I Don't Suck.

A crash course in The Bauhaus.

It has been a difficult week. Grief gathers quietly and then strikes without warning, like while driving or at a Little League game. I watch my kids and their friends running around after school, powerhouses of force and momentum, and wonder at the entropic cruelty of death.

But as always, I find solace, escape and, ironically, order, in the act of playwriting.

And because some submission dates were looming (Hey National Playwrights Conference @ The O’Neill Theater Center! Will this be my year or shall we make it an even 20 no thank yous? Tune in mid-April to find out!) I was compelled to submit.

There was also Ojai, 7 Devils, Premiere Stages— a constellation of distant stars I incongruously still bother to shoot for year after year. They say Albert Einstein was the first person to define insanity as doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. Einstein should have spent more time in the theater community.

Anyway, today, after I submitted a new play to one of the artistic woodchippers listed above, I skimmed through the PDF I sent, imagining myself a gatekeeper, reading it for the first time.

I hated it.

This is a play I have been working, re-working, tearing down and re-building for over a year. I’ve written it forwards, then I tried writing it backwards. I’ve tried setting it in the 90s, then I tried setting it in the 40s, then I tried alternating time periods from scene to scene. I tried writing it using only talking, confessional-style. I tried writing it with no talking, as a brutally subtextual Sarah Kane riff. I even tried ripping off Paula Vogel and The Baltimore Waltz. I’ve never banged my head against a play quite like this. My mentor Mac Wellman says, “the first draft of a play shouldn’t take more than 3 weeks to write.” He’d be pissed to see me overworking the dough for so long.

Each pass I took was… fine.

But my ego doesn’t like fine. That bitch-goddess holds me to an unrealistic standard of excellence.

I did one more final renovation earlier this month, knowing it would be 1 of 3 plays I’d apply to things with this year.

“It sucks.” I told my husband Reid last night, as I got my kid ready for yet another Little League game. “No matter what I do to this play, it fucking sucks.”

Then it hit me.

“I suck.” I declared.

Reid, triggered, snapped back at me with an emphatic:

“Hey! How much do you know about Walter Gropius?!”

Reid studied architecture, theater and art history and throws his knowledge down at just the right times. Our kid would be late for baseball.

A refresher on Gropius, in case you need it, I know I did (forgive me if this is reductive):

Walter Gropius was a German designer and architect who invented The Bauhaus, a school of design, in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, where all the coolest shit was happening before that bag of dicks Adolf Hitler got jealous and ruined everything.

Gropius expanded upon the now ubiquitous concept of “form follows function.” Although that phrase had been used before, Gropius applied it to literally everything— chairs, desk lamps, windows, clocks, plates, shelves, silverware and most importantly, fonts.

Gropius was a Sans-Serif warrior.

If you come at Gropius with a Baskerville or a Garamond, you can get fucked.

“Form follows function” doesn’t mean soulless, bland conformity and cold government buildings. Form can and should also look cool—- as long as the cool supports the function.

So, like: Stackable chairs? Totally Bauhaus! (Contoured to the human ass, fits under a desk, sleekly stored and out of sight).

Universal TV remote? Infuriatingly Non-Bauhaus. (Ever touched even half of those buttons?)

More importantly though, Gropius’ philosophy valued, above all, a unity of the arts.

Gropius believed there was no difference between the guy laying the bricks of the cathedral and the guy painting the masterpiece on its ceiling. So John Q. Stonemason was just as essential as Michelangelo. They had to be unified in order for the cathedral to rise—- in order for it to exist as a cathedral at all.

Gropius wanted you to think of yourself not as an artist but as a craftsman.

Craftsmen come to work each day and do their job— not to be famous or praised as a genius or get paid or even for therapeutic reasons— but simply because it’s their job. And because it’s their job, they feel an obligation to the whole. It’s theirs, too. In the end, this collaboration between different craftsmen would achieve Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art.”

Gropius was awesome. He was about collaboration, democracy, progress, modernity, sleekness and things that worked, all while maintaining a contemporary aesthetic beauty.

So, naturally, that dumbass jealous hack Adolf Hitler was scared of him.

Hitler liked decoration.

Hitler liked glue, sparkles and elbow macaroni.

Hitler liked ornate statues with functionless cocks and decorative balls.

Hitler liked “traditional” stuff. You know, stuff from back when Germany was great. (Gosh that rings und bell…)

Hitler viewed Gropius’ “unity of the arts” philosophy as “Bolshevik” and so labeled him with the Nazi’s favorite burn: degenerate.

So as soon as that dumbass took over Germany in 1933, the first thing he did was shut down The Bauhaus. Gropius came to the US in 1937 and worked at Harvard into the 1950s and continued to influence everyone.

So what does Gropius have to do with my declaration that I suck and my play sucks?

Well, let’s first dispense with the idea that I myself suck. That would be odd. I am trained and apprenticed in my “craft” and haven’t quit and have decades of experience and have had successes and failures and take feedback like a pro and show up to “work” every day. So it would be very unusual if, despite that, it turned out that I did, in actuality, suck.

Now let’s focus on my assessment that the play itself sucks.

According to the Bauhaus manifesto, how could I know?

I have only contributed my part to the cathedral— you know, the words part. I don’t have all the information about the play yet to understand its suckitude. I’d need the other craftsmen for that. Without the craftsmanship of actors, director, dramaturg and choreographer to dig in deeper, it’s kind of pointless for me to continue fucking with the words part.

I rolled this over in my brain as I watched the 10-year-old Pirates vs the 10-year-old Yankees, little powerhouses of force and momentum.

It’s a liberating concept.

But then I got bummed again.

Today’s gatekeeper will judge the cathedral based solely on my words part. Which is like only looking at the floor of the Sistine Chapel or journeying to The Louvre to check out the wooden frame around the Mona Lisa.

There are institutions who recognize the value of theater as the “total work of art.” The Mercury Store in Brooklyn for one, a haven of progressive artistic thought. HARP @ HERE is another (although it’s been paused, seemingly indefinitely, which will be devastating to NYC). I was fortunate enough to have been an artist in residence at both institutions over the years. I saw in real time how my words part worked on an equal playing field as the other parts to make something total.

So I guess applications are non-Bauhaus. Which makes them capitalistic. A sneaky, non-consensual capitalism, one that has chipped away at us craftsmen on such an atomic level we’ve hardly noticed.

I don’t want to think of my plays as just words. I’m not a poet. I’m not even really a language person. I’m definitely not good at plots. Plots confuse me. I’m a theater person who likes to work with other theater people to make something awesome with them.

But this is America, where everything eventually becomes a reality competition show. So that concept is hard.

PS: If you’re in the tri-state, Theater is Hard will be LIVE (!!!) on October 8th at 6:30 at The Salmagundi Club, 47 5th Ave NY NY! It’s free with an optional, self-funded dinner & drinks right after. I will be joined by 2 downtown performance legends, Tony Torn and Jocelyn Kuritsky to read a few of my Theater Is Hard Socratic dialogues. Super fun, short and elegant, plus a chance to hang. FREE TICKETS HERE.