Throwback: The Theatre and the Blues

This essay, collected in Everyone Else is Wrong (And You Know It), reflected a kind of artistic manifesto for myself circa the mid-2000s I find it interesting to read periodically as I contine to navigate my writing life. Happy reading!

Theatre has a lot in common with blues music. That is because both forms come out of one singular human endeavor. They may be nothing like each other, but they are oddly and inextricably linked. I shall explain this, but first—think about the blues for a second. Why would anyone on earth want to dress up, pay a cover fee, go out in public and sit with other people to listen to music called "the blues?" Similarly, I suppose, one could ask why we pay money, dress up, and go to the theatre to see plays that will bum us out?

The reason we do this is because both forms come out of the human impetus to share the experience of humanity with other humans. Blues musicians and the great playwrights understand as well as any other human the pangs of joy, hope, and faith that can occasionally permeate this world. But, in the end, their art forms do not let them deny the experience of pain, loss, and death from which the world is also made. These thoughts do not depress them because they face them continually. I suppose, in this regard, I do not put Sophokles and Shakespeare on any different plain than John Lee Hooker. All these great men and women understood why their art forms existed.

News of the workshop production of one of my most recent plays had reached the ears of a casual acquaintance—someone whom I had met briefly through a friend. My friend had explained to this person that my play was a tragedy. This word is very frightening to people nowadays. Some are frightened by its connotation, others are frightened because if you say you've written a tragedy, you're obviously pretentious. This acquaintance, with fatuous heirs and a slick smile, told me to make sure I threw a little hope in there—no one likes to go to a play and be upset at the end of it. I thought about this for a long time. When he told me this, I simply smiled and moved on. Later, it made me angry. Someone who obviously has no idea about how hard one works to create human drama had just told me my business and had done so in a way that stepped on the integrity of what I've worked half my life trying to do. Even later, it depressed me. This person obviously had no idea why my art form even exists.

I suppose he was right, though. This is a world, after all, in which everyone is obsessed with happy endings—works that explore peace, joy, harmony, hope, etc. In doing that, though, we've lost sight of one of the most fundamental reasons why drama exists. Drama is not, as people might have you believe, there to make you smile or give you hope. We live in a world where you can carry around a iPod that will blast "Walking on Sunshine" in your ear or show you last week's episode of Ugly Betty as you're doing the nominal things of the day. Music and the dramatic form can be experienced anywhere, at any time and, more than likely, you're not going to carry around Requiem for a Dream on your portable player.

But, theatre, music—the great art forms—understand we share all the experiences of human life. Not just the good times, but the bum times as well. Drama, in fact, came out of the need to confront the gods. It came out of the need to make sense of this world. It is no different now. We are essentially very lonely people walking around a very confusing planet. And we are trying to make sense of it. We have false senses of ourselves, hopes, ambitions, faux confidence. We keep trying variations of ourselves on other people. Most often, they don't work. And we keep on changing, rearranging. Through this experience, there are many stories. Stories of love and hope, yes. Also, stories of family, children, death. It is from this impetus that we gather together to represent life in an arena and share close contact with people who will watch us. Together, we hope this will uplift us all by the fact that we've gotten together and explored an issue, told a story, shared an experience. This experience can be the joy of love in the face of hardship in Much Ado About Nothing. Or it can be the experience of Waiting for Godot watching Estragon and Vladimir as they have only each other. Suddenly, we look around and we realize we (the audience) also have only each other. A connection is made. An experience shared.

Onstage, a blues musician tells an old, old story. A story of someone who had a wife and lost her. The pained expression on his face, the strains of the weeping guitar go to our very souls and make us ache. We've all been there—in some way. The experience of life is often having something and then having had it taken away. Does the song leave you with a smile? No, it leaves you with something better. The knowledge that there are other people who've been through exactly what you've been through.

Tragedy is similar. Do you think the Greeks had any more interest in getting together and getting upset watching a story as we do now? Of course not. But they knew they would learn when they did this. They were not afraid—as Shakespeare's generation was not afraid—to face the realities of our existence, to let the poet speak for our hardships and troubles as well as our peace.

I recently got into an argument with a very passionate, very religious person who simply did not see in any hope or holiness in my most recent play—The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Loved Me—the one that experienced a little-seen workshop production this last March. He felt like having something to do with my play impeded upon his Christian integrity because I had not allowed for any hope to shine through at the end of the work. I stood up for myself. I had to. I'll admit—the play is challenging. It is bleak. And no, there is not a clearly defined hope inherent in the script. I explained to him my purposes behind the writing of it. I explained to him that I felt the hope was that, through the allegory of my main character's consistent mistakes and ultimate demise, that it would challenge the audience to search within themselves to find the hope. After all, when you've hit rock-bottom, there is nowhere to look but up. I told him he was right—there was not hope in the text. The hope is that people come, listen to mine and the actors' words, open themselves up to the experience of human sharing—the truth, the honesty of the event. And the hope is, when they leave, they will be left to investigate themselves as deeply as I have had to. And as we all must.

I explained to him I was sympathetic to his religious conundrum. I've been there before. I have, at other times in my life, experienced not wanting to do something for spiritual reasons. And had I believed my friend was right in his decision to excise himself from my work, I would have continued with this sympathy. But I told him the real tragedy was that his integrity as an artist and as a human being was the thing being tarnished by him denying himself the experience of something that is truthful. I do not say this because I think my work is all that great. My work is what it is. You can take it or leave it. I said this because I'm sure I was right.

I asked him what he thought the purpose of theatre is. He answered that it was to show God. While this has its place, one can’t fully agree. The experience of theatre came out of, again, us being able to try and make sense out of this cockeyed existence that God has given us. That is the beauty of what we do. That is the hope. That is the purpose of living—as an artist or otherwise. And I can't tell you how much we must stand up for this. I suppose my friend must've thought my work was harming him. I can't tell you how much his words harmed me. And I will make sure I spend my life fighting for the right to tell the truth, to share this experience. Because, without you people, who I lean on and who read my work and listen, there is no me. There are no stories without each other. And without each other to lean on, there is no story.