Because the Beautiful Means the Ugly and the Uncomfortable?

November 16, 2007 by Susan Hansell.

Lucky for me that, during the completion of a “terminal” degree near the end of Jack Gelber’s ebullient reign as the head of the playwriting division at CUNY - Brooklyn College, his response, to the response, to my work from most (though not all) of “my” numerous guy-colleagues, (whose own works “seemed” to derive from the hooker-gives-blow-job-to-lead-male-in-the-front-seat-of-a-car “mentality”), was precisely “same old shit” to their whiningly how can she use such language!

Once, in a private tutorial session subsequent to Rollover Othello’s inaugural reading in which the fantasy-writing guys literally jumped out of their chairs in competition to condemn my language, Jack said: “Susan, I’m not saying you’ve written the perfect play, but eliciting a strong reaction isn’t a bad thing; you have to realize that, if what you’re doing on stage is reinforcing what people already feel and think, then you can say ‘fuck your grandmother up the ass with a big fat dildo’ and no body’s going to get upset about anything you’ve written, because essentially, you haven’t said anything they don’t already agree with. The minute you start questioning people’s assumptions about life, and about how life should be lived, then you can’t utter one ‘goddamn’ without people protesting your offensive ‘language’; not because your language bothers them per se, but because the ideas you’ve expressed within your words make the audience uncomfortable; the ‘critics’ thus latch onto those ‘4-letter words’ to avoid you ‘ugly’ ideas.”

Sorry if I’m bastardizing here, Jack: R.I.P. (A/nother tangent: Why is it that The Living Theater, under the ‘history’ page of its website, cites The Connection but not Jack Gelber by name?)

In other words, in other worlds, my work is uglier than a hooker blow job? Okay! Okay to the fears of the teacher who submitted her high school writers’ works to SLM’s inaugural issue, yet would not give the accepted contributors their copies of the issue without filing parental sign-off notices and waiting until school was officially “over” for the year. Had these kids never heretofore heard any such “offensive language”? I guess they never go to the movies! But then, that (following Gelber’s analysis), would be a use of “words” in situations canonical to what we “all” know, and about which “we” all “agree.” Right…

How luckily wonderful to have another conversation with Jack, in which I would ask him if he thought that: The “load” was on me to edit my language down, to try and preclude ideas from being willfully obscured by a “bad language” critique, or if any cutting-off-at-the-pass was even possible, let alone desirable. Maybe he would tell me not to be surprised by the onslaught of continuously unconscious subterfuge. Okay then. Bring it on.

Because I trust that neither Jack nor I would ever suggest a writer uncouple language from its manifest presentation (of ideas) in characterization, action, and outcome/s. And the salience of his/my observation (and experience), with how an audience turns its own discomfort into a distorted discourse on the “ugliness” of the “thing” about which it is uncomfortable, informs my still-developing disappointment, and my continuing willful insouciance, I suppose, regarding how the uncomfortable-issuing literary step-sister gets made into the arty but nonetheless ugly-duckling.

We know how “those” stories end up:  Long live Swan Road!

Stay strong, ugly ducklings: Never let the audience-rejection, or perhaps worse, the no-audience, become the society-wide audience of self-censorship.

So whatever happened to Rollover Othello?

Neal Storrs placed it in Oasis (and lost a subscriber for doing so); the play then got picked out of a stack of unsolicited Samuel French scripts (the artistic director of Love Creek called me and enthused about how the play’s language flew off the page); it was scheduled for a 1998 or 9 production on 42nd Street, then abruptly canceled during rehearsals, ostensibly because the company actress playing the lead refused to say the words in the play, due to…

“Language considerations,” naturally. Oil! Oil? Oil.  Lucky lucky me.

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