Last Sunday, I went to see a play that made me very angry. I asked God for the serenity to not tweet about it the day after, and God kinda came through, in that I did indeed not post the giant thread I wrote. But I’m letting it derail my newsletter, so instead of recommendations (the thing you actually signed up for), this week you’re getting a big rant from me (the opposite of what you signed up for). This is your last chance to X out of this email or browser window. Still here? Then buckle up.
So, about this play. (And no, you messy benches who love drama, I will not say which one it was. Focus on the larger point I’m trying to make). It is a truth universally acknowledged that most theater is bad, and a truth even more universally acknowledged that I hate everything. BUT. I was actually looking forward to this particular play because a) I had heard good things about the playwright, and b) it centers an issue that’s pretty central to my identity. And sure, I’m a cold-ass bitch. I could give two shits about seeing myself on stage most days. But I was curious (if not hopeful, per se) about how this play was gonna handle my lived experience.
Spoiler alert: it used it as a prop to make other patrons feel guilty.
Perhaps I should’ve suspected that things would not go well when, after my friend and I took a seat, I leafed through the program and saw the name of an MFA teacher of mine in the Special Thanks section. This teacher is the very same that once humiliated me in class by saying I had “an English problem” and that I needed a translator in order for my colleagues to understand my writing. I wish I could say that I told them to go fuck themselves, but I was a) too stunned and b) the only person in my cohort who was not a native English speaker—so I didn’t know if I could be the judge of whether I had an English problem. I didn’t feel like I had one; I imagined that the school had looked at my TOEFL score and read my writing samples before letting me in (on a full scholarship), but maybe that wasn’t enough? I remained silent, and my classmates stepped in to defend me, saying they had no trouble comprehending my writing—for which I am very grateful. This was far from the only terrible thing that professor said, to me or others, so to know they were being Specially Thanked, on this play of all plays, was a bad omen that I chose to ignore.
And it seemed like the right call! The first act was pretty delightful, with heartfelt jokes and a well-captured ambiance. I was charmed, in spite of certain choices that made it seem like this play was pandering a bit to the “traditional” theater audience (you know what I mean—and if you don’t, I probably mean you). It bothered me a little, but I was okay with it. I have, after all, made similar compromises: the line in Spanish that someone responds to in English, the exposition-y explanation of slang that all the characters should actually know, the conveniently-timed news bulletin that catches the audience up. It’s all part of the game, so as not to alienate people who haven’t lived the situations my writing tackles.
But things started going off the rails midway through. Scene after scene, characters betrayed the humanity they had accrued in the first act to become loud mouthpieces, archetypes that centered the oppressor by making themselves into either its innocent victims or its brainwashed soldiers. It was so disappointing, not because it was unexpected (that’s what most plays/TV shows/movies do these days), but because I had enjoyed the play so far and allowed myself to believe this would be the rare gem that would commit to its characters. Alas. I physically recoiled in my seat, trying to not let what I knew about the playwright taint my perception. But the more the characters yelled their mandated lines, the more I couldn’t help feeling like this writer probably hadn’t lived the situations depicted in the play. Which, I should say, does not mean they can’t write about it; I believe people can write about whatever they want. But when everything about a production is made into A Statement about A Cause, it does raise my eyebrows that the writer has not experienced The Cause personally. They did say that they had a family connection to the issue, both in their bio and the program’s note, and in that (unsolicited) justification, I couldn’t help but see an explanation for this play that was reducing my own experience to a sad tale meant to make others feel bad.
Let’s go back to my MFA program (and I’m gonna get real cynical for a while, so hang in there—I’ll try to believe in love and magic again by the end of this article). One of the annoying things that kept happening throughout my time in school was teachers asking me “why isn’t this script set in Brazil/Argentina?” (the answer being, of course, because it’s fucking not unless I want it to be). The message was loud and clear: “write what you know, or else…” And I’m not saying that my teachers were necessarily misguided in telling me that. It does not escape me that my most successful scripts so far have been the ones that center the fact that I’m a Latino immigrant—that’s what the industry wants from me. No one has actual time to sit down and read my writing, so the only way they can grasp whether I have a “unique voice” is if they hear an elevator pitch from me that doesn’t sound like most other things they hear. It’s not great for my practice, to be pigeonholed like that. But, as I tell the students of my Marketing Yourself and Your Work class, it’s worth thinking about putting yourself in a box. It has cons and pros—which only you can evaluate and decide on.
(That being said, when we’re not writing about something that we’ve lived through, I think it’s best not to claim that we are in that box? “My grandma is Puerto Rican” is a very 2020 statement.)
So we leave school boxed in our little boxes and we become very territorial about those boxes and our right to be in them and other people’s right to be in them—because if we don’t have our boxes, what do we have? How are we gonna achieve our goals and realize our dreams? Talent? Passion? The industry doesn’t give a shit about those! All we have is our “fresh perspectives,” so we guard them with our life and yell at anyone that comes close to them. And the more we yell, the more we start realizing that our fresh perspectives give us a superpower: to make the people outside our boxes feel guilty.
There’s a (cynical) way to look at all the writing-as-activism that is going on as being part of the Oppression Olympics: we’re all highlighting the things in our identities (however tenuous) that will make gatekeepers feel guilty enough to let us in. Because MAN do we live in a time where certain people like to feel guilty. The creepiest passage in a very popular anti-racism book is one in which its white author says (and I’m paraphrasing here) that they crave being corrected in public by a person of color. I imagine they meant to sound altruistic, unafraid of embarrassment in the name of justice, but I read that and was like WOW. So many things wrong with that statement, starting with the fact that you’re mixing your kink life with your work life and didn’t get our consent first. But, more importantly: if a person of color is having to correct you in public, it’s because you likely did something to hurt them. You’re craving situations in which you hurt people? And then they have to do the very uncomfortable and draining thing of correcting you? Think about what you’re saying for a second!
As much as it shocked me, though, I also totally got it, because there’s a certain group of people who is just itching to get spanked right now. As if discomfort was a goal in and of itself. As if discomfort wasn’t something that some people are forced to feel, and as if the discomfort they feel equaled in the least the discomfort one might feel when watching a play that calls you out. But hey: it’s easier to feel discomfort for 1 hour and 45 minutes (even without an intermission) than for your whole life. So if someone is offering you the chance to do the former instead of the latter… why wouldn’t you take it? Especially if it will seem to stand in for the actual work that needs to be done so that NO ONE is uncomfortable (an unachievable goal, perhaps, but one worth seeking?)
I guess what I’m trying to say is: there’s a (also cynical) way to look at a lot of recent programming as an effort on the part of gatekeepers to show that they’re okay with being made to feel uncomfortable and guilty, so people will see them as allies and not cancel them when their time comes (if it hasn’t arrived already).
That’s a deal that should’ve never been offered.
This play that angered me is not the only one to do so, and not the only one to do so in the span of one week—though the other one I’m thinking of did not tackle issues that were personal to me, so I felt it less. But in both cases I left thinking: “I’d love to see a video of the conversation that the artistic team had when they decided to program this play.” Because I can almost guarantee that discussion did not engage with the play on a dramaturgical level. And that’s not just a hunch—I have friends who are part of those conversations and they have said as much: it’s always about what awards the play has won, who else is interested in it, how does it “align with our values” (ie how it makes the theater look). Those teams have no ability and/or desire to really engage with the writing because they either don’t understand it or are afraid that if they ask questions or give advice, they’ll be called racist/homophobes/xenophobes/etc.
So what they do is they program something (correctly) counting on the guilty flagellation fetish of liberal New York audiences to make the play “explosive,” and then leave that team to their own devices, without any actual guidance, too afraid to engage... but, of course, NOT too afraid to use the play, its themes, and its team headshots in their marketing, press, and grants, to show how aligned with their values the whole thing is. This is, I would say, the only true value of the play as far as the theater is concerned. The other play that angered me (though less) is a perfect example of this, because it got a bad review from the Gray Lady. Now, if the theater truly cared about the issues explored in the play, it would’ve ignored this review and picked some quotes from other publications. But the Gray Lady has sway with the ACTUAL people the theater cares about, so instead they picked two disconnected words that had been used by the reviewer to criticize the show and put them together in its marketing to give the impression that the Gray Lady’s critic had loved the play. I gasped. Sure, I have picked quotes with the best of them for my marketing job. But this was a REACH, and one that was so disconnected from what the play said it cared about (and by extension, what the theater said they cared about when they programmed the play).
And while we’re talking about reviews: I personally disagree with them as a way for audiences to engage with work they haven’t seen (though I do love reading them after watching something), so I’m not about to make a full-throated defense of the critic’s job right now… BUT thank God I didn’t go to the play on Sunday as a critic, because what a hellish job it would be to review this play. To tell my truth would get me branded as a class traitor and a stooge of the oppressor, judging by recent tweets I’ve seen about recent plays. This is the level of discourse that putting ourselves in boxes has gotten us: to like or dislike a play/TV show/movie is to avow or disavow any and all subjects the play deals with. To like it is to be an ally, to hate it is to be too fragile to withstand the discomfort the piece engenders. Never mind that, in the case of Sunday’s play, the idea that patrons who felt uncomfortable during the show would go home believing themselves to be better humans for watching it without complaining makes me wanna punch each of them in the face individually.
Discomfort, in my opinion, cannot be an artistic goal in and of itself. Discomfort is a byproduct of change. Some discussions are, by their very nature, uncomfortable, and we need to be okay with that if we wanna get to the other (hopefully better) side. Discomfort can even be a tool, if it motivates that change, if it forces people to get up and do something. But when all that we aim for is discomfort, we stop halfway through. We, both the ones who caused discomfort and the ones who felt it, allow ourselves to believe the work is done. Reader, it is not. And there’s a special place in hell for those who cash in on the discomfort and bounce, opening a wound with no intention of healing it.
Also: please kick me hard if I ever act like putting up an Off-Broadway play in New York City is going to change anything.
All of this was, again, very cynical, and I promised to try to believe in love and magic at the end of this rant. Well, maybe love and magic was a reach. I’ll just try to believe in the best art can do.
So: Yes, I know some writers are writing from genuine places. I know some artists are defensive of their identities because those identities have been used against them, or invalidated, time and time again. I know some gatekeepers are actually curious and willing to engage. And when those artists and those gatekeepers meet, it’s a joy to see! All the plays I recommended last month deal with oppression in a thoughtful way, without obvious heroes and villains, and I feel like I learned so much from each. I’ll never forget them.
Or, to give a non-theater example (but still a very good one): unlike most culture wars stuff, I’ve actually been following the Maus debacle closely, because I really love Maus (count this as the recommendation of the week?) It is, of course, a very hard book to get through—not just because it depicts a harrowing episode in human history, but because it does so without piety. The first time I read it, I remember being shocked at how Art Spiegelman wrote about his father, Vladek, without any varnish. There are scenes in which Vladek is careless, selfish, even racist. And, yet, when he’s sent to Auschwitz, I felt ten times worse than I did watching something like Life Is Beautiful. Vladek’s humanity shone through in his good and bad traits, underscoring the fact that he didn’t need to be a saint to make what happened to him and his wife (and millions of others) an unthinkable horror. The book is not without its detractors, some of whom raise valid points, but Spiegelman’s commitment to an unembellished account of his father’s experience (not his own, it should be noted, and he fully owns up to this) remains a deep influence in my own artistic practice. Just recently, after reading a new pilot I wrote, my friend told me: “it’s almost like the only reason I’m rooting for your protagonists is that they’re immigrants… because they’re kind of assholes.” I was so happy that the message was clear. I think it’s fair to describe me as an asshole sometimes. But I still don’t think I deserve to be treated the way this country (or my MFA teacher) has treated me.
I don’t think art is the same as social work. I don’t even think art is an essential tool of social justice. But I do think that art can allow us, even if only for 1 hour and 45 minutes, to connect. To see someone else’s pain and joy and live it as our own, to understand and empathize with an experience which, on a day-to-day basis, presents itself as a cold headline or historic factoid. Particularly in theater, which asks us to literally come together to see it! And sure, that’s sometimes an uncomfortable experience, especially if it leads us to question our own roles in the characters’ pain.
But, to quote Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (I’m sorry, Chimamanda, I know you’ve been quoted to death on this, but you say it so well): “Perfection shouldn’t be a condition for justice, or even for empathy and sympathy.” To impose perfection on our characters is to reenact that which oppression has already visited on them: reducing them to a stereotype that robs them of their dignity and complexity as human beings.
I hoped I would leave the theater last Sunday feeling uplifted—but instead, I left feeling used and alone. If only one thing from this whole rant sticks, let it be this: please, don’t do that to me (or anyone) again.