Cowboys and Kushner

Yesterday, I got to hear one of my literary heroes talk: Tony Kushner.  USC does this Vision and Voices series, where they feature people in the arts.  I read Angels in America as a college student and have taught it in my Playwriting class.  It's interesting because it's this huge massive epic of a play (actually it's two plays), which seems like a lot to ask of 20 year old college students.  Especially ones who haven't read many plays or written any plays before.  And I only taught the first play, Millennium Approaches.  But it was a play that was essential to my development as a writer and as a person.  I remember sitting in the theatre in New York and watching this 3 1/2 hour play and thinking, "Wow.  This is the first play I've seen in my life time that is making theatre history."  I was 21 at the time.

So when my friends Tim and Drew told me they were going to hear him speak, I had to tag along.  I was prepared for a boring Q & A.  But I didn't care.  I wanted to just drink from the fountain, you know?  But it wasn't that at all.  The conversation was all over the place and Kushner is just so fucking brilliant that it doesn't matter what they talk about because it will always come back to humanity, politics, art and culture.  A lot of the conversation was about writing Lincoln, the screenplay for the fantastic film that Steven Spielberg directed.  And both Lincoln and Angels share something important.  Both works take something incredibly heady and leave it incredibly heady, but make it entertaining.  That's why I love Kushner.  I'm not that heady on a daily basis.  I'm more interested in popular culture, although I do read and I have thought about things.  I'm not all about "Real Housewives" franchises (including spin-offs).  But that key of having something to say and having a story to tell is where I live as a writer.

After the Kushner event, Tim, Drew and I went to meet their friends Amy and Ryan at a restaurant called Cowboys and Turbans in Silverlake.  I was stuck in traffic, so they were all already there before me.  It seemed like a friendly bunch.  And it was a good group of creative types, so I felt comfortable.  Then someone mentioned someone waving around a gun at people in the West Village in New York City.

"In the West Village, of all places," Drew remarked.
"Must have been Annie Liebowitz," I said, referencing a famous photographer.
"Chasing around Duane Michaels," Tim said, referencing another famous photographer.

My people!  If I felt a little ill-at-ease with four friends who all knew each other well, this put me right at ease.

Then after we established that I was a playwright and we chatted about that a bit to bring me more into the conversation (which was so considerate and kind and I loved), Tim asked me what I was working on currently.  I talked about I Want It and basically told them about it, or at least what I currently know about it.  And I stumbled and gave a vague idea of what I'm exploring in the play.  Then I thought about something.  Sometimes I'm so quick to make an idea so easy to explain, both when I'm explaining it and when I'm writing and thinking that eventually I'll have to explain it to someone in a fashion that seems easy to explain.  I get that from the concept of the "log line" in TV and film, the one sentence description of your project that is supposed to encapsulate everything.

I Want It isn't that sort of project.  But here was my audience and Amy loved the idea and suggested a book that I read.  The name escapes me, but she owns it and offers to lend it to me because it might help.  And I realized that if I constantly am writing things that are so easy to explain and "get" in a soundbite, that I'm depriving myself of getting as deep and as wide with an idea as I need to.  Writing a log line or thinking about the logline that you will eventually need to use to explain something means that you're just scratching the surface.  And I don't want to just scratch the surface any more.

I'm not saying that my goal is to confuse or confound.  I'm not saying that I don't care if people understand what I'm talking about.  The explanation of I Want It didn't confuse the group, it got them excited enough to want to lend a hand.  It's just that when you simplify an idea into a sentence, you're deciding that is as far and as deep as you're willing to go with that idea so that it doesn't spill over into something else.  You're not allowing it the grace to transform.  You're keeping it locked and fixed.  And that kind of seems like the opposite of creativity.

TV and Film are about skill and craftsmanship primarily, which is why it's so easy to monetize and assign value to it.  You're making a product and getting paid for that product.  It's the result we want: what shows up on the screen.  With a play, it's also about the experience, it's about the shock value of an idea.  And not "shock value" in terms of being provocative.  But it's the value that lies in hearing something expressed in a way you hadn't expected and you're surprised and intrigued because you've discovered something.  It's the shock of discovery, or as Robert Hughes wrote about in his book about modern art, "The Shock of the New."  You need skill and craftsmanship to get there and even creating that shock is a skill in itself, but it's not as quantifiable as skill and craftsmanship are on their own.  In theatre, all you need to do is get attached to an idea and exploring that idea.  Setting up the argument, regardless of whether you finish it or not.  TV and Film mostly require that you either finish the argument or set up a smaller argument that's easier to put a cap on, or incapsulate.  Hence, the beginning, middle and end of it all.

When you put it that way, it's like apples and oranges, mohair and eggs or cowboys and Kushner: you can't compare them.  And they can co-exist without being competitive or one being better than the other.