My Next Play Will Be a "Knockoff"

I just (finally) saw Clybourne Park.

I walked away thinking that it was a smart, well-crafted, well-constructed play...but not a capital-g-great play.

So why spend time writing about it?  First, because smart, well-crafted-well-constructed plays are rare enough that those qualities alone are worth examining.  Second, because it made me question what is, in fact, the distance or difference between "SWCWC" (oh, let's call 'em "swick" plays, like "slick" only different) plays and the Greats.  And third, because Clybourne Park inhabits a very specific (and quite popular) space in the theatrical universe: the play-in-conversation-with-a-canonical-play.

I'm gonna attack these three ideas eventually, but just one today.  First -- the "conversation" play.  What is it?  Why does it exist?  Is it a good thing or laziness or what?

Clybourne Play is essentially a thought-experiment, with two acts that bookend the events of Lorraine Hansberry's classic "A Raisin in the Sun," where the Younger family (black) moves into a white neighborhood in their pursuit of the American Dream (which is real estate? oy...).  You can enjoy the play, as I did, without having read "Raisin" (I know, I know -- I'm reading it this weekend).  I missed a lot -- like the fact that some of his characters are from "Raisin."  Like the fact that it's the same house as in Raisin.  Like the fact that the whole plays was answering or toying with questions set up in Raisin.  And perhaps it is only in the interplay of canonical text and this text that the text itself is elevated.  Me, I just saw a play where people were trying not to talk about race (as they talked about race).  Essentially, it was like when I listen in to HALF of a phone call.  I get the gist, but miss a LOT.  Hansberry's play can be appreciated in its own right, but the intelligence or genius or point of Norris's play relies on the cultural literacy of his audience.  Which isn't wrong...but if you've got someone with a hole in their cultural literacy (a BIG one.  I KNOW.  Forgive me -- I know.  I'm on it).

Norris is following in famous footsteps.  Think of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," a play that is ALL about the interstitial shit happening in Hamlet, a play that relies not just on passing knowledge of Hamlet but on deep DEEP familiarity with it, and with a ton of other stuff besides.  Funny though it may be, it's a play that will lock you out COLD unless you've done your homework, recently, with several different colored pens and your desktop opened to wikipedia.

Stoppard, of course, is part of a veritable ARMY of people in conversation with (or making homage to) the Bard.  We've got folks like Dietz who rework Chekhov ("The Nina Variations"), we've got The Rude Mechs playing with Tennessee Williams ("The Method Gun")...in more subtle ways, you've got Tracy Letts in "August: Osage County," planting both feet in the American literary-theatrical tradition of the multigenerational hard-drinking fucked-up-family-saga (the fingerprints of Williams, Inge, Miller and -- especially - O'Neill are all over the damn thing).

So one question is: "Jesus Christ -- WHY?"  When the originals are so good, when you could write about anything on earth, why try to have a conversation with those existing stories?
A few possible answers:
(1) The crass pragmatist: "Name Recognition."  Familiarity might breed contempt in some places, but in the theater, it often breeds ticket sales.  It makes people feel safe to hear the name of a play they know...it makes them feel cool to go to a play that is that play but NOT that play.
(2) The starry-eyed student: "To Learn."  These plays are great for a REASON.  Craft, theme, surprise, depth -- it's all there.  The truly great plays are the ones that you learn from every time you return to them -- what better way to apprentice yourself than to spend a year (or two) reading and rereading and mulling over a great play? It's the reason I love teaching Hamlet (and can't imagine ever getting sick of it), the reason Curt Columbus, I'm sure, always assigned a scene from The Seagull.  A "conversation play" is a way of not just returning to the well but setting up shop next to it.
(3) The egoist: "To Improve It."  Okay, not to improve the original...but to update it, or to talk back to it, to tell the original playwright (even if he or she is long-dead) what they missed the first time around.  And so maybe I was being harsh to say "the egoist."  Writing is a lonely business.  If you can pretend that your hero is in the room with you for a while, if you can truly imagine that you're saying "hey Lorraine...you missed a spot"...maybe it makes the lonely work of writing feel a little more congenial.
(4) The obsessive: "To focus on a detail."  This is truly the "Hey Lorraine, you Missed a Spot" answer. Maybe you've had (as I often do) the experience of going to see a show and finding yourself fixated on some minor character or detail or "what if" question that is CLEARLY not meant to be the center of the story.  Ophelia in Hamlet (Svich's "Twelve Ophelias").  "What happens when they grow up" in Charlie Brown (Dog Sees God).  "What ABOUT the neighbors" in Raisin (Clybourne Park).

You know what?  Any of these reasons is enough.  Anything we can do to keep theater in the conversation, anything we can do to entice people out to see new work, anything we can do to learn from our old masters, to interrogate how the plays and their themes are relevant to us as writers, to us as citizens of this particular moment, but in conversation with that one -- huzzah and hurray.  I think my favorite aspect of Clybourne Park may, in fact, have been the thing I was least equipped to appreciate -- its connection to a Great Play, its attempt to play in Hansberry's sandbox, its pragmatism, obsession, idealism and impudence all at once.