Can Art Be A Crime?

 

[In December 2002, just as New York City was bracing for a transit strike that was called for four days hence, 37 black boxes labeled "FEAR" were found in the Union Square subway station.  The discovery caused significant concern and drew public attention—in a New York-sort of way: people were disturbed, suggested theories of the boxes’ origin, and went about their business—which, in a subway station, meant going someplace or coming back from someplace.

[Aside from the looming strike threat—New York City without public transportation is hell, believe me—we were just over a year past the 9/11 attack; it was fresh in everyone’s memory.

[Now, I live near Union Square and the station, which is under the park at 14th Street and 4th Avenue/Park Avenue South, is one of the city’s busiest.  It’s the station I use most of the four that are near my apartment—though I didn’t happen to have been in it that day.  I do remember the incident reported below, however.] 

“37 BLACK BOXES LABELED ‘FEAR’
CAUSE COMMOTION IN THE SUBWAY”
by Robert F. Worth and William K. Rashbaum 

[The article below was the first I read about the mysterious boxes in “my” subway station.  It ran in the New York Times on 12 December 2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]) while the story behind the discovery was still a puzzle.]

There were 37 cardboard boxes in all – some spray-painted black, some wrapped in black electrical tape, all of them inscribed in white block lettering with a single word: fear.

At some point yesterday morning [Wednesday, 11 December] the mysterious boxes were affixed to the walls and girders of the Union Square subway station in Lower Manhattan. Within minutes, in a city long on edge, there was concern that they contained bombs or presented other dangers. The police were alerted, the station and its surrounding area was evacuated, and passing trains were barred from stopping at Union Square, one of the city’s busiest stations.

After hours of investigation, and the delicate, ultimately uneventful opening of the boxes, the police said they believed that the episode was a stunt but did not know its origin or intent. One possible explanation, investigators said, was that transit workers, who have authorized a strike for 12:01 a.m. Monday [16 December], were somehow behind the prank.

A union spokesman denied that transit workers had had anything to do with the boxes.

Stunt or not, in a city with terror in the back of its mind and rumors of possible wildcat actions by the transit workers’ union, the bizarre boxes seemed to crystallize a host of anxieties, and generated panicky speculation among those who stood waiting above ground to hear what they contained.

“You have to wonder,” said Bob Lamb, 57, as he stood in a frigid rain and stared at the crowd of police officers guarding the subway entrance on the southwest corner of Union Square. “It seems suspicious so close to the strike date, but nowadays I guess this kind of thing is becoming routine.”

A police sergeant first noticed one of the boxes about 10:45 a.m., near a stairwell leading to a lower platform in the station, the authorities said. As he was examining it, a subway rider told him that there were others.

The boxes were about 16 by 20 inches, and about two inches high, the police said. Some were duct-taped to the station walls, some attached to pillars near the edge of the platforms and others scattered elsewhere, including under a bench.

The station was shut down, and subway riders and employees were evacuated. The police bomb squad and the Emergency Service Unit were called in, and they examined each of the boxes, swabbing them for hazardous materials and dusting them for fingerprints before the station was reopened in the early afternoon, the police said.

Police officials said they had no hard evidence indicating who was behind the event. One official said, however, that detectives thought there was “probably a pretty good chance that it’s strike-related.”

Another police official also pointed out that Union Square was the frequent site of antiwar protests and other acts of civil disobedience.

And a third official said a review of videotape recordings from a camera in the sprawling station failed to shed light on the incident.

A transit union official rejected any suggestion that workers were responsible. “Transit workers have never been involved in anything remotely like that, and for people to speculate on that is irresponsible,” said Ed Watt, the secretary-treasurer of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union.

In Union Square, though, there was no shortage of people who said they suspected the transit workers.

“It’s probably the transit people,” said Amy Kalt, who was selling scarves and other clothing at one of the square’s market kiosks yesterday.

Others were more sanguine, observing that the city has its share of apolitical pranksters and attention-seekers. “It’s probably nothing,” one pedestrian, Jane Comfort, said as she hurried off toward another subway station. “I’m a good conspiracy theory person, but it didn’t occur to me that this was about the strike.”

And to some visitors from abroad, the incident said much about New York’s relative inexperience with mysterious threats, terrorist or otherwise.

“In Tel Aviv, we get these things all the time,” said Guy Grossman, a graduate student in philosophy who is spending a month in New York. “If it’s a bomb, the robot removes it in five minutes. You have a lot to learn here.”

[In December 2002, New York City averted a potentially crippling transit strike when the Transport Workers Union Local 100 and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority reached a tentative contract agreement.  The strike, which would have halted subway and bus service for millions of commuters, was averted after negotiators "stopped the clock" and continued talks.  An agreement was reached late on 16 December, avoiding the shutdown.

[Robert F. Worth became a New York Times reporter at the metropolitan desk in 2000. He was the Times correspondent in Baghdad from 2003 to 2006, and the Beirut bureau chief from 2007 until 2011.  He’s also contributed to the New York Review of Books and he’s the author of Rage for Order (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

[William K. Rashbaum is a senior writer for the New York Times, covering municipal and political corruption, the courts, and broader law enforcement topics in New York.  He writes investigative stories and news articles.]

*  *  *  *
“AN UNUSUALLY ARRESTING ART PROJECT”
Melanie Lefkowitz 

[The following article, revealing the perpetrator of the Black Box Mystery, ran in the Queens edition of Newsday (Melville, Long Island, NY) on 17 December 2002 (Sec. A).]

Clinton Boisvert’s public-art assignment earned him an A.

A Class A misdemeanor charge, that is.

Boisvert, a freshman at the School [of] Visual Arts, turned himself in yesterday on charges he scattered 37 small black boxes stenciled with the word “fear” in the Union Square subway station Wednesday [11 December], just as worries about a transit workers’ strike were reaching a crescendo.

[SVA, a private for-profit art school, has facilities in both the Chelsea neighborhood on Manhattan's west side, and the ‘Gramercy Park neighborhood, on the east side.  The east side campus is less than a ten-block straight shot south to Union Square.  Chelsea’s a little farther, but only a one-mile/20-minute walk.]

The incident touched off jitters across the city, suspicion that disgruntled transit workers or even terrorists could have been involved, and the evacuation of the transit hub for more than five hours.

But Boisvert’s lawyer said the 25-year-old student only intended to observe the public’s reaction to his project, and wasn’t even aware of the potential transit strike when he planned it.

“It’s an innocent art project that went unfortunately awry, to say the least,” said Boisvert’s lawyer, William Stampur. “It was done in the morning rush hour in full view of hundreds if not thousands of people walking by – it wasn’t done in any surreptitious fashion.”

Boisvert was awaiting arraignment last night on charges of second-degree reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct, officials said.

Boisvert, who is from Michigan, has lived in New York for only three months. He allegedly taped the boxes to walls, pillars and benches throughout the station. A friend who was helping him carry the two bags of boxes will not face charges, police said.

The stunt was part of a class assignment to display art in a public place, police said. Stampur said that Boisvert hung up the boxes, went to class to make his presentation and was planning to return to the station to retrieve his work when he found out the subway stop had been evacuated.

“If it weren’t so serious it would be jocular,” Stampur said.

A spokesman for the school did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Police described Boisvert as “clueless,” not malicious.

“This was not a publicity-seeking stunt in any way, shape or form,” Stampur said.

[Before Melanie Lefkowitz left journalism to enter academia, she was a newspaper reporter for 20 years, and her work has been published in Newsday, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the New York Post, among other publications.  She taught journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.]

*  *  *  *
“ART STUDENT’S PROJECT ON ‘FEAR’
BECOMES A LESSON IN THE LAW”
by Kevin Flynn 

[Kevin Flynn’s report ran in the New York Times of 17 December 2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]).]

Clinton Boisvert’s assignment for his Foundation Sculpture class, according to the police, was to situate art in a specific place, not to create alarm in the subway system.

But Mr. Boisvert, a college student at the School of Visual Arts, succeeded in the latter, if not the former, last week when he taped 37 black cardboard boxes inscribed with the word “Fear” in the Union Square subway station, according to investigators.

After seeing the disruption his project had caused, Mr. Boisvert contacted a lawyer. And yesterday morning, he surrendered to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which intends to prosecute him on a charge of reckless endangerment, a spokeswoman said.

[Formally, there’s no such office as the Manhattan district attorney.  Manhattan is the name of the borough, a city division.  The DA is a state job (which, by the way, is why it doesn’t have term limits, as all city positions do) and the incumbent’s jurisdiction is the County of New York—which covers the same ground as the Borough of Manhattan but is a state division.  (The other four boroughs are also counties, and two of them, like Manhattan, have two names.)]

“The kid is clueless, basically,” a police official said. “He did not seem to know the ramifications his art project would have.”

When the mysterious boxes showed up last Wednesday, taped to the girders and walls in the Lower Manhattan station, they raised the sort of wide-open questions that authorities in a city still anxious about terrorism do not enjoy answering. Were they some kind of bomb canisters? Or a threat from a union member contemplating a transit strike? Or simply an artsy stunt?

The station was shut for hours while the bomb squad examined each box, dusted for fingerprints and checked for hazardous materials. When the station reopened, many subway riders just shrugged. But the Transport Workers Union had to labor to dissociate itself from an incident that some riders mistook for a bit of intimidation.

“No one at the school understood that he was going to do something that was of that radical a nature,” said Adam Eisenstat, a spokesman for the college.

Mr. Boisvert, 25, in his first year at the school, had submitted a proposal to do a different project for the class, but apparently changed his mind, Mr. Eisenstat said. “He chose to make the city, the subway, the topical events, his canvas,” he said. But Mr. Boisvert was trying to mark the tension, not create it, Mr. Eisenstat said. “The tension is at a level that I think he never realized,” he said.

William Stampur, Mr. Boisvert’s lawyer, said his client had arrived in New York only three months ago from Michigan and had not even been aware that a transit strike was being contemplated. Mr. Stampur described the boxes as an innocent art project that had been erected during the morning rush when hundreds of people were passing by. “It was done methodically and in open view,” he said.

As a result, he said, Mr. Boisvert did not anticipate that others would view it as mysterious and frightening. “He feels so bad,” Mr. Stampur said.

Reckless endangerment is a misdemeanor that carries a maximum term of a year in jail upon conviction. A friend who helped Mr. Boisvert arrange the boxes is not likely to be charged because his role was minimal, the police said.

Mr. Boisvert was waiting in a Manhattan holding cell last night for arraignment, and missed one of his final exams, Mr. Stampur said. Mr. Eisenstat said it was unclear just how the subway project would be graded.

[Kevin Flynn is an editor with the New York Times and the co-author (with Jim Dwyer) of 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers New York (Times Books, 2005).  His work as an investigative editor helped earn the Times numerous awards, including a 2009 Pulitzer Prize.  He served as the police bureau chief of the newspaper from 1998 to 2002, when he became investigations editor for the newspaper’s Metro desk.  He’s currently investigations editor for the paper's Culture desk.  He’s also the editor of The New York Times Book of Crime: More Than 166 Years of Covering the Beat (Sterling Books, 2017).]

*  *  *  *
“CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK:
IN NEW YORK, ART IS CRIME,
AND CRIME BECOMES ART”
by Michael Kimmelman 

[This news story was published in the New York Times on 18 December 2002 (Sec. E [“The Arts”]).]

By strange coincidence, New York City’s crime rate was reported yesterday to be the lowest among the 25 largest cities in the United States, New York ranking 197th among 216 cities with at least 100,000 residents. This puts the city below squeaky-clean Provo, Utah, but (thank goodness) still above Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.

At the same time it turned out that those 37 black boxes with the word “Fear” on them, which mysteriously turned up attached to girders and walls in the Union Square subway station last Wednesday, were, as you may have guessed from the start, an art project. The boxes, which spread panic and caused the police to shut the station for hours and call in the bomb squad, turn out to be the work of Clinton Boisvert, a 25-year-old freshman at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, who surrendered Monday [16 December] to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which intends to prosecute him on charges of reckless endangerment.

So now it is left to hapless, fledgling art students, fresh from Michigan, to keep up the city’s gritty reputation for crime. At least New York can still take pride, as the nation’s cultural capital, that even our misdemeanors are works of art. Take that, Rancho Cucamonga.

First things first. Clinton, what an idiotic project. As the saying goes, art this bad ought to be a crime. “The kid is clueless, basically,” a police official said on Monday, demonstrating remarkable acumen as an art critic. The state of public and political art has now declined to the point that plenty of people who follow it simply presumed last week that what happened at Union Square must be a work of art, not a fake bomb by a terrorist or a threat by a union member contemplating a transit strike. In the 1960’s, people might have guessed it was a loony labor activist; in the Son of Sam 70’s, a loony loner. Yesterday’s loony loner is today’s Conceptual artist.

[The term “Son of Sam” refers to David Berkowitz (b. 1953), a serial killer who terrorized New York City between 1975 and 1977, leading to possibly the biggest manhunt in the city’s history. His crimes involved the shooting or stabbing of six individuals and the wounding of eleven others. He also became known as the “.44 Caliber Killer” due to his weapon of choice, a .44 Special caliber Bulldog revolver. Berkowitz also sent letters to the press and police, taunting them and signing them as “Son of Sam,” a name derived from his claim that he was taking orders from a demon that resided in his neighbor’s dog, named 

[Berkowitz appeared calm in court on 8 May 1978, and pleaded guilty to all of the shootings. On 12 June 1978, he was sentenced to a 25-years-to-life term in prison for each murder, to be served consecutively. Berkowitz became eligible for parole in 2003, but remains incarcerated in upstate New York’s Attica Correctional Facility. His next parole hearing is scheduled for May 2026.]

Mr. Boisvert couldn’t be reached for comment yesterday. His lawyer has told him not to talk to the press for a while. Trying to imagine what he intended, I can only guess that he might say the boxes bearing “fear” were meant to make tangible, as sculpture, what New Yorkers have felt since 9/11 – to give physical form to prevalent emotion. But that’s art mumbo jumbo. By provoking fear, the work trafficked in emotional violence. Carried to an extreme, violence as art leads to the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s notorious remark, which he tried desperately to retract, that the attack on the World Trade Center was “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.”

[Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) was a German composer, acknowledged as one of the most important, but also controversial, composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He’s known for his work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance (aleatory techniques) into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.]

Mr. Boisvert’s inspiration was evidently Keith Haring [1958-90; pop artist who emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture; studied at SVA], who made his reputation in the 1980’s drawing happy, cartoonish dancing figures and barking dogs in chalk on the black paper pasted on unused advertising spaces in subway stations [including, coincidentally, Union Square Station]. He was a graffiti artist, which made him a harmless, beloved petty criminal. He did not leave dangerous-looking black boxes in crowded public places. Mr. Boisvert is an admirer of his, Barbara Schwartz, one of his teachers, told me yesterday. She stressed that his project wasn’t meant to be a prank. She insisted that he was a very serious young man. The work was intended to get people talking, she said.

Well, it did. She said she had no idea he was planning it. Her assignment for the freshman foundation sculpture class was to make a site-specific work, part of the curriculum for years. A couple of students in the class shot films on subways. Mr. Boisvert had said he was going to paint Fed Ex boxes black and arrange them in a room in the school. Ms. Schwartz had reserved a room for him, she said, but he mentioned nothing about “fear.” He said he wanted a dance floor. She thought he was planning a performance.

Clearly, he changed his mind after he spoke with her. “It was my last class of the semester and everyone was presenting what they had done, and his was the last project before the break at 2 o’clock that afternoon,” Ms. Schwartz said. “He put out snapshots he had taken around the subway station. He said he had taken the boxes to Union Square that morning and placed them in plain view of everyone. He said he had painted the word ‘Fear’ on them.

“We were all saying, ‘Wow, how interesting,’ but I looked at him when it dawned on me. I said, ‘Clinton, you didn’t leave them there, did you?’ One of the other students then said the trains were no longer stopping at Union Square and two others said there was a bomb threat. I said, ‘Oh my God, do you think this has something to do with your project?’ He looked stricken. He never imagined what would happen.”

Ms. Schwartz consulted her superiors at the school. Mr. Boisvert consulted a lawyer.

He spent a night waiting in a holding cell for arraignment. His work thereby became performance art. The history of modernism is littered with artists whose outrageous provocations have made headlines; only an elite few have made it into jail. Mr. Boisvert joins that company.

A night in the slammer probably caused him at least as much fear as he caused straphangers.

[Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic for the New York Times and has written about public housing and homelessness, public space, landscape architecture, community development and equity, infrastructure, and urban design.  He’s reported from more than 40 countries and twice been a Pulitzer Prize finalist.]

*  *  *  *
“LETTERS: TEACHERS SHARE BLAME”
by Louis Torres 

[The letter below pertaining to the guerrilla artist, Clinton Boisvert, was printed in the Queens edition of Newsday (Merrick, Long Island, NY) on 21 December 2002 (Sec. A).]

Clinton Boisvert is the hapless student who planted 37 black boxes stenciled with the word “fear” at the Union Square subway station. If he is found guilty of the misdemeanor of reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct [“An Unusually Arresting Art Project,” News, Dec. 17], his teachers at the School of Visual Arts should certainly be held responsible for brainwashing him into thinking that something like stenciled boxes displayed in a public place would be considered “art.” He probably thought they would give him an A for originality for the place he picked! They still might.

Louis Torres
Manhattan

*  *  *  *
“WARNING: ART AHEAD”
by Lenore Skenazy 

[Lenore Skenazy’s column in the Daily News (New York City) ran on 22 December 2002.]

Whatever happened to the plain old pursuit of beauty?

The artist had a great idea: He would put some suspicious packages in the subway to get people thinking about bombs, terrorism and maybe even deeper stuff, like a change in the balance of power. Cool!

But this was not 11 days ago here in New York. This was 1994, in the London tube. And the artist, Brooklynite Gregory Green, took one crucial precaution: He put up plaques to explain his project, which had been approved in advance by the subway authorities.

[Gregory Green (b. 1959) is active in New York, where he also lives. Green is known for sculptor-assemblage. He creates conceptual pieces that suggest explosive devices, such as pipe bombs neatly packed into briefcases or hollowed out books with nuclear warheads. His purpose is to stimulate creative thought about freedom and personal responsibility. As for the installation connected to the London Underground, it may be related to a work called Suitcase Bomb #10 (London) (1994) which was part of a series that seems to have been exhibited in London, but I was unable to connect it specifically to the Underground.]

That way, nobody had to shut the station for five hours.

Here in New York, Clinton Boisvert would have done well to follow that model. Instead, he placed 38 black boxes [sic; all other reports said there were 37 boxes] labeled “FEAR” around the Union Square subway station Dec. 11. After the cops dismantled the packages, they set out to find a suspect described as “artsy” by a commuter who’d seen him.

The profiling worked. Even as police were seeking, presumably, a guy with a goatee, black clothes and a tattoo, they got lucky when School of Visual Arts freshman Boisvert – goatee and black coat, yes, tattoo status unknown – turned himself in.

Apparently he had no idea his boxes would cause such a commotion. “He’d have to live in a black box to be that dumb,” opined a colleague.

Whether or not he intended to create havoc, I leave to the judge. But clearly he did intend to create art, and that is just as disturbing.

His sculpture class assignment had been to put a piece of art in a specific place and watch the public’s reaction.

That’s pretty broad. If he had placed 38 wads of gum on the subway floor, would that have been any different? How about 38 papier-maché rats? Or condoms?

My guess is, all would have been equally acceptable in class, because almost anything gets to call itself art today.

Beautiful pictures and stunning sculptures? Those are so old hat that sometimes it seems artists are running in the opposite direction, just to be considered legit.

Why can’t they go back to the simple pursuit of beauty? “I don’t think you can go back to anything,” says Dave Tourje [b. 1960], an artist in Southern California. “The only thing you can do is keep moving forward.”

Forward to “FEAR” boxes. Great. “One of the functions of art is to be on the edge of what is permissible,” says James Yood, a professor of art theory at Northwestern University. Provoking the middle class, he explains, is a time-honored artistic pursuit.

That pursuit has lead [sic] to such gross attention grabbers as Andres Serrano’s [b. 1950] “Piss Christ” [1987] – a crucifix hung in a jar of pee – and the infamous dung-covered Madonna [The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) by Chris Ofili (b. 1968)] at the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Sensation” show [2 October 1999-9 January 2000].

[Both Piss Christ and The Holy Virgin Mary are mentioned prominently in my posts “The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010) and “The Return of HIDE/SEEK” (4 January 2012).

[I also recommend having a look at “Susanne Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater” (4 and 8 January 2010)—I think Skenazy should have as well—which discuss the art philosopher’s ideas about beauty. Langer’s theories are also discussed in “Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 (MoMA)” (2 October 2017). The ideas of Langer (1895-1985) crop up many times in posts on this blog.]

But Yood points out that even Michelangelo [1475-1564; Italian Renaissance sculptor and painter] provoked the public in his day: His “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel was criticized for too much nudity, and parts were soon painted over.

[The reference to Yood didn’t connect. I assume Skenazy means the Israeli rock band, but I couldn’t find any reference associated with them concerning Michelangelo.]

“The first person who did a painting about something that wasn’t a religious subject was considered bizarre,” adds Carol Oster, a Manhattan sculptor. So were such groundbreakers as the now-loved Impressionists, and the wacky Dadaists, whose claim to fame was placing a urinal in an art gallery. After that, it was anything goes [see my report on Dada (20 February 2010), the 2006 exhibit I saw at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City].

Some of that anything is disturbing, but, indeed, does make a point. Those “Suspicious Looking Objects” in London, for instance, were part of Green’s 10-year exploration of power. His bomb-centric art was trying to make people aware of how easily our world could change if a person or group embraced terrorism. Rather prescient.

The difference between Green and the “FEAR” boxes is that Green identified his work as art. He wanted people to think about issues, not about dying on the way home.

Setting out to simply upset people is not art. It’s self-indulgence. The art world has too much of that already.

[Lenore Skenazy is an author, speaker, and syndicated columnist.  She’s known for her advocacy of free-range parenting and her work with the organization Let Grow.  She was a columnist for the New York Daily News for 14 years.  Skenazy has written for various publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Mad Magazine, and the New York Sun, and has given lectures at venues like Microsoft Headquarters and the Sydney Opera House.]

*  *  *  *
“METRO BRIEFING: NEW YORK: MANHATTAN:
ARREST IN SUBWAY INCIDENT”
Al Baker 

[This short notice was part of a regular column in the New York Times on 31 December 2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]).]

Under heightened alert to inspect unidentified packages that may conceal bombs, the police arrested a woman yesterday for placing four cardboard boxes in the Union Square subway station. The incident follows a similar one on Dec. 11, when the same station was evacuated after 37 boxes labeled “Fear” were placed there. The black boxes taped inside the station yesterday were labeled “Fear Art.” Cleaners in the station reported seeing the woman, Ani Weinstein, 26, of East Chatham, N.Y., placing the boxes there. When she was arrested, she had 10 more boxes, the police said. Ms. Weinstein was accused of reckless endangerment and other violations. The police said there was no evidence that the incidents were linked.

[Al Baker was a reporter on the Metro staff of the New York Times for close to 20 years beginning in 2000.  He was a police reporter and the police bureau chief, covered education, Long Island and Westchester County, and was the Albany Statehouse correspondent, among other roles.  Baker also wrote for Newsday and the New York Daily News.

[Clinton Boisvert was initially charged with reckless endangerment, but Lawyer Stampur got that dismissed, leaving only a charge of disorderly conduct.  He was given a ticket, fined, and ordered to fulfill six days of community service and write a letter of apology to the bomb squad.

[He got up early and did manual labor from the back of a dump truck.  Boisvert thus paid his debt to society.]

Pulitzer Playwrights in Dialogue

 

[In the introduction to his interview with the winner and two finalists for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (note the link below), American Theatre editor Rob Weinert-Kendt observed that “whenever I need encouragement about the present and future of the U.S. theatre, my mind turns to the state of playwriting . . . .”  He went on to say that it’s “freshly heartening” to “see few signs of its vitality, immediacy, or unbiddable boldness flagging in the years I’ve been on the beat . . . .”

[That 2022 interview, apparently, was seen as the start of a tradition, and Weinert-Kendt followed up in 2023 with a similar session with the top three dramatists of that year’s Pulitzer competition, which I’m reposting below.  (There didn’t seem to be interviews for the 2024 or, so far, the 2025 winner and runners-up.)] 

“SANAZ TOOSSI, ALESHEA HARRIS, LLOYD SUH:
FINDING FORM AND WHO THEIR PLAYS ARE FOR”
by Rob Weinert-Kendt 

[The transcript of Weinert-Kendt’s interview ran in the Fall 2023 issue (“A New Era”) of American Theatre (40.1) as "Language and Belonging."  As a section labeled “Interviews,” the conversation was entitled as above and posted on the AT website on 27 July 2023.]

The Pulitzer-winning author of ‘English’ and the Pulitzer finalists for ‘On Sugarland’ and ‘The Far Country’ gather to talk craft, language, expectation, and optimism.

I’ve hosted a number of conversations among theatre folks that might fairly be described as lovefests, with praise gushing as freely as wine at a hosted bar and appreciative nods and laughter from all sides (including my own). But my chat with this year’s finalists [i.e., 2023] and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama set a new bar for fellow feeling. Following a tradition we started last year with James Ijames, Sylvia Khoury, and Kristina Wong, we recently convened Sanaz Toossi [b. 1992 in Orange County, California; of Iranian descent], whose play English won this year’s Pulitzer, with Aleshea Harris [b. 1981 in Germany in a military family; lived in many places but was predominantly raised in the South] and Lloyd Suh [b. 1975 in Detroit, Michigan; of Korean heritage], whose On Sugarland and The Far Country, respectively, were Pulitzer finalists. These are three very different plays, stylistically and thematically, but based on our conversation, their authors could form a mutual admiration society (and I would consider joining as an honorary member). I’ve trimmed many of the compliments from the following transcript, but this trio’s sincere affinity still shines through.

A brief word on each: In addition to English, which follows the class and linguistic struggles within an English class in Tehran during the tumultuous year of 2008, Toossi has written Wish You Were Here and was recently named Manhattan Theatre Club’s Judith Champion Playwriting Fellow. Harris is the acclaimed author of Relentless Award winner Is God Is and the popular ritual theatre piece What to Send Up When It Goes Down; in On Sugarland she follows a fractious, multigenerational Black extended family in an unnamed Southern cul-de-sac where the dead from a long-raging war are commemorated. Suh is the author of the much-produced The Chinese Lady, as well as Charles Francis Chan Jr’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, Franklinland, and The Wong Kids in the Secret of the Space Chupacabra; in The Far Country he traces the complicated, often devastating journey of a Chinese family from rural Taishan through California’s Angel Island through several decades after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

[Toossi’s English had its première in 2022 at the Linda Gross Theater of New York City’s Atlantic Theatre Company in a co-production with the Roundabout Theatre Company. Wish You Were Here premièred in 2020 as an audio performance on Audible by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, Massachusetts; its stage début was at Playwrights Horizons in New York City in 2022. The Relentless Award is given in honor of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967-2014) by the American Playwriting Foundation for works that are challenging, exhibit fearlessness, exude passion, and are relentlessly truthful.

[Harris wrote and first directed her performance art piece What to Send Up When it Goes Down in 2016 at Occidental College in Los Angeles. In 2018, What to Send Up When It Goes Down was produced off-Broadway by the Movement Theatre Company in New York City. On Sugarland was produced by the New York Theatre Workshop in 2022. Franklinland débuted at Chicago’s Jackalope Theatre in 2018.

[The première of The Chinese Lady, in a commissioned co-production with New York’s Ma-Yi Theater Company, took place at Barrington Stage Company’s St. Germain Stage in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 2018. Suh’s Charles Francis Chan Jr.'s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery had its world première by the National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO) at New York City’s Walkerspace in Lower Manhattan in 2015. The Wong Kids premièred in 2013 in a commissioned co-production, first at the Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis, then by the Ma-Yi Theater Company at La MaMa in New York. The Far Country had its first performance at New York’s Atlantic Theater Company in 2022.

[Angel Island is an island in San Francisco Bay and is entirely within Angel Island State Park. Angel Island Immigration Station, where immigrants entering the United States were detained and interrogated, operated from 1910 to 1940. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was a U.S. federal law prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. The law was repealed in 1943.]

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.

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ROB WEINERT-KENDT: Congratulations to you all. I want to start by asking you how each play began.

SANAZ TOOSSI: I started writing English pretty soon after Trump’s travel ban, also known as the Muslim ban [January 2017]. I was in grad school [at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts]. It was a very strange time to think about one’s own artistry and one’s own responsibility and who I was going to be entering the theatre. I had to write something very quickly—and I actually would like to put that restraint on myself now, again, because I actually think it’s the only way I can create.

I had always thought about language, and I’ve always been so insecure about my English-speaking abilities. I grew up bilingual, speaking Farsi and English. I think I say this every time I talk about this play: I am sort of mortified when I speak—like, I never feel like I can find the right words or that I’m able to express what I really want to say. I do feel confident when I write. I think that’s kind of how I became a writer. But I knew I could write about that really quickly. I’d always wanted to write about an English class. So I think having not a lot of time to turn out a draft, feeling rage and grief and sorrow, but mostly rage, about the vilification of Middle Easterners and Muslims—I would say, especially as an Iranian and a first generation American, I just needed to scream a little. So I screamed and English was born.

[Toossi has said that she spoke Persian in her home and English outside it when she was growing up.]

Aleshea, your piece could be described as epic, would that be fair to say?

ALESHEA HARRIS: It is an epic piece, and it was born of a great deal of frustration. I too started it way back when I was in grad school [MFA, California Institute of the Arts], trying to adapt Philoctetes [409 BCE; Sophocles (ca. 497/496-406/405 BCE)]. I started out trying to find my analogous versions of each of those figures and it just didn’t work—it didn’t make sense as a play. I wasn’t writing from my gut. I was writing what I thought an adaptation of a Greek play was supposed to feel like. It wasn’t until after Is God Is and What to Send Up that I felt liberated to really change the assignment from trying to adapt that play and being very loyal to that source material, to writing the play I wanted to write having read that play. I just had to filter it through my own sensibilities and interests.

My mother was in the Army, and I’m first generation on my mom’s side—she is an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago. And the Army figured so prominently in my life as a youngster; there were things that are so strange when I look at them now, like everyone having to pause and honor the flag [this is Retreat and To the Colors, bugle calls at the end of the day when the flag is lowered]. I really needed to come to understanding some things and articulating some frustrations about what it means to be a Black person who serves the country—a country that has targeted Black soldiers specifically. I mean, just reading harrowing accounts of soldiers being chased and lynched because they were such an affront to white supremacy by just being a Black person in uniform, and my mom’s stories of being ridiculed for her accent, and being a dark-skinned Black woman in the U.S. Army surrounded by, you can probably imagine, a certain kind of energy. I found the play by interviewing my mom. I remember asking her, “What is it that you want us to know, my brothers and I, about your service?” And she said, “I want you to know that I’m all right. I’m fine.”

[On an army post, Retreat is the bugle call signaling the end of the official duty day and the lowering of the flag. It’s blown around sunset and is immediately followed by To the Colors, blown while the flag is lowered. During these bugle calls, vehicles should come to a stop, military personnel in uniform should face the flag (or the direction of the music) and salute until the end of To the Colors, and civilians and military personnel in civilian clothes should face the flag, stand at attention, and place their hands over their hearts until the end of To the Color.  This is probably what Harris was describing.]

Lloyd, you’ve written a number of plays about Chinese American history. How did this particular one come into being?

LLOYD SUH: It came by accident, this historical impulse. I was writing a play almost 10 years ago, and doing research about the history of where a lot of the stereotypes of Asian Americans come from, and I came across all these stories—there’s so much more scholarship around Asian American history than when I was in school, and I kept coming across the stories that just stuck with me, that almost haunted me. I felt like I needed to wrestle with them somehow. So a number of different plays prior to The Far Country were my attempts at wrestling with these stories that were lost or forgotten. The stories did kind of circle the Chinese Exclusion Act era—it felt like that was the fulcrum where so much of this comes from, so many of the stereotypes, and where the legislative history of the Asian American experiences was established. It was something that felt daunting to me for a long time, and then at the Atlantic Theatre Company, Neil Pepe [b. 1963; artistic director of ATC] and Annie McCray [possibly Annie MacRae, Associate Artistic Director at ATC since October 2014] said, “You can write anything you want,” and I said, “Okay, I’m gonna write about the Exclusion Act.” Once I committed to that, it became a process of research and spending a little time on Angel Island and spending time talking to people, and reading as much as possible. I slowly began to come up with these themes of the way history is erased, the way history is lost, and what that does not just to a person but to a community, to feel the absence of a lost history. And what does that mean for those of us here in the future? How do I process that?

These are three distinct plays, but I saw some common threads. Lloyd and Sanaz, your plays both include elements of translation, where multilingual scenes are rendered for English-speaking audiences with a convention where we hear thick-accented, “broken” diction when the characters are speaking English, their second language, which is contrasted with fluent, eloquent speech when they’re speaking their first language, Chinese or Farsi, respectively.

LLOYD: Most of those craft choices came out of practical necessity, of how you convey both of those vernaculars. Part of the fun for me was that the first scene is a performance, but we don’t know it yet; he is telling them what they want to hear, showing them what they want to see. The other thing—and Sanaz, your play does this so beautifully—is the difference between how one articulates themself in one language vs. another, and just allowing both versions of this character to exist. One who is out of his depth and awkward and kind of flailing and desperate, and one who can be incredibly poetic and forthright, and letting both of those exist, but letting language be part of the thing that makes it possible or impossible.

SANAZ: That’s so beautifully said. It’s funny, I get asked a lot, what made you think of this conceit? It was really practicality; like, there was no other way to tell the story. Language is something I come up against again and again whenever I write about Iranians in Iran, or when I write my never finished American family drama. My household was bilingual, but what is that going to look like onstage? I’ve had that big question: When we see people onstage speaking in broken English, do we fully see them as human? Do we understand intrinsically that they are as complex and interesting as any of us are? For this play, we can only know them through language, and we will only understand what they lose if we know exactly how they express themselves, and we know that in this migration that will be left in the home country.

LLOYD: There’s a sequence of lines in your play about how “a French accent is beautiful, an English accent is beautiful, but not yours.” I know there’s a long tradition with [Asian American Pacific Islander] performers in particular of saying, “I don’t want to do an accent,” and that comes from an understanding of what an accent has signified historically on an American stage, and what it means when somebody asks you to do that accent. But it’s complicated, because my parents have an accent, and I don’t feel shame about that. On the surface, this is not shameful, so how is it that we have internalized the shame, in terms of what that signifies?

SANAZ: I’m nodding my head so hard, I’m about to fall off my chair. It’s not shameful, but to be totally frank, on the first day of rehearsal, I had such intense guilt about making my actors do accents—even though the whole point of the play is that there is nothing shameful in an accent! My parents have accents. They are heroes, you know. I have an accent when I go to Iran and speak Farsi. It is so hard! But, as with everything we put onstage, all of us are coming up against histories and ways of expression that have been harmful to our communities, and we have to balance that with our own artistry and our own truths. Aleshea, you have this incredible note at the top of your play about meta-theatricality, and you address this expectation that readers might have about your play being in the style of realism or naturalism. You confront and disrupt this expectation so beautifully in your play, and in all your work. When I think of your play, it’s like a clarion call for joy in the pursuit to honor one’s own artistry. So I feel like we’re all kind of grappling with this.

ALESHEA: Thank you for that. Obviously, my play is not an immigrant play. I won’t pretend that it is; it is from my mother’s immigrant experience, but it is not an immigrant play. I hope that I am brave enough to write that play someday. But I was really struck by the throughline of figures having to prove belonging in each of our plays, in different ways. There’s something about these pieces that is all about a person trying to come into personhood, or an idea of full personhood, by way of conforming.

One parallel I noticed between On Sugarland and English is the prominence of offstage characters or elements. In the case of On Sugarland, it’s the unseen government that is sending folks to war, which is not named, nor is the place they’re being sent to fight; also, there is the dead mother, Iola, whose spirit remains very present. In the case of English, which takes place in 2008, in the midst of mounting political censorship in Iran ahead of the Green Movement, that context is not referred to directly. I wondered how these absences or this indirection informed the way you wrote these plays.

[The Iranian Green Movement was a political movement that arose in Iran following the disputed 2009 presidential election. It was characterized by widespread protests, primarily focused on demanding the annulment of what protesters believed was a fraudulent election and the removal of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (b. 1956; President of Iran: 2005-13).]

SANAZ: I was really insistent that I call my play a comedy. Whether it is a comedy or not is up for debate. But I insist on the comedy of this play—I insist to a fault. I will say, this is not any more a political play than a play by a white American writer. Like, The Flick [play by Annie Baker (b. 1981) that received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; premièred Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2013] is as much a political play as English is. When writing for myself, I feel these tripwires around me. Sometimes I feel tempted to explain the politics outside the classroom to this audience—but in all my work, I’m not going to explain what’s happening outside more than I need to. I will not explain the Iranian revolution [1978-79] to you. To keep the play comedic, to keep the characters real—you know, Iranians are not going to come into the classroom and read you the day’s headlines. That just wouldn’t happen. So I feel really insistent that we’re not going to talk about it. We don’t need to; it would not be artful to do so. And I wonder, Aleshea, if there are maybe, in similar ways, expectations upon Black playwrights about explaining and educating.

ALESHEA: I have many feelings about that. I don’t think about On Sugarland as a race play necessarily. We don’t even speak specifically about an incident of racism until the very end of the play. I know that people politicize Sanaz’s and my work in that way. So I had a reaction to some of the reviews, because I was like: Oh, you’ve decided who Aleshea Harris is and what my stories are about, in just the same way people tie themselves into knots, even with Is God Is—“This is about a race war,” some reviewer wrote recently about a production somewhere. I feel excited to liberate myself as a dramatist. Suzan-Lori Parks [b. 1963] wrote about this years ago in an essay, and so many folks have spoken about this—this idea that we can’t exist onstage as a person of the global majority unless the context is that we’re fighting against white supremacy. Sure, it’s there—it informed my mother’s decision to join the Army—but when my mother and I are talking to one another, we’re not talking about white supremacy, or very rarely, you know what I mean? There are so many relationships inside of On Sugarland that are just not primarily about white supremacy in the way I think people want them to be. There’s a lens that folks apply, and I think that’s problematic. It’s like cutting off dreams. I can go on and on. That’s one of my rants! Lloyd, I’d love to hear your take on these matters.

[Re: Suzan-Lori Parks, see “How America Eats: Food and Eating Habits in the Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks” by Kirk Woodward (5 October 2009), “A Playwright of Importance” by Kirk Woodward (31 January 2011), “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World” (1 December 2016), “Venus” (7 June 2017), “The Red Letter Plays: In the Blood” (12 October 2017), “The Red Letter Plays: Fucking A” (17 October 2017), “The Red Letter Plays, Continued” by Kirk Woodward (1 November 2017), “Suzan-Lori Parks on the Covid Pandemic” (17 May 2023).]

LLOYD: I think about this a lot. Maybe the best way I can articulate it is, it’s like trying to figure out how to modulate who it’s for. It feels different to be like, “I have to tell white people about this thing,” vs., “I have to tell my kids about this thing.” So it’s a question of, how do you modulate your stuff, and who do you modulate it for? I’ve had experiences in theatres where I’ve been like, “Oh, they don’t get this,” and then being like, “Do I care? How much do I care if they don’t get it? Who do I want to get it?” And Aleshea, it’s so interesting—I’d be curious to hear your take on this. I think about ritual and the way you use ritual, not just in this play, but in What to Send Up, and that question of who is what for? I had a teacher say that the writer’s job is to unify the audience. You want them all to have the same realizations at the same time, to gasp at the same time, to appreciate—Aleshea, you’re already shaking your head. But for a long time, I thought this was true! Then I had this moment where I was working on a play for young audiences, and there’s an interesting tension between the stuff that kids are laughing at that the parents think is juvenile, while the parents are laughing at stuff that’s completely over the kids’ heads. And I thought, that’s so interesting—the ways in which an audience can be divided in a way that creates an interesting theatrical tension. I feel like I don’t have a sophisticated take on that yet. I don’t know how to read that with an audience when I’m watching them. I feel like you might.

ALESHEA: Lloyd, thank you, but I sort of have let that go. Now I am like: I don’t know what you came with, so I don’t know what is going to be a realization for you. I feel like when it comes to anti-Blackness, I’m on page 2023 and there are some people on page 10. So I don’t think, “This portion, these people will get.” I try to make with Black people in mind first, and just asking, “What do you need, Aleshea?” And whoever can get on this train is going to get on this train. To add another metaphor, I think of a play as like a cake, a multilayered, dense cake, right? Some people are just gonna get the icing. And then some people understand like the signification of a cul-de-sac and the way that configuration of homes goes back to the continent of Africa. And it’s okay; I can’t try to serve the white mind or the white lens. Like, I come to writing to get free, so I can’t come here and be trying to serve you. I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work and it hurts. It’s really traumatizing. I really just have to write from my gut. 

Sometimes when you’re speaking with a theatre, you can tell they don’t get it. One of the problems I don’t think we talk about enough, that can affect a writer of the global majority’s bottom line, is that white people not getting your shit will fuck with you—it will mean you not getting a production, so that’s real, it’s a terrible bind to be in. Like, “Oh, they don’t get it, should I . . .?” I’m not mad at the playwright who’s like, “I’m gonna write this and make sure there’s exposition in here to make sure the white people get it.” I’m not mad at them, because they’re trying to stay alive. It’s ironic and awful, but it’s there.

SANAZ: I also think that some people are gifted educators, you know, and some people really know how to do that masterfully in their work. I do not, and I resent the implication that I should. I think about this with Middle Eastern work a lot. We have not had enough opportunities to create a large body of work—I mean, we do have a large body of work, but not one that an audience can pull from necessarily so it’s like, I don’t need to say this, everyone gets it. So the expectations of the world are put on one piece of work, and that’s just bad. That’s going to be the worst play in the world. I always have asked myself, do I want an audience to get it? Of course we want our audiences to breathe together and have those moments of unity. But at the end of the day, when I’m not coming from a place of fear, I wonder who I write for. And for me, it’s my mom. I wonder for you guys if there’s somebody or some group of people that comes to mind? Or if you’d like to disagree with the question, that’s great too.

ALESHEA: Thank you. That’s provoking, in the best way. Sanaz, I write for myself first. I really think that if I’m excited, if I’m juiced—I remember with Is God Is, I was like, “I’m gonna write the hell out of this!” I had no idea it would be produced. Same with What to Send Up and this play: I just really come from a space of, What do I want to see? What have I not seen? What’s sexy to me? I have to trust that there are other people on the planet who get something useful out of this piece. I have to serve my sensibilities as a writer; I have to go, Aleshea, what are you into? Writing is so hard, so that’s the fuel for me, asking myself: Girl, what do you want to see on a stage? And what are you ready to fight for? It’s always a fight.

LLOYD: For me it varies in different pieces. There’s something that happened to me while writing so much about the past. I’ve spent a lot of time living in and thinking about and dwelling on really painful cultural history, and it’s kind of weird to do that. The only reason, and the only way to make that palatable, is to have faith that there’s going to be something redemptive on the other side—that it’s going to matter somehow. And the way that has mattered to me is that I imagine some kind of future. Sometimes this manifests very directly as, I’m writing this for my children. Some days it manifests as, I’m writing this for an unknowable, undefined, almost speculative future person. That’s one of the things I love about writing for theatre. You know, some people think that film and television, something recorded, is more permanent. But I think that’s wrong. I think that when something is recorded, it becomes a moment, and it’s locked in the year it was made. But with a play, you can imagine somebody doing it 100 years from now. That might sound high-falutin’. But why not aspire? Why not imagine that maybe it can be transformative? That’s what I’ve been doing most of the time.

ALESHEA: I wrote this in the notes for On Sugarland: I think about plays as medicine. Do you all think about your plays in that way, as a balm?

LLOYD: Yes, I’ve thought about it in exactly those terms. I would say that with my play The Chinese Lady, writing that was simultaneously diagnosing and trying to heal a wound. I felt this pain, then I had to diagnose it. Then, once I was able to locate a sense of what it was, then I tried to somehow patch it up.

SANAZ: That’s so beautifully said. I’ve never asked myself or been asked that question. I don’t know. My first instinct is to say no, and to say that sometimes my plays have felt more like an exorcism. But I wonder if those two things are not so different. I don’t know. I’m gonna email you later.

Each of your plays has at least one character we just adore the second they come onstage. In On Sugarland, there is Evelyn, the ageless diva, whose every line is quotable. In English, Elham is the kind of free-wheeling audience magnet who says whatever is on her mind. And in Far Country, Gee’s wife, Yuen, enters late in the show and just completely pivots the whole play.

ALESHEA: All of them women, I’m just gonna say.

I’m not a playwright, but I can just imagine that characters like these are both a joy and a temptation—that once they walk into your play, you can have a blast writing them but you have to make sure they don’t walk away with the whole thing. Unless, as with Yuen, that’s what she’s there to do.

LLOYD: One of the things I always knew was that this is a play where we were following this young man as he made his way to Angel Island, lived on Angel Island, then made his way out. But I also always knew I wanted it to begin and end without him, to show what precedes and what is to follow. So there was a point where I knew that something would take over the play, and I needed that to be the thing that takes it to the next place. And that next place was always intended to be a place of hope. So yeah, it’s a good day when you realize that the thing you have to do with your play is to let hope take it over, and you get to write a character where that’s their job. That’s always a fun day.

SANAZ: Elham has always been in the play. She’s always been exactly the same. What was kind of funny was, when my friends came to see the play, they were like, “Oh, that’s you.” She’s the hero of the play. We realize she’s right; she’s been right all along. She gets totally shit on, she gets humiliated, but that last scene is hers. The play is about two women who have totally different ideas about what it means to survive, but it had to be Elham’s play, because it was born out of anger, and she has a really righteous anger. I just love her. She’s so many women I know. I think a lot of us write the people we love as a way of honoring them in a world that maybe kind of refuses to do that. The actor who played her at the Atlantic, Tala Ashe, brought her to life for me. I think the trick with playing Elham is, she’s not a buffoon, and you cannot play her like one.

LLOYD: I’m so curious about those friends who said that Elham was you. Is that something you were ever conscious of?

SANAZ: No, I didn’t really know. I guess, since I love her, I must kind of like myself—I’m not writing my self-hatred in my plays. And I was like, Oh, I must really value my anger. Isn’t that a wonderful thing? I mean, Elham is a total nightmare in the classroom. She bulldozes through that classroom, and I love it. I love that in women, and I love seeing that onstage. To me that is the defining characteristic of so many women. I love their anger.

ALESHEA: I love a rowdy woman! I’m all about it. As for Evelyn, I think part of it was, I did not want an elder who was like in a rocking chair on a porch. I found her because I had this impulse to not write toward an expectation. I wanted a beautiful woman who was in her body and in her sexiness at that age, and who was wise but not like a boring kind of wise, and judgmental and flawed. And I knew the gowns would be cute, so I had a great time. I didn’t have a hard time writing her, though it’s true—she could have her own play. All these women could.

I just want to close by asking, do you feel hopeful about the theatre field, and your place in it?

LLOYD: I feel more hopeful than I’ve ever felt. I’m constantly amazed at the work of my peers, and it’s an honor to call them my peers. There was a time I remember asking myself this question when I was young: How do I take what I want to say and put it in this form? And I see so often writers, like the two of you, that seem to start with the question, How can I create a form that can possibly contain what I have to say? I love that. It’s just so endlessly exciting. I feel like I’ve seen more creativity and theatrical imagination in terms of how to answer that question on stages over the past few years than I did in the 20 years previous. I feel incredibly hopeful, not just for this moment, but for how this work might live in the future.

SANAZ: I think all our plays end on the cusp of possibility. And also this question of, what will I do with all that I was given, the good and the bad? I’m very optimistic. I can’t speak eloquently on the material and structural obstacles that we face right now. But I can say the work is incredible. I trust playwrights more than any other artists with how we’re going to imagine our futures and how we’re going to push our form forward, as evidenced by you two. There’s something about this medium that calls to us. I love it because it’s ancient and simple. I feel incredibly optimistic, and I don’t know if that’s foolish—I’m gonna say it’s not foolish, because if Lloyd thinks that, then I’m not an idiot.

LLOYD: We might both be idiots!

SANAZ: It’s very possible. We shouldn’t rule that out.

ALESHEA: Neither of you are idiots. I don’t know; I’m a fairly cynical person. But I remain hopeful, because if I consider that the future of the theatre has everything to do with the state of myself, then it’s like, okay, Aleshea, what are you doing to push things in a direction you think they ought to go? I take pretty seriously the responsibility of pointing the way to other folks who haven’t come yet. There’s a lot of noise in our field—a lot of stuff that’s not about the simple act of creating a narrative that is meaningful in some way to somebody. And so, through the noise, so much is possible. So much can be beautiful. It’s hard to be here on this plane, but it’s also wonderful, and we can do good things for each other. I think we are doing that. And I think that we will continue to do that.

[Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is an arts journalist and the editor-in-chief of American Theatre.  He was the founding editor-in-chief of Back Stage West and writes about theater for the New York Times, Time Out New York, and the Los Angeles Times.  He studied film at the University of Southern California and is a composer member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.

[Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is / What to Send Up When It Goes Down was published by TCG Books in 2022, and Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady was released in 2024.  Sanaz Toossi’s play English is available from Concord Theatricals in a Samuel French acting edition and was published, with Wish You Were Here, by TCG in 2024.]

Punctuation

 

[This is a post about writing.   I taught writing for several years at several schools in the 1980s and ’90s and I also did some writing for publication, mostly about theater, many of which pieces have ended up revived here on Rick On Theater. 

[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. 

[As readers of Rick On Theater will know, writing is a focus of mine.  I’ve taught it and blogged on it frequently.  While I was still teaching the subject, I collected articles from many sources on the subject of writing and teaching writing; a list of posts is included in my afterward to this post.]

 

“IN FINE PRINT,
PUNCTUATION TO PUNCTURE PEDANTS WITH”
by Sarah Boxer 

[Both of the articles compiled in this post are by the same author, Sarah Boxer.  The first one up is actually the second published.  It ran in the New York Times on 4 September 1999 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”], “Arts & Ideas”). 

[I call this post “Punctuation” because two of the subjects of the two articles are questions marks, below, and semicolons, in the second piece.  Boxer, however, also covers a couple of other elements of written documents in this article: the footnote and what she calls marginalia.]

If footnotes, quotations and marginalia, beloved by pedants and bores, were suddenly to vanish from the planet, you might say: “Yippee! Good riddance to all that received wisdom and tiny typeface. Farewell to the dutiful handmaidens of authority.” But not so fast.

Three scholars from three different fields have independently given these tools of scholarly oppression a revolutionary edge. Quotation marks, footnotes and marginalia aren’t just the voice of authority: they are actually the apparatus of subversion, sarcasm, irony and nastiness.

Consider the quotation mark. In the current issue of the journal “Critical Inquiry,” Marjorie Garber [b. 1944], the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and the director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University, has an article called “ “ (Quotation Marks).

[Garber’s Critical Inquiry article (Vol. 25, No. 4 [Summer, 1999]: 653-679) is a little difficult to interpret by its title as it’s reproduced above.  On the title page of Critical Inquiry, a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal in the humanities published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the university’s Department of English Language and Literature, it’s printed as:

“  ”
                        (Quotation Marks)

[In the running head, above the published text, the essay’s title is simply indicated as “  “.  (Ordinarily, the title of a published article or essay, when cited in another document, is written within quotation marks, as in “In Fine Print, Punctuation To Puncture Pedants With.”  The Times didn’t do this above—for obvious reasons, I think, because it would come out as: ““  ””.  (Also, conventionally, the period, which isn’t part of the title, but part of my sentence in this comment, would go inside the end quotation mark.  In this instance, that would just make this situation more confusing and absurd.  I think.)  

[In the bibliography on her résumé, Garber lists this essay as: “ ‘ ’ (Quotation Marks),” but I’d find that even more confusing because she (correctly) shifts the double QM’s of her title to single ones when they’re enclosed in the double QM’s of a cited title.  I’d imagine that if someone went to find her essay from that citation, say in a database or index, they’d look for something called ‘  ‘ (Quotation Marks) . . . and never find it!  Is a puzzlement!]

One of the “curious properties of these typographical signifiers,” she writes, is that “they may indicate either authenticity or doubt.” Sometimes quotations are meant to lend authority, Ms. Garber suggests, but the most general thing you can say is that they are reminders that words are borrowed things.

“In some ways quotation is a kind of cultural ventriloquism, a throwing of the voice,” she writes. Because “every quotation is a quotation out of context,” it can be a true copy and a false representation at the same time. It is “inevitably both a duplication and a duplicity.” A quotation mark can mean either “ ‘This is exactly what was said,’ or ‘Can you imagine saying or believing this?’”

Think of the sarcastic use of the phrase “quote-unquote”: “‘The mayor’s quote-unquote dedication to duty’ means the speaker doesn’t think the mayor is very dedicated,” Ms. Garber writes. Or think of its gestural equivalent, the “air quote,” or, in Ms. Garber’s words, the “Happy Talk finger-dance.” These gestures often suggest “a certain attitude – often of wry skepticism – about the authority of both the quotation and the quotee,” she writes. Some users call them “scare quotes,” she says, suggesting Jacques Derrida’s [1930-2004; French-Algerian philosopher who developed the philosophy of deconstruction] idea that the words quoted are “under erasure” or somehow deficient.

It sounds very post-modern, doesn’t it? But irony was lurking in the quotation mark long before Mr. Derrida was in diapers. Ms. Garber quotes R. B. McKerrow’s [1872-1940; one of the leading bibliographers and Shakespeare scholars of the 20th century] 1927 book “An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students,” (with respect, not sarcasm): “Inverted commas [the British term for quotation marks] were, until late in the 17th century, frequently used at the beginnings of lines to call attention to sententious remarks.” Early quotations were not even part of the main text, Ms. Garber writes. They were left “in the margins, as glosses or evidence of what was being claimed; sometimes they looked more like modern footnotes than like quotations.”

So quotations have their roots firmly planted in the soil of doubt. And that means they can take their place next to footnotes, which recently have come to be seen as tools of subversion, too. In “The Footnote: A Curious History” (Harvard University Press, 1997), Anthony Grafton [b. 1950; historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University], Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, calls footnotes “anthills, swarming with constructive and combative activity.” Sure, he concedes, they are generally regarded as marks of authority, like “the shabby podium, carafe of water, and rambling, inaccurate introduction which assert that a particular person deserves to be listened to.” But still, Mr. Grafton insists, footnotes are where all the fun is.

Edward Gibbon [1737-94; English essayist, historian, and politician] used one of his 383 footnotes in [The History of] [T]he Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776-89] to make fun of the too-literal theologian who castrated himself after reading the injunction to “disarm the tempter.”

And the footnotes in Pierre Bayle’s [1647-1706; French philosopher, author, and lexicographer] 1696 sleeper, the “Historical and Critical Dictionary,” Mr. Grafton writes, are filled with pornographic biblical interpretations and salacious stories, including “Caspar Scioppius’s [Caspar Schoppe (1576-1649); German catholic controversialist, philosopher and scholar] description of the sparrow he watched, from his student lodgings at Ingolstadt, having intercourse 20 times and then dying” – as well as Scioppius’s reflection: ‘O unfair lot. Is this to be granted to sparrows and denied to men?’”

To this day, Mr. Grafton suggests, footnotes are the “toilets and sewers” of historical writing, where all the rich waste materials are dumped. They don’t just back up the narrative, they also argue with it, destroying the idea that there is one true story. They “buttress and undermine at one and the same time.” So, you might conclude, footnotes are the height of subversion. Wrong again. Long before footnotes had their vogue in the 18th century, medieval artists invented a far more radical kind of marginalia.

In “Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art” (Harvard University Press, 1992) Michael Camille [1958-2002; British art historian, academic, and influential, provocative scholar and historian of medieval art and specialist of the European Middle Ages], an art historian at the University of Chicago, tells the story of the “lascivious apes, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses” and copulating animals, populating the edges of illuminated manuscripts.

In the Middle Ages, the illuminator would do his work after the scribe was finished, Mr. Camille writes, and “that gave him a chance of undermining . . . the written word.” For example, in the Rutland Psalter of 1260, the illuminator colored the manuscript so that “the letter ‘p’ of the Latin word conspectu (meaning to see or penetrate visually)” turns into an arrow that flies into the posterior of a prostrate fish-man, Mr. Camille writes.

“The medieval image-word was, like medieval life itself, rigidly structured and hierarchical,” Mr. Camille writes. “For this reason, resisting, ridiculing, overturning and inverting it was not only possible, it was limitless.” The margins of illuminated manuscripts were a playground. By the close of the 13th century “no text was spared the irreverent explosion of marginal mayhem.”

From the look of the illuminated manuscripts, with their monkey-suckling nuns and bird-headed Jesuses, you can guess where footnotes and quotations get their subversive edge. The margins, Mr. Camille writes, were the place “not only for supplementation and annotation but also for disagreement and juxtaposition – what the scholastics called disputatio” and what we might call talking back.

There’s a lesson here: the marginal has always been marginal.

[Sarah Boxer is a writer of non-fiction and graphic fiction, and a former critic and reporter for the New York Times (1989-2006), where she covered various topics including photography, psychoanalysis, and art.  She has published three books: In the Floyd Archives (Pantheon, 2001), a cartoon novel based on Freud’s case histories, its post-Freudian sequel Mother May I? (Ipbooks, 2019) and the anthology Ultimate Blogs (OverDrive [e-book], 2008).  Boxer has also been a contributing writer at The Atlantic and has written articles, essays, and reviews for the New York Review of Books, the Comics Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Photograph, Slate, and Artforum.

[A propos of this article by Sarah Boxer, another piece, somewhat lighter of heart, appeared in the Times on 9 January 1994.  It wasn’t really an “article,” but a multi-footnoted comic strip, a put-on making fun of the proliferation and expansion of footnotes in academic—and non-academic—writing.

[The piece, entitled “The Annotated Calvin and Hobbes” by Eric P. Nash, who was a researcher for the New York Times for 25 years, where he wrote more than 100 articles.  It appeared in the Times in “Education Life” (Sec. A) at the end of the magazine as a section entitled “End Paper.”

[Calvin and Hobbes is a daily comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Watterson [b. 1958] that was syndicated from 18 November 1985 to 31 December 1995.  At its height, it was featured in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide and appeared in more than 50 countries.

[The strip follows six-year-old Calvin and his best friend, a tiger named Hobbes.  While seemingly simple, the comic often describes abstract topics.  Even the names of the titular characters draw upon philosophy; Calvin is named after the Swiss Protestant Reformer, John Calvin (1509-64; French theologian), and Hobbes is named after the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679; English philosopher, best known for his 1651 book Leviathan).  References to philosophy continue throughout the comic.

[Unhappily, I can’t replicate it on the blog because it not only includes the strip itself, which Blogger makes hard to insert into posts (which is why I don’t do it often), but the typography comprises both fonts and symbols Blogger doesn’t have.  You see, “Annotated”’s footnotes have their own footnotes, each level of which gets smaller and the footnote markers become more and more idiosyncratic and eccentric.

[I can’t append Nash’s column to “Punctuation,” but the Times posts it on its website, but the digital version doesn’t reproduce the comic strip and only goes as far as the sixth note of the first level of annotation.  There are nine notes in the first level and four more levels below that, each one decreasing in font size (and increasing in silliness).  (Linked to the digital text is a PDF of the printed column and the page of the paper, but it’s hard to read and may only be available to Times subscribers.  New York Times articles are also available on databases like Proquest, which is accessible through most libraries and by subscription.]

*  *  *  *
“THINK TANK:
IF NOT STRONG, AT LEAST TRICKY:
THE MIDDLEWEIGHT OF PUCTUATION POLITICS”
by Sarah Boxer 

[Boxer’s second article I’m reprinting on my blog was published in the New York Times on 6 March 1999 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”], “Arts & Ideas”).]

These days the semicolon, one of the least loved, least understood punctuation marks, barely ekes out a living between the period and the comma. It was not always that way.

Geoff Nunberg [1945-2020; lexical semantician and author], a researcher at Xerox, an adjunct professor at Stanford University and a consultant on the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, has spent a lot of time thinking about the semicolon and its changing place in the world.

To understand the semicolon, said Mr. Nunberg in a recent lecture, you must first ponder written language in general. Is it merely a way to transcribe spoken language or does it have its own character? For Mr. Nunberg, the answer is clear.

Written language captures things that spoken language never could. Does anyone know, for example, what a semicolon sounds like?

Consider the sentence “Order your furniture on Monday, take it home on Tuesday.” With a comma, it means that if you order your furniture on Monday, you can take it home on Tuesday. “Order your furniture on Monday; take it home on Tuesday” is different, however; it is a double command. But sometimes you can’t tell the difference between the two sentences simply by hearing them read aloud. You need to see their punctuation to detect the difference.

If you look carefully, Mr. Nunberg said, the world of punctuation has its own rules of power politics. Commas are the weakest, semicolons are middleweight powers and colons are superpowers. Look more carefully and there is even a ranking among semicolons.

There are the weak ones (replaceable by “and,” “or” or “but”) and the strong ones (replaceable by words like “since” or “because” or even by a colon or a period.) But there is a strict law governing all of them. If there is more than one semicolon in a sentence, one cannot dominate. They must all be the weak type. There is parity.

This law of nondominance also governs the weakest type of semicolon, which Mr. Nunberg calls a “promotion” semicolon, a semicolon that would have been a comma if there were not already too many commas in the sentence. Here is an example: “He has written books on Tinker, the shortstop; Evans, the second baseman; and Chance, the first baseman.” In this sentence all semicolons are created equal, and they are all more equal than the commas.

There was not always such a restrictive, democratic order governing semicolons. Mr. Nunberg discovered that in the 19th century and early 20th century, semicolons were as loose and carefree as commas are now.

T. S. Eliot [1888-1965; American-born poet, essayist, and playwright who became a British citizen in 1927] used what is known as the appositional semicolon: “The essential is to get upon the stage this precise statement of life which is at the same time a point of view, a world; a world which the author’s mind has subjected to a process of simplification.”

Jane Austen [1775-1817; English novelist] used semicolons to introduce subordinate clauses. In “Persuasion,” she wrote: “His good looks and his rank had one fair claim on his attachment; since to them he must have owed a wife of very superior character to any thing deserved by his own.”

Mr. Nunberg even found writers who let their semicolons dominate other semicolons in the same sentence. In “Middlemarch,” George Eliot [pseud. Mary Ann Evans (1819-80); English novelist, poet, journalist, and translator] wrote: “But some say, history moves in circles; and that may be very well argued; I have argued it myself.” In that sentence, the second semicolon, working like a colon or period, dominates the first semicolon, which acts like a comma. How could she let that happen?

Did 19th- and early 20th-century writers sprinkle semicolons without any sense of propriety or limits? Or were there rules for semicolons that are obscure to us now? After looking at passages from T. S. Eliot, Henry James [1843-1916; American-British author], George Eliot and Jane Austen, Mr. Nunberg at last discovered the old law of the semicolon: A semicolon that wants to dominate another semicolon in the same sentence must wait for the end of the sentence; and then it can act like a colon, trumping the rest; the last semicolon gets the last laugh.

*  *  *  *

[On 24 March 1996, Sarah Boxer published “Teachers, Teach Thyselves” in the New York Times (Section 4 [“Week in Review”], “Ideas & Trends”) which reported:

This month (4 March 1996) the National Council of Teachers of English released “Standards for the English Language Arts,” which outlined, in mind-numbing terms, what students from kindergarten to 12th grade should learn.  Tucked in it was a glossary that defined obscure words, such as “listening” and “spelling.”

[Boxer excerpted some passages—definitions of terms used in English and writing classes.  (Readers of Rick On Theater will know that I have taught writing and also a little English [high school].)  I’m going to excerpt Boxer’s excerpts, and republish a few pertinent definitions.]

audience  The collection of intended readers, listeners or viewers for a particular work or performance.

grammar  The means by which the different components of language can be put together in groups of sounds and written or visual symbols so that ideas, feelings and images can be communicated; what one knows about the structure and use of one's own language that leads to its creative and communicative use.

punctuation  An orthographic system that separates linguistic units, clarifies meaning and can be used by writers and readers to give speech characteristics to written materials.

spelling  The process of representing language by means of a writing system or orthography.

writing  1. The use of a writing system or orthography by people in the conduct of their daily lives to communicate over time and space. 2. The process or result of recording language graphically by hand or other means, as by the use of computers or braillers.

[The posts on Rick On Theater that are about writing are: Bad Writing (19, 22, 25, 28, and 31 May 2025), “Two Passings: Peter Elbow and Athol Fugard” (17 March 2025), “Peter Elbow and Freewriting” (12 March 2025), “How I Write” (25 February 2022). “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In” (28 July 2015), “Why Write?” (4 March 2013), “Writing” (9 April 2010), and “On Reviewing” (22 March 2009).]