History.

Jesse Green wrote a surprisingly uninformed essay in the New York Times T Magazine a few days ago. This technique or device or style, dramatizing existing text to re-create or evoke real events, has been employed frequently, in myriad ways, going back at least a century. Green cites a few examples, but mainly to say that they are few and far between.

Immediately two shows came to my mind because they were the work of friends: Kristin Marting's piece, Obscene, based on a conversation between Larry Flynt and Andrea Dworkin published in Playboy magazine; and a piece by Clay Shirky that consisted of a reading of a Supreme Court case, my memory is telling me it was Bowers v Hardwick, but I’m not at all confident it wasn’t something else, at that tiny storefront theater on Ludlow that I always forget the name of. It doesn’t so much bother me that this work was not mentioned. The work is obscure and a long time ago. Audiences were small in that scene; reviews, if you were lucky enough to get one in the Village Voice or the Times, were small and often dismissive. Probably only a few hundred people saw those shows, even if they loom large in my own career and memory. But it just wasn’t unusual in that world to make theater from found, borrowed, stolen, or appropriated text, often to depict or satirize or comment on current issues, problems, politics. And so much of what we see on Broadway and off these days has its roots in that earlier era of experimental theater. Green’s piece is incomplete without without mentioning the progenitors of the current plays he’s discussing.

There was a political theater movement in the mid-60s called “documentary theater” or “theater of fact,” whose participants made plays using primary sources like court transcripts and news articles, and there’s The Laramie Project, in which a theater company used the text of real interviews with witnesses to dramatize an event, and A Chorus Line for god’s sake, which was adapted from interviews with Broadway dancers about their lives, and the technique goes at least as far back as the Great Depression with the WPA’s Living Newspaper Project, which dramatized current events.

Anyway, thinking about this nudged me to consider a lot of work again that I hadn’t thought about in years, and I remembered a play I wrote in 1984. It never went beyond the page. I wasn’t part of a theater community yet and I still considered myself at that time a visual artist. Though I remember thinking the writing was very good, I lacked the social confidence I would have needed to find or whip up the circumstances, the resources, a venue, people, interest, etc., the conditions of making a production happen.

A lot of the text is taken from, or adapted from, random sources: an episode of Love Boat, gay erotic pulp novels from the 1960s, encyclopedia entries, Shelley’s Frankenstein, overheard conversations. About half of it is original writing, though honestly there are a couple passages I’m not sure whether I wrote or appropriated.

I think this is the only draft I have. The markup is from when I was going to make it a film script. A friend and I were going to make a movie, but never did.