Guilt Trip - Introduction & February 14
Posted by Bruce Norris on 2/21/2006Bruce Norris is the author of this season’s upcoming play The Unmentionables and four other plays produced at Steppenwolf. We asked Bruce to send some postings during his current venture, a trip to Africa taken in conjunction with his work on The Unmentionables. But we should let Bruce explain…
So, the first and most obvious question is, why go?
I had finished the first draft of a new play called “The Unmentionables” sometime in the Spring of 2005, shortly before going into rehearsal for Steppenwolf’s production of my play “The Pain and the Itch”. The new play, which Steppenwolf had commissioned me to write, is set in a fictitious “third-world” country in western equatorial Africa and concerns a disparate group of white Americans whose simplistic notions of themselves are tested when they become more deeply involved with the local population than they had intended. And sitting in my lovely, comfortable, little apartment in Brooklyn, bent over my tiny computer, reading the newspaper every morning and drinking iced tea, I had concluded that it was my perfect right as someone who makes up stories for a living, to create a fictional story which took part in another part of the world, a real part in which I had never set foot and in which very real, which is to say non-fictitious, people, lived. Of course, this is what writers do all the time. But, at a time in which international sensitivities (justified or not) about how we Americans characterize the rest of the world are easily inflamed… Well, you know, I got to thinking.
There is a Danish filmmaker named Lars Von Trier - whose work I have sometimes very much admired - who has written several films which are set in America. Perhaps it is wholly beside the point, but it is worth mentioning that Mr. Von Trier himself has never set foot in America. His position, as I understand, is that he doesn’t need to. These films (Dogville, in particular as well as Dancer in the Dark and, more recently, Manderlay) take place in a “mythical” America, not a real one, and many American critics have gotten themselves twisted up in knots that a foreigner, a European, for god’s sake, is issuing negative proclamations about us from across the Atlantic without the benefit of so much as a layover in the departure lounge at O’Hare. Was he promulgating uninformed clichés about us? Maybe so, but of course this never troubled me one way or the other since his pessimistic vision of us gratified my own morbid sense of humor and love of a knock-down-drag-out fight. Furthermore, I thought, haven’t some of the most trenchant observations about Americans been made by foreign writers? I thought of Nabokov and his giddy/nauseating America in Lolita, not to mention Tocqueville, etc. But of course, those writers had been here. They had managed to avoid cliché, partly because of experience. And here I was, writing a story set in a part of the world to which I had never been, and wasn’t it more than likely that I was reinforcing some stereotypical – not to mention racist – clichés which may have no basis in fact other than those second-hand facts I read in my daily copy of the New York Times? What kind of creepy, ignorant blowhard was I becoming?
So, I bought a plane ticket to Africa. Friends said to me, “I see, so will you re-write the play based on what you learn?” Well, actually no. The play is an act of the imagination, an analogy for something else, besides which, I never intended to write about Africans per se – if I’m going to insult anyone, I’d prefer to insult Americans. Then they said, “So, will you go there to help people and make the world a better place?” God, no. I’m not arrogant enough to think I have anything to offer anyone, or for that matter, that a play ever changed the world. I write my little plays to amuse me, not to improve the world. Finally they said, “So, if you’re not going to rewrite the play, nor are you going to help people, then why the hell are you going?”
Good question.
So then… oh, no. Is the answer… guilt? The guilt that we, as supposedly uber-sensitive, globally-conscious theatre-attending lefties feel? The shame of having unintentionally trodden on some toes in a less-fortunate corner of the world? Is it to expiate me from the sins of American privilege and boorishness? Or simply to indemnify myself against the charge that I have no idea what I’m talking about and therefore might be talking out of a less-than-respectable orifice? Isn’t it possible I’m just taking a trip because I love to travel? Are you insane? I hate to travel. And it’s a sixteen-hour plane trip.
Perhaps at the start of a trip (since you can’t anticipate the point of a journey until it is under way) you can, with modesty, simply hope to find out what it is you don’t know. And besides, it’s not like I’m going to the South Pole with a team of sled dogs. I’m going for a few days to a nice hotel in a part of the world I never expected to visit, and maybe I’ll have a nice time and maybe I won’t. So, we’ll see…
February 14.
Packing. Panicking. Took my malaria pills. Sprayed clothes with mosquito repellent. I leave from JFK at eleven p.m., and by eight o’clock tomorrow night I land in Cotonou, Benin. If all goes well – and I think we all suspect, in fact hope that it won’t – I should at that point be in my bed at the Hotel du Lac, east of downtown Cotonou, sound asleep. Benin, I’ve been told, is a perfectly lovely country, with none of the violent political upheaval of Ivory Coast (to the West) or the craziness of Nigeria (to the East). But perhaps I ought to mention at this point that, in Benin, they speak French. And I don’t speak French. Which could be a problem.