Free 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl

of drama from contemporary successful works, we would deduce a poetics from Cats that eschewed reversal, recognition, and the tragic flaw, in favor of cat makeup, bodysuits, and feline leg warmers. Aristotle made general deductions based on particulars, whereas the particular goodness of every play is particular, rather than a function of its general features. If one surveyed the six most successful plays of the last century, one would have a difficult time generalizing about what features a play ought to have.
    Whatever one feels about Cats (see essay number 60 about whether there is an objective standard of taste), it derives its power from poetry and spectacle, and from the group mind or chorus on stage, rather than from backstories or protagonists or inciting incidents. And in so doing, it makes an end run around contemporary dramaturgical principles such as there must be a main character, and that character must want something.
    One can imagine T. S. Eliot in the afterlife being punished for his sins, watching a DVD of Cats over and over again, projected onto some large cloud. Perhaps he would be moved to revise his dictum that he preferred to give pleasure to the one intelligent person in the audience who understood his intentions and in the afterlife become a man of the people. We cannot say with any certainty. We know only that he would be puzzled by the leg warmers.

 
    65. Can you be avant-garde if you’re dead?; or, the strange case of e. e. cummings and Thornton Wilder
     
    How is it that e. e. cummings and Thornton Wilder, who radically challenged form, were transformed by intellectual opinion into treacly sentimentalists for the masses? Is it because they died? Is it because people liked them? When formal newness becomes populist by sheer dint of its ability to communicate broadly in its new form, why is it prosecuted (and found guilty) after death? Will James Joyce’s Ulysses always and forever be avant-garde because only a certain kind of literary priesthood enjoys it? How to reclaim the dead and enjoyed-by-many and put them back in their proper place as radicals?

 
    66. The American play as audition for other genres
     
    When American playwrights have had some success in pleasing audiences, the next logical step is for them to write for other genres and disappear from the theater (into film, television, or the musical). When novelists have some success in pleasing audiences, the next logical step is for them to write another novel. When poets have some success in writing poems, they go on to write more poems. I have a fervent wish that audiences would rush the next Pulitzer Prize winner in drama and say, Madam. Sir. It is our fervent wish that you will write another one of those talking plays.

 
    67. O’Neill and Picasso
     
    The long trajectories of Picasso and O’Neill were the opposite; Picasso moved from the representational in his early work into the abstract, while O’Neill moved from early abstract experiments ( The Great God Brown ) to the representational at the end of his life ( Long Day’s Journey into Night ). Would it be true to say that many long-lived twentieth-century painters moved from the representational to the abstract and that many long-lived twentieth-century playwrights moved from the abstract to the representational? You are already thinking of exceptions—Beckett, Ionesco—who never wrote a family drama toward the ends of their lives, to be published after their deaths. So let me undo the generalization and ask instead: is it anything like the opposite when a painter moves from the representational to the abstract and a playwright moves from the abstract to the representational?
    When one is faced with an unanswerable question, it is perhaps best to digress. I once wanted to be a portrait painter. I wanted to study the face in general and loved faces in particular. I wanted to commit to memory each line on a face, try to reproduce its exact beauty, and keep it. In the