American playwright, filmmaker and author (born 1947)
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And there are plays – and books and songs and poems and dances – that are perhaps upsetting or intricate or unusual, that leave you unsure, but which you think about perhaps the next day, and perhaps for a week, and perhaps for the rest of your life.
Because they aren't clean, they aren't neat, but there's something in them that comes from the heart, and, so, goes to the heart.
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My current fantasy is to demand being referred to as, in both the first and the third persons, His Majesty–Your Majesty. Asked for further information, I could display the cold impenetrability of royalty and explain that I am a direct descendant of King David (who knows?), and the gophers around the table could, their choice, scream bullshit or go along with the gag. My daughter Clara says, “Dad, this is you at a business meeting: “Person A: ‘It’s an honor to meet you.’ “Me: ‘Then why don’t you go fuck yourself.
After the conflagration, in the final years of humankind, the artists will, once again, be found painting the ceilings of the caves, and the middlemen will, as always, be trying to talk the honest hunters out of their kill. And it may or may not then be remembered, or indeed believed, there was once a time when the two groups were inextricably linked.
Revolutions begin with the mutual discovery of the ideologues and the Jacobins: the first happy to have discovered compatible souls, the second to have found flunkies. On accession to power, the first become apparatchiks, thrilled with their ability to control events. This brief phase culminates in their murder by their former partners. The ideologues, in their brief illusion of authority, are happy to invent new names for themselves (Citizen, Comrade) and for every other thing under the sun (his-her-we-they-them); they are let free to run through the big-box store of culture effacing and changing the labels, that is, controlling speech. The penalty for opposition, as we see, appears almost on the instant. First the expression of opinion is characterized as dissent, then is calumniated, and dissent (now called aggression) is reidentified as lack of active assent. Those seeking to avoid, first, discord, then censure and the loss of income, quickly find they have nowhere to hide and must choose active endorsement of ideas repulsive to them or blacklisting. After the inevitable Night of the Long Knives, the threat of blacklisting is upgraded to the certainty of imprisonment or death.
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All drama is about lies. All drama is about something that’s hidden. A drama starts because a situation becomes imbalanced by a lie. The lie may be something we tell each other or something we think about ourselves, but the lie imbalances a situation. If you’re cheating on your wife the repression of that puts things out of balance; or if you’re someone you think you’re not, and you think you should be further ahead in your job, that neurotic vision takes over your life and you’re plagued by it until you’re cleansed. At the end of a play the lie is revealed. The better the play the more surprising and inevitable the lie is. Aristotle told us this