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.
38. More failure and more bad plays
The contemporary theater is afraid of failure. That is one reason why we have a culture of endlessly developing plays rather than doing them.But failure loosens the mind. Perfection stills the heart.
If perfection were even possible.
Perhaps we would have more sublime plays if we had more tolerance for and interest in, imperfect plays. Because perfect plays are not sublime plays. Shakespeare’s plays are weird and wonky and oddly shaped and wonderfully imperfect, but they are sublime. They are untidy. As the sublime in nature is untidy. Contemporary playwrights are often encouraged to make tidy plays rather than plays with cliffs and torrents.
In Elizabethan times when they did not resort to doing “old” plays, there must have been many new “bad” plays and a certain pleasure taken in their badness. My God, the pleasure in throwing a tomato at a curtain call. Not to be believed! The soft tomato, perhaps slightly rotten, hitting with soft ripeness the ankle of a beautiful boy actor. Perhaps we have lost our pleasure in bad plays. Certainly we have, as a culture, lost no pleasure in watching bad television. Culturally it seems equally fun to the average American to watch something they find “bad” on television as something they find “good”. (Failure loosens the mind, perfection stills the heart.) Perhaps subscription audiences feel that, by subscribing, they have been inoculated against failure rather than prepared for it. Perhaps theater is just by and large too expensive to tolerate failure. Perhaps we no longer believe in the sublime, we only believe in the tidy.
More failure! More demand for failure! More bad plays! Less perfection! More ugliness! More grace!