"Making an Almanac" by Adam Greenfield

Adam's boot at Playa Badalona, Spain.

Back in December 2019, just after Christmas, I rented an apartment in Spain for a week. I was eagerly, anxiously contemplating the coming year and my transition to the role of Artistic Director at Playwrights Horizons, and I wanted to carve some space around me for clear-headed thinking and planning. My husband called it my “vision quest,” in a tone that was loving and understanding but not without some gentle ribbing and which made me, in turn, gently defensive. Me: “It’s not a vision quest!” But of course it kinda was.

I had spent so much time in my life worrying about the present state of theater and our future, banging fists on tables in barrooms and cafes across America. I had spent so many hours lying awake at night, head spinning with lofty ideas, frustrations, and inspiration. And this week away was a chance to start drawing all of this onto one page: a map to chart our course into the future.

A few weeks before I left, I recall feeling mildly troubled by a news item in the rear pages of the front section of my Sunday Times: a mysterious virus in Wuhan. And then I recall feeling mildly alarmed when, just before I left, news of the spread of this novel coronavirus had moved to the front page.

But still, I went to Spain. And when I wasn’t tooling around on my bike gawking at the Gaudis, I was home, typing page after page of train-of-thought thinking, often late into the night, listening to my Numero Group collection and falling deep into rabbit holes of Jane Jacobs, Charles Ludlam, Joseph Papp, Donald Barthelme. I typed thoughts about building a denser concentration of community within our building, increasing the traffic of artists and audiences; about using our building in new and consistently surprising ways; about making the boundaries of our theater more porous, becoming more truly a theater that is ofNew York City and for New York City, intensifying our commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion such that our work and audience should reflect the make-up of our city itself; I wrote about expanding the definition of what it means to be a playwright; and I wrote about how, as Greenfield family lore has it, I peed my pants the first time I saw a play because I was so scared, and how maybe my fear is what keeps me hooked.

I did not write about what I might do if, three months before my job began, the world would stop, explode, collapse, burn. In March, the map I had made, “to chart a course into the future,” became a file that sat on my computer’s desktop like some lumpy, inert souvenir of a bygone moment. Any sense of preparedness or know-how that I’d brought into the year 2020 dissipated; that file on my computer felt useless to me in those dark days of March.

So yes, like you, like all of us, I am lost at sea, trying to chart a course. And when you’re lost at sea, trying to chart a course, there’s something that can really come in handy: an almanac.

These past eight months have been a crash course in living with uncertainty as, like so many of my friends in theaters around the world, my days have been consumed largely by making plans and then tearing them up. New facts and forecasts continue to undermine our ability to predict the future; and new injustices and indignities continuously undermine our sense of progress. It’s an era of uncertainty, trying, failing, trying again, and hoping for the best. How do we move forward in step with, rather than at odds with, this state of not-knowing?

At some point, roundabout June, it dawned on me: this state, this not-knowing, is the state of making. It’s the space an artist must necessarily enter at some point when making something authentically new. And I opened that old lumpy file, dusted it off (for the imagery), and found this note I had jotted down: “The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.” (This is Donald Barthelme, thinking beautifully.) “Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how. We have all heard novelists testify to the fact that, beginning a new book, they are utterly baffled as to how to proceed, what should be written and how it might be written, even though they’ve done a dozen. At best there’s a slender intuition, not much greater than an itch. The anxiety attached to this situation is not inconsiderable.”

Me: “Yes!”

What I had left out of my hyper, frantic thinking that week in Spain is a foundational truth about making theater. It’s what every artist knows: every director, stage manager, designer, teacher, and most especially every playwright. To make honest work, you have to go backwards, again and again, and try to do it for the first time, every time. You have to cultivate the state of not-knowing, make friends with it, and learn how to use it. And while I definitely didn’t need the scale of devastation, outrage and anxiety that this year has brought in order to get me there, I accept its invitation to reconsider all that I thought I knew. So much of what I wrote during my week away, that last week in 2019, when we were all thirty years younger, is returning to shape my thinking in new and unexpected ways. And I believe it will, in the end, whenever that is, make Playwrights Horizons a better, more vibrant and accessible theater.

So yes, like you, like all of us, I am lost at sea, trying to chart a course. And when you’re lost at sea, trying to chart a course, there’s something that can really come in handy: an almanac.

Every so often I hear the words “Playwrights Horizons” as if for the first time, and it stops me, like when you momentarily forget how to spell a simple word like “pavement,” or “banana.” I think, “what an odd thing to have named a theater.” But then, inevitably, as I think about our name more deeply, and what it means, I am reinvigorated. Because our name is precisely what we believe in, what we are about: the project of our theater, now fifty years old, has been to follow the future, the horizon, that playwrights create for us.

Over the past several months, we’ve been assembling these materials — a snapshot of artistic thought in a time of seismic change — and, in the coming weeks, we’ll begin dropping them into your inbox and social media feed.

Confronting the intractable question of what theater might be on the other side of this pandemic, in the face of how little there is to truly know, my instinct is to look to artists to illuminate the path forward. The impact of Covid-19 has prompted broad, critical conversations within the larger artistic community about theater’s past and future: our architecture, our budgeting, our pursuit of racial justice and equity. Undergoing such transformation, while also marking the organization’s 50th Anniversary, Playwrights Horizons finds itself in a unique moment of reflection. In the attempt to capture the elusive, rapidly changing ideas and mindset of this critical moment, we bring you Almanac, a new literary magazine, a compendium of commissioned works by artists across all disciplines, as well as staff members: essays, artworks, interviews, confessions, manifestos, short plays, and more.

Over the past several months, we’ve been assembling these materials — a snapshot of artistic thought in a time of seismic change — and, in the coming weeks, we’ll begin dropping them into your inbox and social media feed.

Then, ASAP in January, we’ll release the entire accumulated collection of works as a digital magazine, edited and designed entirely in-house by our awesome dramaturgical and graphics team: Jordan Best (Graphics and Digital Content Associate), Ashley Chang (Dramaturg, editor-in-chief), Iman Childs (Digital Content Editor), Billy McEntee (Communications Associate), Karl Baker Olson (Artistic Programs Manager), Kyle Sircus (Associate Managing Director), Lizzie Stern (Literary Manager), and myself.

I can’t know what the future will bring. But I’m hell-bent on getting there. And I’m grateful to have this new almanac in hand to help guide the way; and to be stepping in time with the full community of artists and audiences that make up Playwrights Horizons.