Jules Feiffer, Part 2

 

[This is the second of two Jules Feiffer interviews from The Dramatist, the official journal of the Dramatists Guild of America, the professional organization of playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists.  Like the first interview, posted as Part 1 of the short series on 16 June, this conversation with dramatist, songwriter, journalist, and theater historian Jeffrey Sweet, was dated 1 March 2025 and ran in the Spring 2025 issue (vol. 27, no. 2), under the heading “Tributes.”

[As usual, I recommend reading Part 1, Christopher Durang’s interview with Feiffer, before reading Jeffrey Sweet’s.  There’s a lot of information in the first conversation that crops up again below, and there’s also some commentary from me that I won’t repeat here.

[And a word or two about the editing—not mine, but The Dramatist’s: the editor(s) have made a fair number of insertions here for some reason, and they’re marked with brackets.  But, then, so are mine—and you may not be able to distinguish them.  Sorry about that, but I don’t know a way around that.] 

“THE NEXT PART OF THE PUZZLE:
JULES FEIFFER INTERVIEWED BY JEFFREY SWEET”
by Jules Feiffer and Jeffrey Sweet 

The following interview, conducted in 2014, is excerpted from Jeffrey Sweet’s What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing (Yale University Press [2017]).

FEIFFER: The only class I taught in playwriting was [at Yale]. [Robert] Brustein called me up and he said, “Jerzy Kosinski was supposed to teach a class in playwriting and Jerzy tells me he’s going blind and he can’t teach. We have to find a replacement. You and I have talked about you teaching. Will you take over the class?” And I started laughing about Jerzy Kosinski going blind; I didn’t believe a word of it. I can’t remember if it was known by that time that he hadn’t written his books, but I don’t think it was out yet. He was somebody I knew and been entertained by and I liked him enormously. But I almost never believed a word out of his mouth. And so I didn’t take his going blind seriously. But I thought, “My friends are always telling me I should teach, and so why not try.” 

[Brustein (1927-2023) was then the dean of the Yale School of Drama and the artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre. In 1979, he left Yale after 13 years and established the American Repertory Theater (ART) at Harvard University. Feiffer taught a playwriting class at Yale in 1973-74, despite having no formal training. (He attended the Pratt Institute, an art and design college based in Brooklyn, and the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan.) He drew upon his own experience and improvisation to help his students.

[Kosinski (1933-91), a best-selling Polish-Jewish novelist who had survived the Holocaust, allegedly produced some of his books through a combination of plagiarism and ghost writers. There is no concrete evidence to confirm that, in conjunction with the health issues he faced near the end of his life, Kosinski was going blind before his death by suicide. (nb: These remarks were originally footnotes, which except for one recent post, I don’t use on Rick On Theater. I’ve amended the notes slightly. ~Rick)]

I asked for [plays by the students] in advance to see some of their work and figure out what to do. And one of them was this kid named [Christopher] Durang [1949-2024; see the interview in Part 1]. He sent me a play called Titanic. And I thought, “What the fuck do I teach him?” And there was also a kid named [Albert] Innaurato [1947-2017] and so on. Just an amazing group of young people. But Chris was the one I fell in love with, more than any other. And something I said in class about Titanic he put in a play collection. He quoted me: “A prepubescent temper tantrum.” 

[Durang’s Titanic should not be confused for the 1997 Broadway musical of the same title, with which it has no connection aside from the title and setting (i.e., the ill-fated ship). Durang’s play is a one-act described as an “outrageous tale of sex and seduction aboard the titular ship” in The Facts on File Companion to American Drama (Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig, eds.; Infobase Publishing, 2010).

[Titanic was presented in a workshop at New York City’s American Place Theatre in 1973 and was then performed at the Yale Experimental Theatre at YSD (now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University) in May 1974. It had its professional première at the Off-Off-Broadway Direct Theatre in New York City’s Theatre District in February 1976 and then transferred Off-Broadway to the Vandam Theater (in SoHo) from 10 to 16 May 1976.]

SWEET: When you came to the class, did you have any theories about how to teach playwriting? You didn’t go through formal training yourself. 

FEIFFER: Not ‘til this minute. 

SWEET: But obviously you figured out a course of study for yourself somewhere along the line? Or is that too formal a phrase for it?

FEIFFER: Yes. What course, what study? 

SWEET: The first time your work was put onstage was as a special project in 1961 in Chicago by Second City [improvisational comedy troupe initially founded in Chicago in 1959].

FEIFFER: What made Second City such a natural for me to fall in love with and work with was that I had always improvised on paper. My basic thought process to this moment is making it all up as I go along. After it’s made up, I then start organizing it and try to give it form if the form has not emerged. Often, the form will take care of itself. If you’ve got the right story to tell, the form invents itself as you’re doing it without thinking about the form. But I’ve always been an improviser, you know, without even thinking that that’s what I was doing. 

[Second City director] Paul Sills [1927-2008; director and teacher of improvisational techniques, applying the techniques of his mother, Viola Spolin (1906-94), author of the first book on improvisation techniques, Improvisation for the Theater (Northwestern University Press, 1963)] wanted to put on the cartoons, and that became the show called The Explainers [1960], which later became Feiffer’s People [1969]. The second act included longer pieces like “Passionella” [1957] and “George’s Moon” [1962]. I thought Paul was a wonderful director for Second City—traffic guiding these guys. But for cartoon characters that were written on paper, he had very little to add or seemed to want to add. Mike [Nichols] [1931-2014] came out to see it and said he wanted to bring it to New York, but he wanted to do another version of it. I happily handed the whole thing over to him to do whatever he wanted. Mike was directing for the first time. Lewis Allen [1905-2000] was the producer. He put up the money to try it out at the Hunterdon Hills Playhouse [Clinton, New Jersey, July 1962; summer stock revue] and to bring it to New York [according to Sondheim, it didn’t get there]. Mike got Steve Sondheim [1930-2021] to write some songs for “Passionella” that were going to be part of the show. Steve had not yet done A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum [first try-out, New Haven, Connecticut: March 1962]. He wrote a couple of songs that were just extraordinary. And Mike put together a company of actors; some of them were wonderful, some of them were so-so, but mostly they were good. Ronny Graham [1919-99] and Dorothy Loudon [1925-2003]. Dorothy Loudon was so brilliant in everything that she did. She was loud, she was noisy, she was funny. I loved her. 

I was getting an education. At Second City, I understood these cartoons don’t belong on stage because they’re cartoons and they have no life. In rehearsal, what we were now calling The World of Jules Feiffer, I thought this is great stuff, but I don’t belong on the same bill with Mike and Steve. They’re too good for this. Everything they’re doing seemed to be upgrading material that was not up to their own level. I didn’t feel that I belonged in that room. I felt embarrassed. I didn’t want my first play on Broadway to be carried by Nichols and Sondheim. If I was going to write for the theatre, I wanted to be a legitimate playwright, and not to become a hit because of the favors of my friends.

SWEET: But along the way you did learn.

FEIFFER: For me it all comes out of having something to say. Politics and my anger. And my determination to say something about America that wasn’t being said. All that starts with—not the need to be funny or to write a play—but a need to blow everything up. “Look, you fuckers, don’t you know what’s going on out here? Pay attention!” And figuring out a theatrical or fictional way of saying it and inventing characters to go along with it, who then would take off in their own directions. I knew that if I expressed my rage and anger as much as I felt, there’d be no audience. I had to learn sleight-of-hand. Pretend that this was pure entertainment, and make it very funny, but deliver this impassioned, anti-authoritarian, anti-military argument. [See Part 1 for some coverage of this topic.]

I first started thinking playwriting in terms of TV writing, because of Paddy Chayefsky [1923-81] and his kitchen sink dramas [e.g.: teleplays – Marty, 1953; The Bachelor Party, 1953]. Paddy was a friend.

SWEET: And he went through a kind of metamorphosis into a satiric vein himself after the kitchen sink stuff.

FEIFFER: And for all I know I might have been an influence on that. He was in a rage, but he was always in a rage about everything, and it showed. 

SWEET: You were talking about the starting point for your plays is some kind of rage that you have to transform into a form.

FEIFFER: By the time I was 50, the rage had somewhat dissipated, but it took all that time. [See discussion of Feiffer’s Grown Ups in Part 1 for some insight on this.]

SWEET: Was there a moment when you said, “Oh, I know how to do this”?

FEIFFER: At the end of the first day’s work on Little Murders, I knew I could do this. I had never known it before, but I did the first day’s work. I was having such a good time, and I knew I could make the characters do pretty much any goddamn thing I wanted to, and I didn’t suffer over it, and I had an easy time, a fun time, writing it. I thought, “I’m a playwright.” Now, the two or almost three years to write my novel, Harry, the Rat with Women, I never for a moment thought I was a novelist. The more I worked on it, the more I realized that I was just determined to get it done, but I was not a novelist. 

SWEET: Did that lead you to think about the differences between writing novels and plays? Why one was a good fit and the other wasn’t?

FEIFFER: This is odd for somebody who does what I had always done for a living. I’ve never been very observant. I don’t see things. I see people and expressions and how they move and how they sit, and I can draw any person in any pose that they get into from my imagination. I don’t need anybody posing for me. But I don’t know what this table looks like. I don’t know what this house I live in looks like. I don’t see inanimate objects. Until [I wrote my graphic novel], Kill My Mother [Liveright Publishing, 2014], I never drew a car in my life. I could not draw cars. The first airplane I’ve ever drawn is in that book, and I had to Google “airplanes.” All the backgrounds that are rich in that book were things I didn’t know how to draw. I just don’t see these things.

I love the naturalist writers. I love the evocative writers. [Leo] Tolstoy [Russian; 1828-1910] when he writes about nature. [John] Steinbeck [1902-68] writes about scorpions crawling across the railroad and the names of trees. The only way I can name a tree is to make up the name for it, because I don’t know what any of those trees are. I don’t know the name for anything in nature. A novelist has to have that, some minimum level of equipment, where he knows what’s around him. And I don’t. 

But what I do know is how people talk. What’s always interested me, and [what] remained one of the mainstays of my comic strip, was people speaking in code. How you say one thing when you mean another. That’s basically what my work has always been about. That helping to decipher the codes in which, from childhood on, we are taught exist, and yet when you expose the code everybody denies that there is one. 

SWEET: Someone talking about acting would call that subtext.

FEIFFER: Of course, there’s subtext when a good actor goes to work with a good director. The [Mike] Nichols production of Angels in America for TV [HBO miniseries, 2003]. Al Pacino [b. 1940], who plays Roy Cohn [1927-86; lawyer and prosecutor; chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-57; U.S. Senator from Wisconsin: 1947-57)], listening to this kid who is worried about his marriage. Pacino/Roy is very sympathetic and very close to him and trying to be very helpful and fatherly, and you can see him making the moves on him, just very subtly, nothing sexy, but a touch here and touch there. I sat there and I held my breath. I could not believe what he was doing, because it was so gorgeous, and it was so clear. That to me is subtext at its finest.

But [what I’m talking about is] beyond subtext. It’s telling us what really is true as opposed to what appears to be happening. Now sometimes that involves subtext, other times not. 

What I loved about playwriting was—up ’til then I had to figure out how to do all that stuff in six panels or eight panels. How far can you go [in that space]? You couldn’t expose [code] in a real relationship, with two people or three people talking. That requires a scene which a comic strip isn’t going to allow you (unless it’s a graphic novel which wasn’t being done at the time and I wouldn’t have been interested in at that time). But the chance to create for myself, theatrically, the equivalent of what I saw onstage in [Eugene] O'Neill [1888-1953] and in [Arthur] Miller [1915-2005] in Death of a Salesman [1949], the Biff-Willy [Willy Loman is the lead character in Salesman; Biff is his elder son, 34] confrontation scene—where] you slowly reveal—or a character comes to reveal—a truth. The difference between Miller and me that I’ve discovered over the years is that he thought, as in the Biff-Willy scene, that you arrive at the climax and you know what the truth is. And I decided years later that you never know what the truth is, and the characters never know what the truth is. Because if you do a confrontation scene, which is supposed to lead to a climax, which was act three in those years. But in life, act three is followed by act four, act five, act six. . . [.] That confrontation is followed by other confrontations. There is no such thing as discovering the truth. It’s all the facets, all the different angles.

SWEET: And participants have their own version of what happened, and they were both right.

FEIFFER: Someone may be more right than the other, or the playwright may favor one of the people, but you have to give everyone his argument. [Except, what] Arthur would do—there’s always the lawyer character or the architect—some middle class guy with a degree that Miller never got—and you know that’s the good guy. What I determined, from the beginning, was that there weren’t going to be good guys. Nobody was going to represent my point of view. My point of view would be in everybody. All the characters, together, if I do the job right. If there’s an argument to be made here, the argument comes in putting together all the contradictory things that everybody says, as opposed to one single character speaking the truth and a light bulb flashing.

SWEET: Your cartoon work consistently depicted the corruption of logic. Frequently you have somebody start off with a statement and then there’s a modification to the statement so that in the last panel they’re saying exactly the opposite of what the first statement was. This carried over into your play The White House Murder Case [Circle in the Square Theatre, 1970], which of course came out before Watergate [political scandal of the Nixon reelection campaign and administration. 1972-74].

FEIFFER: Yes.

SWEET: Which is essentially Watergate but that people in your play spoke better than [Richard M.] Nixon [1913-94; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74; resignation, 9 August 1974] and his gang did.

FEIFFER: Well, [in that play] I had a liberal president. Not Nixon, but a good guy who wanted to do what was best. His wife gets murdered, and by the end the “best thing” to do is cover up his wife’s murder in the White House because otherwise he would not get re-elected and those other guys who were a lot worse would be in charge of the country. So, your own wife is murdered and you end up participating in the cover-up. What mattered was policy. And what really mattered was their retention of power. Basically that’s all that counted. 

SWEET: I always wanted somebody to run that in rep with my favorite underestimated [William] Shakespeare [1564-1616], King John [believed to have been written around 1594-96; published, 1623], which predicts Richard Nixon.

FEIFFER: [A] Broadway producer called me up at the time of [the] Gore-Bush [election]. He wanted to put that play on just before the election. So we had a reading of the play. And he got a wonderful cast including Alan Alda [b. 1936] and Tony Roberts [1939-2025] and invited an audience that was made up of potential backers. It played like gangbusters. It was incredible. Alan was wonderful, everybody was wonderful. And we all went out afterwards to celebrate and drink. And then it became clear that the backers didn’t want anything to do with it. No reason was given, but clearly it scared the shit out of them. This was some 25 years after the play’s premiere, and it was still too hot. There was a message in there that was still too hot for Broadway.

[Gore-Bush (2000 U.S. presidential election): Incumbent Vice President Al Gore (b. 1948; 45th Vice President of the United States: 1993-2001) was the Democratic nominee running against George W. Bush (b. 1946; Governor of Texas: 1995-2000) as the Republican nominee. Their running mates for Vice President were, respectively, Joe Lieberman (1942-2024; Senator from Connecticut: 1989-2013) and Dick Cheney (b. 1941; Secretary of Defense: 1989-93). Considered one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history, with long-standing controversy about the result.

[On election night, 7 November 2000, Florida’s electoral tally showed that Bush had won by such a close margin that state law required a recount, so it wasn’t clear who’d won the presidency. After a series of legal battles, a highly controversial 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore ended the recount with Bush winning Florida. This resulted in a major post-election controversy which was only concluded when, in a televised address on 13 December, Gore publicly conceded the election to Bush following the SCOTUS decision.

[Gore emphasized that while he disagreed with the Court’s decision, he accepted the finality of the outcome and urged his supporters to unite behind the next president. While the election conclusion led to some questioning Bush’s legitimacy, Gore’s concession helped to solidify the outcome and promote a peaceful transition of power. Bush and Cheney went on to be reelected narrowly—though less so than in 2000—in 2004 for a second term.]

SWEET: I imagine that you know that there are certain plays that are related to certain periods in your time, and certain experiences, and certain plays that you wrote earlier that if you wrote them now, you would write them differently because you’re a different writer.

FEIFFER: I’m a different human. There was a celebration of Mike [Nichols] at MOMA [Mike Nichols, Museum of Modern Art in New York City, 14 April-1 May 2009], and after they screened Carnal Knowledge [1971], I said to him, “I wouldn’t know how to write that anymore.” And he said, “I wouldn’t know how to direct it.”

SWEET: You seem to be one of the few people who is able to start from theme and make a persuasive play. I find usually when people start from theme, some life goes out of the play.

FEIFFER: I’ve always thought that, too. I thought White House would be my last theme play. I loved writing White House and Little Murders, but I thought, “I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to start with the characters and have the characters tell me what the play is about. And not really be all that sure where I’m going until the characters lead me there.” So pretty much, that’s what I’ve done since.

It was perhaps beginning with Carnal Knowledge that I was thinking [for] the first time of not leaving any fingerprints. I didn’t want to sound like playwriting or dialogue. And I remember years later I stopped in to see the movie, after not seeing it for years. Watching one of the college campus scenes, I sat there thinking, “They’re making this up, I didn’t write this.” And it thrilled me, because there’s not a thing they said that I hadn’t written. But it sounded improvised to me. And I loved that, I loved that. I love it coming out of the characters and not out of the writer.

I swore after Elliott Loves [sic: see note below] that I would never do another play. I said to Mike during rehearsals of Elliott, “This is the best I have in me. if this doesn’t work, I’m out of the business.” (And he said, “Me, too.” And I knew he was lying.) But if all this work that I did out of pure love was going to continue to be critically rejected, I was no longer making money that could allow me to be a playwright by avocation. With young children in my life, I needed to find ways of making money. At one point I could get a movie a year, to write a screenplay which they never made, and that would give me a couple of hundred thousand dollars and that would be fine. But that stopped happening when they caught on to me. For two or three months, I’d write something that I actually liked but I knew they wouldn’t make it and they never did. 

[The Dramatist’s spelling of the title of this play is incorrect: it’s Elliot Loves (with one t). The press of the time used both spellings; in at least one instance, in the same article. (I read one article in which it was spelled “Elliott” in the headline and immediately below, it was spelled “Elliot” in the column’s first sentence.) The clincher, however, is the show’s poster, which clearly says it’s Elliot Loves. (nb: I have not corrected the error in the transcription here.)

[The première was at the Goodman Theatre Studio, Chicago, on 23 April-13 May 1990. It débuted in New York at the Promenade Theatre on the Upper West Side on 7 June-15 July 1990.  Mike Nichols directed both productions.]

SWEET: You must have had a strong sense of the difference between writing for film and writing for stage. 

FEIFFER: Yes. Writing for stage is for yourself and writing for film is for money. Only with Nichols did it really work [for me in film]. Because he and I were working so closely together, and I knew that he was totally on my side.

SWEET: And he also had the power to exercise on behalf of the script.

FEIFFER: I knew also that when he found something wrong with something, it wasn’t because it was Hollywood bullshit. Even when I disagreed with him, I had to seriously consider what he was saying. Playwriting was always fun. Screenwriting became fun as a secondary enterprise. But, other than Carnal Knowledge, I never took it that seriously. It was mainly for the payday. Then I would try to get involved and I would try to do work that I thought would make a good movie. But I understood that I wouldn’t be doing this at all if I wasn’t getting a lot of money for it to pay the rent.

SWEET: One of the things that I’ve been bringing up is the contrast between American and British playwrights. In England they are often allowed to tell big stories. We in America are not allowed to tell big stories anymore. John Guare [b. 1938] had that one huge play at Lincoln Center, Free Man of Color [Vivian Beaumont Theater, 18 November 2010-9 January 2011; cast of 26]. And the other exception is Robert Schenkkan [b. 1953] and All the Way [Neil Simon Theatre (on Broadway), 6 March-29 June 2014; cast of 20]. It surprised everybody by actually breaking even and making a couple of bucks. But American playwrights think we can’t do more than ten people or we’ll never get it on.

FEIFFER: Ten people is a mob! Jesus Christ! Four or five at the tops.

SWEET: One of the reasons nobody revives Sidney Kingsley [1906-95] is today you can’t afford to have 35 people on stage. You can’t hire an actor to come on and do five lines.

FEIFFER: I liked Kingsley. I liked Detective Story [Hudson Theatre and Broadhurst Theatre, 23 March 1949-12 August 1950; cast of 34].

SWEET: Detective Story is a hell of a play. It may be old fashioned but once you give in to it . . . it takes you to the end.

FEIFFER: Those old guys were terrific. When I first came on the Dramatists Guild Council, these guys were on the Council with me. Marc Connelly [1890-1980], was a sweetheart. He was deafer than I am now, and he was the warmest and most ingratiating. As deaf as he was, I’d see him at off-Broadway plays in the front row thinking he could hear. There I was, a little Jewish cartoonist pretending to be a playwright and I was on the Council with Connelly and Kingsley and Paddy Chayefsky. How’d that ever happen? I could not believe it. I could not believe I was in the company of these extraordinary people.

SWEET: Back to teaching at Yale . . . [.] When you were working with young Chris Durang, aside from encouraging him and telling him he wasn’t deluded and that he was doing something valuable . . .

FEIFFER: I didn’t know how to teach at all. I didn’t go to college. But I had them bring in their plays, I cast the plays among the students, we read the plays, and we sat around and talked about what worked and what didn’t work and what could have been strengthened, where the story went. [I would read the plays we were going to talk about] on the train up to New Haven. To figure out how I was going to be smart about them and what I would have to say. And also, I’d have an essay point or two in my mind to make in relation to the play and theatre in general. While we had these plays to talk about, that went very well. There was some good stuff being done. 

[The practice Feiffer describes above for his ’70s Yale playwriting class sounds very much like the way George Pierce Baker (1866-1935) worked in his famous 47 Workshop at Harvard in the 1900s.  See my friend Kirk Woodward’s discussion of this program, the first such course in a U.S. university, in “Shakespeare's Development as a Dramatist (Part 1)” (27 February 2025) and “Part 2” (2 March 2025).]

And then we ran out of plays. And [then] there was a lot of complaining going on about the School and the way they were being treated. And there was a lot to complain about. To get a play on, you had to find a director in the director program to do the play. Or you would not get a play on. And I thought that was outrageous. I thought that was inexcusable.

SWEET: So the directors were deciding what did and didn’t get on.

FEIFFER: I heard enough of this and finally I went to Howard Stein [1922-2012; supervisor of the Playwriting Program at Yale; playwright, essayist, and editor], who was running things while Brustein was in London, and I said to him, “This is bullshit. These guys are here to see their work done and the only way they can learn is to see their work on stage.” And he said, “No, they are going to have to work in the professional theatre and this is a way of teaching them about the real world . . . [.]” Howard, who never had a job outside of the academy in his life, was telling me, who had never worked in the academy, what the real world was like, and he had not a clue. I lost all respect for the whole operation. 

SWEET: So you did it one year?

FEIFFER: One semester. 

And in addition, because I was too busy being their friend, I couldn’t get these guys to write assignments.

They would bring in nothing. Because I was too busy being their buddy, I didn’t have the wherewithal to lay down the law and say: either get this in by next week or you guys are flunking. The next time I taught, which was at Northwestern [University; Evanston, Illinois], I thought, “How do I do this differently?” And the first thing was: don’t be their friend. I’m their teacher, not their friend. That means I can be a nice guy and I can be helpful when I can, but I can’t be good old Jules. Because they will take advantage of it just as your children take advantage. That was an important lesson to learn. Be as helpful as you know how to be, be as friendly as you know how to be, but make it clear: this is what you do, and if you don’t do it, you have no business being in this class.

SWEET: What was the official title of the Northwestern class?

FEIFFER: It was a humor writing class, which involved them writing a one-act play, just as I do now at Stony Brook Southampton [a campus of Stony Brook University in Southampton, Long Island, New York; part of the State University of New York (SUNY)]. At the end of the semester, I have them write a one act play, but up until then I have humor pieces, which are based on whatever idea I come up with. I want them to get outside the voice they normally wrote in. [A voice] is a good thing to have, but it also becomes a trap because you think it’s the only way you know how to write or can write. You become secure in that, and therefore, instead of it being an advantage, it can easily become a disadvantage because it leaves you terrified of doing anything else. 

So, the first thing I have them do, because it’s humor writing and humor is often about victimization . . . [.] Somebody has done something you take great umbrage at—not anything major—but you are very pissed off about it. Write about that, either in the first or third person, but write about that. And then we read it in class and talk about it. And I say, “For the next assignment, you’re the other person. And you write from the point of view of the person who did something to you.” It turns them topsyturvy and they have to have another argument and another voice, and they have to start thinking in a different way.

SWEET: Can you talk about specific responses that interested you?

FEIFFER: The students I used to have in the first six or seven years of the class [in Southampton] were often the beaten-up dregs of society who had gone into self-exile in Southampton. They were broken by drugs or marriage or divorce, some had been in jail, and they all had stories. And they all had a level of motivation and determination about them. But they all had stories. And I helped them tell their stories and put perspective on their stories by giving them humor. I really felt as if I was making a contribution. I really felt as I never felt doing a comic strip. Readers [would say] “how much you’ve helped me” and I never believed any of it. But I could see the results here. I could see the difference in how somebody wrote in a month or so, and it had to do with what I was doing. I thought, “For one of the few times in my life, I’m doing some good here.” And I loved it. 

But after a while the students became more the middle class: nice twenty-year-olds from middle class homes who had gone to NYU [New York University] or the New School [university in New York’s Greenwich Village; formerly the New School for Social Research] or Columbia [University[ or Hunter [College; part of the City University of New York (CUNY)], hadn’t had that much happen to them, and who didn’t have stories, and weren’t that interesting. And I couldn’t alter that much, and I ended up not caring that much about them. So that’s why I stopped after this year doing that class and starting a graphic novel class. We’ll see how that goes.

[Feiffer doesn’t say when this change occurred, but he seems to have started at Southampton in 1997, when the school was part of Long Island University.  In 2006, a year after LIU had closed the campus, it was purchased by the State University of New York, which served a different segment of the population, both national and statewide.  (LIU’s student body comes largely from the New York metropolitan area, including New York City and Long Island. One of its two main campuses, the original college, is in Brooklyn, which is at the western end of Long Island; the other is in Brookville, Long Island, in Nassau County.)  I wonder if this was partly responsible for the shift in student type Feiffer was seeing in his classes.]

Being a writer comes out of need. I need to write. I need to write because I need to put things down because I need, even if I don’t understand what it is, to say whatever it is that’s making me do this. Or I need to paint, or [make other] art. I need to get this out of me. I’m not even sure what it is I’ve got to get out. In those early students, I found that need. In the later ones, it’s more an exercise in a writing class would be run [sic; ‘fun’?], let’s see what it’s like.

I had one 55-year-old Irish woman from Queens in the class who was the oldest one there, who had a checkered family background. She was writing everything from what she knew. She could be very funny and very crazy and overwrought, and she was a pain in the ass. She’d get mad at me and she and I would get into fights in front of the class. But she was a real writer and she had things that she had to get out. And I loved her. She was wonderful.

[The New York City borough of Queens (also a county with the same name) is on Long Island between Brooklyn (Kings County) and Nassau County. Both Southampton and Stony Brook are in Suffolk County, the easternmost division of Long Island.]

Look, anybody with a brain knows, “There’s so much that I don’t know, that I have to figure out.” If you’re an artist, you’re obsessed with finding a way through, not to the answer—although you may fool yourself into thinking that there is one—but to something that completes the puzzle a little bit. At least enough to stop haunting you for a couple of minutes before you go on to the next part of the puzzle. And that’s what artists do. That’s what painters do. That’s what composers do. That’s what writers do. And if there’s not that need to do that, I don’t know why you’re doing it. 

[Jules Feiffer (1929-2025) was a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, and once the most widely-read satirist in the country.  The author of over 35 books, plays, and screenplays, Feiffer established his career in the 1950s as a staff cartoonist for The Village Voice.  His wit and diversity of talent earned him an Academy Award for his animated short film Munro (1961), the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, a place in the Comic Book Hall of Fame, and the Dramatists Guild’s own Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.  He joined the Dramatists Guild in 1966 and was elected to the Guild’s Council in 1970.

[Jeffrey Sweet was a resident writer at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater, where they produced more than a dozen of his plays, winning Chicago’s Jeff Award, two Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Awards (American Theatre Critics Association), and the Audelco Award.  Jeff directed his play The Value of Names in London (Hint of Lime Productions in association with ANDTheatre Company, White Bear Theatre, 11 February-1 March 2025), and his play A Change of Position débuted at New Jersey Rep (New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, New Jersey; 11 December 2023). His book The Dramatist’s Toolkit (Heinemann, 1993) is in use as a text in a number of playwriting programs.]

Shakespeare REMIX

[My friend Erin Woodward, who teaches theater in the New York City public schools, has been engaged in an after-school program called Shakespeare REMIX for several years.  I’ve seen a couple of the program’s performances from her school and I find it a fascinating and innovative effort in arts education—or rather, the use of the arts, in this case theater, as a teaching paradigm—not to teach theater precisely, but to teach . . . well, intellectual curiosity and inquiry.  I hope you’ll see what I mean by that somewhat cryptic characterization.  In any case, when I saw the first REMIX performance last year, I knew I had to blog on the program.  Now, here’s my effort to that end.]

In 2001, a group of theater professionals, some teaching artists, others working theater pros (including actors, directors, managers, and playwrights), launched the Epic Theatre Center.  (In 2007, the company changed its name to Epic Theatre Ensemble to “reflect Epic’s identity as a collective of actors, writers, directors, educators and activists who share a passion for utilizing the theatre to empower voices, foster dialogue, inspire self-exploration and spur social change.”  Neither name seems to be related to the Brechtian concept of Epic Theater, however.)  Among this founding collective were some of the company’s current leaders: Executive Director Ron Russell, a director, and Artistic Director Melissa Friedman and Associate Artistic Director James Wallert, both actors.  Their thrust from the start was to forge links between schools and students on the one side and performing artists and the professional stage on the other.  The company focused its efforts on integrating youth development, the training of citizen-artists, and the production of politically-oriented plays (both new and from the classic repertoire).  In 2005, Epic Theatre was instrumental in founding the Bronx High School for Writing and Communication Arts (BHSWCA), a New York City public school on the Evander Childs Educational Campus on East Gun Hill Road in Williamsbridge with a unique writing curriculum into which the arts are integrated.  

That same year, Epic commissioned No Child . . . from Nilaja Sun, an actor and teacher in the New York City system since 1998.  No Chid . . . is based on Sun’s experiences teaching theater over eight years in New York City public schools, composited into the fictional Malcolm X High School in the play.  A one-actor play with a title derived from the controversial George W. Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, No Child . . ., described by in the New York Times as “a lightning-paced, multi-character solo play in the style of John Leguizamo,” was presented in 2006 at the Barrow Street Theatre in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village with Nijala as a version of herself (named Miss Sun).  The play received good reviews and won the 2007 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, the Outer Critics’ John Gassner Playwriting Award, the Theatre World Award, the Obie Award for Performance, and a nomination for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance.  In essence, No Child . . ., though based on Sun’s experiences teaching and directing theater in the schools predating Epic’s founding, is a portrait of the troupe’s philosophy and practices, especially the program it calls Shakespeare REMIX.

In its first half dozen years, Epic Theatre launched such programs as the yearly young people’s Summer Intensive which evolved into the Epic NEXT Arts Leadership Program, the Shakespeare REMIX after-school program, and the five-week Youth Theatre Festival (Epic YTF) which presents performances from Epic NEXT, Heather Raffo’s Places of Pilgrimage residencies, and Shakespeare REMIX.  In 2011, Russell became Executive Director of Epic, Friedman was named Artistic Director, and Wallert assumed his role as Associate Artistic Director.  The company’s mission, in their own words, “is to create bold work with and for diverse communities that promotes vital discourse and social change.”  This they accomplish by encouraging students to be “creative and engaged citizens,” putting forward powerful ideas that challenge people’s thinking, and fostering collaborations among artists, students, and opinion-makers to produce plays about important issues of our time, such as their 2010 New York première of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play.  “Because theatre has a JOB in this world,” insists Russell of the troupe’s purpose.  “It is not an entertainment.  It is an incredibly powerful tool for social change.  For awakening, particularly in young people, a thirst for rigor, and self-expression, and courage, the courage of speaking with truth and clarity in front of an audience . . . .” 

One student in an Epic program declared, “Epic pushes us to be citizen artists rather than just artists—artists that have something to say about their country, their community.”  Another, now a college student, said that “the most important thing I took away from the program was political awareness,” and added,

I’m 99 percent sure that if Epic had not come to my school I would not have been anywhere near as involved in any of the social or political issues that I am now.  I definitely would not be at a liberal arts college.  I wouldn’t be here.

Other student performers spoke of increased self-confidence born of the work with Epic, the ability to be self-assertive, particularly when confronted with teasing or bullying over perceived differences. 

In 2003, Epic launched its after-school youth-development program Shakespeare REMIX at Chelsea Career & Technical Education High School in lower Manhattan (just west of SoHo).  Epic co-founder Melissa Friedman, a teaching artist with Theatre for a New Audience and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, had been working at Chelsea with Robert Mitchell, veteran English Language Arts (ELA) teacher and Coordinator of Student Activities at the school.  Mitchell, now the vice principal of Chelsea CTE, expressed interest in doing an after-school Shakespeare program. (Chelsea CTE is where Erin Woodward teaches theater.  She’s contributed to Rick On Theater—Erin’s the author of “The Cheapening of the Standing O,” posted on 8 February 2015—and her father, Kirk, is a frequent guest-blogger on ROT, including “Thoughts On Rehearsals,” his last contribution on 26 December.) 

REMIX grew to include three New York City public high schools in Lower Manhattan (Chelsea CTE), Harlem (Urban Assembly School for the Performing Arts), and the Bronx (BHSWCA). (The program briefly expanded to four city schools with the addition of the Frances Perkins Academy at Automotive High School in Brooklyn, but currently operates in only the original three.)  The program takes its name from the recording industry where a “remix” is a piece of music which has been changed from its original form by adding, removing, or altering elements—or any combination of these processes—to create something new.  Any work of art—a song, a painting, a book, a video, or a photograph, say—can be remixed.  

In Epic’s Shakespeare REMIX, teams of actor-mentors work with the students (about 200 in all Epic partner schools) for four afternoons a week over a three-month period.  They discuss the chosen play’s social and political issues fully, analyze Shakespeare’s text, and then intertwine their own writing into Shakespeare’s original dialogue.  In the words of an Epic promotion statement, “Students remix the meaning of an original Shakespeare piece with the help of a professional artistic mentor to push their thoughts far beyond measures they have imagined.  A bridge is created in between the time of the plays and their time once they’re able to recreate an original piece and make it their own. At the festival each borough presents their remixed piece which provides the youth with a captivating experience that can encourage them to get deeper in touch with their theatrical side.”

The final remixed scripts, Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., an Epic actor who’s appeared in several REMIX productions, estimates, usually contain about 10 to 20% student writing, leaving the rest as Shakespeare composed it.  “The students are using rigorous research and text analysis, combined with their native earnestness, empathy, thoughtfulness, and insightfulness . . .,” Epic Executive Director Russell declares, “to sculpt a truly original vision of theatre that will be impactful on their community.”  The program culminates in fully produced plays with students performing alongside professional theater artists.

“The rhythm of Shakespeare’s text is the hook,” says Friedman, Epic’s Director of Education, “and the students connect it with some of the kinds of poetry that they like, like rap and spoken word.  It’s the way into his plays, and they really respond to it.”  As if to illustrate Friedman’s assertion, a 16-year-old REMIX student actor, who’d never encountered Shakespeare’s plays before he worked on Much Ado About Nothing in 2012, confessed, “It just blew my mind.  You go through and find the metaphors and entendres.  Reading it was pretty cool, but when we started to stage it, you saw how much he wrote for actors.  There was just so much freedom.”

Student actor Kayla Bennett of the Bronx agrees: “I like it because it’s not easy.  It’s not regular words.  You have to look inside the text and really understand it and break it down.  Once you know what he’s saying, you know what to do onstage.  Because it’s a challenge to do so, that’s why I like it so much.”  Actor Simmons explains, echoing Friedman’s words:

Epic feels that working with young people on Shakespeare, parsing out the language, understanding the language and using that language within the context of their own lives is very important to understanding themselves—understanding the world while at the same time broadening their experience, broadening their vocabulary, being able to take the words that somebody else has written in heightened language and be able to speak that in front of people, we feel is crucial to their development as young people.

Then he adds: “Once they begin to understand what's happening in the play and what the story is, they begin to understand what's actually being said on the page.  They begin to broaden their vocabulary and they begin to be able to talk about how what's going on in Verona in the 15th century affects them right now.”  Simmons continues: “Teaching artists who are in the play come in and work with the students, help them learn the language, teach them the backstory and then they come in and see the play.  They have a different experience.  They have the backstory. Experiential learning is the way to go with Shakespeare.”  This is the educational rationale of Shakespeare REMIX; it validates both the students’ experiences and perceptions and the universality and impact of Shakespeare’s 400-year-old observations and depictions.

Working with theater designers, the student actor-playwrights also learn about lighting, costuming, and sound as they rehearse their remixed plays for performance before audiences of peers, parents, and the public at an Off-Broadway theater.  Finally, working with Epic artists (and sometimes school faculty as well) as mentors and castmates and directed by a member of the Epic company, the students present this entirely new piece of theater, speaking Shakespeare’s words and their own to connect these classic plays to their time and their world through the interconnected texts of five centuries ago and today.  Friedman insists that the socio-political points in the remixed text come totally from the students themselves, not some ambitious director.  For example, for Harlem’s Urban Assembly School for the Performing Arts’ Taming of the Shrew, directed by Friedman in 2016, the students wrote new scenes focusing on the play’s subjugation of women and turned the play into a call for justice.  The new play was presented as a live taping for TV of the diegetic Crystal Sly Show for the ruling tyrant of a patriarchal society in which women have no right to vote and are required to submit to arranged marriages.  As for what the young playmakers want adults in their audiences to take away from their efforts, an actor playing Petruchio demanded, “I want to not only show the problem but put them metaphorically in the driver’s seat and say, ‘You can fix this.’  I want the audience personally to feel like, ‘Yes, there’s a problem.  How do we fix it?’”

In the remix of Richard III by Chelsea Career & Technical Education High School in 2008, the student co-authors added this warning:

Look out for “Richards.”  Don’t look for the curved back or misformed shape, ’cause you gotta look inside a man to witness his face.

After the political campaign year of 2016, that sounds mighty perceptive and astute—except that this Richard III  was created seven full years before a certain presumptive presidential nominee rose to political prominence and the Oval Office.  So, prophetic as well, then.  (In the 2016 remix of Macbeth in last year’s YTF, one of the potential successors to Macbeth’s throne is a buffoonish, Trump-like corporate mogul named Paul.  Who says kids today are oblivious to current events and politics?)

In 2009, Shakespeare REMIX won the Coming Up Taller Award (now known as the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award), a recognition of exemplary community arts and humanities programs made jointly by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. (At the 4 November White House award ceremony, First Lady Michelle Obama, Honorary Chairman of the President’s Committee, proclaimed of the recipients, ”You ask our young people to dream and you give them the tools to fulfill those dreams.  You affirm that their contributions are valuable and that their success matters to all of us.”) 

In a review of the 2010 REMIX production of Othello by students of BHSWCA, Nicholas Job wrote on New York Theatre Review:

Ron Russell [Epic’s Executive Director and the director of Othello] . . . has done a wonderful thing with these students and this piece.  By challenging his student actors to create an entirely new piece from the fabric of Othello, he’s empowered them with a unique understanding of Shakespeare’s words and meaning.  In addition, by giving them an opportunity to make their acting debuts with Shakespearian verse, in what many would consider a challenging play even to professionals, he’s instilled in them the confidence to handle classical text at an early age.  It’s exciting, inspiring, and at times, incredibly entertaining.  But don’t think just because his cast has only two professional actors Mr. Russell is interested in playing it safe.  He makes the bold choice to employ cross-gender casting for the cunning soldier at the center of the play . . . .

(BHSWCA’s Othello, which Job described as “a bit more of a mash-up and less a Remix,” was moved to the present day, with Desdemona the head of an entertainment law firm who’s “eventually s[u]nk by an untimely death, an affair, and rampant mistrust amongst her employees.”)

On Monday evening, 21 March 2016, I went up to Harlem’s National Black Theatre at 5th Avenue and 125th Street/Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard to see Shakespeare REMIX: Henry 4, presented by Epic Theatre Ensemble’s Youth Theatre Festival.  It was my first exposure to the work of this program, but as I’m a firm supporter of theater and arts programs in schools, and because the cast of Henry 4 were Erin’s students at Chelsea, I knew I had to be there to see what it was all about as well as to show my support for Erin and her ensemble.  (In 2017, I went up to Harlem again to see CTE’s Much Ado  About Nothing remix on Saturday evening, 18 March.)  Epic YTF ran at NBT from 4 March to 5 April, with Henry 4 in performance on 19, 21 (two shows), and 22 March.  (The other plays, presented by different schools, in 2016’s YTF were Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew; 10467, a play, named for a Bronx ZIP code, about the inequities of New York City schools funding created by participants in Epic NEXT; Noura, a work in progress by Heather Raffo, with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; and Shakespeare’s Macbeth.)  I was so taken with the concept, not to mention the work demonstrated by the student performers and writers, that I immediately began thinking about learning more about Shakespeare REMIX and almost certainly writing a blog post on the program and its process.

Chelsea CTE’s Henry 4 was moved all the way to 2042, an election year in which President Henry Bollingbroke is running for his second term.  The country is under siege by foreign powers, civil rights militants, the news media, and the National Rifle Association.  (Erin played one of the TV news crew and an NRA minion, as well as serving as a co-producer.)  The NRA is backing the president’s opponent, Hotspur Percy, while Bollingbroke is trying to groom his son, Harrison, to succeed him (though it’s daughter Henrietta who’s the more activist).  As the program put it, “Part family drama, part barroom comedy”—and I’d add political intrigue—“Henry 4 gives us a glimpse of America on the brink.”  In its cynical view of contemporary American politics during the 2016 extreme campaign season, the team of four student writers and co-directors Asher Gill, a student with Epic NEXT and an actress and model who’s a member of the 10467 ensemble, and James Wallert, an Epic founder and Associate Artistic Director of the company, have given us plenty of skullduggery, corruption, betrayal, a helluva lot of gunplay, and, to paraphrase the line in Irma La Douce, everything, in fact, that makes politics worth doing.  But, my God!  If our politics gets half as nasty in the next 25 years as the cynical creators of Henry 4 predict—I doubt we’ll make it that far!  (This isn’t a complaint, just a horrified observation.  I mean, satire is one thing . . . but, wow!  Thank goodness, I probably won’t be around to see it.)

As you’ve seen from the few examples I’ve cited already, remixes recontextualize Shakespeare’s plots, often moving the time up a few centuries, though not all are reset in our era.  The students at UASPA, for example, transposed 2016’s Macbeth up to the 1890s in a South American dictatorship ruled by a military junta.  A 2011 remix of Romeo and Juliet was reset to 1938 in southern Germany following Kristallnacht.  The daughter of a wealthy Jewish family has fallen in love with the son of a neighboring family who’re flirting with National Socialism. (CTE’s Much Ado was reset in contemporary times, but took place in Messina High School, a New York City school where “gossip fills the hallways, classrooms, and bathrooms.”  Yes, that’s right—there were scenes set in the school johns, complete with stalls!)  Erin, who’s worked with Shakespeare REMIX since her second year at Chelsea CTE—she’s also involved at various levels with Epic’s in-class projects as well—identified three REMIX techniques that the students have used: building new writing and scenes within the established concept of the play (2004’s Romeo and Juliet, ’05’s Much Ado About Nothing, ’06’s Hamlet, ’08’s Richard III, ’08’s Winter’s Tale, ’12’s Henry VI), a modern retelling that runs parallel to the original text (’09’s Macbeth, ’11’s Measure for Measure), and, as applied to Henry 4, a combination of existing Shakespearean text and new student writing within a specific, original concept and setting (’07’s Othello, ’12’s Hamlet, ’13’s Twelfth Night, ’14’s Romeo and Juliet, ’16’s Henry IV.

Epic formally recruits participants for REMIX by visiting every ELA class at the partner schools before auditions and interviews.  Each school’s faculty also informally identifies students to work with REMIX, recruiting when they see students they think should be involved.  “I try to pull kids in if I know them,” explains Erin, “or I  observe behavior that suggests that REMIX would be a good fit.”  The application and selection of student participants occurs in the first semester of the year, so Erin and other faculty don’t have much chance to get to know new students vey well.

Many of the students are failing classes or exhibiting discipline problems.  According to Friedman, however, “As participants learn to master Shakespeare’s challenging text, their school attendance and grades improve, and their confidence rises.”  A report earlier this year on the Daily Beast, the on-line journal of reporting and opinion, says that through Shakespeare REMIX, Epic has “greatly impacted their students’ academic performance and empowered a new generation of artist-activists.”  Friedman adds, “On average, 95 percent of Shakespeare REMIX participants finish high school, and 90 percent of graduates go to college.”  In the 2015-16 school year, Epic reports, “92 percent of Remix seniors applied to at least eight colleges and received acceptances to at least four.”  (In the schools where Epic works, the average for college attendance is 50%.  Epic NEXT, the company’s three-year mentoring program, maintains a college-attendance rate of 100%, the theater reports.) 

All students are welcome, but they must fill out a simple application and then, depending on whether their interest is in onstage or backstage work, do an audition or interview.  Every student who expresses an interest in the program may participate; the average ensemble is about two dozen.  There’s no limit to the size of the ensemble “as long as everyone involved has a task and feels useful and excited,” explains Erin.  She declared, “We want more rather than less,” and repeaters are common.  Most REMIX participants do at least two projects during their time at the partner school.  During the workshop period, Shakespearean and student writing is read and performed until it becomes familiar, and students all have a chance to act bits of the play in front of the ensemble.  Specific casting doesn’t occur until the play has been remixed, however, typically well into the rehearsal process. 

The project’s director selects the play on which each REMIX session will work (though Erin says that she provides input—as I imagine the faculty at the other partner schools do as well—and now, as the program has become part of the school’s milieu, the students also make requests). The texts students start with are pre-cut by the director—though, of course, changes are made as the project develops.  Typically, the REMIX project is based on a single Shakespeare play; the histories have been the only exceptions at Chelsea (Henry 6 incorporated all parts of Henry VI and Richard III; Henry 4 used Henry IV, parts 1 and 2).  The director pre-cuts the texts with which students start; in the case of the histories, for example, the initial text the students see could be a small bit of one play and the majority of another. 

According to Erin, the choice of play affects the way a process unfolds.  “The only really consistent effect that I see in the process,” says Erin, “is that some plays inspire characters to be created, while others inspire characters already in existence to be further fleshed out.”  The development process, says Erin,  has evolved and changed over the years, but the overall arc of the process is pretty much the same from project to project.

While the prime goal of Epic’s REMIX program isn’t  to train theater artists, NYTR’s Nicholas Job remarked that “Shakespeare newcomer Brianna Del Rio does a nice job with her portrayal of the ruthless Iago.  I suspect we’ll be seeing more of her and her fellow Remixers in the future on the New York stage . . . .”  Working closely with teaching artists (defined by Marit Ulvund as “a professional artist working in and through the arts in an educational or community setting” in her essay “In the age of the teaching artist: What teaching artists are and do”) has had an aspirational impact on some students and, over the years now, REMIX has fielded National Champions and New York City runners-up in the English Speaking Union’s National Shakespeare Competition.  

[I was able to get some input for this article from Erin Woodward but her work schedule precluded much follow-up.  Associate Artistic Director James Wallert, a founder of the Epic Theatre Ensemble, was willing to submit to an interview, but ultimately his schedule also made him unavailable.  The result has been that I’ve composed this article based mostly on secondary-source research, from which I was unable to answer all my questions.  Nonetheless, I believe the REMIX program is well worth covering on Rick On Theater and so I have gone ahead with posting this profile even in its incomplete state. 

[Epic’s office and mailing address is 55 West 39th Street, Suite 302, New York, New York 10018; e-mail:  epic@epictheatreensemble.org  phone: 212-239-1770.]

Why Write?

Back on 9 April 2010, I published an article I called simply “Writing” on ROT.  I confessed in the article that I’d been a college writing teacher starting back in the mid-1980s (which happened to coincide with the dawn of the personal computer era).   Why did I teach writing, and “freshman composition” in particular?  It’s really a matter of practicality.  I’m firmly and unshakably convinced that the ability to write simply and clearly anything from an office memo to a Ph.D. dissertation to the latest journalistic exposé is still an absolute necessity in our world.  I’m also equally convinced that few people who are confronted with this task today, in school or business, can do it so that readers can understand the result easily, if they can read it at all.

 

For decades, advocates of the craft of writing have bemoaned the loss of the art of letter-writing.  Well, matters are far worse.  It’s not just letters that people don’t write well anymore, it’s anything.  And it isn’t even a matter of artful writing—it’s just plain writing.  Writing that can be read.  Writing that can be understood.  Writing that communicates.  It isn’t being done because it isn’t encouraged (God forbid it should be required!) in high school or, sadly, even in college.  Letter-writing died because the telephone made communication possible without writing, and memos and telegrams made brevity not just the soul of wit, but a financial necessity.  (E-mail, though it actually requires a form of writing, seems to lead people to dispense with the kind of verbal composition old-fashioned letter-writing encouraged.  I won’t even address texting or Twitter.)  Writing in general, however, is dying simply because few people care what gets put on paper, not to mention computer screens.  Most students seem convinced that writing is nothing they need be concerned about.  Unless you’re going to be a writer of some kind, you’ll never have to do it.  Besides, isn’t the computer going to make words obsolete anyway?  That’s essentially what one of my students, a computer-science major, told me.  I’m afraid all these naïve youngsters are in for a great shock when they hit the world—and have to write something.

 

Scientists and mathematicians have to write—and some even do it voluntarily, beyond the academic requirement of publishing in professional journals.  The late Carl Sagan was chastised by some of his colleagues because his books and articles, and especially his well-received TV series Cosmos, popularized science for the layman.  Far from opprobrium, I say that’s cause for praise and gratitude—speaking as a scientific layman myself.  (That computer student was in my class in the ’80s, before the advent of the Internet.  A quick glance at the World Wide Web today will reveal how relevant words are to the cyber world—the ’Net is positively overflowing with words.  They may not all be any good, but somebody writes all that content.)

 

Businessmen and corporate executives write, too.  Aside from all those interoffice memos and quarterly reports, some leaders of commerce have written books (Lee Iacocca, the CEO of Chrysler, published his autobiography in 1984 and real-estate tycoon Donald Trump wrote The Art of the Deal in 1987).  Nearly every presidential candidate has put out a biographical book on the eve of his campaign  (Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father, 2004; John McCain, Faith of My Fathers, 1999).  Some politicians have even been known to write their own speeches.  And lawyers have to write prodigious numbers of briefs—and a few have been reprimanded in court and even penalized by judges who didn’t appreciate their bad writing.  (A 2004 New York Times report entitled “Judge Finds a Typo-Prone Lawyer Guilty of Bad Writing” recounted that a federal judge in Philadelphia docked an attorney’s payment for submitting written filings with many errors, as well as “vague, ambiguous, unintelligible, verbose and repetitive” prose.  Hah!)

Not writing shrinks the mind, and someone has to put a stop to this trend.  That’s why I taught writing.  I believe in the need, and I myself have experienced the struggle to overcome the lack of real training in an essential skill.  (That’s fundamentally what “Writing” was about.)  After all, I wasn’t a writer when I started out on this track, either, but even I found I needed to write for all kinds of reasons and to all kinds of purposes.  If I could make that need clear to a few students, even if I didn’t manage to teach them anything about writing, I would have accomplished something worthwhile.  And, besides, I have to read all that unintelligible junk everyone’s turning out.  It’s a good way of fighting back.

 

Of course, there’s a deeper value to learning to write decently, beyond the practicality of expressing yourself to others in clear, straightforward prose—in the office, in the classroom, even occasionally at home.  Writing well is the same as thinking well.  Writing clearly is the same as thinking logically.  Writing—composing, selecting, arranging, and putting together words and ideas—could as well be called puzzle-and-problem-solving.  That’s relevant no matter what discipline you work in—even, I trust, computer science. 

 

Make no mistake:  Writing is an art.  Much of it can’t be taught in the conventional sense, though it can be learned.  There aren’t any formulas for good writing, and teachers aren’t there to provide The Answers.  There are no Answers—and, if there were, neither I nor any other teacher would know them any more than any student does, since my solutions wouldn’t be their solutions.  In the world of writing, no two writers accomplish a task the same way and no two readers respond to a written work the same way.  If they did, we’d never innovate, make anything new, or progress from where we stand now.  The Truth changes and Knowledge expands.  My function as a teacher was to ask questions.  If, by inadvertence, I happened to say something that sounded like a Truth or everlasting Knowledge, I should immediately have been called to account. 

 

Writing can also be a way to work out on paper or screen thoughts, ideas, questions, or impressions I have from any source.  Writing often serves two complimentary functions: a means of expression and a means of discovery.  In early versions, I can explore what I think, feel, or know about something.  I approach this kind of writing task as an inquiry and an exercise in problem-solving  This happens to me often when I sit down to write the performance reports I publish on ROT.  I won’t necessarily have fixed notions of what I think about the topic, say a play or performance, when I start out, and I probably won’t know exactly how I want to approach expressing myself about it.  That’s what drafting and revising is for—finding out what I think about something.  After I’ve begun to work out what I think and what I want to say, I’ll start to find the best way to express it.  This is where logic and clear thinking comes into play.  To put it succinctly, first I find out what I want to say, then I find out how to say it.  I find that the first part of the process does a great deal to determine the second part. 

 

(In my classes, I often used to paraphrased the comedian Gracie Allen here: How do I know what I think until I see what I write?  A more recent pop reference is also apt, from the 2000 movie Finding Forrester in which Sean Connery played William Forrester, a reclusive writer who tutors Jamal Wallace, a talented high school student played by Rob Brown.  In Mike Rich’s screenplay, Forrester advises Wallace: “No thinking.  That comes later.  You write your first draft with your heart; you rewrite with your head.  The first key to writing is to write—not to think.”  In both statements, the implication is that writers start out by figuring out what they feel about their subject, then they figure out the best way to say it.)

 

At bottom, all writing is basically the same: an attempt to communicate something to someone.  The only practical differences between one type of writing and another are the purposes (the “something” to be communicated) and the audience (the “someone” for whom it’s intended).  But provocative writing goes beyond this preliminary task.  I used to explain to my students that writing is a kind of conversation in print.  One writer says something and another picks up the idea, or a part of it, and says something else, and so on.  That’s how new knowledge is created, I told them.  I challenged my composition students to follow this paradigm.  Add something to the dialogue, I admonished them: argue with the writers they read, expand on their thoughts, show how their ideas relate to or differ from someone else’s or their own.  Examine in detail a small part of what the other writers said, or expand those ideas beyond the authors’ limits and show how the ideas function (or don’t) in a world outside the authors’ boundaries.  I expected them to go off on a tangent—imagine, dream, create.  In short—THINK.  Go out on a limb.  Stick their necks out.  Dare to make their readers think and wonder anew.  Take a chance on being wrong, I told the student writers—but also take a chance on discovering something new and exciting.  This is where the challenge of writing expands the mind. 

 

I used to be asked sometimes, usually by a department chair or some other academic administrator, to outline my “philosophy of teaching writing.”  Well, none of this amounts to much of a philosophy.  The fact is, I’m not sure I have a coherent philosophy of teaching writing in the sense this question seems to mean; if I do, then the Little Dutch Boy had a philosophy of flood control.  Maybe I should have developed one I could haul out whenever someone asked, but I thought I’d wait until I knew what I was doing a little better.  I’m still trying to develop a writing technique, let alone a philosophy—and practice always precedes theory, not vice versa.  Let’s remember what we got when we tried to put the theory cart before the practice horse: Prohibition and the Edsel.