PLAYWRIGHTS FOR THE 90S
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The late Diane Arbus once stated, “By aiming for the specific, you arrive at the general.” Although she was speaking of photography, this principle may apply to any art that attempts to capture human experience. When an artist sets out to create a character who is to be something of everything, the end product is usually not much of anything. This is a common flaw in television writing, the goal of which is to reach the largest possible audience: characters are not people so much as signposts marking the presence of a particular social group, and plots resemble panel discussions more than linear narratives. Among many young playwrights this impulse toward generalization is compounded by their propensity to write of their own lives and families. As they try to impose an artificial orderliness on a natural confusion, they make real and familiar persons more and more like harmless fictions. Life is not that simple, of course, and the wise artist eventually comes to realize that at best art can accurately convey only a very small portion of the great messy universe. Ironically, once the artist realizes this and concentrates on the re-creation of a single individual–with one biography, one point of view, one truth–then what sometimes emerges is an icon with which audiences can identify.
In Jenna Zark’s Foreign Bodies, a young woman learns not to fear death (and, by extension, life) by participating in the Orthodox Jewish ritual preparation of the dead for burial. Like her mother before her, she becomes so comfortable with the continuity of death and life (“We wash the bodies for two reasons,” says a longtime member of the Holy Burial Society. “To purify them ritually and to become familiar with that part of life”) that she finally requests cremation for herself rather than a traditional funeral.
The real stars of this show, however, are the playwrights. They don’t provide us with any answers to the riddles that beset us, but they ask the questions in a manner that can be understood universally.
