It was a skinny envelope. We all know what skinny envelopes mean (all of us in the arts do, anyway). A skinny envelope means “no”. I didn’t feel like hearing “no” that day, so I placed the envelope, unopened, on my printer.
I got a lot of no’s back then, but they didn’t bother me much. These days, when I sit on a panel like “Making Your Career as a Playwright”, one of my fellow panelists is always talking about how you should research all the places you submit to ensure your piece is right for them. It sounds like very good advice. I did the exact opposite. I sent everything I had to every place that would read it. I accepted a lot of rejections as the price to be paid for playing.
This particular skinny envelope bothered me less than most because it represented what could charitably be called a long shot. It was from Cincinnati-Playhouse-in-the-Park, which had just won the Tony for regional theatres. I had no agent and very little track record at that point. Normally, I could never even get a place like Cincy Playhouse to read me. But the director of a workshop production of my first full-length play was a set designer who had a gig there. He asked if he could give my latest play to the artistic director. I said yes, thanked him profusely, then promptly forgot about it.
I forgot about the envelope, too. I‘m not sure how long it sat unopened on my printer. I think it was three days. One night I was up late trawling around on the internet when my eyes fell on it. I grabbed the envelope and opened it, doing a quick scan. I was looking for certain catch phrases - “not able to place it at this time”, “so many qualified applicants”, that kind of thing. I didn’t find any. One word, however, did leap out. It was “finalist”.
On a rainy night several months later, I was driven up a long and winding road. At the top of a hill sat a theatre that seemed the highest point for miles around. I stepped out of the van to come face-to-face with an eight foot tall poster for my play. It was the next production at Cincinnati Playhouse-in-the-Park.
Last weekend I went back to Cincinnati for the first time in seven years. I was there under circumstances that were both remarkably similar to, and totally different from, my first visit. I had again won a prize, and again was going to have a play produced. Only this time the play wasn’t written yet (the prize was, in essence, a commission), and it was going to be produced by the children’s theatre at the Playhouse.
My first experience in Cincinnati had been a whirlwind. Up to that point productions of my work usually involved cadging props from friends. Here a dozen union carpenters labored to physically realize half-formed ideas I'd had while sitting at my desk. Everything that happened during that time seemed heightened – the glory of rehearsals, the pressure of rewrites, the surreality of interviews, the blow of a scorched-earth pan from the major daily. It all felt bigger than life.
There was nothing bigger than life about what I was doing this time. I was being driven to schools in the middle of the afternoon, watching the travelling production of the children’s theatre’s latest show. It is a production built for efficiency. The play is 55 minutes long, and everything fits in a van. The actors and stage manager put up and strike the set for every show. They perform, basically, anywhere they are asked. I saw them perform in a gymnasium, a lecture hall, and a theatre. This is what I was writing for.
On the opening night of my first show in Cincy, I was served champagne in a glass with a graphic of my play carved on it. Smiling handshake pictures were taken with local dignitaries. And when I came home to New York, the party kept going. Another play of mine was being produced by the (now sadly departed) Summer Play Festival, one of the country’s top showcases. Having one play done at a top regional like Cincinnati, then having another done at a major national showcase, convinced me that big things were coming. Indeed, I was convinced that they were imminent.
It didn’t work out that way. Neither of those plays got picked up for subsequent productions. My next play was flawed, having only one major reading before quietly sinking. My career has had many high points in the years between my two visits to Cincinnati, but nothing has hit the same height, career-wise, as my production there. In the immediate years after it, I considered this a personal failure. It would not be an overstatement to say I was a little tormented by that.
Other things happened in those years, however, that began to change my perspective. I met and married a fabulous woman, Blair Sams Yearley. I became father to the world’s most spectacular little boy, Henry. Slowly, in fits and starts, I began to look back on the last few years and see the mistakes I had made. I had fallen into a trap I had seen catch many others but failed to notice when I fell into it myself – the idea that your highest career accomplishment is somehow your rightful place. As if having a gig at a big regional theatre made me a “big regional theatre” playwright. I am no more a “big regional theatre” playwright than I am a “bar in Alaska” playwright, or any of the other places I have been lucky enough to have my work done.
Knowing this intellectually is a simple thing. Taking it into my heart, however, really knowing it, took a while. Maybe it even took until last weekend.
After each one of the children’s shows there is a talkback with the kids. It was remarkable to hear the intensity of some of their responses. Kids who barely looked at the stage turned out to have been passionately engaged. One mother was astonished that both her small kids had been riveted by anything for that long. One kid told a character he should stop being such a butthead. It was kind of thrilling.
On my last night in Cincinnati, I saw the new production at the Playhouse. It was performed in the very theatre where my play had been done seven years before. It was a terrific show, genuinely enjoyed by all. But as I left the theatre, surrounded by a group of about 200 mostly white, upper-middle-class Cincinnatians, I had a thought – “Why is this better?” Why is it somehow more important to perform at night for older people than during the day for kids?
It isn’t, of course. Yet the unwritten rules of our theatre world state that a performance for adults is of greater value than one for children. A prize won to write a play for children, though laudable, carries less prestige than one for a play written for adults. Over this last weekend, the arbitrary nature of this esteem, indeed the folly of it, became strikingly clear.
Up till now, I've ingested these rules unconsciously. No more. I am thrilled to return to Cincinnati this way, and to write this play. Sometime next year my new play will be performed in a lecture hall at 3 in the afternoon. The room in which it will be performed will have high ceilings and be lit by fluorescent lights. Many kids will look bored, and some may genuinely even be so. No matter. I will be as proud of it as I am of anything I have ever done.
