Practicing Radical Interruption Acceptance.

or, R.I.A.

The other day, I dropped my kid and his friend off at the movie theater to see Toy Story 5. Because they like to feel independent and because I don’t want to watch Toy Story 5, I gave them my credit card and sat outside in my car in the parking lot.

I know that sounds like a strange way to spend two hours, but as an introvert with photosensitivity, sensory issues and very limited ability to suffer fools gladly, sitting alone inside a quiet locked car is my idea of heaven.

Soon, my playwright friend called.

She wanted to chat about how to balance playwriting while working a full time 9-5 office job, something she knows I do and something she was about to start doing.

“I just… I can’t be an office worker,” she said dismayed.

“But you won’t be an office worker.” I said. “You’d still be a playwright.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

I thought for a second and said, “I had this theater professor in college who once, inconceivably, said to my small class of aspiring actors:

‘What you do for money— that is what you are.’

He said it with a tone of inevitability, with a casual smile and a shrug. As in, sorry kid, you can scream ‘artist’ till your larynx blows out, but if your W2 says hostess, you’re a hostess. Capesh? Now everyone turn to Act II Scene I of Vanya.

I remember at the time being 90% sure this was bullshit. I was training to be an actor then and because it would obviously take a minute for me to become Ethel Merman Jr. I’d need a day-hustle as a waiter or hostess or dog sitter or whatever. But would that then negate my aspiring actor status? Of course not. That’s not even a question worth asking.

But 10% of me was like… maybe? He’s the professor, after all. Maybe I hostess, therefore I am. Maybe whatever pays the bills is in fact reality and everything else is delusion. Maybe it really is that that grotesquely capitalistic, that… feudal. Like: you’re a farmer and you’re a blacksmith and you’re a prostitute and we all work in service to the lord of the manor and if you don’t like it there’s an ice floe with your name on it.

What a horrible, false concept.

Real life example: the other night I went to see my friend and brilliant playwright Jonathan Spector’s new play Birthright. Afterwards, I walked from MCC down to Penn Station to go home. It was around midnight so the Penn Station late night crowd was in full force— drunks, homeless, drunks, fanatical sports fans, second shifters, more drunks, New York’s shadiest and sleaziest. I zipped into the women’s bathroom. Waiting in a long line of girl-drunks, I spotted a young woman sweeping the floor of the stalls.

I covertly watched her, just for a second.

She wasn’t angry about it, she was just doing it, dare I say, contentedly. She had something else on her mind, something mentally transporting her.

So? Is sweeping the stall floors at Penn Station all this woman is?”

“Of course not,” my friend said.

“Not according Professor Fiefdom of Richard Scarry Manor. The same would apply to you at your potential full time 9-5. I say: take the job, make the evil (but stupid) capitalistic system your bitch and keep yourself housed, fed and pap-smear’d so that you are then completely free to be what you actually are: a playwright.”

“But when?” My friend asked.

“What do you mean, when?” I asked.

“When are you a playwright? Do you just… use your vacation days?”

I rolled up the windows of my car. This was gonna get ugly.

“Listen:” I said. “The American workforce gets a real hard-on when you give up your dreams. Pam Bondi loves to hear you dropped playwriting. JD Vance? He gets aroused at the mere thought of you knowing your place. But it is a lie, a terrible lie.

As long as you are practicing, you are a playwright 100% of the time. Dropping art because you have a full time day job is as absurd as dropping, I don’t know… Judaism or Buddhism because you have a full time day job or-or-or dropping being a woman or dropping your favorite band or dropping liking turquoise or cilantro. Theater is in you. It is you. So you must find a way to make being a playwright work while also surviving Trump’s idiocratic America simultaneously— not just on a two week vacation allotment, but all the time.”

“How do you do it?” She asked.

“Well, I’m sneaky,” I said.

“Sneaky?”

“Yeah. Sneaky means write and eat. Sneaky means decline that happy hour. Sneaky means no more binge-watching shite TV. Or good TV, for that matter. Sneaky means declining that wedding or baby shower invite. Sneaky means printing things out in places that have printers. Sneaky means reading the room and, if it’s safe, writing inside it. Sneaky means buying a privacy screen protector. Remember what George Costanza said about work? “Always look annoyed. When you look annoyed, people think you’re busy.” Sneaky means developing a two-track mind 100% of the time. Sneaky is harmonizing— work sings Anita, playwriting sings Maria.

And this is the most important thing: when the job yanks your attention away, be ok with that. Perfectly ok. Evolve a metal agility that continues to function inside the yank. Sarah Ruhl aptly labeled this process in her book, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, as “working within the interruptions.” Don’t get mad, just practice Radical Interruption Acceptance (or R.I.A). Have your way with capitalism the same way it has its way with you— has been having its way with you your entire life! I mean, doesn’t that piss you off?”

“Yeah,” my friend said. “It does.”

“Then seek your revenge by maintaining a job and an artistic practice in equal measures. There is room enough in life for both. Now don’t get it twisted: I don’t like that it’s this way. Do I wish I were independently wealthy and didn’t have to work at all? You can bet your last plug red wooden nickel I do. But I cannot control society, nor should I waste my time wishing and praying for things. It’s like wishing the alcoholic would stop drinking or that The NPC at The O’Neill would think about different ways to consider my play beyond one read.”

“Hm.” My friend sounded skeptical.

“I know, I know,” I conceded. “There are about a million arguments against my position here. Kids, caregiving, class, privilege, time constraints, fatigue, working multiple jobs, working no jobs at all, the consuming act of job-hunting, not to mention vast degrees of ableism and one’s own physical and mental health limitations. But I still maintain, in general, as a society, if someone really wants to also be an artist— has to be an artist— then they must find a way, regardless of what their weak-ass W2 says. I will die on this hill.”

“Well,” my friend said. “Thanks so much for taking the time to—”

“What you’re considering is actually dangerous to you personally,” I continued undeterred.

“Dangerous?” She asked. “Why?”

“If playwriting can be viewed as something so capricious that it can be easily dropped because now you’re an office worker— the flip side of that is that playwriting is really only worth holding onto if it serves the same purpose as the day job, ie money. But I ask you: do you know any playwrights who make a living solely from writing plays?”

“Uh…”

“Bearing in mind, I don’t mean playwriting and teaching or working in TV or acting, etc... I mean a playwright who, with only income from writing their plays, can feed, clothe and house themselves and their children, get an annual pap and mammogram (or whatever the penis equivalent of that is) and not live in sheer terror that tomorrow they will teeter over the financial abyss. Do you know any playwrights like that?”

“Um…Tom Stoppard?”

“Good choice, but he also wrote movies and is dead.”

“But you said dangerous,” she said, rapidly tiring of me. “How is dropping the playwriting for the day job dangerous?”

“Well,” I said. “Where’s The Urge gonna go?

“The Urge?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Your constant compulsion to make a play. Where’s that gonna go?”

“Well…away. Hopefully.”

“Ha!” I laughed from high upon my horse. “It’s gonna turn into a neurosis! My bro Carl Jung described the unacted upon artistic urge best in his Modern Man in Search of a Soul:

‘A psycho-neurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.’

This is why you dropping art is dangerous for you and for a society at large.”

“I’m actually getting another call, so—”

“Have you noticed the correlation between the decline of experimental theater and the rise of MAGA?”

“Uh—”

“Hear me out: As our society produces more musicals about a non-child-molesting Michael Jackson and fewer formal theater experiments like what Foreman, Breuer, Akalaitis and Wilson did, then MJ musicals are gonna start being viewed as ‘good’ because that’s all there is left. The curious artists, the easily bored artists, the deep thinking artists, the manic-depressive artists and critical artists will have slowly but surely dropped their practices—- because… why bother? The people want MJ! But as you sit at your desk in an office in midtown, my friend, The Urge is growing! And as per Jung, if The Urge is not acted upon, the unconscious is repressed and what happens then?”

“Uh… what?”

“MAGA! You become Lindsay Graham and Amy Coney Barrett! Sycophantic rule-following unconscious-ignorers who take their repressed urges out on all of society! Don’t think for a minute that the theater world doesn’t do the exact same thing.”

My friend was now, officially, over me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a lot.”

“No, no this is…uh… actually inspiring.” My friend said.

Oh. Maybe I misread the room. I often do.

Just then, the door to the movie theater swung open. My kid and his friend shuffled out into the stark sunlight of the parking lot, each holding a gigantic plastic bucket of popcorn. I’m guessing the damage on that was about $50.

“All I’m saying,” I said, thinking about my credit card bill. “Is that theater is hard. But it’s much harder without a paycheck, wherever that paycheck comes from. We need a room with a view. So take the job. Then start making the most interesting work of your life.”