The problem with finishing a very successful project is “what do you do next?”
September 8th we closed my play, “eve2”. I got the best reviews and audience response of my career as a playwright. I only had one play left in my computer that hasn’t been produced, and suddenly a really great LA theatre offered me a reading and then a production of that play. Great! Of course I began to worry (months ahead of time) whether this new play will come anywhere near the popularity of the one I just closed. But I can overcome that with the sheer enjoyment of thinking about the work itself: the public reading, the collaboration with my director, actors, and a couple of trusted colleagues on what needs to be re-written. Lovely.
But – then I realized that after this next play is produced, I might have nothing left to offer an audience ever again. And not only do I need to keep writing for my soul, but I seem to be gaining acceptance in Los Angeles as a playwright – that means this is a really dumb time to give it all up. But at that moment, I didn’t have a creative idea in my head: Until I had to write a grant proposal (I hate grant proposals). They are detailed, tedious, un-artful. Everybody who has ever written one gets nervous and pissed off at the intrusive questions the funders ask before funding your work!
To make matters worse, I have a long track record of getting funding support, so I feel obligated to work hard on the proposal. Okay, I got started. And after a couple of warm up questions on the grant about the name and address of my theater company (Indecent Exposure Theater!) the funders want to know my plans for the next two years. And I can’t say to them that I plan to get my next play produced and then retire.
I drink a glass or two of wine and I go into my bathroom, and on the wall behind my medicine cabinet-mirror there is a picture of me when I was 13. I begin to stare in the mirror at this photo of myself on the wall and I see the picture morphing. The 13 year old Me is changing into the current Me. Cheek bones are hollowing out, baby fat turns into contours, the impossibly messy black hair is now somewhat chic – and blonde! And I start to think about the process of growing up, or to be blunt, the process of aging.
After another glass of wine, I keep thinking about how much I would like to stop the Hands of Time. And how impossible it is to do that. Because the one sure thing about life, is not whether my next play will be good or great, but that time moves on, people change, and finally it all ends. I hate this story, but it is the truth.
I started to imagine a woman who was so terrified of aging that she made a deal with the Powers that Be to let her stay young indefinitely. Yes, this is the Faust myth, and endless versions of it exist. The deal with the devil is not always about staying young, but in my play as it was developing, that was the deal. Just let me stop getting older. Let me not see the changes in my face, my body, my ways of thinking. And I began to feel the delicious itch that is the beginning of Creating Something.
Soon, I was searching Wikipedia for the Faust myth, and finding things I never knew. Things about sorcerers and shaman and magical beings – the kind of stuff that inspires me and makes me feel glad that I am not 13 years old, because when I was that young, I didn’t like to work hard. And now I do. An hour later, I had the beginning of a play in my head. It started out one way and quickly transformed into something better as my experience as a writer kicked in and I began the dive down into my subconscious mind. I find everything worth writing down there – in my subconscious mind.
I have had to keep working my documentary writing job and also to keep up the work on the grant proposal since I had this epiphany. But now, instead of being scared that I am empty of ideas, I have an anxious yearning to get to the writing of this new play. I feel all the excitement that the beginning of a piece of work always gives me. The protagonist has changed from a psychiatrist to an actress, and will change many more times. But the train is on the track, and I am comfortably in the conductor’s seat. I have no idea where the play will go, but I know that writing it will be a journey that I will cherish. And I have figured out that I am not empty of artistic impulses. I guess I should thank my funders for this, since they pushed me into the train!