Table of Contents
OTHER WORKS BY WALLACE SHAWN
SCREENPLAYS:
My Dinner with Andr
by Wallace Shawn and Andr Gregory
Marie and Bruce
by Wallace Shawn and Tom Cairns
TRANSLATIONS:
The Mandrake by Niccol Machiavelli
The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen
The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht
OPERA LIBRETTI:
In the Dark, music by Allen Shawn
The Music Teacher, music by Allen Shawn
PLAYS:
The Hotel Play
Marie and Bruce
Aunt Dan and Lemon
The Fever
The Designated Mourner
Grasses of a Thousand Colors
EARLY TEACHERS
Our Late Night 1972 -1975
Andr Gregory
Gerry Bamman
Tom Costello
John Ferraro
Saskia Noordhoek Hegt
Karen Ludwig
Angela Pietropinto
Larry Pine
Kathleen Tolan
INTRODUCTION
ITS EASIER TO SLEEP if your head is elevated, and so people use pillows. If you want to attach one piece of cloth to another piece of cloth, a sewing machine can be extremely helpful, and thats why Isaac M. Singer made sewing machines. But why do people make and use what we call artistic objects?
Its a question that seems particularly puzzling if you make such objects yourself, in a way devoting your life to it, without quite knowing why youre doing it.
George Gershwin might possibly have wondered to himself, Why do I write songs? and yet, as soon as he wrote them, many, many of his fellow humans were eager to sing them, and others were dying to listen to them, and when they heard them, they all felt better and happier, so even though, in a way, those facts dont quite answer the original question, they dont quite explain Gershwins drive to write music, still, in another way, what more of an answer could Gershwin possibly have wanted?
Everyone knows that if youre hungry and depressed, a little ice cream can bring a moment of relief, and thats why we like it.
Our Late Night was completed in 1972, A Thought in Three Parts in 1976. I think I presented them to the world with many of the same feelings that Gershwin had when he presented his songsin each case I had given my all and done my best to make something that I found pleasing. To me, they were more than pleasing.
Although Id already written a few other plays, Our Late Night was the first to be publicly performed. It was done in New York City in 1975 by Andr Gregorys group, the Manhattan Project. The production of the play was absolutely brilliant. But the level of hostility that boiled up from the small audience was seriously disturbing. It was almost sickening. A Thought in Three Parts was done in New York the following year. It was performed for three weeks for the subscribers of a large theater, but it was not officially opened or presented to the critics. This time the audience was not so much hostile as stricken, miserablethey seemed hurt and baffled. (Footnote: the official United States opening of A Thought in Three Parts finally happened in 2007, in Austin, Texas, by Rubber Rep.)
Every day I wake up wondering what happened to these plays. They havent caught on, apparently, even after all this time. And the years I spent writing themwhat were those years? Were they like the years that recovered alcoholics describelost years spent wandering in a drunken haze from one nights incomprehensible encounter with someone or other to the next nights horrible barroom brawl?
Not long ago, I made a film with a group of people, and wed poured a significant portion of our lives into making it, along with quite a bit of thought and passion, and finally it was shown at a film festival. And when the screening of the film was over, a moderator asked the audience if anyone had any questions for the filmmakers. Almost instantly, a man spoke up from the center of the auditorium. Yes, I have a question, he said in a loud voice, What was the point of that? Now, lets note that his question could have meant two different things. He might have been wondering what the point was for us in making the film. Or he might have been asking what point there could possibly have been for him in watching it. But in a way, I feel that my whole life seems to revolve around the fact that Im crawling through the streets every day unable to answer either version of that question about anything I do.
You have to understand, I do read these plays myself every few years. I read them, I change a few words, I improve a few lines, and I note one more time that Im obviously different from a lot of other people, because they havent liked these plays, and I do, even though I dont seem that different from all the other people who are out thereI like the same foods that other people like, I admire the same actors that they admire, I listen to the same songs on the radio and sing them to myself as I walk down the street.
People always say that tastes differ, and that thats just a fact. A lot of people like spinach. Many fewer like dandelion greens. When certain people take their clothes off in public, theyre worshipped and rewarded, while others are arrested or taken to an insane asylum. But if you have a stake in the answer, its hard not to ask, Why the spinach? Why not the greens?
Surprisinglyand for me, in a way, it makes my life even harder to understandthere are a group of people now who like what I do, and at this very moment a wonderful publisher has decided to publish this book, and here it is. Should I say something about the book to you, dear reader?
I do remember that when I was a boy it seemed terribly enjoyable to put a little bit of everything that was there in my mothers kitchen into a bowl, and then I would mix it up with a big spoonbut in the end it actually didnt taste very good, not even to me. Without quite realizing that that was what I was doing, I think Ive learned to do some equivalent of that mixing-bowl trick in the theater, and Ive even learned how to come up with some mixtures which I myself find delicious, though admittedly they dont have universal appeal the way my mothers creamed chicken once did, for example.
To begin with, my plays are a response to the world we live inI mean, I only say that because it might well seem that they take place on Mars. And like other people who write for the theater, Im writing about how people interact in the worldyou know, society, power, even sometimes classes of society, in a waybut also about peoples inner states. A Thought in Three Parts really is a meditation: three approaches to something are being contrasted, held up to the audience for their inspection. The degree of naturalism of the plays is hard to defineI think maybe the guests in Our Late Night may not be quite real, for example. Maybe they simply express whats going on inside the hosts as they enter into an awful, terrifying downward spiral. Its clearly central to the story that they live very high up in a gigantic building that overlooks a giant city.
A play is a wonderful pile-up of bodies, lights, sets, gestures, clothes, nudity, music, dance, and running through it all and driving it all is a stream of words, sentences. Words and sentences are aesthetic materials, and a purpose which I think one would have to call aesthetic is the governing element in the book youre holding. Im playing with sentences the way a child plays with matchesbecause theyre unpredictable. Sentences make up a sort of jungle in which I seem to be living. Anyway, Im stirring up and mixing up various elements in order to create an artistic object, an object that exists for the purpose of being contemplated. The object doesnt mean one particular thing, it doesnt say one particular thingits just sort of there, and you can walk around it, look at it from different angles, enjoy it in whatever way you like, and take from it what you like.
