"Circles Rise Together"

"Circles Rise Together"

This is a lovely phrase that got tossed around in Aspen, when I was part of a group of MFA playwrights from around the country who were invited to show work there/in NYC. I think it was attributed to Paula Vogel. (Sometimes I wonder if the legendary Ms. Vogel has ACTUALLY said all the fabulous, inspiring things that are attributed to her? What is she, the Oracle at Delphi? Anyway). The idea is, we all need a peer group, we all need to encourage our peer group, that as their fortunes rise so too will our own.

It's a lovely sentiment.

I hope it's true.

I wonder if it's true.

And it makes me ask questions like "how big or small a circle? what circles am I part of? what about squares?"

Really, it makes me ask questions about Community. I think community is really really REALLY important. More than anything, the idea of community (Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities?") is why I keep this damned blog in the first place, on the off chance that something I've learned in a classroom or picked up at a cocktail party might prove useful to someone I know or someone who finds these posts. The posts are my effort to widen the circle, my messages in a bottle to anyone who DOESN'T get to sit in a classroom with the likes of Suzan Zeder, Paula Vogel, Marsha Norman every day (which, uh, will be me in a year or so).

And it's nice to think that our circles will rise together. But I also want to think that our circles are a...well, I think the word I'm looking for is Mitzvah...in their own right (says the shiksa). It is right and good that we, who are working hard to tell meaningful stories, should come together at a table, should support each other, should share the joys and, yes, burdens of trying to make stories in a world that still needs stories. It is right and good that we should form a community, whether or not the members of our community can ever help us "get somewhere." We are somewhere. We're together at the table.

In graduate school, that table is often literal. The workshop table, the table of the nearest local bar (bless you, Sao Paolo's and your happy hour), at the kitchen tables of our classmates. It's been a real joy to cook for people at my house over the past few weeks, and I look forward to doing it a lot more next year.

But what about BEYOND graduate school? What about in the big, bad world, when the community that we have formed moves to far-flung parts of the globe (Los Angeles, China, Germany, Chicago...)? How can we maintain a meaningful circle across space and time? How can we be sustained when the table goes from tangible to metaphorical?

I don't know. I know websites help, listserves help...but I'm someone who, as fellow playwright David Modigliani has said "lives in the analog world." I love Facebook, but God, please, give me face TIME. Give me table.