The Obscure Sorrow of Turning 26

"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."
—Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby

I turned 26 last month. This, I'd thought, was not a particularly remarkable birthday to celebrate—turning 25, a quarter century, is what gets all of the hoopla. Yet in recent weeks, I've seen several references to the idea that one's twenty-sixth birthday marks the end of foolish youthful hedonism.

There's this humor piece on The Hairpin, "Thank You So Much For Being With Me to Celebrate My Twenty-Five-and-Twelve-Month Birthday," by Julia Meltzer:

As a twenty-five-and-twelve-month-old, it is completely appropriate that I spend Saturday nights locked in my apartment with the five of you and two boxes of Franzia playing Settlers of Catan, Drinking Rules Edition. Max and Joe, I still think that longest road trade was sketchy! No but seriously, when I turn twenty-six that will all be over. I will start going to casual dinners at sophisticated restaurants with friends I haven’t seen in soooooo long, having One or Two Cocktails, and heading home to watch an independent film with my serious boyfriend before knocking off a quick journal entry and falling asleep in a haze of contentment. 

(As many 26-year-olds do, I alternate between the "watching indie films with my serious boyfriend" phase of my life and the "drunken Settlers of Catan" phase. Nonetheless, I relate to what Meltzer is saying about the gap between our real lives and our ideal lives. It's one of my favorite subjects.)

Then there's this, from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Midsummer, n. A feast celebrated on the day of your 26th birthday, which marks the point at which your youth finally expires as a valid excuse—when you must begin harvesting your crops, even if they’ve barely taken root—and the point at which the days will begin to feel shorter as they pass, until even the pollen in the air reminds you of the coming snow.

(Are you familiar with The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows? I only just discovered it, but it is the best. It puts words to all the secret aches and regrets and doubts that characterize life as a sensitive soul in the 21st century, yet so often go unacknowledged. The kinds of delicate, poignant, but universal emotions that I want to write plays about.)

Maybe this is just confirmation bias, turning 26 and then suddenly becoming more aware of/interested in other writers who talk about this.

Or maybe it's that I was born into a huge cohort of Internet-equipped, navel-gazing youths, all full of So Many Feelings, all convinced that we're the first people ever to feel this way, and compelled to share our uneasy angst with the world. We're attending our five-year college reunions, and listening to the new Vampire Weekend album, and watching things like Frances Ha and Girls that speak to the anxieties of our generation; and we link to Buzzfeed articles about "growing up in the '90s" and wallow in nostalgia for a childhood that suddenly feels so far away; and I'm amazed that we don't all melt into one quivering blob of jelly, overwhelmed by the weight of all these obscure sorrows.

(Nota bene: I originally typed "quivering blog of jelly." A Freudian slip.)

And when the more practical voice in your head speaks up to tell you that nostalgia is a foolish waste of time, that your life is actually going pretty well, that you have no reason to castigate yourself for being an "irresponsible youth" because you're a type-A perfectionist who's had maybe two hours of true irresponsibility in your entire life... well, it can be tempting to wish that that voice would just shut up, even though it speaks the truth. Angst and nostalgia are so seductive, and it seems like it'd be so beautiful to stand with everyone else, in confusion and misery, and feel All the Feelings.

As a matter of fact, today is my five-year anniversary of moving to San Francisco. I love it here, and I also realize that during these five years I have matured, ridding myself of many of the self-delusions and false beliefs that held me back, and generally becoming a much happier, better-adjusted person. I'm more outgoing and confident; I have a better understanding of others' motivations, as well as my own. In many respects, I feel like I lead a charmed life (for which I try to cultivate gratitude). This anniversary should be cause for a (responsible) celebration! Yet my joy is tempered with a sense of "Okay, Marissa, you've had five years as an aimless flâneur; now it's time to get down to business, figure out what you want out of life, purge yourself of everything extraneous, and for God's sake, start saving for retirement! You are going to need to push yourself a lot more in the next five years in order to accomplish everything you want to do in your twenties."

In the first blog post I ever wrote after moving here, I quoted Angels in America: "Heaven is a city Much Like San Francisco."

And now, five years on, I'm saying to myself, "The Great Work begins."

And here's another question: now that I am 26, am I too old to refer to myself as a girl? My blog header calls me "a girl with an answer for some things and a question for most things," and in my Twitter bio I'm a "would-be girl-about-town," but at what point does that word start to become ridiculous when applied to a grown, adult woman?

Theater, the Thief of Time

In 99Seats' post on Parabasis today, he mentions a theater teacher of his who "told me that theatre must justify its theft of time. Theatre, he argued, was a time-intensive, not at all convenient, required dressing up (back in the day, anyways). It asked a lot of its audience and needed to repay that with worth. This has stuck with me and leaves me irrationally angry at bad theatre. It smacks of disrespect to me."

Tony Kushner said something similar when I heard him speak earlier this month. He wasn't talking so much about bad theater as about boring theater, but he made the same point as 99Seats: because theater is a time-intensive activity, bad or boring theater is a moral outrage. It's not just that you're giving your audience nothing in return for their attention -- you are in fact taking something from them, their precious leisure time, and that's something they can never get back. Or, as Kushner put it in his memorable, hyperbolic way, "This is what I tell my students: let's say you have a bad play that takes 2 hours to perform, and it's playing eight shows a week for an audience of 500*, well, you can do the calculations and figure out how many of their hours you're wasting, and it doesn't take long before you've killed a two-year-old child."**

*Of course I think Kushner was being wildly optimistic about the size of audiences that a young playwright can expect to receive in this day and age!

**Calculations, for the math geeks in the house: 2 hrs/show * 8 shows/week * 500 people/show = 8,000 man-hours. A 2-year-old child = 2 yrs * 365 days/yr * 24 hrs/day = 17,520 hours. The show would need to play for only a little more than two weeks in order to have wasted two years' worth of its audience members' time!

Playwriting is Lasagna

"[Tony Kushner] has compared the [playwriting] process to making a proper lasagne: 'All the yummy nutritious ingredients you’ve thrown into it have almost-but-not-quite succeeded in overwhelming the design. A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.'"

--"The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide To Himself," New York magazine

"If I think I'm going to do research for a particular play, my inner child rebels and I won't do it. So I do research by constantly reading things that excite and interest me and I don't know yet if it's going to be a play. [...] I just kept sort of laying in all this reading because of being excited and not knowing for sure a play would come out of it. But then I realized I was getting close ... It's like making lasagna. One book is the noodles and a couple of movies are the sauce... And then one day, suddenly, I know it's the moment to put it in the oven and start writing."

--Liz Duffy Adams, quoted in the Magic Theatre's playbill for Or,

Playwrights in Person, part 3: Tony Kushner

I hope neither Brooke Berman nor Liz Duffy Adams would feel offended if I said that, in retrospect, seeing them in person felt like the soup and salad courses of a fancy dinner, and seeing Tony Kushner speak at the Herbst Theater on November 6 felt like the main dish. (This, despite the fact that I chatted with Berman and asked Adams a question during a talk-back, whereas I didn't directly communicate with Kushner at all.) Face it, Tony Kushner is the author of the most important and influential American play of my lifetime, and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to hear him speak in person.

Kushner had come to town for the opening of a new exhibit at the Museum of Performance and Design, "More Life! Angels in America at Twenty" (which I have not yet seen). His talk on Saturday took the form of an hour-long chat with the museum director, with some time for questions from the audience.

I was disappointed that the Herbst Theater was only half full--I'd thought that the San Francisco gay community would have turned out in force. I sat with about six of my friends toward the back of the theater; so the "young San Francisco theater community" made a respectable showing, at least.

One gets the impression from reading Kushner's work, or articles about him, that he is extremely intelligent, agonizingly self-conscious, and never quite at his ease. Seeing him in person bore this out; the applause embarrassed him, and his three-piece suit was a little too big for him. And yet, it is so fascinating to listen to him talk and argue, to hear him employ million-dollar words and instantly quotable phrases. For instance, he said that if he were writing Angels in America now, he'd have a harder time feeling sympathy for the Mormon characters, because the Mormon church nowadays is so much more politically active than it used to be (cf. Prop. 8). But, twenty years ago, the Mormon church "did not yet engage in the kind of sulfurous evangelism that has come to define them." Yes, Tony Kushner can come up with phrases like "sulfurous evangelism" when speaking off the cuff. I was dazzled.

I'm always fascinated to learn what shaped my favorite works of art, especially when it happened in unexpected ways. Kushner talked about how the Eureka Theater, in San Francisco, commissioned him to write Angels in America when all he had was the seed of an idea for a play about AIDS and Roy Cohn. Even though this original idea implied a lot of gay male characters, the Eureka had three resident actresses, and Kushner was instructed to include parts for all of them. Thus, we get Hannah, Harper, and a female Angel. And I think the play is immeasurably stronger--it becomes universal--because it includes such great roles for women.

He wrote the early drafts of the play while living in San Francisco, going to the Café Flore (an always-bustling café on a street corner in the Castro--it still exists) and doing his writing there. Evidently, early drafts of the play have a whole parallel plotline that takes place in S.F., before Kushner decided to set all of it in New York City (and assorted metaphysical realms). I've always wondered, though, if he ever considered having any of Angels in America take place in Los Angeles--the City of Angels?

San Francisco is still a presence in the finished script; there's the Angel's "Heaven is a City Much Like San Francisco speech" (sound familiar?), and Harper's decision to move there at the end of the play--where San Francisco is presented as a place of hope and healing.

"Poor Harper," joked Kushner, "someone pointed out to me once that she leaves her gay husband only to move to San Francisco... I mean, what was she thinking?"

At one point during the talk, Kushner defended himself against the charge that he "preaches to the choir" by saying "Historically, haven't some of the most renowned preachers been the ones who preached to the choir?" This must be one of his new "things" to work into his speeches; I found a similar quote in a recent LA Times article. "A great preacher starts with the doubt and uncertainty and skepticism that are the necessary concomitants of faith... He starts in the scary places, in the places where God is silent, in the places where God seems cruel, in the places where the world is not just and where people are ground to dust by monstrous, even satanic, forces where God doesn't intervene. Or where you ceaselessly betray God in your heart and your actions. You start there and progress toward whatever hope for change and light you can find. It's true of the prophets, it's true of John Donne, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King. And it's true of artists."

(Of course Kushner didn't put it quite the same way when I heard him speak, though I do recall that he specifically mentioned John Donne that time, too.)

One of the audience members asked whether Kushner tries to convey a message with his plays, and if so, what it is. Kushner replied that he doesn't think the theater is the right place to convey messages. "If I really had a message," he said, "if all I were trying to do with my plays were to say something like You Should Be Nicer to Gay People, Because Gay People are People Too, I'd put it on a billboard... I'd write it on a fortune cookie! I wouldn't make people sit through a seven-hour play! And then everyone could read their fortune cookies and see the message and go home and watch Project Runway. And they'd probably be a lot happier... although maybe not this year." Whereupon Kushner launched on a hilarious tangent about how much he adores Project Runway, how excited he was when he met Michael Kors recently, and how much he disagrees with the most recent choice of winner. I must say, I had expected Kushner would talk about his disappointment with recent election results... but the results of the 2010 midterm elections, not the results of Project Runway!

I think it is disingenuous of Kushner to say that his plays are not meant to convey any message. Because I think that drama can be a subtler, but more effective way, of getting a message across. Reading a slogan like "Gay People Are People Too" takes five seconds and is quickly forgotten. But to see a seven-hour drama about the lives of five gay men--all of them fascinating, complex characters who are defined by so much more than their sexual orientation--that conveys the message "gay people are people too," and in a much more compelling way. I feel like Kushner probably knows this, but for whatever reason, he won't say it in public.

Kushner concluded by saying something similar to this passage from the above-mentioned LA Times article: "I don't think my plays are polemical. I don't think you can be if you deal in paradox and contradiction. Everyone has principles, an ideological program to which they are more or less consciously adherent, ways in which they fail or ways in which their lives don't fit comfortably with what they profess to believe. And if you're not nuts and you have some kind of inner life, you experience those contradictions as internal stresses that have to be reconciled."

But I recall it as being even more beautifully phrased than this. Something about how it's terrible to write a play about something that you have a black-and-white opinion about... but the only thing that's worse is to write a play about something that you don't have a black-and-white opinion about. It's a contradiction, a paradox, and if you're going to be a playwright, you have to embrace this ambiguity.

It was the perfect note on which to end the talk. I turned to my friend in the seat next to me and we both breathed "Wow..." simultaneously. Tony Kushner. There's no one like him.

For more on Kushner and his unique position in the American theatre, I also recommend this New York Magazine profile of him from last month.

"Tiny Kushner": Angels, Therapists, Politics & Hitler

Five short plays make up the Tiny Kushner program at Berkeley Rep, and I think I had read all of them, at various times, before seeing them last weekend. Two of the plays, "Flip Flop Fly" and "A Shrink in Paradise," were commissioned by the New York Times Magazine for their annual "The Lives They Lived" issue. They came out when I was in high school and I remember going nuts for them--or, more precisely, for what they represented. I thought it was awesome that these short plays stood alongside the nonfiction essays that filled the rest of the magazine! And they were Kushnerian plays too--crazy and imaginative and language-drunk.

But you know, these plays weren't written to be performed, and they suffer somewhat when put onstage. "Flip Flop Fly" dramatizes a meeting--on the moon, after death--between eccentric American singer Lucia Pamela and deposed queen Geraldine of Albania. These women both led fascinating lives, but too much of the play consists of having them shout their biographies at each other. That's fine in a magazine, but not in the theater. The point of the play is that Lucia symbolizes American gumption and optimism and Geraldine symbolizes tragic European decadence, which is clever enough, but not dramatic--if these characters are both symbols and both dead, how much real conflict can there be? Berkeley Rep's staging of this piece concluded with an amusing song-and-dance routine, Lucia moving like a loose-limbed hoofer and Geraldine as though goose-stepping.

"A Shrink in Paradise" is another after-death play, imagining Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, Richard Nixon's shrink, being counseled by Metatron the Recording Angel (who evidently moonlights as an analyst). It runs into the same problem as "Flip Flop Fly": these characters are not sufficiently dynamic and dramatic. Also, it feels like Kushner is repeating himself. There was already a play, earlier in the evening, that took place in a therapist's office, with the same actors playing therapist and patient. It's yet another Kushner play that involves angels and takes place in a metaphysical realm. The big dramatic payoff is a comparison of Nixon to Hitler, but the big payoff of Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day is a comparison of Reagan and Hitler, so at some point, you want to say "Lay off the Hitler comparisons, Tony!"

Thankfully, in the final play of the evening, "Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy"--the play where Laura Bush reads to the dead Iraqi children--Kushner resists the temptation to compare G.W. Bush to Hitler. All the same, it's another play with an angel in it, and another play that presents a basically static situation, intended to rouse our liberal guilt and protest the Iraq War... it's agitprop, not theater.

The other two plays of the evening aren't available online but you can find them in the collection of minor Kushner works called Death & Taxes. "Terminating," about a gay man who thinks he's in love with his lesbian analyst (and doesn't that sound like a bad Woody Allen joke?) has the characters say a lot of quotable Kushnerian things, but the language gets so dense that I don't know what the point of the play is.

So in the end, the only play that really came off well was "East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis"--in which Kushner writes à la Anna Deavere Smith, a series of short monologues spoken by diverse characters, all meant to be played by the same actor. Based on a true story, this play is about a bunch of NYC city employees who get in touch with a crazy right-winger to learn how to cheat the tax code and claim that paying income tax is illegal. While it deals with political themes, it's not a hit-you-over-the-head-and-make-you-feel-guilty play like "Only We Who Guard the Mystery." The monologues are engaging and fast-paced, and actor Jim Lichtscheidl transitions effortlessly between all of the characters he plays. And again, Kushner's prescience can stun an audience: this play was written in 2000 or earlier, but the address of the right-wing group's website is Teaparty.com. The city employees' scheme got discovered and duly punished, but it is disheartening to realize that this anti-tax ideology has only spread...

The bare-bones staging further prevented these plays from coming alive: despite Berkeley Rep's ample resources, scenery was minimal and the actors wore the same costumes throughout. (I was rather impressed with the dark-red satin pantsuit worn by Kate Eifrig: she plays Queen Geraldine, Esther the NYC psychoanalyst, Metatron, and Laura Bush, and somehow her costume works for all of those characters.) All stage directions are read aloud, rather than interpreted; sometimes these are useful, as in "East Coast Ode," but sometimes very obtrusive. In "Only We Who Guard the Mystery," when the Iraqi children open their mouths to talk, Kushner writes that the only sound we hear is "the bird-music from Messiaen's opera St. François d'Assise." Hearing this stage direction read aloud, the audience feels stupid for not knowing their Messiaen, whereas if the sound-op had simply played the music, we wouldn't feel stupid and we'd hear what Kushner had really desired. For, while Kushner intends to make us feel liberal-guilty, I don't think he intends to make us feel stupid.

Photo: Valeri Mudek as Lucia Pamela and Kate Eifrig as Queen Geraldine.

"To Startle Words Back Into the Air"

It's just the words, reverse transcription. Thinking about it. Something I can't help doing. Writing began with the effort to record speech. All writing is an attempt to fix intangibles--thought, speech, what the eye observes--fixed on clay tablets, in stone, on paper. Writers capture. We playwrights on the other hand write or rather "wright" to set these free again. Not inscribing, not de-scribing but... ex-scribing (?)... "W-R-I-G-H-T," that archaism, because it's something earlier we do, cruder, something one does with one's mitts, one's paws. To claw words up...! To startle words back into the air again, to...evanesce. It is...unwriting, to do it is to die, yes, but. A lively form of doom.

from "Reverse Transcription: Six Playwrights Bury a Seventh," by Tony Kushner

Posted because I had a great time at Playwrights' Pub Night yesterday hanging out with other people who practice this strange métier... and because tonight I am going to see the Kushner one-acts at Berkeley Rep!

Could Tony Kushner Win a Nobel Prize?

Yesterday I was reading about the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Herta Müller, and figuring out when to go see the Tony Kushner one-acts that will be opening soon at Berkeley Rep, when a thought occurred to me:

When people list American writers who might possibly win or deserve the Nobel Prize, why do they never mention Kushner?

I'm a Kushner fan, but I'm not just saying this out of blind admiration. I think you can objectively argue that he's the type of writer who'd appeal to the Nobel Committee, and should be included in the annual speculation.

• He's YOUNG(ish)! Even though people think of the Nobel as an end-of-career prize for elderly geniuses, the committee has shown, in recent years, that they are willing to award writers from Kushner's generation. Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 and Herta Müller was born a year later. (Kushner was born in 1956.) It's not too soon to add him to the list of candidates, in other words.
  
• He's GAY! Evidently, winning the Nobel has become, in part, a question of a writer's subject matter and political correctness. Many laureates write from the perspective of an outsider or one who has experienced oppression: African-Americans (Toni Morrison), feminists (Doris Lessing), citizens of totalitarian states (Solzhenitsyn, Müller), etc. Conspicuously un-awarded, thus far, are authors who write from a gay or lesbian perspective. (At least one gay man, André Gide, has won the prize--but that was in 1947, long before the gay rights movement existed!)
  
• He's a LEFTIST! In addition to my feeling that the Nobel committee is going to want to pick a gay author sometime soon, they definitely prefer the politically liberal. I think that this will be specially important for American authors--they won't have a prayer of winning if they didn't oppose George W. Bush and the Iraq War, if they are uncritically Zionist, etc. Kushner passes these tests, of course.
  
• He's INTERNATIONAL(ish)! Probably the biggest knock against Kushner is that he's American and our country has not fared well with the Literature Nobel recently, culminating in the chairman's comment, last year, that "American literature is too insular." But Kushner has, at least, shown a consistent interest in other countries and literatures: adapting Corneille and Brecht, writing a play about Afghanistan.
• He tackles the BIG THEMES! Death, religion, American identity and the melting-pot, gay identity, AIDS and other crises... The subtitle to Angels in America says that it is a play on "national themes" but I should hope that readers in other countries would also find it worthwhile literature. And he has a knack for tackling these themes at the opportune moment: his drag name is Eara Lee Prescient, after all.
  
• He can WRITE, TOO! Though the political themes of his work will endear him to the Nobel committee, his subject matter is not his only notable quality. His language is vivid, energetic, sometimes lyrical, eminently quotable. He has a wild imagination and a recognizable voice. He knows how to use the tools of theatricality and stagecraft.
  
• He's FUNNY! Though humorous novelists don't get much respect with the Nobel, humorous playwrights are another story--cf. Shaw, Pirandello, Fo, even Beckett. Comedy in the service of a larger message.
  
• He's INFLUENTIAL! Certainly among American playwrights, at least--I don't know about his influence abroad. Joyce Carol Oates often gets mentioned as a Nobel candidate, but I rarely read of younger novelists saying "I want to write like Joyce Carol Oates." (Well, okay, everyone would like to be as prolific as JCO, but when it comes to being influenced by her style, or her subject matter?) Whereas, all the time, young playwrights say "I want to write like Tony Kushner."
  

Of course, discussions of who'll win awards are always really just idle speculation, and particularly so with the Nobel Prize for Literature. This year, you can make a case for Kushner, but a lot could happen to change things. If Philip Roth ever does win the Prize like people are always suggesting, that'd diminish Kushner's chances, because it's unlikely to go to two American Jewish authors in close succession. Or if the committee gave it to another important gay writer.

All the same, it's pretty clear that Kushner is the only American playwright who has a chance of winning this thing. (Albee? Not after Pinter's recent win, I think. Kushner's a better bet because he's from a different generation and has a very different writing style than Albee or Pinter.) And you can make at least as good a case for Kushner as you can for several American novelists who always get mentioned as potential winners. So--even though America seems to be in a prolonged slump with the Nobel Prize for Literature committee--let's add him to the list of people who just might be the one to break the losing streak!

Crazy for Kushner

Speaking of Tony Kushner, I have recently been re-discovering my love of his work. I think he is the most quotable current American playwright, the one with the most lines that linger in my head. I've been reading the short plays and the one crazy full-length in the Death & Taxes volume for the last few days, which I just learned gives me a jump on Berkeley Rep's new season--they will begin next fall by producing a bill of Kushner one-acts entitled, cutely, Tiny Kushner. I've been pondering the themes that run through his work, too--how much he writes about death (his first two major plays confront the Holocaust and the AIDS crisis!) and yet I do not consider him morbid. I realized that that's why it's so appropriate that the New York Times Magazine, on three occasions, commissioned him to write a one-act play for their annual "The Lives They Lived" issue. It's not just that he is one of our most talented and acclaimed playwrights. It's that he is one of the best at writing about death and the dead.

Meanwhile, I'm listening to my iPod on Shuffle a lot at work, and songs from Caroline or Change keep popping up. I didn't love the score the first time I heard it (on CD--I've never seen the show), but it's really starting to grow on me. I love the use of the different musical idioms for each character. Part of me wonders if Caroline or Change appeared on Broadway five years too early, whether it wouldn't have done better nowadays. The repeated lyrics about "There ain't no underground in Louisiana / There is only / Underwater" resonate much more post-Katrina. And the two social forces that drive the story are black-white race relations, and poverty/income inequality. When do you think those two issues were more in the forefront of American culture: 2004, when the Dow was sitting pretty at about 10,000 and the (99% white) Republicans controlled the government? Or 2009, when we have a black president, and an economic crisis that has made everyone more conscious of the plight of the poor?

Sometimes I remember that Angels in America takes place a year or two before I was born, and I think "All right, it's a portrait of the world you were born into, with all of its problems and injustices. And you will have to change this world for the better." Similarly, Caroline or Change takes place around Kennedy's assassination, that is, two years after Barack Obama was born--and to produce it in 2009 would show how things have gotten better in his lifetime, but also how relevant its themes still are...

Inspiration's Promise, Fulfilled

I enjoy reading old interviews with my favorite artists while experiencing the benefits of living in the future: they don't know what will happen to them in years to come, but I do. My favorite thing is when they mention some project that is no more than a glimmer in their eye at the time the interview was conducted--a project that had a distinct possibility of never being realized at all--and yet I know that they did write that play or make that film, and furthermore, that it is brilliant. I collect these stories, because they inspire me, give me hope and make me happy--"dreams can come true" and all that. Here are examples from some of my own favorite artists.

• During the marathon interview sessions that became the classic Hitchcock/Truffaut, the two filmmakers discuss how strange movie soundstages can look to an outsider, what with all the behind-the-scenes tricks that don't show up in the finished film. At this point Truffaut confesses, "It's often occurred to me that one might make a first-rate comedy on the making of a movie." The Hitchcock/Truffaut interviews were published in 1967. Six years later, Truffaut released Day for Night, which is a first-rate comedy on the making of a movie--one of those films that always makes me happy.
• I once read a profile of Tom Stoppard from the late 1980s that mentioned that he was halfway through reading James Gleick's nonfiction book Chaos. The interviewer asked Stoppard whether this subject might find its way into his next play, and the playwright responded noncommittally. But in 1993, Arcadia premiered, a play inspired by chaos theory (plus a whole lot of other stuff)--and a work of freakin' genius!
• In the introduction to his collection of plays Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia & Other Plays, published in 2000, Tony Kushner wrote "Though I have been handsomely remunerated for my movie and TV writing, I am bitterly disappointed, as none of my work for Hollywood has achieved what I'd hoped for it, which is to provide its author a pretext to meet Meryl Streep." As we all know, three years after that, not only had Kushner met Streep, but she was starring in the epic miniseries adaptation of Angels in America!

Heaven on earth

View from Nob Hill, midday 8/21/08.

"The French police declare that Basil never arrived in Paris at all. I suppose in about a fortnight we shall be told that he has been seen in San Francisco. It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world."

--Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"Heaven is a city Much Like San Francisco.
House upon house depended from Hillside,
From Crest down to Dockside,
The green Mirroring Bay:
Oh Joyful in the Buckled Garden:
Undulant Landscape Over which
The Threat of Seismic Catastrophe hangs:
More beautiful because imperiled."

--Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Perestroika

Two Ways of Classifying Playwrights

I've just started digging into this week's New York Times Magazine-- the annual "The Lives They Lived" issue, highlighting interesting people who died in 2007. In past years, my favorite articles in this section have been Tony Kushner's short plays (check out his works on Nixon's shrink and on two unusual women) but he didn't contribute one this year.

Meanwhile, I'm also reading Wendy Wasserstein's compilation of essays Shiksa Goddess, and it includes a "The Lives They Lived" article from 1996, about Martha Entenmann, founder of the baked-goods empire and inventor of the see-through cake box. That got me thinking about something I heard once and remember often, about writers and food:

It's summer 2006, about ten o'clock at night, and I and seven other winners of the Young Playwrights' Contest are sitting in the Morning Star Diner devouring big slices of pie with Lucas and Sheri, who work at Young Playwrights. We thank them for the food and the invaluable experience of feeling like a successful New York writer.

Sheri says, "There's two kinds of playwrights in this world: those who lose weight when they're writing a play, and those who gain weight." She explains that the people who lose weight stay up all night and subsist on cigarettes and coffee and alcohol when they have to finish a play. Meanwhile, the gainers write in cafes or restaurants, or they need to feel cozy and comforted while writing, and so they snack a lot.

Some of my fellow winners, mostly the guys, are attracted by the macho romance of being one of the weight-losing playwrights: drinking and smoking and sweating out a Hemingwayesque masterpiece. (Some of them even use typewriters.) But I sheepishly admit, "I'm probably a gainer."

Sheri and Lucas assure me that I'm in good company: Tony Kushner and Wendy Wasserstein are also gainers. "You can always tell when Tony's working on a new play!" laughs Sheri.

I still think about this way of classifying writers. And Lucas and Sheri's assessments seem to be spot-on. Wasserstein writes about food in several of the Shiksa Goddess essays, and I just watched a documentary about Kushner called Wrestling with Angels, where he talks about becoming 100 pounds overweight because he always wrote with a box of Entenmann's chocolate chip cookies by his side.

So what is it about playwrights and Entenmann's? Have I just been eating the wrong cookies all these years? If I switch to Entenmann's, will I suddenly acquire the eloquence of Kushner and Wasserstein?

It's worth a shot. Except, of course, for the "gaining weight" aspect.