1.
What IS it? (PLAYSCHOOL)
Let’s paint a picture:
You’re somewhere in your twenties. Your BA in History, English Literature, Women’s Studies, Anthropology, or DRAMA has gotten you a job at a coffee shop or grocery store or front desk at a gym or legal office or maybe…even…at a non-profit. Rolling up to Whole Foods in your Honda/Toyota/VW/Infinity/Ford/Hundai/Mazda (that…uh…your parents paid for) you think—this is just not exactly, like, not really exactly what I thought I’d be doing with myself right about now. You buy your mango and soymilk. You consider getting a cat.
Not you? Don’t worry.
Your friends seem to all suddenly be engaged. Some of them are hip and like to take road trips or start urban gardens. Some of them seem to get laid CONSTANTLY, some of them are sadder than you, some funnier, some hotter, some sweeter, you know…generally. They are all way better at going out to bars or parties. Some kid from your high school comes into your coffee shop (studying for his BAR EXAM…test?) and is like…Oh, hey! What are you up to now? And you’re like…This.
SO what do you do?
You go to grad school!!!!
Specifically (or…if you’re me…you go to an MFA program.)
Yes, friends, oh friends, oh friends. What’s another forty (to one hundred and forty) thousand dollars of debt when there are places to explore, things to learn, people to meet, and jobs to NOT have? Why keep working in your service industry job when you can go away to get another degree and come back to your service industry job?
For me…this…is Playschool.
Others might call it Drama School or Conservatory or something.
In Playschool, I write plays. I write them all the time. I write them in the morning and at night. I rehearse them in class, in a theatre, in my head, in other cities…just…all the time. I’ve become one of those people (I hope you don’t know one) that’s like this:
You: I just ate a hamburger.
Me: I just wrote a play about hamburgers, actually.
You: Oh.
Me: But not about, like, you know hamburgers, like, real ones, like…you know. Like.
Really. Or suddenly, while shivering, walking in a cemetery with a latte, on the phone with my mom I’m like…OH MY GOD IT NEEDS TO TAKE PLACE IN THE SPRING OF 1982. I gotta go.
It makes a person crazy. Drama all day and all night. You wake up with it, choke on it, die a little when someone else gets produced or wins a thing or gets into a conference or you know, seems better than you in every way. You re-invent yourself to match your “art,” whittle away what you used to be in order that you create something profound, transcendent, extraordinary.
And then you’re staring at a weirdo pile of SHIT, littered with clichés and moments that seem implausible, unstageable, or just stupid. Filled with tiny nuggets that will reach at your eyes and remind you that you’re incompetent.
I have to do Bikram yoga, basically every day, in order to sweat out all of the toxins of my being, strain and die a little while I sweat in the 110 degrees with 50 people more flexible than I am, so that I feel “refreshed” and “cleansed.”
I’ve gone insane.
Then I look at the undergrads.
Yes.
1. These people (actors) are too attractive to be real. They should stop looking at me because suddenly my 25 years feel like, I don’t know, 56. I’m staring at their fresh (nymph-like) faces and am…half in love with them, half really pissed that they’re three to seven years younger than I, and about to embark on some television-movie-broadway career I can’t quite fathom.
2. They’re like…nice. They are smart and eager and fun and adorable and good at acting! Why are they like that?? Aren’t they in DRAMA SCHOOL? I really thought it would be bitchy legwarmer-wearing nicotine patch-sporting cut throat DIVAS. Nope.
They have to act in our plays. Big plays, small plays, television sketches, class work, what have you. We write it, they act it. Bam. Incredible.
We writers, avoiding eye contact in the hallways, make it up the stairs past the theatre lobby, wind our way above the dance studios and rehearsal studios, singing undergrads, pacing designers, and to our WRITING CENTER.
The WRITING CENTER is Rob’s office. He’s the chair of playwriting. And the only professor of playwriting. His office is the only place where we gather and learn about plays. We read them out loud and we talk.
We talk A LOT. We discuss things that we’ve seen or that we’re working on. In THEATRE LAB class, we discuss our THEATRE LAB project, and then we go to our DISCUSSION LAB where we discuss our discussion. Often, after that, we go to playwriting class where we discuss the discussion we had about the discussion. We discuss other things as well. We discuss history and neurophysiology and philosophy in our COLLOQUIUM class, and somehow we all manage to relate it back to DRAMA.
Because we all LOVE PLAYS. And we LOVE DISCUSSING EVERYTHING THAT HAS TO DO WITH PLAYS and if it isn’t about plays we will CERTAINLY MAKE IT ABOUT PLAYS.
*Inconsistency: There are some people—not to name names, but they are mostly in the technical and production management area? They, sometimes, don’t really seem to like plays.
LET’S NOT TALK ABOUT WRITING. But let me say something about writing.
Writing? I don’t know exactly how to do it or where it comes from but I like to go to fun places, sit down with a cup of coffee (or tea, if I’m feeling especially enlightened) and then write. That’s all I have to say about it…but it brings me nicely to my second BIG THOUGHT about Playschool.
H O M O S E X U A L I T Y.
How? Because of these fun places! I go to places where maybe I’m going to see GAYS!
I recently learned that my new city of residence, Pittsburgh, PA, is the FIFTH GAYEST city in the country. I don’t think that was the term they used…gayest? But whatever, it meant gayest.
My question is…where…are…the gays?
I have one answer, and that is: They are at PLAYSCHOOL.
But I’m maybe trying to find some who are NOT. Also? Who checked up on that stat? I certainly don’t remember anyone knocking on my door or leaving me a post card in the mail that said, “circle the rainbow if you like it like that.”
Where are they? And who found them?
