My most successful full-length play, Leap, is riddled with faults. It begins with a long monologue to the audience, a convention that gets inexplicably dropped in the middle of the second act. The main engine of the plot, something about back taxes coming due, is a MacGuffin, totally contrived. There is also a dream sequence that doesn’t make much sense and a few plot holes. It’s got problems.
But there’s a reason it was so successful. The reason is inseparable from the time in which it was written.
I was a desperate man when I wrote Leap. My wife had just left me, virtually without explanation. I was two blocks from the Trade Center at the moment the Towers fell. That same summer, my stepmother and grandmother died. It felt like not only was I unraveling. The whole world was unraveling.
So I wrote this play, a black comedy about shock, set on September 11th and 12th. I finished it in a cabin in Woodstock on September 11, 2002. Right after I typed the words End of Play I said, out loud, “One for the drawer!” I honestly never thought it would see the light of day.
I wrote Leap because I had to. I would have written it if I lived alone on a desert island. That conviction permeates every flawed, passionate page of the play.
I got to thinking about this as I was listening to the new Arcade Fire album, The Suburbs. I have resisted Arcade Fire for a long time, despite near universal acclaim (I’m a bit of a contrarian). Needless to say, as soon as I heard the album I was hooked. When it concluded, I played it again. It has been in constant rotation on my Ipod ever since.
When raving about the album to my friends, I kept trying to put my finger on exactly what was so special about it. It isn’t just that the songs are great (though they are) or that the musicianship is startlingly original (though it is). There is an indescribable something about the album that makes it great. It is surely this same something that inspires their fervent following. The only word I can think of to describe this quality is conviction.
Arcade Fire, at least in The Suburbs, is playing for keeps. They are swinging for the fences. If it were a poker game, Arcade Fire would be all in. Though it is impossible to pinpoint an exact moment that proves my point, I know it's true. And I think millions of other people know it, too. The intensity of Arcade Fire’s commitment to create something great suffuses the entire album. It’s impossible to miss, and equally impossible to fake.
The truth is that conviction matters a hell of a lot more than most of the things one learns about how to create art. A prefect example is Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul. Homebody/Kabul is, in a purely technical sense, a failed play. It does not answer in its end the questions it raises in its beginning. The contradictions of the main character remain frustratingly unresolved. Yet despite (because of?) this, Homebody/Kabul is probably the most profound and beautiful new play I have seen in the last 10 years.
Mary Karr was having terrible difficulty writing the latest volume of her memoirs, eventually published under the title Lit. She wrote her friend, novelist Don DeLillo, a long letter outlining all the problems she was having. He responded with a postcard, on which was written three words: “Write or Die.”
It’s advice we would all do well to heed.
So I wrote this play, a black comedy about shock, set on September 11th and 12th. I finished it in a cabin in Woodstock on September 11, 2002. Right after I typed the words End of Play I said, out loud, “One for the drawer!” I honestly never thought it would see the light of day.
I wrote Leap because I had to. I would have written it if I lived alone on a desert island. That conviction permeates every flawed, passionate page of the play.
I got to thinking about this as I was listening to the new Arcade Fire album, The Suburbs. I have resisted Arcade Fire for a long time, despite near universal acclaim (I’m a bit of a contrarian). Needless to say, as soon as I heard the album I was hooked. When it concluded, I played it again. It has been in constant rotation on my Ipod ever since.
When raving about the album to my friends, I kept trying to put my finger on exactly what was so special about it. It isn’t just that the songs are great (though they are) or that the musicianship is startlingly original (though it is). There is an indescribable something about the album that makes it great. It is surely this same something that inspires their fervent following. The only word I can think of to describe this quality is conviction.
Arcade Fire, at least in The Suburbs, is playing for keeps. They are swinging for the fences. If it were a poker game, Arcade Fire would be all in. Though it is impossible to pinpoint an exact moment that proves my point, I know it's true. And I think millions of other people know it, too. The intensity of Arcade Fire’s commitment to create something great suffuses the entire album. It’s impossible to miss, and equally impossible to fake.
The truth is that conviction matters a hell of a lot more than most of the things one learns about how to create art. A prefect example is Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul. Homebody/Kabul is, in a purely technical sense, a failed play. It does not answer in its end the questions it raises in its beginning. The contradictions of the main character remain frustratingly unresolved. Yet despite (because of?) this, Homebody/Kabul is probably the most profound and beautiful new play I have seen in the last 10 years.
Mary Karr was having terrible difficulty writing the latest volume of her memoirs, eventually published under the title Lit. She wrote her friend, novelist Don DeLillo, a long letter outlining all the problems she was having. He responded with a postcard, on which was written three words: “Write or Die.”
It’s advice we would all do well to heed.
