Category Archives: Christopher Shinn

Power, publishing, David Mamet, and Christopher Shinn

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The Fall 2012 issue of Modern Drama features “The Canonization of Christopher Shinn: A Modest Proposal on Ethics” by Stephen Bottoms, the first major academic consideration of the body of the playwright’s work; it appears only a few months before Mr. Shinn’s new play, Teddy Ferrara, opens at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. Prof. Bottoms’ excellent essay situates Mr. Shinn’s plays within Alain Badiou’s consideration of the role that ethics plays in theatrical presentation through the form of “traumatic realism” — and Mr. Shinn, who is among America’s foremost dramatists working in the realistic tradition, is well-served by it. The essay is likely to be a foundation for future scholarship on Mr. Shinn’s plays; it is available in full here for a nominal fee.

Obviously, the title is striking, and arises from the professional circumstances that led to Prof. Bottoms’ essay in the first place. “The Canonization of Christopher Shinn” is prefaced by an interesting first-person memoir that is in itself rather illuminating and indicative of the politics that drives the reception of mainstream American theatre to this day, both here and overseas; and because it deserves a somewhat wider dissemination than it might find among the readership of academic journals devoted to the topic of American theatre and drama, I present that preface in full below. And it, too, is about ethics, not about the law. Nobody involved, neither Methuen (a fine publisher of American plays of all kinds) nor the estate of the late Arthur Miller nor the very much alive David Mamet, acted illegally, of course. But the story does speak to the power of some individuals to marginalize the  work of other individuals, through their perceived influence or importance, for any number of personal, political, or professional reasons — to make a pretense to a readership that the work of those other individuals simply doesn’t exist. What perhaps is most surprising is the extent to which Mr. Mamet apparently held effective veto power over both a distinguished academic editor and a major publisher as to which plays could be included in an anthology which purported to offer a representative sampling of contemporary American drama.

Again, I urge readers to the full essay, which is available here. The prefatory comments from Prof. Bottoms follow below the rule.

Sometimes, when a door has been left ajar, one needs to open it wide rather than force it shut. This article represents a belated attempt to respond critically and creatively to a series of events that took place at the beginning of 2008 and that have bothered me ever since. At that time, I was approached by the British drama publisher Methuen about editing a new anthology of four modern American plays for the general market. The two stipulations I was given for my selection of texts were that (a) I had to include some wellknown titles, in order to maximize sales potential, and (b) I had to choose from a list of plays already licensed to Methuen. At first, the latter condition gave me some concern because the available list included only plays by white, male authors — a worryingly unrepresentative sample. I was hooked, however, by the possibility of including a play by a contemporary dramatist whom I have come particularly to admire: Christopher Shinn.

Shinn’s coolly precise dramas of interpersonal tension were on Methuen’s books list partly because he has already found a receptive British audience through being championed by London’s Royal Court Theatre. His first play, Four, premiered there in 1998, and since then, four more of his works have had their first outings at the Court. In New York, his work has appeared repeatedly at an equivalent “new writing” venue, Playwrights’ Horizons, as well in other theatres (most recently, Picked premiered at the Vineyard Theatre in 2011). He has also won an Obie Award, has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and is the only American dramatist of his generation to have had collections of his plays published on both sides of the Atlantic by different publishers (TCG in the United States, Methuen in the United Kingdom). He thus seemed an excellent candidate to bring the proposed new anthology “into the present.”

After due consideration, I proposed to Methuen a quartet of plays placing Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949, a required inclusion), David Rabe’s Streamers (1976) and David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) alongside Shinn’s post-9/11 drama Where Do We Live (2002). This combination would allow me to frame my introductory essay as a discussion of the four writers’ differently contextualized dramatizations of troubled, white, American masculinity (at home, at war, and in business). My contact at Methuen initially responded with enthusiasm to this proposal, but in late January, 2008, I was informed that we had run into difficulties. Agents for Arthur Miller’s estate had apparently raised concerns over the proposed list because they had assumed that Miller’s work would be appearing beside that of recognized, canonical writers such as Mamet, Sam Shepard and Tennessee Williams. I duly proposed a compromise, dropping Rabe in favour of Shepard — a suggestion again welcomed by Methuen. Several weeks later, however, in mid-March, I was asked to drop the Shinn piece too. This time I was informed (in an e-mail which I have been asked by the publishers of this journal not to quote from directly, for legal reasons) that David Mamet himself, as well as the Miller estate, had threatened to withdraw permission for inclusion in the anthology if Shinn was on the list. Attempts at explaining the rationale for the juxtaposition of these plays had, apparently, made no difference to this hard-line position. I reluctantly participated in some further to-ing and fro-ing over possible substitutions for Where Do We Live, but enthusiasm for the project had clearly waned on all sides. When I asked for an update in June, after a couple of months of e-mail silence, I was tersely informed that the anthology had been scrapped. And that was the end of that.

The whole experience, however, continued to rankle with me. Was the canon now policing itself, excluding putative newcomers? I had not, for my own part, even been thinking of the anthology in canonical terms, but it seems that others had. And while it was one thing, perhaps, for the Miller estate to be over-protective about its properties and the company they might be seen to keep, I was perturbed that a living playwright such as Mamet might prevent his work appearing alongside that of a younger counterpart. Of course, I had no way of knowing for sure that this was indeed what had occurred: those e-mails from Methuen might well have presented a somewhat slanted version of events. But what particularly struck me was a coincidence of dates. In the very same week, in mid-March of 2008, that David Mamet had allegedly withdrawn approval for the anthology, he had (indisputably) published an article in the Village Voice — “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’” — in which he came out as a conservative (a conversion later elaborated on in his 2011 book The Secret Knowledge). Inevitably, perhaps, I began intuiting connections between Mamet’s proclaimed commitment to the political status quo and his alleged commitment to the canonical status quo.

The Voice article offered a retrospectively politicized rationale for Mamet’s  own drama: the “view of human nature [that] has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years,” he wrote, is that people are fundamentally “greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt.” It follows from this that any organized attempt at working toward a greater good is doomed to failure: “I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.” The best to be hoped for, politically, Mamet proposes, is a settlement such as the U.S. Constitution, which enables people to co-exist in their essential selfishness. “[W]e in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances,” he asserts, and liberal voices of discontent such as those on National Public Radio (or “National Palestinian Radio,” as he terms it) should simply “shut the fuck up.”

Mamet’s argument invites all kinds of obvious rebuttals, but I want here to invoke political philosopher Alain Badiou and his short book Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (English translation, 2001). To posit, as Mamet seems to, that “[e]very collective will to the Good creates Evil” is, for Badiou, an example of “sophistry at its most devastating” (13). It is to behold the insufficiency, or “void,” of the present situation and to pronounce its “plenitude” (68). For Badiou, such cancerous logic constitutes, in itself, a species of evil (71). Not only that: Mamet’s position declares, in effect, the end of politics, and for Badiou such specious arguments are linked analogically to rhetorical declarations about the end of theatre that have frequently been heard in recent decades. In his Rhapsody for the Theatre (English translation, 2008), Badiou proposes that — insofar as theatre is a public forum for the expression of thought — it shares with politics an ontology of the present, of ongoing process: “[T]hey can exist or not but they cannot come to an end” (192). The live encounter of theatre carries an unpredictable, potentially disruptive energy that has always had to be carefully monitored and contained by state authority.

Now, it might seem a stretch to relate such ideas to the exclusion of a playwright from a drama anthology. Yet anyone advocating the plenitude of a canon whose newest entrants are Mamet and Shepard (both now well into their sixties) would surely be papering over a self-evident void (on which, more in a moment). We might also ask, in Shinn’s case, whether the foregrounding of political debate in his plays breaks some conservative law of dramatic etiquette. Badiou’s analogy of theatre and politics seems particularly apposite in thinking about Shinn’s plays, since his writing so clearly represents an ongoing attempt to think through the politics of our present cultural moment. So what might it mean for America as a nation if he were to be admitted to its dramatic canon, rather than being required to “shut the fuck up”? Shinn’s attention to underlying states of personal and communal trauma might, at the very least, demand a reappraisal of Mamet’s complacency about America’s “wonderful and privileged circumstances.”

His plays suggest an ethical imperative to listen, even to voices that may trouble or disturb, and to respond, even to events that call us out of our closets and comfort zones. It is for this reason that, reflecting on the questions left hanging by this small story of the abandoned anthology, I finally decided to forego scholarly discretion and share it.

Upcoming: Christopher Shinn’s “Picked”

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UPDATE: Chris talks about the unique qualities of writing for British and American theatre audiences in today’s Guardian.

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Christopher Shinn’s new play Picked, according to the Vineyard Theatre’s Web page for the play, “chronicles the story of a young actor named Kevin who gets ‘picked’ by a legendary director to have the role of his dreams in a new, big-budget Hollywood film, only to find out that the movie the director wants to create is one based on the authentic emotions, fears and hopes of its leading man. In order to allow the director to achieve his vision, Kevin subjects himself to extremely in-depth interviews, neuroimaging and the best technology in the business in exchange for the part of a lifetime—a process that affects him in ways he never could have expected.”

This is Chris’s first new play to be produced in New York since 2007′s Dying City ran at the Lincoln Center Theatre (his 2008 play Now or Later premiered at the Royal Court in London but never managed to make its way across the Atlantic). Chris is one of the best dramatists writing in the genre of American realism today, and Picked will no doubt be worth your while. The play, directed by Michael Wilson, opens at the Vineyard Theatre on 6 April and runs through 15 May. Tickets are now available here.

Christopher Shinn, Down Under

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On the eve of the Melbourne premiere of his play Dying City, The Australian runs this interview with playwright Christopher Shinn. In the interview he muses on his status as a kind of internal aesthetic exile in the United States, and offers thoughts on the current American theatre such as this:

I used to say that the American theatre was becoming more conservative, but now I’d put it differently: many of the people who work in it seem to me to be in denial about emotional pain and tragic situations. It’s not so much that they understand and then reject the work, but that they never actually experience it in the first place. That’s much scarier to me than conservatism. Denial and negation are very hard, if not impossible, to undo.

Chris’s most recent play, Now or Later, produced at the Royal Court in 2008, has yet to receive a New York premiere, despite four- and five-star ratings from The Independent, The Daily Telegraph (“a gripping, daring work that examines the Western response to Islamic fundamentalism and the threat to freedom of speech”) and The Times.

Dying City begins previews Thursday at MIPAC in Brunswick; details here. I wrote about Dying City on the occasion of its New York premiere in 2007, along with a few short notes on Chris’s other plays, here.

Dying City by Christopher Shinn

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Dying City. A new play by Christopher Shinn. With Rebecca Brooksher and Pablo Schreiber. Sets and costumes: Anthony Ward; lighting: Pat Collins; sound: Aural Fixation; stage manager: Roy Harris; casting: Daniel Swee. Directed by James Macdonald. A production of the Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, under the direction of André Bishop and Bernard Gersten. 90 minutes, no intermission. 15 February-29 April 2007.

Christopher Shinn‘s new play Dying City, which opened at the Royal Court last year and opens at the Lincoln Center Newhouse Theater this week, is a coruscating meditation about the individual in history that cuts both ways: it lays the question of responsibility for world events precisely at the feet of the torn and wounded individual. Set in a downtown New York apartment in July 2005 and January 2004, the two-actor three-character play splits this torn and wounded individual several times in its attempt to discern the roots not only of contemporary warfare but also of a numb social malaise that permits the war to continue even in the face of majority disapproval. An ambitious play, as are all of Shinn’s domestic meditations. The production meets it more than halfway, but falls slightly short of the mark.

But truth be told, Shinn sets the challenges to its performers and production very high. Kelly is an Iraqi War widow, packing her downtown New York apartment for a move; appearing at her door the night before her departure is her late husband’s brother Peter, an actor whose own personal sense of trauma has led to his abandoning a Broadway production of Long Day’s Journey into Night in mid-performance. He appears on Kelly’s doorstep bearing not only his own emotional baggage, which he wishes to share with Kelly, but also a set of emails from his late brother Craig. The play engages a series of flashbacks, the same actor playing both Peter and Craig, to delineate the personal cruelties and passive characteristics of a domestic sadomasochism; ultimately, Shinn locates within Craig a long-simmering predilection to violence and an inability to embrace and love the Other, be that Other a woman, a country or a world, a seed of destruction sown by the other traumatic war of our time, the conflict in Vietnam, and perhaps all those wars that have come before.

This is a provocative play that in its form and 90-minute running time forecloses easy ideological resolution. In twinning the brothers Peter and Craig, Shinn ensures, even in Peter’s seeming differences from his brother (his homosexuality, his artistic ambitions), the continuity of the genetic and psychic threat; Kelly has fallen since Craig’s death into a cocoon of media-saturated ironic numbness. She reacts only to Peter’s twin psychical threats to her: his appearance a reminder and confirmation of Craig’s tendency to humiliate the Other (Abu Ghraib is also in play here), and his status as an agent of reproduction, reawakening Kelly’s memory of a desire for children. Kelly, at the end of the play, refuses both, but she is a woman with few resources for self-preservation left.

This isn’t the first two-performer, three-character play Shinn has written. His 2001 play The Coming World, also featuring a pair of twin brothers, now seems a run up to this more textured work, but both the more complex texture and the device of twinning male characteristics (Edward Albee says he is also writing a play about identical male twins now; there must be something in the air) are challenges to which the performers and production don’t entirely rise. Pablo Schreiber’s Peter/Craig, their contrasts well-delineated, is a convincing creation, but Schreiber’s transitioning from one to the other is sometimes fraught with a sense of contrivance; how many times, after all, does a scene have to end with a character running into the next room to take a phone call? The young Rebecca Brooksher is burdened with the heavy responsibility of the moral and ethical nexus of the play and as the carrier of her own victimhood, and sometimes these burdens seem to paralyse her not only as a character but also as a performer. James Macdonald’s otherwise sensitive, nuanced in-the-round production on a revolving platform occasionally emphasises this paralysis, to me, too strongly; in a few scenes, Brooksher’s Kelly stands rooted to her spot for minutes at a time, the stage turning slowly under her, until you begin to feel that even the psychically paralysed need to shift their weight once in a while.

Upstairs at Lincoln Center, Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia is also examining the role of individual agency in world history, as his Russian revolutionaries set the stage for the Bolshevik revolution. Downstairs the problems, because contemporary, are more acute and less dispensable as entertainment. In biting off perhaps just a little more than it can chew, Dying City nonetheless still is one of the most ambitious and urgent of Shinn’s works, its blood surging violently beneath the surface of its fragile domestic flesh. It’s a blood that Stoppard’s more elegant tropes and gestures lack. But it’s a blood that the theatre needs to let, in the attempt to heal.

PETRA: … You asked me once, you said are you in pain? And I lied. I said no. And I’m in pain because I am not loved. You see. And artists–there’s so little love to go around–the promise of love is so fleeting and inconsistent so to get noticed–people do–what they do is–just like you cheated on your wife, you see it in art too, the terror of not being loved, safe art, meaningless art, pandering art, commercial art, outrageous art, can we sell it, can I sell myself, will I be rewarded with money, with prestige, with recognition–all those things which are, which are perversions of love–and let me tell you. If there were more love to go around. And more consciousness and less fear. People might make beautiful things. Beautiful things. What are all those horrible disgusting movies with violence and anger and, you know, I mean, they’re cries for help! You look at a Quentin Tarantino movie, you know, this man has never been loved. He has had no experience of love in this life. Art, the art can never be better than the person who made it.
MAN: Well you have to love yourself, don’t you? Isn’t that the hardest part?
PETRA: You know what? That’s New Age bullshit. You can’t love yourself. You go and try. One is a fiction. Reality exists when the other person walks into the room. Life is other people.
MAN: So is hell, or so someone said.
PETRA: Well then so is heaven.
MAN: Do you think you’ll be loved?
PETRA: I’d better.

Christopher Shinn
Other People (1998)

Even before 9/11, Christopher Shinn’s characters spoke with the voices of traumatised exhaustion, of anxious surrender (and now I think of it, this characterizes the sound of a Christopher Shinn play as well). Locating the politics of post-capitalism in small everyday gestures and dialogue, his plays brook no closure: before the curtain has risen, something has happened, something has broken the world of possibility. His young artists, drug dealers, businessmen and hustlers are already tired, even if they don’t know it. Some recognize the world as a world in which the possibility of love has grown narrower, less likely; this realization, though, brings them no comfort as they are compelled to continue to seek, and even to jeopardize their own integrity in the process of finding it, or (more likely) a reasonable facsimile of it. Wholeness is impossible.

What makes Dying City a transitional play in Shinn’s body of work is its refusal of sex as a temporary escape from post-capitalism. Ecstasy is now firmly a trade name instead of a source of sensual wonder. In his first plays, including his very first, Four (1996), characters could find at least momentary connection and communication, even comfort, in a love expressed through physical coupling. In his lighter works, such as the 1998 urban relationship comedy Other People, Shinn found difficulty of connection even in more bemused moments of flirtation and comic dislocation.

It’s hard to say whether 9/11 came as a surprise to Chris or as confirmation of his perspective, that all this market-driven alienation and subsumed violence would have exploded in some manner in any event, the War in Iraq as inevitability instead of ill-conceived adventurism. What seems different now is that, as Dying City indicates, the crisis is too intense, too omnipresent, that individuals need to begin seizing the responsibility for their own needs, for love as well as everything else, and exercising the will and desire for their own completeness. It’s too late to wait any longer; if the end hasn’t already arrived (and, in a sense, it has), it’s too near to refuse happiness and loving contact. It is an integrity hard-won in a play about personal, artistic and professional achievement like the 2002 What Didn’t Happen, Shinn’s urban-professional-on-the-beachfront-porch comedy-drama; it is an integrity, and acceptance of personal responsibility for the world, just beginning to be perceptible by the central character Stephen in Shinn’s most successful dramaturgical achievement to date, the 2002/2004 Where Do We Live.

With Dying City at the Lincoln Center’s Newhouse Theatre, Chris moves one step closer to a commercial Broadway run. If drama on Broadway (itself a sharer in post-capitalist illusion and spectacle) is to break from the pre-9/11 solipsism in which it has been sunk for decades, its producers and its audiences will similarly have to take responsibility for their own experiences in the theatre, demand that the theatre ask larger, open questions that deny ideological closure. That a Chris Shinn play is running at Lincoln Center is a very good sign indeed. Whether the commercial theatre can further open its arms to the challenges that Chris presents to the theatregoing culture–for that, we will have to wait and see.