The playwright, puppeteer, and savage wielder of whimsy, Scot Augustson gave me a book recently. It’s called Debt: the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. One cannot call the volume concise, nor is it completely clear to me yet what the author’s bottom line thesis is, though he seems to be circling around a fascinating notion that the responsibilities and complex, nuanced relationships among individual human beings, as well between humans and institutions, ideals, gods, demons, etc., all got flattened into a two-dimensional space with the introduction of coinage and currency. A formerly infinitely complex mapping of memories, obligations and gratitude, became something so stark and simple it could be captured in a simple ledger. Of course, I could be way off: I still have another couple hundred pages to go, plus footnotes, which I can’t stop leafing to; but this is the general whiff I’m sniffing at the moment.
I was reading the book last night before falling asleep five minutes later, but in that short time I started to wonder: what do I owe the theatre, and what does the theatre owe me?
It’s an awkward thing to confess in the wider civilian world that one is a playwright. I stopped doing it pretty early in my career. The inevitable follow-on questions just lead to more and more frustration on both sides.
Have I ever seen anything you’ve written?
Probably not.
Where have your plays been done?
In the Mystic Realm of 99 Seats.
What are your plays about?
The usual: neutrons, genomes, philosophical zombies.
What’s the most you’ve ever been paid for a play?
Less than I drink in a bad year.
It might shock you to hear it, but I have my pride. So I would often attempt to end conversations such as these by stating something wildly arrogant like, “Let’s put it this way: I’m the best playwright you’ll ever meet.” And then I’d skulk away, silently hoping that this civilian never met Scot Augustson, or Kelleen Conway Blanchard, or Yussef El Guindi or…”
So yeah, bottom line: I considered myself a pretty good playwright, back when I was wrighting them. I certainly left everything I had out there on the stage before I retired from it. Having written over twenty full-length plays and countless smaller works for the stage, I felt by the end of my run that I had certainly given theatre at least as much as theatre had given me. We were square.
But I’m starting to consider, inspired by this tome which Scot bequeathed upon me, that maybe debt doesn’t work that way. Maybe our obligations, our relationships and responsibilities, our needs and our gifts can never be balanced on a ledger. Certainly not when it comes to creativity.
If it hadn’t been for the theatre, I would have never memorized Sonnets 29, 76 and 130; I’d still have a thickish Baltimore accent (even dough Bawlmore dudn’t have en accent, hon.); I wouldn’t have have moved to New York City— twice, and most likely would never have come to Seattle in search of greener theatrical pastures; I wouldn’t have met the funniest people in the world, whom I now count among my dear friends; I would have never known the sheer terror of having an actor on opening night utterly blow the big monologue I wrote for them while I sat 15 feet in front of her in the first row, or the astounding heart-expanding elation of pulling off a show when only 8 hours before the stage was a mess of cables, unpainted set-pieces and infuriated cast and crew.
If it wasn’t for theatre, I wouldn’t be sitting here on a Saturday morning writing this mini-essay, because I wouldn’t have learned to write at all. Which means my recent books, of which I’m so proud The Starting Gate and Seattle Trust and which ostensibly stand apart from my dramatic achievements, would not exist. And perhaps worst of all, I wouldn’t be able to claim to know the likes of Yusef El Guindi, Kelleen Conway Blanchard, and Scot Augustson. And with no Scot, there’s no book about debt in my hand.
So yeah. I’m going to go to the theatre tomorrow. For the first time in eight years. Not because I owe it to myself or to the art form or to anyone or anything. And not because the art form owes me squat. But sometimes friends just want to be with friends and do those things that friends do together.
