Time-Poverty.
Would you rather: live forever or die right now?
My younger son, Levi, has a favorite would-you-rather:
“Would you rather live forever or die right now?”
He asks me this all the time. (So much so in fact, I used it in as a scene in my play Look Out.)
My answer is always the same:
“Live forever.”
“Mom,” Levi always says. “This is forever we’re talking about. Forever forever.”
“So?” I bait him.
“So you’d see the sun explode and the universe contract and pretty soon you’d be the only carbon-based life form left in an infinite vacuum of darkness.”
“I know,” I tell him. “But think of the free time…”
I’d be a time-trillionaire. As opposed to what I’m looking at now: Time-poverty.
“Time-poverty” is defined as having so little free time that your entire reality changes. Your thinking and behavior becomes desperate. You’re no longer concerned with what matters to you, only what you can squeeze in before you drop dead.
Which brings me to my latest diary entry breakdown.
In case you’re a newer T.i.H. subscriber (and please skip this part if you’re not), this year I began a personal archeological-paleographical dig to extract and analyze all the entries about the theater I wrote in my countless journals, starting in 1991, when I was 11. I break down each theater-related entry psychologically, emotionally, societally, etc…Then, I further challenge myself to adapt each entry for the stage as a very quick scene. Hopefully, whenever this archeological dig ends, I’ll have accidently written an interesting play.
You can catch up on my previous two excavations here and here.
My last excavation, I am Pinky and The Brain, was me, at 12, finally landing a leading role in the elementary school play: Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. In this entry, my hubris knows no bounds. I thumb my nose at the gods, I smote my enemies, I laugh at those who doubted me. I sound a lot The Brain from Animaniacs.
But strangely, after that entry, I didn’t write a word about actually performing Dorothy. But that’s ok. I was a child who just won something and that’s all that mattered. (But you don’t have to be a 12-year old to mistake getting the role for doing the role. I’ve cast many an adult actor over the years, who joyfully accepted the role, who I then never heard from again. It feels good to win the lottery, but for theater making at least, obviously, that’s just step one.)
SIDE QUEST #1: What followed my Dorothy diary entry was page after page after page of boys. Months and months and months of boys. I was disturbingly preoccupied with boys. I brought this up with my shrink recently.
“Most of what I wrote in my diaries was about boys.” I lamented.
“Normal,” my shrink said.
“No, you don’t understand,” I said. “I’d become so fixated on some boy that my entire reality was altered. My first real love in high school, this guy Ryan, I have almost three full journals just about him! So what’s my new plan of care? Ketamine? Voluntary commitment?”
“Again, normal.” (My shrink’s “you’re ok” philosophy is my north star.)
All this to say, I had to skip over a lot of boy-heavy diary entries to get from Dorothy in 1992 to my next theater mention in 1994, which I’ll break down now.
Here’s the entry, I wrote it 32 years of precious time ago, in June, 1994, when I was 13 in 8th grade.
A youthful awareness of time-poverty is everywhere here. Time is a thing, an Albee-esque physical object to hold—- evidenced first by “this has been the best year of my life by far” and of course the next line—-
I just can’t believe I’m in high school already. Soon I’m going to have to think about what I’m going to do with my life.
I seemed to know that I was time-rich in 8th grade, time was a Platinum card with a massive credit limit and 0% interest. But I knew it wouldn’t last because I immediately I remind myself in the next line that I already know how I will spend my riches:
I’ve already made up my mind though. I can’t picture myself doing anything else but being on stage.
Digging my heels in about how I intended to invest and budget my time-wealth was the greatest gift my 13-year-old self could have given my 45-year-old self. I can’t believe I had the instinct to do this. It was a form of existential life-insurance, but also self-preservation. Because in the years that followed this entry, I grew very confused, reckless, sad, mad, misguided, led astray. But a fear of time-wasting was ever-present in my consciousness. It warned me that if I went too far in the wrong direction, did too much of a bad thing, I’d risk losing all my time. And if I lost all my time, one day, many decades later, maybe I’d get my act together and wake up to financial wealth but existential destitution.
That’s my place! I want to get started now.
Whereas in my previous two entries, I immaturely viewed myself as a raw talent unjustly ignored, awaiting discovery at Schwab’s Pharmacy, this “I want to get started now” line implies an acknowledgement of work and an awareness of time circling the drain. “The stage” was a far away Valhalla I had to reach and I seem to be waking up to how long it would take. Not doing it, languishing inside my Long Island childhood, was like setting my time-dollars on fire.
But whenever you tell someone you want to be an actress, they automatically think movie star. Well, not me. I want to be on stage!!! No one can understand that. No one understands!!!
SIDE QUEST #2: Although this section is not really about time-poverty, I thought I’d go a little off track to break down the importance of this feeling of being misunderstood by society.
In my 20s and 30s, when I told a civilian I was a playwright, their standard response was (all together now):
“What of yours have I seen?”
I used to panic at this question. Nothing I did or said could ever rise to the occasion of what the civilian was asking here. What of mine would she have seen? Uh… In a flash, I’d mentally blast through my resume. What’s the most mainstream thing I’ve ever done? Which thing sold the most tickets? Which thing got the best review? When I came up empty-handed, which I always did, I’d curse myself for the massive failure I am, before smiling politely and saying:
“You probably haven’t seen any of my work.”
And, undaunted, the civilian then would say:
“Have any of your plays been on Broadway?”
And after my the elevator of my soul free-fell to the groundfloor, killing any hope of redemption and self-respect, I’d pretentiously say:
“Oh no. I’m a bit too avant-garde for Broadway.”
But now, at 45, that question doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I understand that they don’t understand and I don’t feel the shame I used to, only a pang of “they just don’t get it” and the echo of my shrink’s, “you’re ok.”
Anyway, side-quest over.
The next bit:
Oh! Why couldn’t I have been born in 1900? That would have made me in the prime of my life during the Roaring ‘20s. I could have done so much. I’d have married George Gershwin and have been famous in the Broadway scene. But no! I had to be born in the stupid 1980s. The worst decade is the ‘90s. You have no idea. I wouldn’t mind being old today if I only could have been there. Everything was so much more romantic and everyone had a chance to make it big.
It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: I no longer feel this way.
Judging by my ongoing parasocial kinship with “mad” women-artists from the 1920s (Zelda Fitzgerald, Dora Maar, etc…) I am pretty sure, like them, I would not have done well in their time.
And I’ll be honest: I don’t think George Gershwin would have married me.
Gershwin was a lifelong bachelor with an almost religious devotion to his work, working constantly, day and night. Because somewhere in him he knew that despite his enormous success, fame, wealth, boundless musical experimentation and almost superhuman creativity, he was time-poor. In February of 1937, while performing his breathtaking Concerto In F, he became disoriented and lost his place in the music. But he kept working in the weeks after, even harder than before, despite his worsening headaches. On July 9th, Gershwin collapsed and died from a glioblastoma, an incurable brain tumor. He was 38.
So he wouldn’t have had time for me.
But because he was a genius and because he was a beautiful, lithe, elegant man consumed by his artistic calling, I would definitely have tried to hit that.
“Hiya George,” I’d say at the cast party at the bar, amorous on gin.
“Hello,” he’d say, not looking up from the piano. “Any requests?”
“Just a question,” I’d say.
“Shoot.”
“Well,” I’d lean in. “Would you rather live forever or die right now?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” George would silkily say. “Live forever.”
I want to rehearse in an empty, spacious theater which would be filled that very night with people who just paid $60 to see me. I want them to clap for me and I want to feel the sweat of the spotlights. I want that so bad I’d kill for it.
I’ll forgive myself the icky, childish fame-hunger in this entry (the $60 ticket price? The crowd clapping for just me specifically?) but 32 years of time has not eroded the primary want here, rather brought it into deep relief.
When I was a student at the National Theater Institute at The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in 2001, a teacher asked us to visualize ourselves in 20 years— to actually see, hear, even smell where we were. It’s a common self-actualization exercise and always easy for me. As evidenced in my journal, I’d been doing it since I was a kid: “rehearsing in an empty, spacious theater, under the sweat of the spotlights.” I’m unsure if the lights are sweating or I am, but both visuals are nice.
Anyway, to sum up:
As a playwright, I feel time-poverty on a micro-scale every day. Like when I waste my precious time-dollars applying to things I’ll never get. Or when I put thought and effort into a relationship or institution only to be abruptly ghosted. It’s petty time-theft, all of it.
But on a macro-scale, time-poverty is much worse for me to think about, for us as a society to face, especially for the American Theater as a whole.
Because I will be dead soon, we all will be. Every day that passes brings me and you one day closer to the grave. That mission statement about love and trees and championing new work? Ashes. Your “I didn’t do it” musical celebrating Michael Jackson? Space dust. Such hubris to think we have the time to afford making shite theater. I, we, must make innovative, dangerous, charged and experimental new American plays, plays that will remind us that forever forever is coming and we won’t be here for it. It’s just a fact.
So, like Gershwin, who I have outlived by seven years, I try to work as hard and fast as I can.
Theater is hard. And gone in a minute.
POSTSCRIPT
Here’s my quick and dirty adaptation of the entry, which is the artistic purpose of my archeology-paleography playwriting project. (This one is more a synthesis of the time musings above.)
CHARACTERS:.
SARA, me.
LEVI, my kid, 10.
GEORGE GERSHWIN, George Gershwin.
July 2026.
LEVI: Would you rather live forever or die right now?
July 1937.
SARA: Hiya George.
July 2026.
SARA: Live forever.
LEVI: This is forever we’re talking about. Forever forever.
SARA: So?
July 1937.
GERSHWIN: Any requests?
SARA: Just a question.
GERSHWIN: Shoot.
July 2026.
SARA: So?
LEVI: So you’d see the sun explode and the universe contract and pretty soon you’d be the only carbon-based life form left in an infinite vacuum of darkness.
July 1937.
SARA: Would you rather live forever or die right now?
GERSHWIN: Isn’t it obvious?
July 2026.
SARA: I know.
July 1937.
SARA: Well?
GERSHWIN: Live forever.
SARA: This is forever we’re talking about. Forever forever.
GERSHWIN: I know. Think of the free time.
July 2026.
SARA: But think of the free time…
END OF SCENE.
Another terrific column. I think you’re on to something really really big. IT has to do with the lines at the bank teller that we line up for in the arts in our country. The ones that aren’t moving. Movement is almost an illusion, after a certain age. You’re actually doing all these things because there’s a time clock that’s even more severe than death itself in our industry and that is the the window of fame opportunity. If you don’t become well-known soon enough in your lifetime you shift from emerging to veteran staus and suddenly no one is interested in producing you because you’re no longer a discovery. So living forever doesn’t just have the baggage of the sun exploding it alos has the baggage of : …that all with one consent paraise new born gauds and give to dust that is a little gilt more praise the gilt o’erdusted.” - (Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida). Age prejudice is the most protected and practiced -ism in the world. And when you get old enough to complain about it , by complaining you just sound old - it’s a Catch-22.