Guilt Trip - February 26
Posted by Bruce Norris on 3/13/2006Back home. Nasty intestinal distress from some African pathogen, but more or less safe and sound. And if you’ve read this far you’re even more of a glutton for punishment than I am. (I should point out that writing a blog was Steppenwolf’s idea, not mine, so please wait until AFTER my play to cancel your subscriptions.)
In May we begin rehearsal for “The Unmentionables”, the play which motivated my undertaking this trip. And as I anticipate the start of that process I’d of course like to believe that I didn’t go all the way there and back for nothing. It’s all still a bit of a blurry fever dream and yet as I’ve spoken to friends in the last twenty-four hours I feel myself rapidly trying to anecdotalize the experience, to fashion amusing little vignettes that I can share with people - the verbal equivalent of snapshots - but the fact is that the experience truly unnerved and disoriented me, and that feels difficult to share. I don’t want that to be the story of my trip.
A few days ago, standing on the ramparts at Cape Coast castle, as I held my digital camera in place of my ancestors’ whip, and looked down on the locals below, and the lives that they lead, so seemingly alien to my own, I had a horrible feeling come over me. The feeling was contempt. And momentarily, I felt better, as I stood there - afraid thousands of miles from the life I know - feeling this contempt for people because they happen to use the beach as a toilet. How disgusting, I thought, and I felt better, safer, because the contempt allowed me to cling more tightly to my own narrow life as I condemned theirs. Part of what “The Unmentionables” is about is how we behave in a crisis, and why. There are some people, and we all know them, who you’d love to have around in a crisis; self-assured people, the people who always seem to know exactly what to do. But I’m not one of those people. I’m an actor, so I like to give the impression that I am, but internally I churn with self-doubt. I secretly curse and vilify the people who have caused me distress, who have robbed me of control. And luckily the worst I encountered on my trip was temporary confusion and the occasional sneers of the locals. Thank god nothing truly dreadful happened. Because if it had, I don’t like to imagine the kind of person I’d become or what I’d be capable of. Actually, I have imagined it, and the result was the writing of “The Unmentionables”. I’m interested in what kind of people we become when panic (especially the panic of a political and cultural crisis) arises. In recent years I feel like I’ve seen some displays of the worst that humans can do to each other. Okay, I know, I know… we go to the theater for a good time, not to flagellate ourselves. But I happen to be a pessimist. It’s my nature. I focus on what is UN-heroic and IG-noble in myself and am naturally suspicious of optimists and those who talk about the great things that we Americans are capable of. I don’t feel like I’ve earned the right to be an optimist - it’s a luxury I can’t afford. Pessimism doesn’t mean defeatism. It just means looking realistically at what we DO, instead of what we like to SAY we do. And the nice part is, we pessimists are rarely disappointed. Sometimes we’re even pleasantly surprised.
Thanks for reading. See you at the play.
June 12th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
I can’t imagine that anyone who saw your last play will go to the next one expecting ” a good time”. In fact, I left that play convinced that you had written a play that seemed to be about politics, but was in fact about the uselessness of dialogue, of conversation, and even of words. I was mystified by the fact that you chose such a conventional form for the questions your raised, since you seem to have no confidence in the theater and its conventions. I’m not saying that you ought to. I’m saying rather that when you have a radical distrust in the nature of identity and the content of language, then you may want to use a form that is not realistic and doesn’t rely on very traditional structures of character and narrative. I felt as if I were watching someone try to escape from a trap of his own making, without actually daring to break it. I would love to see what you would do if you decided that you didn’t care what “we” went to theater for, because I think that somehow, your idea of your audience or some imagined sense of what you are permitted to do as a playwright has created an artificial barrier in your work.