WWJD was written as Anna Lewis’ Master’s thesis in Creative Writing. The following is the eighth and final part of the accompanying essay. Earlier entries are posted here:
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
The End.
***
No. Actually, not really the end at all. So I’ve learned a bit about audience and Jesus in literature, but there is a lack of resolution to this essay that bothers me. About a month ago my husband off-handedly remarked that I was no longer a poet. When I angrily protested, he was surprised, “But you haven’t written a poem this past year! How can you be a poet if you don’t write poetry?” I made him take it back and also clean the bathroom as a punishment, but he has a point. I entered the Master’s program with a collection of poetry—but my thesis is a play.
I love playwriting. I’m proud of this play. But I wrote a play in large part because this was the only medium with which I could actually see the face(s) of my audience. A fictive audience is all well and good, but I am still compelled to see the face. Ong is logically convincing to me…yet sometimes in writing I still feel irresponsible to the other.
I sit down to write a poem, and I see the encouraging but slightly bored faces of my professors. I write a few lines until it occurs to me that I might better spend my time washing the dishes from last
night. But when I hear my play performed before a live audience it is different. It doesn’t matter that I know a single theater audience is not my real audience. I watch them laugh or frown or sigh and for a moment I feel that the fictive plane is nothing and that here we are in our respective theater seats having a face to face conversation. At least I feel this way for an instant until we all leave the theater and our moment of communion is over. Suddenly we are strangers again, and I wonder about the value of that moment. Working with plays involves the audience in a way that my poetry writing does not. A poem requires a writer and a good editor (who can sometimes be the same person). A play requires a playwright, a director, a producer, and actors…not to mention dramaturges, stage crew, make-up crew, ushers, ticket sellers etc. I wrote the play, yes, but it was much more of a community activity than any other type of writing I have ever experienced. In workshopping the play, actors read my lines aloud. This allowed actors to add meaning to my text, transforming me into my own audience. On their side, the actors became both audience and creator. They heard lines written by a separate author, but then made them their own. In some ways, it is the perfect level of creation.
When I sit down to write a play, I have a fictive audience in mind; however, through the process of workshopping and producing a play, my audience interacts with me in an instant and direct way that alters my idea of them. I am still alone when I write, but I can count on my fictive audience to suddenly materialize in the face of an actor or director to give me a face to face reaction to my words. That is satisfying! That is communication! But still, there is a part of me that cannot close this essay.
***
Mostly, I wish I could end this essay with some little anecdote that would show you (my imagined reader) that after a thorough investigation of the problem of audience, my writer self has made peace with my social work self. If I could just recall some nice story where the greater art of literature overshadows the temporal nature of soup kitchens in its ability to reach and sustain the other I could
easily end this essay. The truth is there is no such anecdote. Writing this paper has only heightened my awareness of the problem. This winter, I have spent most of my time in the library, reading and
writing. My last winter as an undergraduate, I spent most of my time in elementary schools interviewing kids and investigating possible incidents of child abuse. It would have been nice if Levinas had explained in his work, not just why we serve the other, but a clear outline of the best way to do that. Even the scriptures, God’s instructions for our lives, don’t clear up this question for me…though it is interesting that they are delivered to me in the form of a text.
Instead I will conclude with two vignettes that keep me up at night, one already mentioned in this paper.
***
After many apologies for the form and style, I finally gave my poem I wrote to my brother Tom. He read it out loud then looked down at me, a bit shocked. He said, “This is not how I would say it, or even think about it. I would not have chosen these words. Good grief, this is not even what happened. You got your facts all wrong. But somehow, it’s absolutely right. I mean, you’ve told it the way I didn’t even know it happened.”
***
One of the girls asked me the following question: “Do you really believe that you will be doing anything as a writer that is more important than what you are doing here?”
WWJD opens TONIGHT, and plays at the Provo Theatre (105 E. 100 N.) March 24-28 and April 8-11
Photo courtesy of Christian Cragun
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