Writer's Diary
5/26/26
In the end, the last five years have, as much as I focus on the stressful, the negative, the oppressive, been magical, dangerously magical, frustratingly magical, but magical; I can say for certain that I’ve gotten to live out a lot of the cliché TV movie projections of what life in New York could be. In this diary, I often focus, indirectly at least, on the downsides of local or micro fame. But I should speak to some of the upsides—of making funny, moving, influential theatre with one’s friends (many of whom often flash their own idiosyncratic genius). I really am a Rousseauian in that I think that people are basically good until institutions make them bad. And for how damaged and ridiculous and superficial as Internet and phone pseudo culture have made us, creativity and inventiveness and indeed sweetness and soulfulness come back right away—as soon as there’s a real creative task at hand, at least for most. As far as we are away from the soul, we are never that far.
If the whole of human history was 24 hours, the amount of total freedom experienced in those 24 hours might be a second or two.
I’m reading Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (which gives panoramic view of Soviet life during the time of World War II). During the time of the Soviet Union, at least at the height of Stalin and Stalinism, perhaps only a few people in the whole country didn’t live with the terror of death or denunciation; very few people lived without the fear of starvation or poverty or exhaustion. The cost of building up a Soviet industrial and war machine was the servitude, the deprivation of all the Soviets, was the individual soul.
Literature seems to have shrunk because it no longer purports to have anything to say about the larger movements of history or the meaning of life. What autofiction marked was the curtailing of fiction, the folding in and solipsism of fiction, the extraordinary re-allocation of artistic responsibility from the whole to the part. I do think basically CTR has been a part of the most exciting theatre in America for the last five years, that even without money or pop star influencer level fame, we’ve managed to acquire audiences and influence and community. And I think there’s nothing better than hanging out with the cast and the audience after the show at a bar. For that’s after the show, I’ve spent my life for five years and that’s not so bad.
Beautiful.