A Treatise on Apollonian Theatre
“It’s true that good governments appreciate the holy indignation of the governed, provided it remains lyrical. I think we need to be aware that very often it is those who govern who talk, are capable only of talking, and want only to talk. Experience shows that one can and must refuse the theatrical role of pure and simple indignation that is proposed to us.”
—Michel Foucault, 1984
I. A Chaotic Introduction to a Theme, a Pathetic Intro
Drama breeds its own sort of chaos, and the falsely manipulated version of chaos that serves as the locus of modern American playwriting only distracts from an understanding of real, lived chaos. When something occurs of its own through a certain artistic medium, trying to conjure up the spirits of that very thing make the effort itself seem extraneous, like a medium in a paranormal horror movie still screaming into a totem when the ghost is already in the room.
So, in the information age, what we are left with are the detritus of so many epochs, however cleverly arranged, but still jockeying for attention amongst the scraps of history. These ghosts of our past begin not just to look strange to us (we’re well past that point), but they also begin to look at us with disdain as we keep screaming past them. Not only are we exhausted from the screaming and emotionally spent on the effort itself, but the ghost begins to get bored and, without warning us, leaves the room—haunted still.
In our current milieu, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty looks like that selfsame screaming and nothing more. It will not conjure up the ghosts; it just looks silly now, to us and to the ghosts. The force of the play, the short distance between gesture and thought, the dynamism of the play even—have all become moot points for our haunted century. The best plays so far have all been so overly concerned with what we can do with our haunting (i.e. classify each and every ghost) that the sum total of the poltergeist never gets addressed. Like the little girl of Spielberg’s movie, we all know that “they’re here” but remain unable to either address it adequately or perform the exorcism.
This would be why Brecht has been a more useful critical tool for understanding plays right now, but it’s also why Brecht remains a poor guide for the actual writing and production of the plays themselves. This is where the detritus of the epochs comes into play: if his theories stay with us still, they stay with us in the sense of something in an eternal past never moving forward. Brecht’s theories have become the theatre equivalent of philosophy’s Plato, where the rest of the dramatic cultural oeuvre becomes footnotes to the theories, while Artaud’s theories have become a sort of transcendental turn. The problem is that while philosophy moved past Plato in theory (not practice) and past the transcendental turn in practice (not theory), theatre has yet to move past Brecht in theory or Artaud in practice, leading to some very confused dramatics.
If plays nowadays were more honest in their bumblings, this would not be an issue. Sadly, they are not. They purport the wisdom of forbears that no longer make any sense culturally and castigate political opposition that would help if only in the sense of debate and then cleansing those elements away from the discourse anew. Passion plays are no longer being acted out because of the homogenization of the dramatic discourse, and, while they’ve contributed to so much pain in the past—often in the form of gay panic or their contexts within the justifiably politically embattled and now (thankfully) gone conversion camps—they were just plain something to rail against. And what’s worse: we’re now mistaking the ghosts for our created straw men! Am I arguing that passion plays are better than Boys in the Band, The Normal Heart, orAngels in America? Hell no. I am, however, arguing that we no longer know what better is because of the newfound quality of homogenization.
But it is the fault of the Right for culturally resigning themselves to the dregs of aesthetic history; theatre won’t (and can’t) change that. We know better culturally at this point; that’s not up for discussion. What should be up for discussion, though, is whether or not the Halloween pageants taking place for the privileged liberal audiences are shocking anymore. It is not something that inclusivity of playwrights will help much with: playwrights are now (thankfully) an extremely diverse bunch, if only because the rigors of theatre weeds out the weak-willed privileged (usually straight and white) few, who know no hardship and probably couldn’t articulate well the brief moments of “the dark nights of the soul” that they have had.
No, we have inclusivity now (at least at the level of playwriting worth a damn). But that alone won’t wake our theatre up—the only thing that can do that is to reach theoretically farther than we have before, and to practice the art like it is a hunted aesthetic form. Is Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play Choir Boy worse than his Brother/Sister Plays because the former gives (usually) liberal audiences a peek into something overcame through the indomitable spirit of the protagonist, while the latter knows no such closure is possible and resides within that ambiguity?
Maybe, but the issue has more to do with the aesthetic quality of catharsis lacking from much modern theatre in general as the concept—and all its anti-dramatic Joycean undertones—has not endured very well conceptually in this new century. It is as if McCraney learned this after writing the Brother/Sister Plays, and his next two either maintain emotional but not theoretical/formal catharsis (Choir Boy) or reject both forms of catharsis entirely (Head of Passes). Either way, McCraney has reached such a theoretical and practical impasse in his playwriting that I for one will be first in line to his next show to see how he maneuvers out of it—it will probably be brilliant.
It’s important to note that modern audiences are not weary of catharsis because of Chekhov’s gun being shot so many times in their faces. No, audiences are covering their ears not because of the gunshots ringing out but rather to rid themselves of the general tinnitus of modern playwrights’ lack of lyrical invention when it comes to the language’s relationship with the mise en scene. Directors and stage managers and playwrights do not get along well (a very well-kept secret of drama!), but calls for harmony are entirely beside the point. What is more to the point is that they should know each other’s jobs—not for the purpose of one-upmanship or micromanagement but just for the sake of producing more affecting theatre.
Some of the best contemporary playwrights know their relationship to poetry and lyricism (Sarah Ruhl comes to mind), and some others know how to work their way around a mise en scenethat’s already been established (Annie Baker). But most of the attempts to fix this issue have been shortsighted at best. For one, Anne Washburn’s play 10 Out of 12 feels like a very condescending dog-whistle of an attempt to remedy the issue: that’s just theatre! *cue card.* If 10 Out of 12 had been released beforeher brilliant Mr. Burns: An Electric Play, I would probably call my previous sentence unfair. But it was released just after Mr. Burns, so it’s not. If a retrograde conception of the problems of the mise en scene epidemic in American theatre is a way to clear the mind for the next better play, then so be it.
You may have noticed I’ve been mixing metaphors like a crazed sous chef attempting to overcome the head chef’s advice on matters of the kitchen. You may have also gathered that politically this essay is very scattered. Both of these things are on purpose. To lay down all my cards: I’m on the left side of the political equation and lean more towards Artaud on the dramatic theory equation. Now, the further question will be: Who radicalized you so in regards to theatre and the artistic possibilities of this craft I’d (we’d) like to keep sequestered under economic division and cheap labor? What irresponsible drama teacher fed you Artaud? Why have you rejected Mamet’s knife book as too simplistic and dated? Most importantly, Who hurt you?
The answer is that nobody hurt me. I was just blessed to attend college near Chicago and see a great deal of good theatre, I’ve read quite a bit of plays in book form (as well as theory), and I want the best for the theatre. If you’re wondering if I have a sycophantic love of the theatre—similar to Artaud’s actually—then I would have to agree with you and then stress it even more for the book that follows. The book that follows is not some sort of looney tune’d reproach of the art form as it currently exists in America—it is more just observations (some benign, some pretty harsh) of an art form that I happen to enjoy analyzing. Nothing more, perhaps a good deal less.
Now, as is the tradition, I will end on a personal anecdote of a theatre-related event that happened to me. I was accepted into and participated in the 2018 Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive, where a good deal of the peers around me were either well-versed in writing plays for the stage that have then been acted out, or well-versed in drama, or both. At this point in the story you’d be forgiven for thinking the harsher aspects of this book have been birthed by a disdain for the very real trauma that theatre itself causes and inculcates. This would be true, if the second part of the story didn’t occur.
One of the weirdest things that happened to me at the Intensive—besides the general intensity at large—was the Artistic Director of the program having a conversation with me while smoking on the patio outside. I initially thought the conversation was completely harmless, but the minute I return from the break to watch scenes of “theatre life” being acted out in front of me, the very first scene acted out had to do with the discussion we’d had on the patio. Not only that but a couple of the lines of dialogue—about a young student asking an aggrieved (read: established) professor whether she was in fact a playwright not just a writer—were lifted from my dialogue with him verbatim. It was traumatic, scarring, and brilliant. I’m almost positive that anybody besides me would have hung up the towel after that egregious “insult,” but—while that was of course my first, blushing reaction—I didn’t feel that way by the end of the scene.
No, by the end of the scene I was galvanized to be someone who leaves the closet of my reading world and partakes in theatre anew, like someone acting for the first time, forgetting a few lines, and then overcoming it. This might not have been his intention when he crafted the scene to be word-for-word what I experienced, but being amidst a life lesson—that I didn’t realize had already happened—happening on an impromptu stage made me realize that I would never experience anything—in life—if I didn’t put myself out there. And if theatre were my life, then I would find it there. And it was this absurd zero-sum game that I found myself irresistibly drawn to, like a self-aware, sadomasochistic Catch-22 protagonist.
II. In Accordance with a Dream’s Beginning
So much of drama has been give over to logic: the logic of a scene, of an Act, of action itself, of the dream, logic trying to cunningly subvert the very chaos that drama breeds.
When logic in drama was still read along stilted lines (often in lines of verse), Artaud and (to a lesser extent) Brecht broke down that edifice with both dream logic and mythic logic. But while the structural integrity of the forms were kept intact, the grandeur behind them became less grand, more real (courtesy to some extent of Wedekind and then later the Theatre of the Absurd).
As such, and in accordance with how slowly America typically responds to and then redevelops artistic transformations for its own purposes, American theatre in the 20th century went from the lyric realism of Miller, Williams, O’Neill, Wilson, and Hansberry to a kind of lyric realism subjugated by the dream and mythic logical systems that had previously been latent in the former realist classics.
Contemporary playwrights such as Annie Baker, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Anne Washburn tell their stories through a glass inverted, not through a glass darkly (the only playwright who comes close to that is McDonagh). Their formal tools for developing the narratives within their plays only serve to perpetuate the clearness of the glass itself, of the clarity of form. Bruce Norris and Lynn Nottage have extremely recognizable and clear dramatic form(s). In the case of Norris, it is to the detriment of his oeuvre and the larger story he seems to want to tell through the individual plays spanning his career. With Nottage it is almost the reverse problem, but they are two sides of the same coin, a coin that has been corroded into unrecognizability by the popularity of the American musical.
III. To Sing or Not to Sing
It is not the American musical’s fault for usurping any sort of slim cultural role the dramatic theatre itself once held so tightly. It is also not the fault of Hollywood, and less so the fault of its blockbusters. The cultural whims that led to those capitalistic “successes” are irrelevant to the fact that the vast majority of today’s dramatic work either doesn’t speak at all to anybody but the playwright, or speaks so plainly in words of its own obviously improvised language that the audience would rather watch a popcorn flick where the clarity of form is somehow less showy.
One other straw man used to defend modern plays is that money just isn’t being poured into dramatic work in nearly the same ratio as it has been into recent musicals. Even if Broadway (and by Broadway I mean their financial heavy-hitters, their musicals) were to lose all its funding and revenue tomorrow and writers had to start from scratch, the problem still wouldn’t be with Broadway, and would even less lie with the American public.
No, it is the fault of plays, of American theatre in the 21st century. With its equivocations and logical miscalculations, its rampant pathos masquerading as the only avenue towards empathy. Their avoidance of the Real outside of their sequestered silos of dramatic understanding and regimen. A separation between actions and what they mean has taken place, and it is not the fault of the culture writ large.
IV. New Logical Systems
By which I mean that theatre is just no longer being as creative with all the tools it’s been given culturally. I DO NOT mean that the rise of artists from underrepresented or marginalized communities in any way is a step back for American drama. Far from it. If dramatic artists from all backgrounds and understandings made better use of the dramatic tools we’ve been given culturally (Eastern and Western), that defense wouldn’t need to be made in the first place. If the playwrights stopped adapting old stories to even older forms, American theatre wouldn’t be putting its foot in its mouth at the same time the other foot hops backwards.
What I am advocating is not a slow-down of the current trend towards diversification of logical systems within drama, but instead a rapid influx of them such that their very foundation and structural integrity break at the seams. Everybody seems to forget that Shakespeare was such a radical playwright for his era not in spite of his variety of thematic registers and genres but because of that variety, and because that variety was an attempt to break the seams of Elizabethan drama down to its essential elements, the threads of which he and his collaborators weren’t classifying but weaving together.
And identity politics and “political correctness” are not to blame for the different threads not being able to be woven together; it’s because the cultural threads are not the same. Because American artists are slow to recognizing artistic transformations (which has more to do with American politics and culture being even slower on the uptake)—and because they then incorporate those elements in their own, distinctively American way—the different threads are being classified right now rather than woven into a tapestry.
The solution to this is of course collaboration, but also comparing threads (not as a game of “who has a higher thread-count” but as a genuine attempt towards empathy) not as classifications but as elements of both cultural and individual talent. Just because theatre now exists within the modern world doesn’t mean that worlds can’t be woven; it just means they also need to be destroyed.
V. A Social Sphere for a Social Art
What are the tools with which these individual strands and threads are classified? you may ask. To which I would say the dual forceps of Social Media and Branding. One is not present without the other, but the latter exacerbates the negative qualities of the former to such a harmful extent within artistic communities that what has bred works of genius in the past within drama—the dichotomy between the lone artist vs. the world (taken from Romanticism in poetry)—has been thoroughly eliminated.
This would be fine if 1) Romanticism no longer held any sort of weight in drama, or 2) branding was not used for capitalistic purposes. For point 1, the influence of Artaud has made this impossible, but social media and branding have made this such a moot point that it has become a sort of Chekhov’s gun that can never fire. For point 2, the American musical and the surrounding zeitgeist around it culturally have given the American dramatic theatre no choice but to kowtow to the demands of branding for individual playwrights only using their own recognizable threads. And of course all of this would be fine if the American public—let alone playwrights—understood social media or branding in order to not use it at the expense of the art, but that is expecting way too much of playwrights, let alone the American public. We don’t understand these changes yet, and if we did, our plays would be better.
The American musical isto blame for the issue of branding, but only peripherally because of how capitalism has overtaken its artistic machinations. The form of the musical itself is first and foremost responsible for the artistic sin of the playwright wearing their personality on their sleeve both thematically and formally. The easy-to-understand, paint-by-the-numbers cue-card showmanship of the American musical has siphoned at least its aesthetic attitude into the American drama.
Pretty ironically, Bruce Norris again is one of the worst offenders of a play’s logic being tied to the capitalistic need for instant intelligibility via branding. Even though on the surface they ask so many questions (!), the questions themselves are thematically tied to the formal questions to such an extent that the play becomes a self-answered rhetorical question, which is why his plays are sometimes called self-involved. But they’re not self-involved, they’re just recursive. The threads are not allowed to speak for themselves, so the rigging of the ship becomes off-kilter. By branding himself as an Outsider Artist in this influx of new voices, he is not being problematic; he is just being aesthetically regressive at a time when Branding needs to be reformed outside of the need for the genius of the individual artist.
VI. A Call for Cunning Logic
But what is the genius of the individual artist to do when diversification and branding assail it so? The answer (?) lies less within how a play is put out into the world and more within how a play is performed. Playwriting that knows it exists in a vacuum until it is performed is the best kind by miles. And playwriting that knows it is hunted (culturally or politically) is even better: the kind of play that sees the struggle from either a distance and it has enough time to prepare, or that is fighting the powers that be in the immediate present. It is not an accident that three of the best plays of the past few decades are How I Learned to Drive (where the struggle is seen from the kind of distance Vogel always employs, however personal), Topdog/Underdog (where the struggle is being fought out in the immediate present), and Equus (where the struggle is intellectualized from a distance yet fought in real time, making it all the more haunting).
It is also not an accident that the bestAmerican play of the past 50ish years is Angels in America, where the distinction between realistic, dream, and mythic logical systems is not only not seen or recognized by its themes, but is also not even acknowledged by its form. It’s a play that doesn’t even need to pretend it’s being culturally hunted and therefore must outfox its opposition, and it’s a play where the vacuum is the closet and therefore it’s always being performed anyway. But that is also why Angels in America can never happen again: it was an event where all the catch-up work American theatre did met the beginning of the trends this essay is about. And that’s not a bad thing, it just is.
So what we are left with is a call for a more cunning logic. Not even a system of logic that doesn’t see the distinction between logical systems themselves, but a rippling undercurrent of subversions of all of them at once. An attempt to bridge all the gaps of all the genres formally must meet an attempt to cover several themes. The play doesn’t need to be as world beating as Angels for it to succeed in creating worlds (weaving tapestries) that can then be destroyed (torn). By the same token, the cunning logic doesn’t need to be a defense from straight white males who see these trends happening and are desperately keeping their thread(s) to themselves.
What’s needed is not Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, not Beckett’s Theatre of the Absurd, not Kushner’s magical realism, and not the thrill-seeking modern theatre. What’s needed are less classification and more comparing, less holding onto and more weaving, less branding and more Individual Talent Meets World, less logical determining and more quickness. Only then will the promise of the coming decadence of modern American playwriting meet its maker and be able to look it in the eye for once. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche speaks about the Dionysian elements of femininity and chaos being subjugated to the Apollonian elements of masculinity, order, and logic during Greece’s decline. The democracy was not being saved by the Dionysian elements of the playwrights, but was instead being destroyed by the rising Apollonian tide.
So the question then becomes what is necessary for America, if its decline is the reverse of Greece’s, if its cultural relationship to politics is the reverse, if its democracy was already in decline? What is necessary for American theatre becomes not the rising tide of either a Dionysian or an Apollonian approach, but rather an ocean that doesn’t reveal itself to be near either camp, an ocean we’re all sinking underneath, an ocean where the pull of the waters becomes the logical system more than previous dichotomies. Apollo never paid much attention to Dionysus, and our plays should pretend to ignore him too. But gone are the times when plays can afford to formally or thematically ignore our reliance on logical systems or dichotomies. Because we’re sinking, and America is sinking; but theatre doesn’t need to.
VII. Playwright as First Mate of a Sinking Ship
So then a logical exercise is in order—in order to figure out what ails contemporary American playwriting. It will take the form of a central initial question, followed by the answer to that question (only in reality) as a subset to the question, and finally ending on an answer (not in reality) as a second subset to the initial question.
1) What role does the 21st century playwright think he or she has? (non-reality)
To answer this question one must first outline the initial, non-reality subset of the question: i.e. what the playwright truly does think his or her role in society is. It is a subset because its cause and answer make it subjected to the reality of its very existence. Being the non-reality subset, you would think that material concerns are not among the primary factors of this subset, but that first gut-reaction thought would be wrong. However, if you guessed the dark horse in this essay’s themes so far, then you would be correct: late capitalism is the reason.
Because of recent economic trends, a playwright can safely assume his role will be either in an academic setting, at a nonprofit, or in the streets. The conditions present in the United States in the 21st century make it not only not feasible to pursue an artistic career in drama, they make it less an insult to the powers that be and more a necessary recursion for it because of the state of drama in this century anyway.
Any cultural role the playwright fills will therefore by necessity only serve to bolster the system it threatens to undermine: it’s like Moliere just never left Louis XIV’s garden. Because the playwright is blinded both from the reality of the situation and from any true hopes to make it better, the powers that be are not consigned to a position by cultural heft but rather consign playwrights—and therefore plays—to a lesser role in society.
a) The role of the playwright in the 21st century in America as it is, truly. (reality)
The role the 21st century American playwright has is such a small one—however overblown by the occasional success—that it’s easy to lose track of it. You could stand in one region of the country (i.e. the West Coast) and be able to lose sight of the other end of the country (i.e. the East Coast). No matter which coast reigns in these situations, the fact that one can’t see the other means that nobody wins and—by extension—nobody loses.
The sequestering of the play culturally has happened at the direction of the powers that be and has been perpetuated by playwrights who need to kowtow to those powers in any case. However, a hard bargain has been driven such that politicians are able to go to these plays unscathed by the material they are watching—their place in society is now more established and they can therefore more easily turn the other cheek.
The role then becomes to sit between dual imaginings—of the play as it is in the dramatist’s mind vs. the play as it should exist based on the role playwrights in this country should have. There is such a disconnect between those two fundamental questions that—even though the first question is posed as a statement—the role the playwright should have in reality is erased as a potentiality to begin with.
Now, this is where I will say it is not the fault of playwrights, drama, the musical, directors, etc. etc. It is first and foremost a problem with the rightward shift of America first politically and then—as it has siphoned downward—towards the public sphere. Although the reality of the political situation is that playwrights don’t have the pull they used to because of this rightward siphoning, the shackling of a play’s imaginative impact has to do with economics.
It would be stupid to postulate that the American theatre in this century doesn’t have the same pull as in the 20th century because of television and films. It would be more accurate to say that American theatre was already just not prepared for the economic reality to conjoin with the political reality outlined above. The tools for understanding how those two forces combine to culturally annihilate plays is a far cry from the sophisticated political understanding American plays have developed over the last century.
b) What role should the 21st century playwright have? (non-reality)
Because of all this, a play’s reality becomes sandwiched between two separate imaginary planes, one of which (the last one, the solution) is inextricably subjected to the other. Combined with the subjection of the initial question to itself (in a bizarre culturally Hegelian-yet-capitalistic formulation), the subjection of this final question (and thereby solution) to the initial question means the dynamism of recent plays have only remained cyclical at best.
In the current economic and political situation in America, the very pull outwards of a play serves only to confirm the more conservative impulses of the situation itself. Every revolution of a new play becomes just a new revolution in the turning of a gyre that never moves forward but only spins in place because of the dire surrounding situation. Therefore, the frequently used ship metaphor of a play becomes extremely apt if we keep in mind that the seas right now are so stormy that we can’t see ahead of us—not to mention the whirlpool at the center.
So the non-reality of the playwright’s dilemma becomes the central criterion for a playwright’s self-understanding. This is nothing new; this is how it has always been. The difference is that now—because of the factors mentioned above—both the actual reality of a playwright’s situation and the hope for a way forward have become increasingly subjected to that same imaginary self-understanding, in ways unprecedented and in ways that only confirm the worst cultural critics of plays right (just for the wrong reasons of course).
So what then shall we do? I’m not so naïve as to think that playwriting can change the American political and economic spectrum to such a degree that we enter a new utopia of plays. No, it seems much more logical to me to think of playwrights as the first mates of a sinking ship. (First mates have gotten a bad rap recently, but only because we’ve moved past their actual usage: first mates usually had more say so than we give them credit for nowadays.)
As first mate, the playwright would first and foremost 1) see storms, 2) help direct the captain out of the whirlpool, and 3) oversee the activities of the ship. Politically, the applications of these are all fairly obvious when thinking of the problem at hand. But when thinking about the solution, it gets more difficult. For instance, how can the playwright see the storms if they’re blinded by their own self-understandings of their roles on the ship? How can the playwright direct the captain out of the whirlpool if that same understanding doesn’t lend itself towards a nuanced understanding of the political whirlpool itself? How can they oversee the activities of the ship if they are constantly reexamining and redefining their roles themselves? The answer is threefold.
1. Political endorsements. I believe the country is heading towards a more liberal direction politically and maybe economically, and this will eventually siphon towards the arts. But if playwrights continue down the paths they’re headed down, then drama won’t necessarily hold the same (or any) weight in the current discussion as it happens on the ground. Therefore, it will be key for future playwrights to pick candidates left of center enough to be endorsed by the up-and-coming playwrights. And it is then up to them to keep them electable and in good shape politically so that we can move past this impasse.
2. Political understanding plus economic empathy. Some of the best modern plays by white male American playwrights have been related to the economy, not because they have been relegated to that topic based on cultural currency, but because that is a topic they can cover with relative cultural abandon and still strike a true note. (Lynn Nottage’s Sweat probably beats them all, though.) It is high time every American 21st century playwright understands all the economic downfalls afflicting this country, not just parochially, or ethnically, or individually. Economic empathy must be cultivated not just because it will strike a true note, but because when the Left Turn finally happens, we will be there to at first celebrate and then remind people of a worse time in our history, when we were both embattled and self-involved.
3. Better plays. And finally, better plays. The only way to cure the rampant scurvy amongst first mates on the ship of America is to eat more fruit: make better plays. Everything that I have talked about so far is not about plays on a craft level so much as a cultural, political, and socio-economic level, and this has been on purpose. I have not mentioned how to make a play better itself orhow this situation arose in the first place; that is for the rest of this book. For now, suffice it to say that David Mamet in Three Uses of the Knife underplayed the dire political situation to such an extent that his instrument became not only egregiously unhelpful but also egregiously moot. As in, the craft levels of plays as they are written in the culture are inextricably tied to cultural, political, and socio-economical happenings anyway.
What are now called for are plays that think beyond the strictures of the situation both the American people and playwriting have put themselves in. What are needed are plays that call beyond the grave of dead cultural artifacts, plays that try to create their own legacies, genealogies, traits, trails, clear horizons. What is needed now more than ever is hope, but a carefully wrought and chastened hope. I spoke before of my borderline sadomasochistic relationship to the theatre, and—beyond the cynical need to insert a confessional note to this essay—it was more meant to show that America’s playwrights have the same relationship to theatre: hoping they will be called good in the eyes of the theatre, the American public, or (hopefully) both. No, our role is established; it’s high time to show it.
Blake Wallin is the author of the poetry collections Otherwise Jesus (Ghost City Press), No Sign on the Island (Bottlecap Press), and Occipital Love (Ghost City Press); the novels Papal Glow and More Perfect; and two full-length plays. He attended the 2018 Virginia Quarterly Review Summer Workshop for poetry as well as the 2018 Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive. He is an MFA candidate in poetry at George Mason University.