Thoughts on Corsicana
Today is April 6, and — for now — we’re all back at work. After more than two years, Playwrights Horizons’ offices in Hell’s Kitchen are creakily returning back to life; but not back to “normal.” The phrase “back to normal” seems to be everywhere right now, in every conversation, as we try to resume our old routines. But normal is out the window. Normal is AWOL. Normal stole all the office supplies and isn’t coming back.
All over, I hear it’s hard to be around people. In the office Slack channel a colleague linked to a New York Times article titled “Everyone is Not OK, but Back to Work Anyway,” in which a DEI Consultant from North Carolina says, “We’re all feeling our way around being together when we don’t know what each other’s state of well-being is. You go to a three-day off-site, or to the Oscars, and you find out people are different.”
It’s painfully logical that living through 2020 and 2021 has changed us. Everything that reliably made up our days — what we ate, what we wore, how we communicated, how we worked, how we exercised, the air around us, what we did at night — changed seismically and suddenly, and for so long. And the biggest impact we’re feeling, I think, is the effect of our isolation from one another.
The first time I spoke to Will Arbery about his play Corsicana (probably in early 2019?) he introduced me to the idea of “consensus reality” — a term I wish I’d known decades ago. The idea of consensus reality is that our collective understanding of what’s real (or natural, or normal) is the margin of experience and perception that we’re all able to share. It’s a general agreement, the middle ground, the venn diagram overlap between our spheres, the consensus we silently negotiate in our day-to-day encounters. By extension, this concept also suggests that we humans, each acting within our uniquely formed web of perceptions, contain a much broader spectrum of experience than what we share.
Isolated from one another during the pandemic, without the minute daily interactions that would establish consensus reality, has the margin of what we share narrowed? Here, in 2022, it’s jarring to negotiate the labyrinth of other people. We overstep, or understep; we’re touchy. But, however anxiety-provoking it may be, is it really a bad thing to be reminded there are discrepancies between how we think?
This foundational question, “Is your reality my reality?,” simmers gently beneath the surface of Corsicana. In their unique way, and to various degrees, each character in this quartet lives outside the “norm,” reaching across the divide to forge a kinship. That chasm is especially wide for two characters.
Ginny is a 33-year-old woman with Down syndrome — a condition that occurs when a person has three copies of chromosome 21 instead of two copies, causing that person’s body and mind to develop differently than the majority of others. In Corsicana, Ginny’s experience of the world is different from the dominant experience; her genetic make-up keeps her at a distance from the agreed reality, and that distance determines the options that she does and doesn’t have access to in her life. Her needs, however basic, however human, are considered “special,” and we’ve created institutions and programs to meet those needs and create a bridge to the majority.
Early in the play, Ginny is introduced to Lot, a local artist, a recluse. Though he has no diagnosis, he suspects he’s neurodivergent. His ideas don’t make much sense to other people, so his life has grown more and more secluded. “Yeah I know special needs,” he says when we first meet him. “I know the place in the high school. The hallway in the high school. ‘Special needs.’ You know I’m not one of them right?” Lot defies categories, controverts social norms. In his 40s, he got a graduate degree in Experimental Mathematics, which enabled him to prove the existence of god; only to then throw it away in his 50s. “Art is a better delivery system,” he says.
In the art world, Lot’s work is classified as Outsider Art, a genre that generally includes artists who, like Lot, are self-taught, with no formal training or connection to the professional arts scene. Often, artists are considered outsiders for their lack of access or exposure to the mainstream, whether this is because of class, neurodivergence, or physical limitation. But, like Lot, many outsider artists have no intention to conform to the commercial art world; nor do they pursue the recognition that could come with it. The late great Daniel Johnston, who many (including me) consider among the great songwriters, reflects this disconnect in “The Story of an Artist.”
Listen up and I’ll tell a story
About an artist growing old
Some would try for fame and glory
Others aren’t so bold
Everyone and friends and family
Saying, “Hey get a job.”
“Why do you only do that only?
Why are you so odd?”
“We don’t really like what you do,
and we don’t think anyone ever will.
It’s a problem that you have,
and this problem’s made you ill.”
Listen up and I’ll tell a story
About an artist growing old
Some would try for fame and glory
Others just like to watch the world
In Corsicana, Lot doesn’t “try for fame and glory.” He’s not much interested in selling his pieces. The making of them and the giving of them is what’s important, which is acutely at odds with the culture.
I try to think of what of my own life sits outside the context of buying or selling, and the list is pretty short. Looking back at the day today and all of my encounters — how I got my food, my music and stories and clothes — it’s all bought and sold. Which is natural to us; it’s hard to to imagine any other way, and I feel silly or embarrassed, even to call attention to it because this is simply our reality.
Lot, though, opts out. As an artist, he has no intention to enter the marketplace, and, more than the nature of his work itself, this is what really makes him an outsider. “[I] believe in gifts, not capital,” he says. “It’s a prison. To consume, to consume. And then evacuate. To toss out. It’s sinful. It’s man-made. It’s all a man-made evil.”
The root of “consensus” is borrowed from the latin cōnsentiō (“feel together; agree”), which is also the etymology of “consent.” Lot doesn’t consent to the norm. He doesn’t agree.
The action of Corsicana is a quiet revolution. The residents of Will’s play, each displaced in their own lives, their city, their culture, slowly find each other. As they endeavor to learn what each other needs, these four lost souls begin to arrive at a common experience between them. They become a community, however fragile, founded on the help they can give one another. Together they find a new consensus outside the dominant one, outside of what’s considered normal; and, being characters in a play, they offer that possibility to us.
In 2019, Playwrights Horizons premiered Will’s play Heroes of the Fourth Turning, which focuses on a different kind of community: former students of a conservative Catholic college, who, as right-wing Americans, feel their world being torn apart. Responding in part to the shock of the Trump Administration, and the deep fractures it revealed in our country, Heroes was the terrifying sock in the gut that we needed. Three years later, after the profound isolation, anxiety, and social divisions we’ve endured as our old sense of “normal” flew the coop, Corsicana delicately charts how we might find our way back to a normal that’s new.
Another character in Corsicana, Justice, is writing a book. “Well, it’s about anarchy and gifts,” she says. “It’s about small groups. It’s about community. It’s about the right to well-being. It’s about family. It’s about the dead. It’s about ghosts. It’s about gentle chaos. It’s about contracts of the heart. And the belief that when a part of the self is given away, is surrendered to the needs of a particular time, in a particular place, then community forms. From the ghosts of the parts of ourselves we’ve given away.”
Adam Greenfield
April 2022
