Dear Mr. Guirgis,
I know you’ll never read this. I’m just a struggling dancer/actor in Miami with a tiny little blog. But I want you to know:
I am a big fan.
You just write with a depth of understanding and nuance of character that… well, I deeply respect. For a literary nerd who had begun to believe she only liked dead authors (with the exception of J.K.Rowling), I’ve found myself avoiding contemporary fiction and literature due to a general disdain for the seemingly self-indulgent, single-mindedness of the majority of contemporary plot lines. Maybe I feel an affinity towards the philosophies I sense in your work: sometimes doing the wrong thing for the right reasons is, well, more honorable than just doing the right thing. It takes a hell of a lot more courage. And it takes a hell of a lot more conviction. And I know I deeply respect the ability to “capture” the varying voices of your characters: no two people talk the same in real life, why should two characters that just happen to be voiced by the same …. person giving them words?
The bottom line is: I want to write like you. I want to be able to write a play with a wide variety of fleshed out and humanized characters, telling one story – sometimes a very famous story – but also telling the story of universal suffering. I want to be able to share a story about seemingly hopeless events, the injustice and inequities of the world, while still lighting a glimmer of hope in the background.
Unfair or not, I feel like the majority of new works I’m exposed to are … always some selfish reflection of the author’s own experiences. “Write what you know,” as they say. And it feels more and more that writers “know” only their own personal experiences (aka ‘screw our canon, screw literary awareness’). While I’m sure your own personal experiences are at the heart of your work, your work stands alone as more than that. MORE. THAN. THAT. Your subject matter says this in and of its own accord.
One of the reasons I’ve always loved Shakespeare is because there has always been SO MUCH GOING ON in it that it’s so much richer than one production, one viewing, one reading of the play can represent. There’s an A story, B stories, C stories and D stories; then there are the themes of universal love, longing, jealousy, revenge… I read something recently saying that playwrights “don’t write for the ages,” they write for their own particular life and town.
I say bullshit.
There are certain things that are universal. Then there are certain things that end up blind to their inherent consequences. Comparing McCarthyism to the events in Salem is universality; things that are written for our own particular life and society are the constant productions of money-seeking media monsters, blind to the potential side effects of their wide distribution (I’m looking at you, Call of Duty, Twilight & 50 Shades of Grey), and they’re, well, incredibly short sighted and relatively ignorant towards the furthering of understanding and empathy of man.
So, thank you for your work. I can’t imagine you’ve made a ton of friends in the religious realm. Then again, maybe you’ve met some open minded individuals who are as grateful for your work as me.
PS – You know, I once tried to get a group of middle school Catholic school students to reenact some of the Easter story one spring, inspired by your play. We had been working on etudes, or structured improvisations, and since I was pretty certain they knew the Easter story, I figured this would be a safe subject. When one girl asked me “isn’t that a sin,” (meaning, representing or potentially changing the story of the bible) I immediately backed off and changed focus as it was clearly not my job, as a parttime theater instructor in a private institution, to open their minds too much (or maybe it was, but that day wasn’t the day to take a stand). But I hope in the future we can reconcile these ideas – it’ll be nice to live in a more understanding and empathetic society; reconciliation with the narrative will be just the beginning.
Erika Diane 