Too many writers! Too much money!

A friend once interrupted my endless rhapsodizing about the joys of times gone by, saying, “Well, yes, there were all those wonderful writers here at the same time, but nobody really thought of them as wonderful writers at the time, right? When you were just walking around with them and running up against them all the time, they were just some writers, and it was only later that they came to be recognized and admired and so on.” But really, the thing was, there were even more wonderful writers here than eventually got recognized. And now, I’d hazard a guess, there are not only writers in Minnesota who’ll be thought of as wonderful themselves not too long from now, but also many really cool writers who will give up and move along and do something else: non-profit administration perhaps, or running hair salons, or herding freaking sheep for that matter, or anything that our culture esteems more than writing plays. Which is really almost anything. Not writing plays is easy to do. And I’m willing to bet hard cash that not writing plays is one of the fastest growing and most promising of all occupational specializations. In Minnesota, however, largely thanks to the Playwrights’ Center, there has always been a grand excess of fine playwrights. I’d like to propose this embarrassment of playwrights as my second element of Minnesota style.

We stole proudly

Alfred Hitchcock said that "self-plagiarism is style." I don’t think he was just being clever. Style evolves from the selection and repetition and emphasis of particular elements in conception and presentation (conscious or not). And I think the self, in "self-plagiarism," can be thought of not as just the individual but as a group that self-identifies, is self-aware. Like Minnesota writers. When I first came to the Twin Cities I was very naïve. Picture a fresh-faced lad with shepherd's crook and clumps of stuff on his boots. This was never me, but it is fun to picture things like that. I believed that when the rules of my Jerome grant said that I should live here for the grant year and attend Monday night readings every Monday night during that time that they meant it. So I did that, literally: moved here and went every single Monday night, pretty much for two years (since I had two Jerome grants back to back). I watched a new play every Monday, heard an audience react to it, and argued about it over drinks afterward. Most of the writers were from here, even if they hadn’t originated here, and had seen lots of not only each other’s stuff but they had seen the same other stuff that was going on in town then, and so that was naturally what we stole from. In those simple times it was not thought either necessary or proper to slog all the way off to New York or Chicago or Seattle to find something to rip off or make fun of in your work.

With the smallest encouragement

Money is a large part of the reason there have been all these playwrights here. The Playwrights’ Center has overseen the distribution of grants from several insanely magnanimous foundations. What I’ve always heard, the statistic, is that there’s more money given here—GIVEN AWAY—MONEY—per capita to artists than anywhere else but New York. (And who even counts New York?) But the best trick of the Center is that they started being what they are so long ago. Dude, they were wearing flares, the people who started the Playwrights’ Center, they were bra-less and had those Fu Manchu moustache things. It was the freakin 70’s. Playwrights have only ever needed the smallest encouragement, and for some reason, the Playwrights of Minnesota—let’s see, how does the story go, Barbara Field, John Olive, the guy who adapted Cuckoo’s Nest, they linked arms, and started the Center. (Write me angry letters, please, telling me who I’m forgetting.) And they did it so long ago. See that’s the power of starting early, like if you’d been smart enough to invest money at any time before this minute now today, or buy computer stocks when only Radio Shack carried personal computers. You get the idea. That long ago. Growing a community of writers is like building an advantage in chess, or letting your yard be taken over by weeds. Or like your cat waiting by the front door to sneak out. In chess, you have to begin doing what you’re going to do—something effective—early, immediately, and keep at it, consistently. With weeds it’s like there’s one, there’s another one, now there’s seventeen thousand. Weeds are weak individually but single-minded and ready to fill any space. And Kitty never forgets she wants to go out. But you forget. You don’t remember that she’s always perched there, waiting for that crack in the door. Writers here did all those things. They built slowly on what came before, on each other’s connections and tricks. They bred geometrically, with pretty much every writer who got by at it inspiring a couple more to think they could do it. And they constantly waited right by the door for their chances, learning from each other where opportunities might appear, purring quietly, watchful.

A scene for playwrights

By the time I got here in the mid-eighties, there was a scene for playwrights. Which is really just hilarious to think of. The uncoolest group perhaps possible at that time, before anyone outside California wrote software, played games with eight-sided dice, or understood that you could live your whole life without being serious about anything but science fiction or network TV. The geekiest possible individuals in the pre-tech, Po-Mo landscape. Not only was there an unnatural number of cool playwrights here, but they thought this was the best place they could be. And the other people here, the actors, the designers, the people with theaters, they seemed to be laboring under the same delusion, that this just might be the best place to be. Imagine that. Rock music people had the same silly idea here at about the same time. In fact, the playwrights’ community here probably had a very similar development as the rock scene. Slow build through the seventies, self-aware scene time in the eighties, then a lot of people left for Seattle in the nineties. The scene continues, but the charming delusion that this is the best place you could possibly be to do what you’re doing isn’t always totally convincing. There are other places, even New York, and some of us might move. So writers float in and out of the scene here more these days, maintaining work lives across the country and Feeling Minnesotan mainly only for grant applications.

Playwright style?

So how did the presence of all these writers shape the style of Minnesota theater? I’d say we’ve produced more original work than other places. Exported lots of work and writers to other places. Drawn all sorts of writers and other theater artists here from other places. Inspired lots of actors, other performance professionals, and other kinds of writers to attempt playwrighting. And self-plagiarized like crazy. Sometimes to the point where I imagine writers from elsewhere seeing something in a play by a Minnesota playwright and just not having any idea where it’s coming from. For example, in Craig Wright’s Recent Tragic Events the character of Joyce Carol Oates is played by a sock puppet operated by an actress wearing no pants. Seeing the play, in its production at The Jungle, this made me think of lots of things I’d seen on Twin Cities stages over the years. For me, it came from somewhere. But for someone in the audience in New York, it may have been a different moment—maybe more of “huh?” moment. Speaking of Craig Wright, here’s his opinion of the Minnesota style issue: “I always found theater in Minnesota to be cerebral. I remember being very surprised, when I first saw plays in Chicago or Philadelphia, how much more visceral they seemed. Often less intelligent, less well art-directed, but always more visceral and passionately, simply human. I can’t help but think this trend was tied to the city’s long history of high institutional giving to the arts. Plays and projects that started as ideas that could be pitched to corporations and foundations rather than people putting on a show for an audience.” Minnesota style may be cerebral because we’re so very writerly here. We’re not just writers, we’re grant writers, pursuing public funds and pitching ideas to the same theaters. It’s a common idea that some books are chosen to be taught in literature classes because they’re the kind of book that needs to be explained. Do we write plays that need to be funded? Maybe some writers, some ideas, are more grant-able, easier to put on the schedule. In any case, I’d vote that the Minnesota style, for better or worse, has been shaped by a profusion of strong playwrights. I’d list them, but they don’t pay me by the word here. Besides, I might leave you out, then I’d be in trouble. Next time: bomber hats, cheap beer, plaid shirts, and frostbite—the influence of Greater Minnesota on Twin Cities theater.