5 TILF from Sarah Ruhl's "100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write"

 Recently finished "100 Essays" by Sarah Ruhl.  

Five reflections.  (See also my posts on other parts of her book "Teaching us to Wait" and "Life is about pleasure")

1. Essay 59: It's Beautiful, but I don't like it.  Recently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on television: "It's beautiful but I don't like it." And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of such a distinction?  It's beautiful and I don't like it. Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I don't like it, so it's not beautiful. What would it mean to separate those  two impressions for art making and for art criticism?
2. Essay 76: Must one enjoy one's children.  [Starts with question she remembers her mom asking: Why bother having children if you don't spend any time with them?  (her mother later says she meant "if you didn't spend time enjoying them.  Essay is about feminism, breast-feeding, crying as achild as mother left... only to have a lot of fun with dad.].  Here is the great last paragraph.  I like how she ends things:  questions and a final illustration.    How many hours spent with children is enough? How much must we enjoy them?  How much attention is enough? When I am not paying attention to my children, they apprea to despearate need it. When I am giving them my full attention, them seem just as happy to play by themselves. It is as though they need to be certain of my attention in order to play their own games and ignore me. My son has a way, when I'm not looking at him while he's talking, of taking my chin with his hand and turning my face directly toward his. Give me your full attention, he says with his hands.
3. Essay 80: Is playwriting teachable?  [This is MOSTLY an appreciation of her teacher Paula Vogel.]. What strike me most when I remember Paula's teaching is her presence as much as the content of her teachings. I think in this country we have an obsession with content and curriculum, all the while devaluing presence and proximity, which are teaching values hard to describe or quantify (or, indeed, teach). Paula has a tremendous gaze, a tremendous listening power, and the most intelligent curiousity of anyone I have ever met.  She took me seriously. . . . I found in Paula's approach to playwriting a great deal of pleasure and a great deal of play. It was almost too pleasurable, too decadent. I always thought I'd be a poet, which gave me a solitary, ascetic kind of pleasure, not the kind that makes you laugh out loud or stay up late into the night with others, And so I thought playwriting was a wonderful diversion. . . . When I reflect on all the things Paula taught me -- among them, Aristotelian form, non-Aristotelian form, bravery, stick-to-itiveness , now to write a play in forty-eight hours, how to write stage directions that are both important to stage and possible to stage -- the greatest of these is love. Love for the art form, love for fellow writers, and love for the world. . . . So, back to the abstract question: is playwriting teachable? Of course it's not teachable. and of course it is teachable.  It is as teachable as any other art form, in which we are dependent on a shared history and on our teachers for a sense of form, inspiration, and example; but we are dependent on ourselves alone for our subject matter, our private discipline, our wild fancies, our dreams.  The question of whether playwriting is teachable begets other questions: like: is devotion teachable? Is listening teachable? is a love of art and a willingness to give your life over to art teachable? I believe these things are teachable mostly by example, and in great silences.
4. Essay 81 and 82: "Bad play and original sin" and "A love note to dramaturgs." The first essay is a rant about dramatrugs; the second an appreciation.  I love the richness of that... Rather than writing a single essay in which she demonstrates her complex relationship.... it's a rant.... then a love note.
5.  Essay 89. Gobos, crickets, and false exits: three hobgoblins of false mimesis.  Here she talks about recording of crickets to be played during a scene.  [she'd prefer us to imagine it, I'd guess, as in Shakespeare.]. I love the phrase: "Someone else's shorthand for night." If the sound of crickets makes us feel that the night is more real on stage, it is more real with reference to a real night elsewhere, somewhere else recorded, someone else's memory of a cricket-drenched childhood, someone else's shorthand for night.
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Also... she talks about a theater called 13P, standing for 13 Playwrights, "and we wanted to do thirteen plays by thirteen playwrights and then implode.  Which we did."

Also, in (91. Exits and entrances and oh the door) she muses on the difference between film and plays in terms of entrances... In film, the camera becomes the door.  In a play: "A person enters, and the scene is transformed. A witch enters, a witch exits." ... [when the theater tries to do an exit like a film, "It lacks magic."....  "Oh, the door! Made of simple wood, stanidng wobbly on a fake frame, it opens, it shuts, it slams or is quiet, people, things or animals come out and come in, a person comes out, an ostrich comes back in, oh the door!"  (great ending, again... a prose poem)

Also, in 91. The first day of rehearsal, she writes about one director, John doyle, and his distinctive first day: "he pulled out a large costume rack, crammed with bustles, top hats, rehersal skirts, rags, three-piece suits, dilapidated white wedding dresses, and sad sweaters.  he instructed the actors to pick out whatever costume they thoguht their characters might wear. The actors were giddy with excitement, suddenly young children, rushing out to the costume rack.  Once the actors had changed into their costumes, John said, "Olga, where do you think you might sit?" Olga sat where she tought she might sit. "Al right, Olga," said John, "begin the play."  (versus a corporate, boring first day of powerpoints and speeches.  What if the first day of rehearsal could contain more joy?  More costumes and fewer packets of information?  What if it were as secretive and intimate as children building a fort, covering themselves with blankets, sitting in the dark, saying to the outside world: keep out, keep out, for now...