The Aliens

Three years into keeping this blog, I begin to notice that I'm repeating myself. I'm a little embarrassed by that, yes, but I also think it makes sense -- there are lessons you need to learn and re-learn, obsessions that stay with you. And sometimes you come back around to old ideas, from a different angle.

I was reminded of this two nights ago, when I went to see Annie Baker's "The Aliens." Annie is a major talent -- and if you don't believe me, just ask the New York Times. She's had three plays produced in New York now, all gold.

The Aliens reminded me a lot of her previous play, Circle Mirror Transformation. Of course it did -- it was set in the same Vermont town, it employed an impeccably realistic set, and the dialogue unfolded slowly, with lots of silence and pause and false starts. It felt a LOT like watching real life unfold onstage, a kind of studied verisimilitude.

It also flew in the face of an enormous number of things I was taught in grad school -- where were the "things that could only happen on stage?" Where were the events? Where plot? Annie gave us these rich, rich characters...but those other things, the things I teach my kids when I teach Aristotle, weren't as easy to spot.

Or DID she give us rich, rich characters? I don't really know. The thing I loved about this play was the acting...because they took what felt like pencil-sketch lines and turned them into something in every nuanced color. And yet it takes one hell of a playwright to make the exactly right pencil-sketch lines with which that can be done.

What am I struggling with? I think I'm struggling with the fact that I loved the play, this play that did all sorts of things I've been told not to do. I loved this play because it was like watching the best acting class you've ever seen, where people are given a scene that's two steps above a "blank scene" and told to do their magic, and they do. And I know how hard that is.

And I think of all the bells and whistles and time-jumps that I throw at my own work, at least lately (and hell, that stuff is fun!) and I wonder where it leaves room for the work of very, very accomplished actors (not performers, who are also wonderful, but bigger and more primary-color somehow) -- for those water-colorists of the soul. It reminds me why I started writing plays -- to write good parts -- and makes me want to return to that.

I'm reminded of something I told one of my students two weeks ago -- that she should assume she has the best possible director, the smartest designers. I told her that every play is, among other things, an invitation to collaborators -- and that the smartest artists will run in the other direction if they feel like you're trying to do their work for them.

I think Annie writes gorgeous, golden, hand-engraved invitations to the kind of artists with whom she wants to work.