I Wrote a Thing (And I Read Some Others)

On Caryl Churchill, JD Vance, sobriety, sofas, and such like

“Caryl Churchill, among the fiercest and boldest of Britain’s modern playwrights, goes nearly as hard about identity in A Number as she’s gone in other plays about sociopolitical upheavals (Mad Forest and Far Away) and sexual politics (Cloud 9 and most famously Top Girls) — big-swing, big-think exercises all of them, none as interested in providing answers as suggesting the endless complications involved in opening the questions.”

Or at least so says some wise-ass in The Washington Post this week:

I come not to boast, but to whine. Because writing short about a play like A Number is way more work than it ought to be.¹ Not that I haven’t had practice: If you know me well, you know I worked as a writer and editor at USA Today for half a decade, writing both punny headlines and tight-bright paragraphs for the Lifeline column, not to mention the occasional tech and theater story. An 8-inch² theater review was the norm for us, and my colleague David Patrick Stearns taught me all kinds of lessons about writing short. Another genius at the task: music critic Edna Gundersen,³ a godsend of a journalist who always hit her word count and never, ever left her fact-checks for either me or the copy desk to do.

So yeah, I can write short when I need to. Once I even managed to squeeze an explanatory roundup of 13 Elizabethan in-jokes into barely 1,000 words. (Many thanks to the Shakespeare In Love nerd who reposted that copy, because I couldn’t find it in the USAT archive.) And honestly, I shouldn’t complain, because the 600-word targets I get at The Post would still be considered a luxury at some other outlets.

But I swear, y’all, I do sometimes miss the stretch. One of the great things about writing for the Washington City Paper back in the Before Times was that even in the print edition, they’d let me go on forever if the moment demanded it. (I hurled 1,100 words at Churchill’s hallucinatory 50-minute apoca-drama Far Away back in 2004, and still felt like I’d barely begun to get at what made the Studio Theatre’s production so terrifying and so extraordinary.)

Herewith, ideas in A Number that I might have gone deeper on, given more room to run:

• The absent maternal. Salter’s wife/Bernard’s mother doesn’t make an appearance in the play, and we don’t learn her fate until midway through. At lunch after the show, my plus-one and I spent some time wondering how and whether a maternal impulse might have changed the course of Salter’s decision-making process — not to mention how a lack of mothering might have shaped the various Bernards. (Given circumstances be damned: These are the things a critic thinks about sometimes.)

• Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Bernard’s reference to Salter’s drinking and (maybe) drug use couldn’t help but strike me pretty hard, especially given my own bourbon-soaked history. Churchill gives us a busted protagonist whose flailing suggests a man who might have stopped drinking but is far from getting sober. (Sobriety of mind and action being the ultimate aim of any serious recovery program.) I have no clue how much Churchill thought specifically about the kinds of work people do in AA, NA, and other Twelve Step programs, but Salter — a “dry drunk” if I’ve ever seen one — clearly hasn’t done enough to bring any real clarity to his parenting thought process.

• The whole real-life father and son thing. After the matinee last Saturday, David Bryan Jackson and his son Max stopped in the Gunston Arts Center lobby to say hello while my friend Gene was sorting out some post-show logistics on his phone. (Embarrassingly enough my first words to Max were “OMG you’re a tiny person — you look so tall onstage!” This is not the actual reason for this bullet, just a little insight into what an utterly inept dork I can be. Invite me to your dinner party! Your guests will never forget the occasion!) More to the point: I have to admit I wasn’t sure I saw anything in this production of A Number that I could pinpoint with any specificity as the result of casting real-life relatives in the roles of Salter and the Bernards. (Then again, I hadn’t seen the show before, so I had nothing to measure the Jacksons against.) The trick has been tried before, and certainly I can imagine ways in which it might color both the rehearsal process and the end result, in performance. But actors are actors, trained and paid to get under the skins of people unlike themselves, and to bond — and clash — convincingly with people they don’t know at all. Certainly Tom Wilkinson and Rhys Ifans make something memorable of the material in the film version. [Prime Video, Apple TV] Until and unless something useful occurs to me, I think I’ll just say I enjoyed the Jacksons tremendously — and otherwise let them speak for themselves on the topic.

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Speaking of theater journalism

Lots of y’all have talked about your hopes, fears, and wants for what it ought to look like in the post-Peter Marks era, and you haven’t always been terribly polite about it. So I hope you’ve booked your seats for this month’s Kennedy Center thingy with Peter and The Post’s new chief critic, Naveen Kumar, in conversation. I’ll be there; you should be too.

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His Secret Service codename is ‘Naugahyde’

To be clear, there’s no evidence JD Vance has ever had anything to do with this sofa.

My playwright friend Gwydion and his co-author Steve Gimbel have some thoughts on “truthiness” as it’s playing out (in some unexpected ways) in the current election cycle, and this line in particular makes me feel like they are not wrong:

“Memes of Vance claiming “I did not have sectional relations with that couch” are funny not because they’re factually accurate, but because they’re narratively true.”

More details on that idea of narrative truth when you read the thing:

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You should really check this dude out

Lastly, I would like to point out, if you haven’t discovered it yet, that the estimable Benjamin Dreyer — late of Random House and of Twitter, author of Dreyer’s English and many a tart tweet besides — has migrated to this here platform and is publishing with some regularity (and without a paywall). Among other things, this veteran copy editor has already weighed in (more than once!) on how we are meant properly to deploy our possessive esses and apostrophes in the era of a Harris-Walz presidential ticket. Also he’s just a fun read in general, being the huge theater and classic-Hollywood nerd that he is, and his deftly comic way with footnotes is something I have shamelessly attempted to mimic in this very post, so I recommend him to you without reservation.

Thanks for reading — and for subscribing, whether you’re inclined to contribute or not. Be good, y’all.

1. “I filed a 1,200-word story because I didn’t have time to file an 800-word story,” as the reporter said to her editor, at least according to one of journalism’s great apocrypha.

2. Yes, we measured print stories in inches. And yes, an 8-incher could be remarkably satisfying in the right hands — though naturally we were always happier with 10. A vertical inch of type set one column wide in USAT’s house typeface was roughly 44 words, if I recall, so our average Broadway show review would have been 350-450 words.

3. She’s a noted Bob Dylan-whisperer, too. She scored the first, impossible-to-get interview with him after he won the Nobel Prize. She also interviewed Madonna for me when “Ray of Light” came out. I still have a phone number for Madonna in my address book, because you know I copied it shamelessly from the fact-check file on that story.