8:42 a.m. - 2007-02-17
The (Tentative) Breakthrough Answer
One of the geniuses of comedy is a man named Christopher Durang, someone very rarely heard of outside of theatre circles and New York, because he mostly writes plays. Genius friggin' plays. This man plays absurdist comedy--I'm talking nuns and talk show hosts with guns, psychotic nannies, sex-crazed thingamajigs that live in the ceiling--like a symphony orchestra, swelling and cutting the insanity to produce effects that go way beyond simply making people laugh. In my favorite work of his, Laughing Wild, he lets the insanity of two paranoid individuals coming together at the Harmonic Convergence crescendo through nightmares of poisoned tuna fish and shootouts with the Christ Child until it stops suddnely, right before the end of the play, and the two insane, paranoid, disheartened, as frustrated as they are clinging to hope people manage to communicate, briefly, and cause the sun to rise. Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, the first play I ever directed, works in reverse; stories of rape and abuse turn into a scene of violence that gives way to comedy, and even as the audience laughs, they shiver at the horror. I need to direct some of his work again.
I might start with a short one-act of his (he's written a number of 2-15 minute pieces) that I saw done horribly WRONG in Philadelphia. It's called DMV Office, and in it a man tries to explain to the woman at the DMV why he's not listed in their system. She keeps looking for him in the system, and every time she finds he's not there it's like he doesn't exist for her anymore. The critique of bureaucracy and its dehumanizing tendencies is nothing new, but what makes this play quite wonderful is the punch line, when the man yells, "WHAT EXACTLY SHOULD I DO?" and the DMV woman says, quite naturally, "Leave New York." The man responds by saying, "Thank you." Now, the PANTS Philly production of this piece RUINED the scene by having the man's "Thank you" be sarcastic, the impotent thank you we always unleash at such treatment. Zzzzzz, first of all, and second of all the script SPECIFICALLY STATES that the "Thank you" should be delivered sincerely, as though her advice is something that hadn't occurred to him but is, in fact, a very good answer. That's what makes it FUNNY. Granted, you may not know this from my synopsis, but trust me, it is, particularly because it means that her following line, "Ohio's nice!" makes SENSE.
I really love the answer that shuts you up. Usually, and maybe this is just me, I find that when I'm talking to someone about something, I am not actually looking for an answer. I am trying to get some ideas out on a table, and I want some help in perusing them and seeing which make more sense or less, or what I might be missing. It's not the best habit in the world, because on some level I know that I don't actually WANT the other person's opinion unless it agrees with what I'm thinking at the moment, but I hope that I am not the only one guilty of this, and I have certainly been willing to participate when someone else wants me to help them peruse their ideas.
There are moments, though, when someone says something that shakes you up, that gives you the missing piece. My best friend, Kim, gave me one of those moments during one of my innumerable bitch sessions during my last semester at Berkeley. As you know, I was hating my life like I don't know if I've ever hated it. I was hating graduate school, and I was hating California, or at least the Bay Area. The thing that was bothering me, though, was that I didn't know which one I hated more, and whether or not one thing was making me hate the other. I mean, both graduate school and California have their bad qualities. Graduate school is isolating, has a demanding workload with very little financial reward, getting a job at the end is FAR from guaranteed, it's subtly competetive, and unless you really love talking about the Levinasian "face" as made visible by the closet drama of Milton's Samson Agonistes--which, I must admit, I loved SOMETIMES--you tend not to enjoy your work. The Bay Area also has a tendency to be oddly isolating, particularly since the high cost of living means that free time is anything but free, what with the price of doing things for fun and the time you could have spent working. I am reluctant to say more about why I hate the Bay Area, since I don't want to give offense, but I will say that there is an episode of South Park in which Kyle's father buys an electric car, and he becomes so smug and superior over what HE'S doing for the environment that no one ELSE is doing that he even grows to love the smell of his own farts, so his only option is to move to the one place where people fart into wine glasses to better savor the bouquet. I am not saying that everyone in the Bay Area farts into a wine glass, although chances are that one or two people do for reasons that have nothing to do with smugness. I am saying that I can see how one might develop such a stereotype. An acquaintance from the South living in the Bay Area said that the Bay Area is to the political left what the South is to the political right, a place where the most negative stereotypes are alive and well and totally unabashed.
I don't want to bash the area too much, though, because there are a lot of really cool people out there. Like Panda Woo, who, admittedly, hates the Bay Area. And the cool gay boys and girls I went to Camp Move Night with. And a lot of the people I knew at Berkeley, most of whom were from somewhere else. And, um, and, I will think of more people in a minute. Also, I don't want to bash because of the insight I got later in the entry.
Anyway, for all that both graduate school and the Bay Area can suck, it didn't mean anything, because anywhere and everywhere can suck, and any profession can suck right along with it. I was trying to figure out what was making life intolerable, what was making me feel like I didn't want to face the next day. And yes, the easy answer is that I could probably handle graduate school in a place I loved, and that I might be able to enjoy the Bay Area if I weren't in grad school, but that wasn't HELPING.
Enter Kim's brilliant idea. I was talking about whether or not I should stay in graduate school, and how I didn't know if it was the Bay Area that was making me feel this way or graduate school itself, and she said, "Look, I've been wanting to say this, and I haven't, because I know that when people tell ME what to do I have an impulse to do the exact opposite, but I don't think you can make the decision in the Bay Area. I think you need to come back to Austin or go back to Philadelphia or go to New York. I think then you can decide."
And that was it. I began planning for my return to Austin the next day.
In case you couldn't tell, I've been way happier. As my last entry said (and if you missed the last entry, on Stephen Colbert, read it and be sure to look for the video of ME!!! or at least MY VOICE!!! on Comedy Central), I find myself back on the list called Lucky (a line I'm cribbing from Ani DiFranco, by the way). I am doing what I love. I am surrounded by people that I love and respect, very deeply. And sure, there are a lot of rough days, a lot of times when all I want to do is cry, but when I do I feel like I'm crying out all the crap I was keeping inside in graduate school, when I wasn't writing and wasn't doing theatre and basically wasn't living a life that I wanted.
I have also been reading for orals, as part of my attempt to remain reasonable stupid. And I've been loving a lot of what I read. I've been enjoying reading about modernism, and theories of affect, and new ways of conceptualizing morality. I really, really enjoy it. So that's it, right? It must have been the Bay Area. The pretentious, overrated, highly commercialized, expensive, hypocritical, more-PC-than-thou, wishes-to-God-it-was-still-1969-and-doing-its-darnedest-to-convince-itself-it-never-ended Bay Area. Fuck the Bay Area! Long live Austin!
This had been my line of thinking until last night, when I went to a friend's birthday party. This friend is a graduate student in English at UT. I was curious to see how UT grad students were, whether they were happier than the people I knew in Berkeley.
I really like the girl whose birthday it was. I also really liked a lot of the people I met. I don't want anyone to think I didn't like them. But as soon as I started talking shop, finding the one piece of common ground, being an English graduate student, I wanted to get out of there, which is not to say that I regretted it.
Turns out graduate students, at least in English, are miserable everywhere. There were people there just as ready to leave their programs as I was, some of whom were already making the plans to do so. It was so familiar that I was practically making parallels between the people there and the people I knew at Berkeley: "Okay, SHE'S the Alexis, and that's definitely the Tanya, and that has to be the Margaret, and wow, he even LOOKS like Kelvin!" There, were, nevertheless, two things that shook up my frame of reference.
I told my story about how I really didn't like the Bay Area, and was so much happier in Austin. Then the people I was talking to looked at each other. I knew that look. I'd given that look. Finally, one of them said, "Actually, I think Austin is kinda conservative" and that UNLEASHED the FLOOD. Austin was poorly planned, ridiculously hot, had woefully inadequate recycling, was nowhere near as weird as it thought it was, had no right to call itself the Live Music Capitol of the World, and only had its reputation as a liberal bastion because it was in Texas, and "that's like saying you live in the nicest part of Hell."
I offered my rebuttal. Yes, a lot of those things were very true, but I felt that 1) the Bay Area was just as hypocritical, if not moreso, and 2) I valued the perspective of being in Texas, the way that it reminded me that I was living in the United States, that I had to learn to understand perspectives different from my own and hone my ideas in the process. They certainly agreed, but one woman said that, when she was in Austin, she felt like she was talking to someone presenting an inauthentic self, that she'd be fine with Austin if it was honest about how it really was.
The first thought was "Wow, that's EXACTLY how I talk about San Francisco." The second thought, and I worry that this thought may have flashed through my eyes for a second, by which I mean I know it did, was "I will CUT A BITCH that talks shit about MY TOWN!!!" The third thought was, "You know, maybe, just maybe, the Bay Area isn't so bad. Maybe it was graduate school and its isolating nature that convinced me that the Bay Area wasn't all it's cracked up to me. Maybe if I were doing something else, I would have found a Bay Area that I loved as much as I love Austin YOU BETTAH STEP THE FUCK OFF BIATCH THIS IS MY TOWN!!!"
There was another moment, later on, where things got even more interesting. Three grad students were talking about how a friend of theirs was pursuing music, doing it and writing about it. They were worried he'd never finish his dissertation. At one point, though, they started talking about their own work, saying things like "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, or that you want to, or that it will do any good in the world." Another said, "You know, music is this guy's passion, and I think if you have a passion other than English, you should pursue that. I just don't know what else I would do."
That was the moment. The answer that broke through. Plain and simple. If I weren't doing English, I know what I'd be doing. I'm doing it right now. And I am so much happier.
Of course, things still aren't that easy. Reasonable stupid is telling me that I should still finish anyway, that I might change my mind. There's also the fact that I am enjoying the reading, but couldn't I make it into art rather than criticism? And should I return to the Bay Area AS an artist, or try to say sleep be damned and be a grad student and an artist by doing the MFA while I get a PhD? I don't know. I am still trying to figure it out. But the answers, while clearer, are no less easy, and I'm not done thinking about it. I am done for the moment, though. I have a rehearsal to go to.
