Playwright’s Perspective: The Trees

From the playwright: Agnes Borinsky

I am hiking up a mountain with friends. It's getting late. What will happen when the sun goes down? someone asks. No one has an answer. Then the sun goes down. 

A camera can't record what's in front of it below a certain threshold of light. But our eyes can, our hearts do. What is it like to walk down a mountain in the dark? Our phones have flashlights, but that light, weirdly, makes it harder to see. No flashlight, then. I hear differently. I soften the edges of my awareness. And there's an area, it's true, beyond what I think I can see, where I can sense everything I need to move down the path. 

Only one act of this play takes place in darkness, but still. I am interested in the kind of spidey-sense opening of our awareness to what happens outside the realm of what we usually pay attention to. Outside the realm of light, of narrative, of purpose. Of the idea of a certain future. 

We are always falling — how can we fall more softly? What are the stories that can soften us to terror? 

There's no moon but the sky is still translucent, holding the light, showing its clouds. I feel how vulnerable I am and in a funny way that makes me feel safe. I listen to the voices of my friends just above me on the mountain. 

When I started writing plays I saw it as: you decide on a horrible thing that will happen at the end, and then you make things slowly more intense until that horrible thing happens. 

Marxist critic Leon Yushi has written against dread as a dramaturgical instrument. Serious catastrophes are so narratively distracting that you lose track of the mumbled thrum of human life -- where the meaning lives. “If you're going to write politically there has to be more laughter. There has to be more stupidity.” 

When I was thirteen I accidentally swallowed eight cherry pits. I had read that cherry pits were horribly poisonous. And here I'd gone and swallowed eight of them. Oh boy, I thought. I'm going to die.

I was far from home, staying with people I didn't know. I didn't want to cause any trouble. When it was announced we were going to go to the beach, I went along. We drove through the desert. I saw a scorpion. There were teenage girls in bikinis. We had ice cream. 

This is it, I thought, as I closed my eyes that night. I guess it wasn't such a horrible life. 

The next morning I woke up. Oh. 

I'm not great at writing plot. I end up writing logistics. But my life is full of logistics. And the life we look back on is rarely the life we thought we were building. Meaning rarely unfolds in the place we think of as the center. 

It's a mess in here. I come from a family of people who always wanted to fix things. I can't stop giggling in rehearsal. I like sentimental movies.  These days I am melting my body with synthetic hormones. I'm sliding, slipping around. I wake up in the middle of the night, I don't want to leave the house. I will be no curator of contemporary horrors, I have no answers, my life is all logistics, remember? 

Forget dread. 

What if we don't have to worry about the end of the world because the world has already ended?¹

What if we admit the catastrophe from the beginning, soften our bodies to admit all that grief, all that worry, all that rage? Soften the very questions we're asking so that we find ourselves walking barefoot in grass, spidey-senses tingling, instead of trying to ensure a secure future, squinting into the beams of cellphone flashlights? 

Plots are a bit ridiculous. Just like malls are a bit ridiculous. But they're part of the landscape of what we do, and anyway sometimes you have to swing by the Apple store. Maybe the word for it is dancing. We dance between the darkness and the light, between the catastrophe and the errand, between the giggle and the sob. 

"The whole world is a narrow bridge," the old song goes. "And the main thing is not to be afraid." I used to think that was a song about fear. Don't be afraid. But I actually think it's a song about a bridge. You're afraid? Oh good. It means you've found a bridge. 

The path starts to level. There's a wobbly log over a stream that we remember from the first bit of the hike. We cross. The path goes a little longer. And then there's the highway, and the car. We drive back into the city. We go to a restaurant and under a heat lamp we order soup and fried things and noodles and talk about how we spent the day.

¹ I've heard versions of this idea in a few places. In a zen koan, in a few books, from a friend.