100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write
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Authors: Sarah Ruhl
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.
For my mother, Kathy Ruhl, who taught me that the etymology of the word
essay
is
to try.
More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children need one
now
… It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity.
—
TILLIE OLSEN,
Silences
I guess I don’t really like solitude. The fun is hammering bits of it out of a crowded life.
—
ROBERT LOWELL,
from a letter to Elizabeth Bishop
I wanted to make something. I wanted to finish my own sentences.
—
LOUISE GLÜCK
Contents
Part One:
On Writing Plays
3.
On the loss of sword fights
4.
On titles—comedy and tragedy
7.
On Andy Goldsworthy, theatrical structure, and the male orgasm
8.
Don’t send your characters to reform school
9.
Should characters have last names?
10.
People in plays
11.
An essay in praise of smallness
12.
Plays of ideas
14.
Investing in the character
15.
The future, storytelling, and secrets
16.
On Ovid
17.
Miller and Williams; or, morality and mystery plays
19.
Satyr plays inside tragedies
20.
On knowing
21.
The necessary
23.
On neologisms
24.
Bad poets make good playwrights?
25.
The place of rhyme in theater and is it banished forever?
Part Two:
On Acting in Plays
26.
On nakedness and sight lines
27.
The four humors: an essay in four parts
28.
Greek masks and Bell’s palsy
29.
Greek masks and star casting
30.
Subtext to the left of the work, not underneath the work
32.
What do you want what do you want what do you want
34.
Being in a pure state vs. playing an action
35.
Speech acts and the imagination
36.
Everyone is famous in a parade
38.
The language of clear steps
40.
The decline of big families and the decline of cast sizes
41.
Color-blind casting; or, why are there so many white people on stage?
44.
Dogs and children on stage
45.
On fire alarms
Part Three:
On People Who Watch Plays: Audiences and Experts
46.
On sleeping in the theater
47.
Wabi-sabi
48.
Is one person an audience?
50.
On pleasure
51.
Reading aloud
53.
God as audience: a non-syllogism
54.
Do playwrights love the audience and should they?
55.
Hungry ghosts, gardens, and doing plays in New York
56.
Advice to dead playwrights from contemporary experts
57.
What of aesthetic hatred, and is it useful?
58.
More failure and more bad plays
59.
It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it
60.
Is there an objective standard of taste?
61.
Why I hate the word
whimsy.
And why I hate the word
quirky.
62.
A scholarly treatise on the parents of writers
63.
William Hazlitt in an age of digital reproduction
65.
Can you be avant-garde if you’re dead?; or, the strange case of e. e. cummings and Thornton Wilder
66.
The American play as audition for other genres
68.
Confessions of a twelve-year-old has-been
69.
Is there an ethics of comedy, and is it bad when comedies make people laugh?
70.
On writing plays for audiences who do not speak English
73.
Theater as a preparation for death
74.
Watching my mother die on stage
Part Four:
On Making Plays with Other People: Designers, Dramaturgs, Directors, and Children
75.
On lice
76.
Mothers on stage
77.
On motherhood and stools (the furniture kind)
78.
Must one enjoy one’s children?
79.
The meaning of twins on stage
80.
Is playwriting teachable?: the example of Paula Vogel
81.
Bad plays and original sin
84.
Democracy and writing a play
85.
What about all that office space?
87.
Storms on stage
88.
Snow on stage
89.
Gobos, crickets, and false exits: three hobgoblins of false mimesis
90.
Oh the proscenium and oh the curtain
91.
Exits and entrances and oh the door
92.
Theatrical
as a dirty word for architects
94.
On standard dramatic formatting
95.
On the summer Olympics and moving at the same time
96.
The first day of rehearsal
97.
On watching
Three Sisters
in the dark
98.
The audience is not a camera; or, how to protect your audience from death
99.
On endings
100.
On community theater
Part One
On Writing Plays
1. On interruptions
I remember reading Alice Walker’s essay in my twenties about how a woman writer could manage to have one child, but more was difficult. At the time, I pledged to have no more than one, or at the very most two. (I now have three.) I also remember, before having children, reading Tillie Olsen, who described with such clarity: thinking and ironing and thinking and ironing and writing while ironing and having many children—she herself had four. I myself do not iron. My clothes and the clothes of my children are rumpled. The child’s need, so pressing, so consuming, for the mother to
be there
, to be present, and the pressing need of the writer to be half-there, to be there but thinking of other things, caught me—
Sorry. In the act of writing that sentence, my son, William, who is now two, came running into my office crying and asking for a fake knife to cut his fake fruit. So there is also, in observing children much of the day and making theater much of the night, this preoccupation with the real and the illusory, and the pleasures and pains of both.
In any case, please forgive the shortness of these essays; do imagine the silences that came between—the bodily fluids, the tears, the various shades of—
In the middle of that sentence my son came in and sat at my elbow and said tenderly, “Mom, can I poop here?” I think of Virginia Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own
and how it needs a practical addendum about locks and bolts and soundproofing.
But I digress. I could lie to you and say that I intended to write something totalizing, something grand. But I confess that I had a more humble ambition—to preserve for myself, in rare private moments, some liberty of thought. Perhaps that is equally 7.
My son just typed 7 on my computer.
There was a time, when I first found out I was pregnant with twins, that I saw only a state of conflict. When I looked at theater and parenthood, I saw only war, competing loyalties, and I thought my writing life was over. There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me (truly you have not lived until you have changed one baby’s diaper while another baby quietly vomits on your shin), and finally I came to the thought, All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe. I could investigate the pauses.
I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is also a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.