Playwrights on Their Plays

About a month ago, Old Navy released a children’s sweatshirt with the label “Aspiring Young Artist President.” Being an artist for its own sake is indeed worthwhile, asserted every criticism that proceeded to light up the Internet. What a soul-sucking world we would live in, they continued, if we had no art and no artists.

I could not agree more.

But they forgot one thing: artists can influence what the president does. Forget that. An artist, if they are great, can influence society more than any president or politician would or could.

Don’t believe me? Harriett Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1861 because she was angry about slavery and wanted more white Americans to be appropriately outraged. It worked. Tens of thousands of Americans – the very populations that politicians originally wrote off as apathetic – rose up in fury for the first time. When Abraham Lincoln greeted Stowe in the midst of the Civil War, he bowed down his lanky frame to meet her and said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

This productive strain of social anger, it turns out, has fanned the flame of much of the best art our society has ever seen. In an interview with Arthur Miller, the world-renowned playwright of Death of a Salesman, Charlie Rose asked him what distinguishes a good playwright from a great playwright – one like Tennessee Williams, William Shakespeare and Miller himself. What would they share in common?

“I personally think what the big ones have in common is a fierce moral sensibility,” Miller said. “They are all burning with some anger about the way the world is. The little ones have made peace with it. And the big ones, can’t make any peace.”

If this is indeed the case, then why do so few do-gooders turn to art as a channel? Look no further than the slogan on the Old Navy shirt, which summarizes the unspoken belief about artists curdling in highbrow society. Get off your frivolous ass and do something that actually helps people, it might as well say. Helping people is what do-gooders want to do more than anything else in the world. To change the status quo. If making art does not accomplish that, most of us figured along the way, then perhaps we ought to direct our attention elsewhere.

Some artist reading this right now is probably reeling inside. Of course, you have to love the craft for its own sake. Indeed, the only reward you are entitled to when you write is the love of writing – not the extrinsic rewards. You will not create anything worthwhile or revolutionary unless you love doing it.

During our middle school years, we are all given a choice concerning creative pursuits: either we can start training to become a legend, or bump it down to a side hobby. At the root of this ultimatum is fear. Fear that we will not be productive citizens if we spent time on art. Fear that we will not be successful artists unless we happen to have been born with strange genes that gave us an urge to create since before we could crawl. Many successful artists fit the second description, which is why they only make art out of pure compulsion.

In our J-term class, we had the supreme privilege of Skyping with the contemporary playwrights whose works we spent the prior week reading. One of those playwrights was Dominique Morriseau, the mastermind behind Detroit ’67 and Sunset Baby, highly acclaimed plays about racial injustice and inner city plight. It was a tremendous relief to learn that the primary inspiration for her writing comes from the social issues that fire her up. How does she avoid being ‘preachy’? She writes about the people behind the social issue.

“Politics affect people,” Morriseau explained. “And when you’re writing about people, that always brings in a good story.”

In short, get off your frivolous ass and do something that actually helps people. Make art.