The Most Personal Is the Most Creative

A Year of Essays: December 29, 2021

Before I made the conscious choice to become a theatre artist in my mid-fifties, I had seen close to a thousand productions ranging from school plays to Broadway/West End. I saw every kind of theatre one can imagine — classical, modern, absurd, divisive, stellar, and downright awful. I’ve walked out on three productions: The Lion King (yes, I did), We Will Rock You (the musical about Freddie Mercury), and an all-male nude production of The Importance of Being Earnest (truly awful, even if I had acquaintances involved in the production).

I resisted musicals for a long time, preferring the storytelling of straight plays. In 1996, I saw Talking Heads in London, a double bill of Alan Bennett monologues. The first monologue was Soldiering On, of a widow tidying loose ends after her husband’s death. The second was Bed Among the Lentils, of a disillusioned and detached alcoholic. The actors: Margaret Tyzack and Maggie Smith. That work, and Yazmina Reza’s West End premier of “Art” which I saw a few days later, sparked the notion I might become, one day, a theatre artist. It would be 15 more years until I took that spark seriously.

I have always been a storyteller. Structurally, I have found monologuist and duologist works tell strong stories, like those works mentioned above, and they have served as the structure for my recent plays, Desperation for Glue and Mothers and Terrorists, two highly personal works.

Desperation for Glue is an elegy for my “brother from another mother.” We met when he was a poet in an MFA program, and we spent Fridays working in a writing center. He stopped writing in the late ’90s. After his death, I retrieved a cache of his poems, rereading each, inserting them into my own (or, really, our own) story. He had a daughter. She wants to be a writer like her father. Initially, writing this play was to work through my own grief. Then, it became something else: for his daughter so she’ll have access to his creations and to some of his life, and for the world so his work could live on in some way.

Mothers and Terrorists is the outcome of working with 105 emails I received or sent on September 11, 2001, and for a two-week period thereafter. In the months prior to 9/11, I put my mother in a nursing facility and tended to dismantling a life to which she would never return. Around noon on 9/11, the only thing I remember thinking was that my mother was in the facility’s common room in front of a television. In the first draft, Mom appear half-way through, after a long exposition of the attacks. From that point on, it was all about my mother. The play became an exploration of juxtaposed emotions — personal, national, existential.

When Bong Joon-ho accepted the Oscar for directing Parasite, he said he was inspired by something Martin Scorsese said: “The most personal is the most creative.” I’m happy I’ve learned that lesson.