Free Drinks Before Dinner by E. L. Doctorow

Introduction
    This play originated not in an idea or a character or a story, but in a sense of heightened language, a way of talking. It was not until I had the sound of it in my ear that I thought about saying something. The language preceded the intention. It’s possible that the voice the writer discovers may only be the hallucination of his own force of will; nevertheless, the process of making something up is best experienced as fortuitous, unplanned, exploratory. You write to find out what it is you’re writing. Marcel Duchamp was once asked why he gave up painting. “Too much of it is filling in,” he is reported to have said. The worker in any medium had best give it up if he finds himself only filling in what had been previously declared and completed in his mind, a creative fait accompli . Writers live in language, and their seriousness of purpose is not compromised nor their convictions threatened if they acknowledge that the subject of any given work may be a contingency of the song.
    Now, this language of the play, this way of talking, derives from two very odd sources, the prose of Gertrude Stein and Mao Tse-tung. I read a quotation of Mao’s one day from a speech he gave to his officers in the field sometime in the 1930s. And the rhetoric of it was startlingly like Stein. I think now it is probable that anything transliterated from the Chinese sounds like Gertrude Stein, but Iwas set off nevertheless. I reasoned that a style of language common to an American expatriate avant-gardiste who lived in Paris seventy years ago and the political leader of eight hundred million people was worth the writer’s attention.
    I didn’t analyze this language but merely set out to see if I could do it. It is a frankly rhetorical mode that loves repetition, the rhythm of repetition, and at its best finds the unit of sense not in the clause or the sentence, but in the discursion. I have since detected a similar sound in the recorded lectures of Zen masters and in sections of the Old Testament. Once you hear it, it is all around. It’s a spoken language, a flexible language with possibilities of irony and paradox that are as extended as any modernist could wish, but a simplicity to satisfy the most primitive narrative impulse. I quickly and easily wrote four or five thousand words and took the opportunity to deliver them aloud several times in public readings in different parts of the country. I gradually understood I had composed a monologue, that someone was speaking and that he had a lot on his mind. His point of view was so single-minded in fact, and his dissatisfactions so vast, that everything he said could be answered by someone stepping a little bit to one side or the other of where he stood.
    I began to respond to his remarks with the remarks of others. They were soon engaged in dialogue, and to keep things clear I had to give them all names. The one who started everything, the malcontent, I gave the name Edgar. But they were all in the same universe, these people; they were defined by how they spoke, in this heightened language that seemed to ebb and flow and rise and break on itself. The leisure for such language seemed to me to go hand in hand with privilege, Chairman Mao notwithstanding. I had a sense of time that had been bought, accomplishment of the kind our society endorses. So I put them into a dinner party (the habitual means by whichprivileged people wait for the next day), I put drinks in their hands, and I wrote the play.
    Now, what this account says about my dramaturgy may seem to betray a serious flaw of composition. If the sound came first, the words second, and the names third, do we not have here a defective understanding of what theatre is supposed to do? Apart from the fact that I find among playwrights I admire a tendency of all their characters to speak the same way, I suspect so. Especially if we are talking of the American theatre, in which the presentation of the psychologized ego is so