In an early note for my play The Elf King I wrote, “Ritualistic remembrance may be the overarching form of the play” and “This play is not about hope. It is about how to live without it — those who are left behind.” As such it is an extended ritual of mourning: during its theatrical run (uncharacteristically for me, I am optimistic that there will eventually be one) a ritual which takes place every evening from Wednesday through Saturday at 8.00pm. And unlike many American plays, it will deny ironic or dark humor as a palliative, primarily because this palliative is an illusion. This irony and humor drives us further from the recognition and confrontation with death — a recognition and confrontation that, paradoxically, teaches us what it means to be fully alive as loving creatures. It also teaches us that the act of mourning is constant, and that human experience is an unending and uneven balance between gains and losses, dictated by our being born into a body which, from its emergence in the world, will inevitably die.

All this to recommend the rebroadcast this week of the 2007 documentary The Undertaking by Miri Navasky and Karen O’Connor on the PBS Frontline series. The 60-minute program is a brief portrait of the Lynch & Sons funeral home in Michigan and the final days of several people who eventually pass through its doors, among them the 84-year-old Mary Beardsley and the 2-year-old Anthony John Verrino. The program is refreshingly free of a musical underscore (indeed, the soundtrack is a small study of silences), irony, or maudlin sentiment; and the depiction of death and mourning, different for each individual, is thoughtful and respectful, however occasionally disturbing, given its unmediated experience for the spectator. The program can be seen in full at the Frontline Web site here; the Web site also includes a great deal of background material on the program and a worthwhile list of links and readings for those who want to pursue American ways of death and mourning further.

I must also recommend “When Bad Things Happen to Good Babies, and, the Brazilian Butt Lift as Grief Management Strategy,” Emily Rapp’s latest entry at her Our Little Seal blog. Ms. Rapp writes about her New Year resolutions (“Wouldn’t it be incredible if my problem of soul-cracking, life-destroying grief could truly be solved by having a LIFTED BUTT?” she wryly muses), and concludes:

The opposite of gnawing, heart-twisting ache is euphoric, the-top-of-your-head-opens-to-heaven joy. Perhaps the human body was built this way, in order to survive what life brings you. I watch my son, my beloved, snatched away from me in front of my drowning eyes. Looking at chronological photographs is like watching a film reel in reverse and in fast forward. I offer every trade I can think of (him for me, this for that) and am met with a blank and nasty and unforgiving, dangerous wind. My heart is a swollen thing I could pull out of my mouth and kick across the room. I was happy in Dublin, truly, but in a baby fat way. Because I wasn’t miserable at all then, I actually didn’t know what happiness meant until now, when I’m the saddest and most hopeless I’ve ever been in my life or ever imagined I might be. …

Because, truly, the only resolution that would appear at the end of both lists? LIVE. In spite of everything; in the face of everything. Live. For 2012 that’s the only resolution I’ve got.

Bernhard Neher (1806-1886): Erlkönig.

One of the paths from Romanticism to Modernism, which I identified as a facet of a reconceived Theatre of Revolt, is a new form of an urban making-strange. It leads to a post-catastrophic world of fragments, fragments which resist meaningful reconstruction: instead, to live within the aftermath of catastrophe, as we all must, we must somehow displace ourselves from it, to be able to live both within and without it as a form of survival. To see this catastrophe aesthetically: which teaches no lessons. The artwork provides no comfort, only perspective and recognition. To present this catastrophe in the form of seemingly unrelated fragments of perspective is not to encourage obscurity (no artist intends to be obscure) but to reflect this strangeness. Obviously this opens the artist to the charge of obscurity among those who like their art clear and comfortable. But it is a charge without basis.

This formal experimentation is reflected in Emily Rapp’s most recent essay for The Nervous Breakdown. Written as a June 2011 letter from Spain, the narrator pulls together various fragments of European and personal experience, the example of that classic Modernist writer Franz Kafka, and a children’s book with which I myself am intimately familiar (and coincidentally was a gift to my daughter Goldie from her first pediatrician). It is a means of expression — though not self-expression — to reach beyond these fragments and the words which comprise them, reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s frustration with the language and form of his time:

It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. … As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it — be it something or nothing — begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. Or is literature alone to remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly holy in the vicious nature of the word that is not found in the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? …

Emily Rapp and her son, Ronan. Photo: Alexandra Huddleston for The New York Times.

Why would a dramatist who is the parent of two healthy young children write a play like The Elf King, which follows two parents as they raise a child who will die before reaching her third birthday? The psychic trauma which this risks is a means of exploring perhaps the darkest of our fears, for it calls into question almost all of the assumptions of humanism itself: the value of a single human life, the knowledge of mortality, the ineradicability of suffering. It doesn’t bode well for a light, entertaining evening in the theatre.

But it is the function of theatre and drama at its most profound to call our assumptions about these very things into question. As we gather together in an auditorium to witness a theatrical event, Herbert Blau once remarked, what is unquestionable about the dramatic process is that we are all — those on the stage as well as those in the audience — at that very moment dying as time passes, together, and a drama and theatre which takes that very condition as its subject reaches to its metaphysical roots. That condition is best sought through extremities of imagination; but what must be avoided at all cost is to sentimentalize or romanticize these extremities, for these are cold hard facts that do not permit alleviation. It is perhaps only in this way that my own creative imagination is similar to that of writers like Beckett, Barker, and Kane, and these explorations also induce us to re-examine our own morals and ethics — how we live in a world in which such things happen, and how we should approach each other, as well as our children, as we bear that knowledge.

In her interview on NPR’s Talk of the Nation last week with Brian Naylor, Emily Rapp, whose essay in the New York Times provided some of the impetus for the composition of The Elf King, discussed the necessity, even the unavoidability, of this kind of imagination, but also warned against keeping silent about its experience (emphasis is my own):

NAYLOR: And have people — tell you — how do people respond, you know, when they find out about Ronan? Do they say they, you know, they couldn’t imagine facing such a thing or …

RAPP: Yeah. That’s the common response. I mean, what I think is interesting about that, when people say I can’t imagine, is that the reason that it’s so horrific is that they actually can imagine. You know, I have a lot of friends who are parents and they just — you know, a lot of the parenting is about terror of this very thing happening.

NAYLOR: Yeah.

RAPP: So I think people actually can imagine, but they maybe don’t want to. And I think it’s important — I mean, I’ve — from the very beginning – have been very frank about it and I think that sort of helps people be at ease, but yeah. It’s hard to know what to say. I mean, I guess the only thing to — the wrong thing to say would be nothing at all …

The transcript of the interview is here, and the interview itself is below. Ms. Rapp also maintains a blog about her son Ronan, Little Seal.

Geoffrey Streatfeild and Stephanie Street in Steve Waters' The Contingency Plan at Bush Theatre. Photo: Tristram Kenton

Yesterday brought the second installment of dramatist Steve Waters‘ series “Secret Diary of a Playwright” at the Guardian, a pointed reminder that, more than the creation of a final product, the writing of a play is a process all its own, with its lucky and unlucky mysteries. And like all mysteries, they are primarily of the night:

Plays are accidents waiting to happen. I may well have mouthed those very words this morning at 3am, loping to the loo, giving in, at last, to insomnia. Epiphanies in the small hours might have worked for Philip Larkin, generating great poems such as “Sad Steps” and “Aubade,” but I’m in a house with two children who I would prefer to remain asleep, with a wife who’ll have to work in the morning, having suffered my turbulent handling of the duvet, not to mention a newly arrived and rather neurotic cat downstairs who offers up heartrending mews at any stirrings in the house. Fits of inspiration have larger consequences. But the call to art, like the call of nature, may not be resisted.

So often it starts this way: “Chaos, according to plan,” as Brecht once said of his rehearsals. The idea you’ve been chewing at, the scene which is stuck in holding, the characters who stubbornly refuse to answer your imprecations, suddenly are all laid out before you. All those boring daytime questions — what do they want, what do they do, where are they going, why did you say you would write this thing? — are resolved at one stroke, as you feel the surge of that strange confidence only experienced in dreams. By 9am it’s already looking more shaky, but the small hours revealed the way forward and God, does it feel good.

One of the things that Waters is describing is the tension of “nightenglish” and “dayenglish,” as David Ian Rabey points out in his comment to Waters’ essay: a tension that not only affects language but inspiration as well. Indeed, I’m perfectly comfortable in trusting my own nightenglish to pervade the dialogue of the play, little of which partakes of living-room naturalism or realism; when you have been writing for 35 years or so, you learn to trust that nightenglish. But the mosaic of inspiration too comes together, I find, only fitfully and without consciously seeking it. Writing a play is a longish business — some may write a first draft in as quickly as a week; for others it takes a year or two — and sustenance of faith that the mosaic will eventually fall together after all requires the ability to maintain confidence as one plods through the slough of despond and self-doubt as well as enjoy the heights of confidence. The Elf King, after about three weeks, is about one-third finished; in the next six weeks, Waters’ questions will no doubt echo through my own sleepless nights. (My own household — two young children, one working wife — is not at all dissimilar to Waters’, though we do lack that neurotic cat.)

And sometimes one turns the fragments of that mosaic of inspiration over and over again. Below, another sample firing The Elf King: a curiosity from YouTube called “Signs of Approaching Death.” What strikes me most about this clip is the paradox of matter-of-factness and uncomfortable intimacy with which the young woman describes the final symptoms of that disease to which we all will succumb one day or another. As I said, a curiosity: but it haunts.

John Whiting (1917-1963)

In the collection of John Whiting‘s essays At Ease in a Bright Red Tie: Writings on Theatre from Oberon Books, there is an undated note called “Statement for a Play,” which is very much a reminder to himself about the urgency with which attention must be paid to the creative impulse. I imagine most dramatists have felt these things at one time or another, especially those like myself in the midst of completing a first draft, and so a few excerpts here:

I want to achieve something very raw: not coarse in texture, no, raw in the sense of an agony of an exposed nerve. As such it must carry at its beginning the sob of pain, the half-laugh, and then, in progress, rise through the crescendo scream to a finale of realisation and awe.

The whole must have a brevity of expression and a considerable sense of pace. … Speed, clarity, simplicity of expression, and motive — remember this. Never wait for effect. … Never pause for an audience’s realisation: never! But repeat — again and again if necessary — a boxer hitting monotonously in the same vulnerable spot. Find that spot — find the nerve centre of the play and then hit it — hard! and keep on hitting. …

Keep a line — a steel thread — from beginning to end. Do not deviate. No digressions for the building of character, so-called, for the moment of atmosphere or for that moment when you can show what a clever fellow you can be. Work on the principle that the cutting of one word will throw the meaning — the meaning, not the rhythm of a sentence. I mustn’t build consciously dramatic peaks. Let them come. Don’t worry about how someone comes on or goes off — don’t worry, that is, as to whether it fits. Let them come in or go off, and if it makes a balls of the surface don’t worry — let it tear into the surface — let it stick out like a sore thumb.

Write it fast. I must set a time when I’m ready to begin, and then down it must go on this bloody machine and I mustn’t stop until it is down to the last word in some kind of shape — any kind of shape — but let me get it down. …

How to put it down. Words. Ordinary: brief: caustic: (a styptic pencil applied to a pimple): funny if you like but contribute to the story.

Get on the inside. Don’t use even the smallest property which you can’t now get up and fetch and touch — feel its weight, its warmth, its shape. Try not to use any phrase which you haven’t heard — actually heard. (Forget your “wonderful use of language.” Language is dying — hopelessly perverted — then use that perversion to bring home certain facts.)

Get on the inside. Remember what you have learnt. It doesn’t matter what it looks like on the page. It can’t be balanced in the writing as you thought. (It can — you will allow no one experiment.) Balance the dialogue. Look through the conventional plays. Just put it down — that’s all.

Just put it down.