Weller - Five Plays

Table of Contents

Rereading these early plays for the first time in a decade and a half was a peculiar experience. As a rule, after something of mine is performed I close the door on it and clear my head for new work. I have seen these plays produced in the intervening yearssome of them several timesbut performance is an impersonal experience for a writer; more about actors and production than about the text. From time to time I entertained fleeting thoughts of looking over this or that early play but quashed them fast, afraid that a backward glance might make me cower with embarrassment or, worse, send me racing to my tool kit to fiddle and tinker away precious hours trying to improve upon the past instead of getting on with the principal business of a writers life: todays pages.

So I set about revisiting these plays with a certain trepidation. As I read on, however, a mood of baffled amusement took hold, the sort of feeling you get when perusing old photos. Were those really my friends back then? How did I ever live in that apartment? Where was that picture taken? Who is she?

Entire encounters came as a surprise to me. I forgot Id written them. I had in fact forgotten several small roles altogether, and in one case remembered character x being in play y, not play z (this really threw me). Some passages I recalled vividly enough, and certain scenes I recognized as embryonic attempts at things I would dramatize more fully (and better) in later plays, but in the main I felt as if I was listening to a stranger speak.

But not a complete stranger. Someone just different enough from who and what I know myself to be now that tampering with his words would be like invading another mans larynx. Im obliged to commit more than enough sacrilege as a working screenwriter. As a playwright, never, dear god, never let it come to that!

Result: very little here is changed from the first edition. A word, a sentence, a line at most. I prefer to let the album stand as what it is: fond recollections of how the world struck me at certain times and places long gone.

As a writer, my concerns have naturally enough changed over the years. From being a solo act, with only myself to support and fret about, and with whole days free to write whenever the mood took me, I am now in my middle years and amply, happily, miraculously provided with all that implies... family, house, bills and days so full of things to do, that finding time to write for pleasure (plays) rather than profit (movies) is a constant juggling act. As a friend once observed, after forty years on earth, everything becomes maintenance.

I have come to see things more vertically, if you willparents, children, generations of familythan horizontally; my contemporaries, our woes, our frolics. I am still chiefly concerned with my own generations particular style of life, but I see it more in relation to the work we do, the partners weve chosen, the families we build or borrow, and the ideals we try to protect in the face of time, waning energy, increasing confusion and the hardening certainty of our appearance here being a limited engagement.

What seems to me unique and fascinating among those I know best (my generation) is how weve now lived to see the world change from one where we could plausibly (and with passion) believe that the efforts of a committed group of people like ourselves might alter a piece of history, to one where most if not all politics has become a subfunction (a rapidly diminishing subfunction) of global commerce. Our elected officials frantically tread water to create the illusion they are still necessary, while the important decisions of the day gravitate to the hands of international financiers accountable to neither voters, politicians nor mankind as a whole.

This is new. And to watch my generation sense the effects of this power shift, with its attendant feeling of helplessness, is a fascinating enterprise. Some turn to religion, some turn cynical, others manage to invest themselves in something akin to traditional small-town volunteerism at a local level: their neighborhood, their block, their school, their gender group, their coworkers...

As a student, I recall furious debates with friends about the future disappearance of manual labor. It was assumed that in the foreseeable future, most of the dirty work would one day be done by machines. This would leave us free, said one side, to embellish our leisure time in unimaginable and wonderful ways (more theatre?!). The other side worried that it would leave a very large part of the human race with too much time on its hands and no good notion of what to do with it.

The latter group would seem to be winning the argument. And here, to me, is the deeper concernthere seems to be no compelling theory at hand to describe a course of action that might correct this trend or parlay it into a positive vision of the future we can invest in.

Both our political parties preach the same tired solutions to the same tired scenarios (cut the budget, cut expenses, cut taxes, tra-la, tra-lafor this we need office staff, not leadership). No one any longer believes these suggestions will solve the underlying problems. And in the midst of our disenchantment what is lost is hope. Whatever that rough beast may prove to be, we hear it slouching our way, but we dont know how to respond. We have no theory, no social agenda to arrest or resist its advance. We sit and wait. We look away. We get on with fixing the doorknob, planning the holiday, going to the movies. We splinter into smaller and smaller interest groups that seem less real than a neighborhood and less inspiring that a nationhood. To what do we belong? To what do we owe allegiance? To what thing bigger than our own well-being can we assign value?

However, I digress. America, history, theatre, my playsthats it, I was talking about...

In one respect my playwriting has changed very little over the years, and, reading the work in this volume again, it was instructive to see a clear continuity between my earliest and my latest output. Most of the plays herein are profligate, huge, impractically so; lots of actors; lots of sets. If I wrote them today theyd never be done professionally, at least not readily. I managed to sneak in just under the Wire of Time, before public and corporate abandonment of the arts shifted into high merry gear and, among other things, shaved the average size of a producible new play to something in the neighborhood of five actors.

But I still write large cast plays. Its what I like to write, its what brought me into the theatre to begin withthe idea that I could put on stage a canvas, a gallery, a portrait of a time and place. My early excitement with theatre came from nights at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre under Laurence Olivier, the T.N.P. in Paris, the Berliner Ensemble and, later, when I returned to live in New York, watching the phenomenal work of Andre Gregorys Manhattan Project, whose Alice in Wonderland I saw no less than six times. Big plays. Big sets. Big visions. Bustle. Movement. Dramatic daring, imagination, abundance.

This is still what I want to see when I go to the theatre. And I believe audiences do, too. They crave something on a scale reflecting the fact of many people assembled in one space to watch a story enacted, to see imitations of themselves striving, erring, achieving, failing and reaching the greatest of all moments in drama: recognition of their moral selves.