Sarah Ruhl
one hundred essays I don't have time to write*
*Please consider these essays as starting points. Consider them starting points for someone else to finish.
57. Advice to dead playwrights from contemporary experts
To Ionesco: “I can’t track the rhinoceros’ journey”.To Shakespeare: “You should cut that long speech ‘To be or not to be’, it’s confusing and it doesn’t advance the story.
To Sophocles: “I don’t get enough information about Oedipus’ backstory in the first act.”
To Shakespeare: “It is too sudden when the lovers fall in love with each other in the forest, couldn’t they get to know each other a little better first?”
What can a living playwright learn from this? Canonical plays are weird. Being dead is the most air-tight defense of one’s own aesthetic.