The Douchebag With a Thousand Faces

“What does she look like?”

The question stymied me. I mean, it shouldn’t have – it was innocent enough. A moment ago I’d been nattering on enthusiastically about a character I was developing in one of my scripts, and it wasn’t until the question was put so baldly that I realized I didn’t have the faintest idea what she looked like.

I could, however, hear her voice clearly – her cadence, her tone, her verbal tics. I may not be much of a visual thinker, but I’m obsessive about dialogue. I think this has mostly served me well, as a playwright who works with some fairly expressionistic material. Over the past twenty years, I’ve had the privilege of seeing many of my characters animated by many different bodies, of all shades and shapes.

The joy of show business is that it’s a uniquely collaborative form. Now, when I pick up one of my older scripts, I see many faces.

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In what feels like a lifetime ago, I was director of a mime troupe for a youth theatre. After concluding our last project, I asked them what they wanted to work on next. The two answers were “Norse mythology!” and “Commedia dell’arte!”, with some wit immediately suggesting “Why not both?”

I laughed, and then chewed on it. Why not both? Maybe it was nothing more than a kind of apophenia, but the more that I looked at it, the more it made sense to me. Farcical exploits revolving around an amoral trickster? Larger-than-life characters both immune to harm and incapable of growth? So we improvised, and I spitballed character exercises, and we hammered together some wordless physical comedy.

Years later, when I was setting out on my own and digging through old projects, it stood out as a potentially fruitful premise. For months I pored over the Eddas, scribbling down lyrics and one-liners. And after many more months of blind mailouts, a response to one of my despairing posts to rec.arts.theatre.plays (it was 2003, so think Reddit before Reddit, kids) mentioned the Fringe.

There followed a musical revue, a touring one-act, and many, many open-mics. My point is that this process was, at every step, collaborative. Actors ad-libbed jokes, and I reworked them into the text. Audiences told us what was and what most definitely was not working.

Working on the script again after so much time has felt, oddly, less like rewriting and more like a collaboration with a version of myself that no longer exists. I am, by nearly any definition, a better writer now than I was then. But I know too much – I reject jokes out of hand because of course that won’t work. There’s something a little melancholy about looking back at a giddy new playwright who will throw out gag after gag without hesitation.

This was my journeyman project. While I’d been writing plays for theatres on commission for years, this was the first production over which I had creative control. This was the first space I had to give these voices, and faces, free rein.

It feels appropriate. The script contains in microcosm many of the defining features of what would become Maximum Verbosity: the dense language; deconstruction of a medieval text; the casual mixture of comedy and horror; a keen interest in the problem of evil; an admiration for and dread of the harsh face of moral freedom; plus, y’know, lots of dick and fart jokes. Probably more than I would include now, but, hey, I was twenty, and I’d been writing children’s theatre for years. Cut the kid a break.

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I pick up the script now and I see many faces, and hear many voices. I take pride in the work that I’ve done. I remember the long hours and the fights and frustration. But I also remember that I didn’t do any of it alone.

We live in a world today that I don’t think that younger version of me could have fully conceived of – a world in which everyone has a platform. It’s both wonderful, and horrifying. And I’d say that its existence makes live theatre more precious than ever. Sure, the medium is dying. It was dying then, too. I expect it’ll still be dying twenty years from now, or two hundred years from now. Because if the theatre loves anything, it’s a long fucking death scene.

Taking the words that were once inside my head; hearing and seeing them reinterpreted by so many artists of so many different disciplines; walking into a room full of strangers, and sharing them; I mean, sometimes I have to step back and say, like, what percentage of the population of the planet gets to have this experience?

Thank you for coming tonight, and thank you for listening. I’m an individualist (neither unapologetic nor rugged), and I don’t believe that it’s prudent for me to speak for anybody else. But having the opportunity to share these words with you – heady and hacky, profane or profound - for the past twenty years - has been the honor of my life.