Day 18: On The Irrelevancy of Originality

Earlier in this month-long extravaganza, I wrote about how reading plays can give a person unique access into a writer's psyche, the fears and anxieties and deepest secrets, all projected out on to a group of fictional characters wrestling with some fictional conflict. When you see a play staged, it's different. The written text becomes merely one part of a grander product. The acting, the directing, the lights and sounds and set pieces all combine to create something bigger than any one part, bigger than the sum of the parts as well. The writer becomes just the first of many artists who have lined themselves up in front of the audience to have their souls examined. This collective offering-up is what makes theater so great. But just as powerful is the singular relationship that is forged between the person who writes the words and the one who sits with their pages in his hands. There is no intermediary, nobody to step in and do the interpreting for you, just people moving about in your mind's space, talking to each other in your mind's voice, revealing themselves and their creator to you.

Of all the crimes that plays can and do revolve around, the abduction of children is far and away the most written about, at least in my experience. I imagine that part of this is due to the fact that the abduction of a child has a level of drama inherent to it that most other crimes can't touch. Children are innocents, and so to see them victimized is so unfair as to be immediately gut-wrenching. And the relationship between a parent and his or her child is one that we regard to be sacred, unknowable, almost indescribably beautiful. So to see that relationship violently damaged releases something in us that is biological and almost primitive, an emotional outpouring the likes of which theater has aspired to since the first person stood on a stage and said something. It's a great, great subject for a play, and this is why people write about it. But I also think that they write about it because nothing scares us more. And when you think about it, these two reasons are more or less the same.

Today's play was good, not great. In many ways, it was a rehash of just about every other play about a child disappearing. We watch as the two parents fall to pieces, we watch as their marriage falls to pieces as a result, and then we see the lengths that they ready themselves to go to in order to rediscover any sense of happiness before inevitably the play ends with the realization that nothing will ever be the same. If I was going to be callous, and I usually am, I would say that this play was simply following in the well-trod path of the many plays about this subject that had come before it, fully aware that its status as part of a genre of plays proven to be popular and effective would guarantee it consideration, probably even a production at one company or another. And I wanted to dismiss it because of that. In fact, I did dismiss it. I won't recommend it to the theater that gave it to me. But it scared the shit out of me and I know it will scare the shit out of an audience too, an audience that, in the moment, won't care in the slightest if a thousand plays had come before it, saying the exact same thing. That thousand plays, that number, just proves what the audience already knows, that this fear is inside them and accessing it, no matter how many times you've done it before, will lead to an emotional release that is revelatory in its pain. It makes me think that originality might be the most overrated virtue out there.