News flash

How I became a playwright

February 17, 2010

In case you’ve been wondering about the infrequency of my architectural criticism and cultural commentary of late, the main reason is this:

On Jun 2, 2008, I began writing a play, my first attempt at the form. It has been an extremely difficult and time-consuming project, and I am pleased to report that it has not been futile. To cut to the chase, I submitted my play to a competition organized by the Texas Nonprofit Theatres, and, to my great surprise, it was one of four selected to be given full productions by member companies. [UPDATE: My play, "Three Views of a Waterfall," opened at the Bastrop Opera House on Oct. 14, 2011, with an extraordinary cast.]

Now, about the play:

I’d been thinking about it for several years but had no time to write it until I was emancipated from full-time employment at the end of 2007. My initial notion was to make a play based on the most remarkable individual I’ve ever met. Chuck is a Vietnam combat veteran beset by ghosts, nightmares, alcoholism and terrible physical pain from failing metal body parts. He is also skilled in construction and electrical work, an avid reader, generous to a fault, resourceful, highly intelligent and deeply honorable. When I met him, in the spring of 2004, he was homeless. I hired him to do some desperately needed work on my house, and he moved into a room next to my garage. We became friends.

For a variety of reasons, a biographical play about Chuck’s life was not a possibility, though his way of speaking, his wartime experience and a few incidents I observed provided some starting material. I could not write the story of Chuck and Mike because Neil Simon had already done it. I also knew I didn't want my play to be narrowly about PTSD. I knew that, although the Vietnam experience would provide much of the material, I didn't want it to be about the Vietnam War, or even war in general. What, then, would it be about?
Without having a clue to an answer, I conceived some additional characters and a plot.

I didn't begin to have an inkling of what it was about until I'd finished the first draft -- really more of sketch, about 65 pages -- and slowly, over the course of dozens of further iterations, teased into semi-consciousness what must have leaked from my subconscious onto the page. As my understanding grew, successive iterations brought the semi-hidden themes into somewhat clearer relief. But I also resisted making too-explicit an argument, partly because a play shouldn't be a philosophical disquisition, partly because I think a play should give actors and the director and the audience some scope for interpretation, and partly because a neatly folded package would contradict the central idea that emerged: The moral realm is messy.

The three main characters in the play are Vic, who is based loosely on my friend; Roger, also a combat veteran of Vietnam, now the owner of a liquor store; and Roger’s wife, Susan, a still-life painter. All are haunted, in different ways, by the ghosts of their pasts -- of war and its extreme stresses, but also of the social webs of expectations, beliefs and traditions that shaped and largely defined their identities.

I won’t say more about the plot, except to note that my friend, Chuck, has spoken many times of his struggle to “make friends with the ghosts.” In a way, the play seeks to understand what that phase might mean. It is, I think, Chuck’s way of expressing the notion of redemption, or of forgiveness -- of ourselves and of others. To make friends with the ghosts is to free ourselves from moral certainty, from the idea that we are fully in control of our moral lives, or the idea that good motives always produce good results, but to retain mindfulness that our actions have consequences. Moral accountability is limited, but moral responsibility is unavoidable.

That may be a puzzling and unsatisfying ambiguity. That's life.

Mike Greenberg