Day 27: Can't We All Just Get Along?

I was talking with a director friend of mine the other day, bitching to her much as I have been bitching to you over the last month. My rant was somewhere near in spirit to Day 11's harangue about plays for twentysomethings. This director agreed and then said something to the effect of, "I'm tired of plays where people are mean to each other." This initially struck me as a very strange thing to say. After all, the essence of any narrative is conflict. A character is at odds with something. Often, that something is another character. And when two characters are in disagreement with one another, then very often they will act poorly towards one another. People being mean to each other is a brick in the foundation upon which drama has been built, and to ask that it be removed is to threaten the integrity of the structure as a whole. To complain about people being mean to each other is kind of like saying you're tired of plays with characters crying. It's going to have to happen from time to time, you know?

All the great plays feature characters being mean to each other. Look at Hamlet. Plenty of people being mean to each other there. Look at A Streetcar Named Desire. Same thing. But the thing to note is that in these plays, this kind of behavior is treated as incitement towards exploration of an almost completely unrelated theme, or as a symptom of conflict. The bad behavior itself is neither the theme nor the conflict, and in neither case would you describe the plays as being about people being mean to each other. Saying that would imply something nihilistic about the play. So the fact that this director, who is incredibly cool along with being incredibly good at her job, would say something like that is interesting to me. Even the fact that she would complain about it at all suggests that there is something about this meanness that has been made central for her. It has become the theme and the conflict for her even if it is not supposed to be. You know what that tells me? It tells me that the world is getting more and more fucked up by the day. People bring their own lives to bear on the plays they see. And while we might not live in a world that is any meaner than it was 100 or 1000 years ago (we actually seems a hell of a lot nicer to each other than we did 1000 years ago), we do live in a world in which our own bad behavior is displayed to us and analyzed for us all the time. We're hyperaware of it so much so that our stories have become about it too.

Today's play was all about the Holocaust, a prime example of people being mean to each other if ever there was one. It was a heartfelt but very poorly written show about a man in the gas chambers at Auschwitz looking back on his life and reliving his best moments. It ends with the man asking God what he and his fellow Jews had done to deserve this end. And as I read this and thought about what my friend had said to me, I realized that what she really meant was that she was tired of a world where people are mean to each other.