. It seemed impossibly complex, disordered, out of control. 

And I thought, if I can just understand the city better, maybe it’ll open itself to me. I dove into books, into podcasts. I wanted to know where our tap water comes from, how it gets here, and how our waste water leaves, and how is the city powered, and where are all of the wires? Why are the subways routed the way they are, and why do they serve certain neighborhoods but not others, and how are the traffic lights timed? Who chose the width of the sidewalks, and the shape of the curb, and how did Broadway get diagonal when the rest of mid-Manhattan is a grid? In defiance of the city and the crowded, sweaty subway commute, I got a bike because, as I recall thinking, “The city doesn’t want me to ride a bike and therefore I will!” 

And something happened, which I didn’t expect: I fell in love with the place. The more I got to know New York, traveling through its streets and neighborhoods by bicycle, dodging cars and pedestrians, alternating routes to see new angles, fed by the appreciation I learned from reading about its internal engines, I began to feel attuned to how it works, its rhythms and mood swings, its mercurial attitude. I gasped at the way sunlight bounced off of windows looking eastward toward the city at sundown, and I looked forward with disproportionate glee to my descent into Chinatown biking across the Manhattan bridge in the morning, and the smell of fish and exhaust that accompanied it. I heard “Rhapsody in Blue” played on a steel drum in Union Square, and tears sprang to my eyes.

5.

That last bit made me think of another thing that Jane Jacobs wrote. She said: 

“The trust of a city street is formed over time from many little public sidewalk contacts.… Most of [these contacts are] ostensibly utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all. The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level — most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone — is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in a time of personal or neighborhood need. The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street. Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized…. A lively city scene is lively largely by virtue of its enormous collection of small elements.”

And I think: The theater is a city. The city is a theater.

6.

Long, long before I felt lost in New York City and then fell in love with it, I felt lost in my life and then fell in love with theater. I don’t remember much about being a kid, except feeling pretty embarrassed and ashamed: I was supposed to be a developing Jew but found little there that was simpatico; and I was supposed to be heterosexual but knew that was a sham and that my future guaranteed only disease and loneliness. Because I was neither of the things I most needed to be, I spent many years having no sense of existing much at all. 

I have no idea why, but it was only through plays that I began to feel present. For some bizarre reason this ritual of watching human stories unfold in time, in space, in worlds imagined by these Gods, these playwrights, to expose life’s paradoxes, to suggest an alternate worldview, to present life idealized and those ideals corrupted, to grieve, to celebrate, to expose psychology, to craft poetry: they pumped painful, challenging contradictions into my years of teenage melancholy, and wrestling with these shaped who I am.

Aunt Dan and Lemon. The Crucible. The Road to Mecca. Into The Woods. Merrily We Roll Along. (All of Sondheim). Rhinoceros. Loot. M. Butterfly. Skin of Our Teeth. Two Trains Running. The Maids. Prelude to a Kiss. Machinal. Reckless. Dutchman. Cloud Nine. Antigone. The Importance of Being Earnest. The Bald Soprano. 

When the Dionysian cultists of the seventh century BCE, minds blasted by ancient Greek wine, donned their goatskins to dance the dithyrambic chorus — the ritual that led, ultimately, to Athenian tragedy — it was to please a cruel and mysterious god. When the acrobats and musicians of eighth-century China introduced the popular religious Sangaku ceremony to Japan, it sparked the origins of Noh drama, a ritual that engages Buddhist dogma to confront the moral contradictions inherent to the human experience. And across the diversity of cultures in Africa, performance rituals are sewn into the fabric of society as far back as history can reveal: rituals that uphold values essential to a community’s physical, ethical, and spiritual health.

This work sprang organically from human need, to help us see the world; to help us understand our place in the cosmos. It can expose irreconcilable questions, show us how little we know, bring us together as a community, as a city, one audience at a time, in pursuit of these things. It’s an analog, artisanal, bespoke, hand-made public offering that, when it wants to, can add more life to the experience of being a person. It can make the world a better place — by which I mean a deeper place, a more interesting, complicated, mysterious place. It’s supposed to help us. It helped me. And the way it helped me is what made me want to spend my life making it for other people who need it like I do. 

I’m no longer on social media — I never really understood how to use it? — but sometimes lately (I can’t help myself) I look at the Comments section of the online news sources I read, where avatars of people have typed things like, “I have news, everyone, live theater is over,” and, “The only salvation for theater is to go digital.” I can’t agree. If this is indeed a Year of Jubilee, a time “for the redemption of the land,” I think it must be a time to become that melancholy teenager again and tap into that first love, to find my awe and fight for it, and to dismantle the barriers of access to it.

7.

It's October 23, the morning after I wrote that last part, Thought #6, and my pre-meeting computer-clicking led me to the IRS’s “Charities and Nonprofits” site.

Even though the US government shows no particular indication that it believes theater is of value to the culture, it has managed to classify our work as tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, provided we remain organized and operated exclusively for “exempt purposes.” And when I click through the link, the IRS offers this definition: 

“The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.”

Before there was an IRS, before there was a republic of united states, there was a tax-exempt sector. Absent a government, European settlers formed voluntary associations (hospitals, fire departments) to serve the public. By the early twentieth century, the 501(c) code was established to fill a gap in public welfare program support when the U.S. government’s own efforts were insufficient. And to assure the public that these service organizations are operated with integrity, in good hands, and true to our exempt purposes, the government stipulates oversight by a Board of Directors.

“In this year of jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property.” 

Above all, our existence is a debt to the public trust. I will tattoo this on my eyelids. I will write it on a carrot and dangle that carrot in front of my face from a dowel that’s connected to my hat. I will reduce it to a powder, mix it into my kool-aid, and then drink. Oh my god, the presidential election is in eleven days. Looking forward to our fifty-first year, and to whatever metamorphosis this fiftieth year is sparking, our primary pursuit is the public trust. From the midst of this pile-up of crises and awakenings that the year 2020 has brought, a mandate is screaming at me: Your purposes must be exempt! It says, Figure out how you’re not serving the public, all of the public, and then serve the public.

After the Federal Theatre Project was terminated, Halie Flanagan said, “We know now what many doubted four years ago — that great numbers of people, millions of them, who had never gone to the theatre, or had stopped going, want to go to the theatre if the plays are good and the admission reasonable.” 

Photo courtesy of Adam Greenfield.

8.

Here’s a picture of my bike. It’s mangy, and I love it. Last week, someone stole the seat and broke the seat-post clamp, so that’s a new seat. And the handlebar grips are new, too. One of the old ones had split and I was using duct tape for a while as padding, but I finally got these new ones yesterday. I think they’re kind of ugly, which makes me love them more.

9.

It’s impossible to consider the work of Jane Jacobs, and the life of New York’s city streets, without also considering the foil to her grassroots, community-based vision of the city: Robert Moses, widely revered in his time, widely criticized in ours.

A man equally wealthy in capital, political power, and bluster, Moses found inspiration in the feverish utopianism of modernist architects like LeCorbusier, whose “Radiant City” project aimed to impose symmetry and order on the patterns of city life, emphasizing raw geometry over decoration of any sort, and separating a city’s design from any whiff of a preexisting culture. LeCorbusier envisioned a city that would function as machinery, built to behave in the most efficient way possible. A product of the industrial revolution, he envisioned a city design that could essentially be mass-produced. Le Corbusier considered Manhattan obsolete, describing it as “utterly devoid of harmony” and “a storm, a tornado, a cataclysm.”

Robert Moses’s entrance into the field of urban planning coincided with the rise of the automobile, which may explain why his own utopian vision was so car-oriented, envisioning New York City from the vantage point of the driver, not of the pedestrian. Having placed himself among the city’s politicians in a position of great influence, Moses became instrumental in the construction of the Triborough, Throgs Neck, Bronx-Whitestone, Henry Hudson, and the Verrazano bridges, as well as the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Staten Island Expressway, the Cross-Bronx Crossway, and the Belt Parkway, among many others, all of which made a fortune for the city, and for himself.

Like Corbusier, Moses favored the eradication of the “blighted landscapes” — a popular expression at that time — where lower-income communities lived, suggesting they should be destroyed and replaced with high-rise public housing towers surrounded by parkland. “When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis,” he said, infamously, “you have to hack your way with a meat ax.” Under Moses, historic neighborhoods and communities were bulldozed to make way for idealized, controlled housing plans across the city, many of which still stand today: the housing developments on New York’s east side waterfront from 14th Street clear down to the Brooklyn Bridge, all built under Moses’s oversight, reflect the strictly symmetrical, nearly totalitarian order that the modernists espoused. At the time, this ordered combination of tower and green space, set back from city traffic, promised an idyllic, safe vision of city living. Over the decades, though, these gated utopias, closed off from the city street, proved instead quite efficient at nurturing vandalism and crime.

In the 40s, Moses set out to create the Lower Manhattan Expressway (the “LOMEX”), which would connect the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges and demolish Washington Square Park, as well as much of SoHo and Little Italy. And Jane Jacobs, a resident of the cozy, labyrinthine West Village, was pissed. Mobilizing the communities who called these neighborhoods home, and inspiring the support of the independent press, she raised a grassroots army against Moses’s plan. She decried the short-sighted, top-down, utopian approach of modern urban planning in favor of a city that’s built from the actual, living patterns of its residents.

“Human beings are, of course, a part of nature,” Jacobs wrote in 1961, “as much so as grizzly bears or bees or whales or sorghum cane. The cities of human beings are as natural, being a product of one form of nature, as are the colonies of prairie dogs or the beds of oysters.”

The seeming chaos of New York City — the “cataclysm” that Corbusier maligned, and “the overbuilt metropolis” that Moses set out to tame — was, to Jacobs, the key to its greatness. The vibrancy and potency of this city, a font of culture and commerce, a cacophony for the senses, is made from the people who live here, by the accidental symmetries and unplanned encounters that make up our daily lives here. “There is no logic that can be superimposed on a city,” she said, “people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.” 

To Jacobs, what makes a safe and livable neighborhood: small, close, walkable city blocks; a density of people, and a diversity of people; a mingling of old and new buildings; and a mixed-use landscape that integrates cultural, commercial, residential, and institutional functions in close proximity. 

She says, “homogeneity or close similarity among uses, in real life, poses very puzzling esthetic problems. If the sameness of use is shown candidly for what it is — sameness — it looks monotonous. Superficially, this monotony might be thought of as a sort of order, however dull. But esthetically, it unfortunately carries with it a deep disorder: the disorder of conveying no direction.”

She saw a happier city life in the co-existence and trust of neighborhoods, where residents looked out for each other while finding access to all the cultural offerings of the metropolis.

10. 

More and more, this decades-old battle over the future of New York has framed my thinking about theater. Replace the word “city” with the word “theater,” and I start to picture the theater that should exist, the one I hope to make: potent, safe, unexpected, a mixed-use landscape, filled with a density and diversity of life, and — above all — a theater made of and by people. 

Broadway is a street that slashes diagonally through the grid of New York City, creating public squares where people meet, where communities form. How can our theater, too, be a diagonal slash?

11.

Now it’s October 27. The election is in 7 days. When you read this, we’ll know what happened, and we’ll both think I sound naïve; and we’ll feel a year older than we do today.

There’s so much I don’t know about what the next year will look like. When can we return to Playwrights Horizons? What will the colder months be like in this lockdown? What’s the financial outlook? When will it be safe to start doing all the work that I’m so hungry to do in this new job?

I see people, friends, going a little crazy. I feel like I’m going a little crazy too. The margin of my notebook still says, don’t move against the chaos, move with the chaos. That’s how I learned to love New York, and the city is the theater, the theater is the city.

The theater doesn’t feel like the city right now, so that’s the first thing we do. Figure out who you’re not serving, and serve them. Be awesome at being 501(c)3. 

“For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you.”

This essay turned out longer than it was supposed to be. 

My other hero, Charles Ludlam, wrote a manifesto for his theater, the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. It begins, “You are a living mockery of your own ideals. If not, you have set your ideals too low.”