A Letter to Will Arbery on “Corsicana” from Emily Davis

Dear Will,

Last week after seeing the matinee of Corsicana, I wrote in the little margins of my program that it had me thinking about whether or not there was anything more important than how we give and receive kindness in moments when our community quietly expands because it has to. 

Corsicana imagines what is possible if we let a person’s ability to give and receive kindness be the most important thing about them. It’s a faith-based pursuit. And, it’s distinctly Texan, to boot.

But now…is this really a play about Texas? It’s hard to argue that there would be a better place to situate shame, pride, dogged idealism and a kind of spiritual deference so closely and still get a melody so expansive. Part of what makes Texas a place unlike any other is the difficulty we have determining what, beyond a certain mercurial individualism, binds its people together. Your beautiful play is, for me, filled with flickers of recognition of the very thing.

I told my mother about Corsicana and she said she’d like to see it. Then I told her I was trying to figure out how to intellectualize the fact I just always know everyone in Texas is going to be okay. “I don’t know how or why you would do that,” she said, verklempt like some Horton Foote matron looking to the horizon, “Some things just are.” 

That singular sweet curtness tinged with calm resolve reminds me again of this faith-based living I left your play thinking about.

Its practitioners do a kind of shared believing out loud that is less an invocation of a higher power than an invitation to see the light bouncing off what is already right in front of them.

These people can sometimes be hard to see because they’re off in a corner fussing around and finishing the thing you were too shy to ask them to do. Or they will make themselves known right away while stuffing the second one of some Buy One Get One Free deal into your cabinet while they muse about whatever’s eating their tomatoes in a voice that’s just slightly too loud.

In tougher times, their small affirmations help us consider the spokes of what we possess, sparing us the monotony of ruminating on what we don’t have or what has been taken away – an affliction of perpetual wanting that your character Lot describes with his “Styrofoam People.”

I know these people very well. I know that they are inclined not to waste time dwelling on who another person “is” and who they might “become” when the precious in-between time is where the good stuff happens.

_____

LOT
Justice is a friend of everyone’s family. 

CHRISTOPHER
That’s true. But she’s like really sort of a part of mine. 

LOT
Well me too. So? 

_____

When I was 10 and my brother was 12, he suffered a traumatic brain injury. We were not a religious family in the slightest, and not sure what to do with suggestions that we pray for his recovery. 

The deliberate incantations we would start making shortly thereafter would be about a different kind of believing out loud, together with him. Our gospel, so to speak, was about returning again and again to the quietest, most personal and singular things we had shared as a family, through jokes, art, cartoons, and song. The rapturous song was the ability to finish each other's sentences once again but with new words, a lingua franca for this life.

This was a defining moment of my adolescence: watching my brother John’s reordered sense of self and new modes of self expression emerge – a decidedly quiet pursuit – in a society that was quick to “other” him in lieu of questioning the absurdity of their own imperatives. 

What I learned during this time, as circumstance grew our community, and more of our friends and neighbors forfeited their very quotidian and known imperatives in order to be close to us, in order to expand our "consensus reality," was a very basic lesson about kindness that Corsicana also gently brings to mind.

Kindness isn't doing something for someone because you’ve decided it will benefit them: 

It’s about asking a person what matters to them in all the ways we can ask questions through humanly gestures and then doing our best to help get them close to those things every damn day. It’s about giving space to people to work through their wonder, and taking in vast plains of uncertainty – and possibility – together.

_____

CHRISTOPHER
Like — yeah, this has been just a pretty depressing house to live in. 

JUSTICE
Yeah. It’s my favorite house ever. But I hear you. 

_____

I don’t write plays about Texas, Hell, I just tell the same 10 stories over and over again to my poor friends who respond with the attendant pity or reverence reserved for us Texans on any given day. But you’ve gone and written something tremendous; a tribute to the people and the place to which I will return again and again. Thank you.

Emily D.

Emily Davis is an actor who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Recently, she played Reality Winner in Is This A Room on Broadway, after originating the role Off-Broadway (Obie Award, Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Actress, Drama Desk nomination for Lead Actress). Emily was born and raised in Oak Cliff, Texas.