I love art. I love literature.
Sometimes, though, I get so saddened by the spaces in between them. The brushed-over program note of a dramaturg. The embarrasment of a sloppy adaptation. The limitations. The ennui.
In my life I have so many radiant examples to fuel each love: a family that has been, for almost a century, nourished by a feast of fiction. We share the delights of a juicy poem like secret fruits. I have sat in beautiful places all over the world and wept at the last page of a book. I crave French literature like I have some palpable, sickening deficiency because I can't read it fluently. I admire deeply those who read well, often, and to the point of taxation. It is one of the most enduring parts of my center. It is a home.
The other home, of course, is theater. At one point when I was about 16, I had been benched for the umpteenth time in JV basketball. I came to my mother, wrecked, self-disparaging. She finally said outloud what I had wanted to hear: stop doing what you're bad at, and do-- do
fully, and dutifully--what you love. I had a home, and, it turned out, a future and an adulthood in the theater. I let it happen. I am endlessly proud of my peers in the theater, endlessly admiring of my mentors, endlessly aspirational myself. I see the structures and shape underneath the future of American theater and I am excited about it.
This duality is strange and stark. My family doesn't know or understand those shapes and structures underneath drama, or what it would really mean to have a career as an artist. My friends--the luminaries!--maybe see books in an analogous way: a hobby, a private world. Separate. Distinct.
Let me return, briefly, to the spaces in between:
Several times in my life I have tried to understand the bridges. Find out what they are, fantasize about becoming an influential architect of one of them. I try to understand the transgressive innovations of Modernism, the instinct to overhaul, and the ingredients of the success. 1910!
I think there is a frontier out there; it would mark an end to this division, and represent something new about the human imagination, power of expression, and consciousness. I don't know what it is. I don't know how to begin to excavate it. But, perhaps more profoundly than I am called to understand anything else about humanity, I feel compelled to understand it and move something forward.
