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.
5. On titles and paintings
I often long to call my plays something like Untitled #3 or Red #4. I tend to feel neutral and utilitarian about titles, favoring nouns. However, theater is a different medium from painting and it is more unusual to call our plays “untitled”. How is painting different from theater and why does theater require that titles have content instead of numbers? Is a nameless play somehow not a play? Beckett occasionally called his plays things like “Rough for theater 1”, or “Rough for theater 2”. And sonnets we often call “Sonnet.” Dances can be similarly untitled. In the theater do we object to the idea that a playwright might be working on a series? Or are titles simply devices to try to get people to come to the theater? In which case Untitled does not help? And what titles make people want to come to the theater and why do people want to come to the theater anyway and would people come to untitled works or would they be too hard to list in the newspaper? A lack of a title implies a lack of a decision and I suppose a lack of drama insofar as drama requires decisiveness. I would be interested in seeing a short series of plays, all called Untitled. So that the eye might be redirected and the play might become ever more interior and private, with no recourse to a title that might reduce or restrict meaning. Titles by their nature imply that the play’s architecture is like a bull’s eye (and some are) with the point being in the center. Sometimes the point is in the margins, or else in the experience of throwing the dart.