F*ck Biopics.
Dora Maar has come unstuck in time.
For the past month, I kept hearing this Voice in my head:
“Sara,” it said softly, “reread Slaughterhouse-Five.”
“I can’t right now,” I would mentally respond day after day. “I’m too busy to read anything for pleasure because I’m rehearsing a play of mine called Dora Maar. It’s about the surrealist artist, her tortured relationship with Picasso and how they made Guernica together. But it’s not a biopic. I loathe biopics. All of them suck—- plays, movies, shows. When it comes to telling a story about a historical figure, it seems creativity and experimentaion is immediately replaced with Wikipedia-style exposition 100% of the time. Do not get me started on Oppenheimer.”
“Sara,” the Voice said from deep inside an ancient file cabinet in my brain, “reread Slaughterhouse-Five.”
“Sorry,” I calmly explained. “Dora Maar is too consuming a project for me to shift my limited brain power over to Kurt Vonnegut right now. You see, the play covers the ten years of Dora’s life she spent with Picasso, but is told completely out of order. Imagine a Cubist painting, but as a play. Like Cubism, all parts of the story and characters are presented simultaneously via quick flashes of memory. No scene in the play is more than five lines long. The entire thing is staged before a canvas of ‘magic fading paper,’ which mimics the dimensions of Guernica. With actors using only water as ‘paint,’ images from the iconic painting appear, vanish and reappear. And that’s just the art part. This is me and director-husband Reid self-producing here. Do you have any idea how many years self-producing takes off the average American playwright’s life? And let’s not forget that I started writing Dora Maar in 2021. It took me five years of rewrites, rehearsals, workshops, total teardowns and renovations, a research trip to Madrid, chats with experts and a final scorch-the-earth narrative script reconstruction. And what I’ve been rehearsing all year for is only a 2-night workshop run. This isn’t even an opening.”
“Sara,” the Voice whispered across time, “just reread Slaughterhouse-Five.”
“I don’t need this right now!” I grew increasingly angry. “I have voices in my head telling me to do things all day everyday: Write this play and read this biography and watch this movie and go exercise and sign your kid up for this expensive sport and that expensive camp and don’t sit too long and don’t eat too much weed and does my neck hurt because I’m old or because my pillow is bad or because I’m on my phone too much and on and on and on until I start to wonder if perhaps my norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibitors need to be turned up to eleven. The last thing I need is another voice in my head telling me to read for pleasure at this critical moment in my artistic evolution!”
“Saaaaara,” the Voice in my head incanted, “reread Slaughterhouse-Five.”
“Look, here’s the thing I’m secretly panicked about,” I leveled with the Voice. “I don’t even know if Dora Maar works as a play yet. Like dramaturgical boiling oil on a skillet, my story jumps from Maar and Picasso’s first meeting to Maar’s attempted suicide to painting Guernica to hiding from the Nazis to Maar and Picasso’s first meeting back to Maar’s suicide attempt back to painting Guernica and back and forth and back and forth again and again and again. I personally love it, but do people want formal experiments anymore? Do people want to be confronted with mankind’s natural inclination to destroy itself? Do people want to know what happened at Gernika, Spain that beautiful April morning in 1937 or do they simply want a non-child-molesting Michael Jackson celebration told in conventional beginning-middle-end biopic fashion?”
“Sara,” the Voice was louder, “reread Slaughterhouse-Five.”
“Oh my god,” I suddenly realized something. “Dora Maar is way too avant-garde and will never work. Why didn’t I just write a biopic about Dora Maar? With plenty of fun Wikipedia facts and long explain-y speeches! And why didn’t I write Pablo Picasso as the dick-ish character everyone expects to see and throw tomatoes at? Oh my god what if the stultifyingly unfunny Hannah Gadsby comes and makes one of her stultifyingly unfunny Picasso jokes? Why did I have to render Picasso as complicated? Just because I personally think watching dicks on stage is way more interesting than watching non-dicks on stage, doesn’t mean everyone else does. And who the fuck am I to experiment with form?! I’ve never won a Tony. I’ve never even been a finalist for the O’Neill Playwrights Conference! What the fuck is wrong with me? Why didn’t I just write a girl-power version of Dora Maar—- who kicks Picasso in the balls with a real barnburner of a final monologue? Why can’t I just write a normal play?”
“Sara,” the Voice was fed up, “reread Slaughterhouse-Five.”
I took a beat.
“Well,” I said, composing myself. “I don’t need to read Slaughterhouse-Five because I read Slaughterhouse-Five when I was in high school.”
“Do you remember anything about it?” the Voice asked.
I took another beat.
“I confess,” I confessed. “I don’t. Actually… I don’t remember a single thing about it.”
“Nothing?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
The Voice was silent, just shot me a smug little grin.
“Fine.” I finally said. “I’ll read it.”
So on Saturday, June 13th, I took my kid and his friend to our local community pool. I told them we were staying there all day long— that’s noon to 8PM. I told them I would be “working” from my pool chair. I gave them my debit card for the pool snack bar to procure chicken fingers, cotton candy and Sprite.
And then I listened to the entire audiobook of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
Here’s a really, really reductive refresher (if you need it, forgive me if you don’t): Vonnegut opens Slaughterhouse-Five by saying it will be an impossible book for him to write because of all the horrific things he needs to describe. He then tells the life story of Billy Pilgrim, who, thanks to some kindly aliens called Tralfamadorians, learns how to experience his own life in non-chronological order. All at once, “unstuck in time.” The “homebase” of the book is Billy’s horrific experience as a P.O.W. in World War II witnessing the firebombing of Dresden— but if Billy closes his eyes and opens them again he’s a baby, or he’s 12, or he’s having sex with his wife on his wedding night, or he’s about to die, or he’s getting his degree in optometry, or he’s on display in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, or he’s the sole survivor in a plane crash— all things that happened to Billy Pilgrim over the course of his life, but that he gets to experience— we the reader get to experience— all at once. And so because of Billy Pilgrim’s trick of chronology, death is no longer the end, rather just another moment in time next to any other moment in time—- happening all the time.
And it’s through this portal that Vonnegut can allow himself speak the unspeakable, describe the undescribable— death camps, war crimes, burning children, civilian murder, tortured soldiers and finally firebombs from above. Because if there is no death, no beginning or end, if every moment is happening all the time simultaneously next to every other moment well, death isn’t so bad now. We can talk about it. Write about it.
Upon finishing the audiobook of Slaughterhouse-Five at my local community pool while my children cannon-balled and ate Ring-Pops, I experienced, yet again, Full Ego Death. So it goes. (You probably already know this, but after every instance and mention of death in Slaughterhouse-Five— from the soldiers to the lice living in their uniforms—- Vonnegut writes his iconic, comically tragic refrain, “So it goes.”)
I couldn’t believe what that Voice had delivered to me, completely against my will.
Despite me not remembering a single thing about Slaughterhouse-Five from when I know I read it high school, that Voice inside me had the wherewithal to pull some ancient file in my brain and unrelentingly foist it upon me.
It knew.
I knew.
Once I came down from the high of the death of my ego, I quickly refreshed myself on Kurt Vonnegut:
Vonnegut was a POW and witnessed the bombing of Dresden and did want to write about it. But that was in 1945. Slaughterhouse-Five wasn’t published until 1969. Vonnegut knew the story he needed to write, but it took him 24 years of rewrites, revisions and teardowns to locate the artistic form it would take. He knew the story was too traumatic to be told in conventional American beginning-middle-end style. Conventional American beginning-middle-end style is too weak to contain it, too cheerful, too boring. Vonnegut knew it wasn’t a biopic. So he took an enormous risk and experimented with form. And it worked incredibly.
So I’m glad I read it. I’m newly confident. Slaughterhouse-Five is just as avant-garde in narrative structure as my play about Dora Maar. BUT DO NOT GET ME WRONG: I am not worthy of fetching Kurt Vonnegut’s coffee. I am a hack’s hack compared to him, an amateur, much worse than Kilgore Trout. But I know this much is true: If I am making a play about Dora Maar, Pablo Picasso and Guernica it better not be a motherfucking biopic.
Theater is hard. So it goes.
POST-SCRIPT: When I first moved to New York to be an actor in 2003, I went to an audition one time in a building in midtown. When it was over, I pushed the “down” button on the elevator.
When the elevator doors opened, Kurt Vonnegut was standing there. Just him in an empty elevator.
I got in with him.
Starstruck beyond words, but trying to play it cool, but knowing I had to say something so I could tell this story 23 years later in a Substack piece, I said:
“Slow elevator.”
And Kurt Vonnegut said:
“Sure is.”
Soon the elevator doors opened and Kurt Vonnegut exited the building into the streets of New York.
POST-SCRIPT #2: If you want to see Dora Maar, it will be performing in workshop at Luna Stage in West Orange NJ on June 19th at 8PM & June 21st at 2PM. Tickets here. And it’s easy to get to. I promise.
Dora Maar is a Foxy Films show, directed by Reid Farrington, featuring the radiant Alissa Finn & fierce Rafael Jordan, with unmatched stage management by Margaret Fortuna Yassky.
My eternal gratitude to Ari Laura Kreith, Lucas Pinner and Laura Hoffman at Luna Stage for yet again taking a chance on my work.