I know something about envy because I have had my own bouts with it: Plenty of them. And I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’re going to envy somebody, you have to basically agree to change places and BE that person. You can’t just envy an aspect of a person without being willing to take on their whole story – their lovers, their illnesses, their families, their feelings inside, their Life.
Back up a minute. I am a writer, and writing is not a meritocracy. Like if I were a singer, I could either hit high C or I couldn’t. If I played an instrument you would hear the sour chords if I played them. And a dancer can either perform a triple pirouette or they can’t. But writing is so subjective! There are no markers you can achieve where you are definitely a Good Writer. It is a matter of opinion. It is easy to get envious of people I think have less talent than I do but get more attention. (Especially knowing that statistically, only 12% of plays produced in the US last year were written by women) It would be very easy to envy all my male counterparts.
But I just had a play produced and I am getting another play produced soon. I make a living writing documentaries about subjects that I care about. With this much going well for me, I want to figure out other ways to look at myself as a woman who is a writer. Not a victim of statistics, or subjectivity or anything else. I want to be able to make a healthy analysis of where I am, how far I have come, how much more I can achieve if I work hard.
Two weeks ago I went to a master class by Terence McNally. I was invited because I am a resident playwright at Skylight Theatre and they were hosting a weekend with Mr. McNally – a Big Shot whose first play was produced on Broadway. In fact, he has been produced on and off Broadway for close to 40 years. Certainly an enviable position to be in – and in keeping with my comment about subjectivity, I will admit that I have liked some of his plays a lot, and some of his plays not at all.
I got to the class expecting to write, to do some fun exercises that might give me the start of a new piece of work. But Mr. McNally spent the time talking about his experiences as a playwright over many years. And the longer he talked, the better I felt.
Because the things he had faced as a Big Shot were so similar to what I face when my work is produced. McNally talked about producers who tried to tell him how to write his plays, actors who asked annoying questions in rehearsal until he wanted to shoot them (on a short break I asked him if actors were really ever disrespectful to him at this point in his career. He smiled at me with a bit of pity because I was asking something so dumb, then he nodded and said, “Yes of course – that still happens to me.”) He talked about being insulted by critics, having had some of his plays make audiences angry at him when he had no idea he would get that response. He described a career that although it is very successful is not easy or without terrors, disappointments, lack of control.
At the end of this master class I had put another nail in the coffin of envying other writers. This Big Shot and I both get to express ourselves as best we can. I don’t want to say what he has to say, and I doubt he’d want to say what I say in my plays. But it felt like we were on the Same Path. That we shared a Simple Dedication to the art of writing plays. And I realized that if you do your art long enough, and you really want to cut back on wasting time – you can ditch envy completely.
Instead, for me, the prize goes to the person who can be aware, and certainly upset that women get such a small piece of the pie as playwrights, be upset that the best writer doesn’t always do the best commercially, but be a person who can keep going anyway. Keep on writing. Because doing your work is all that really counts.