Unthinkable.

Thinking about it.

(Trigger warning: Murder and death.)

At my weekly therapy session Wednesday, I talked about nothing but death. Mostly because I am fixating on the Rob Reiner murder.

It’s not that I was a massive fan, but as a younger Gen X-er, Rob Reiner was always… there. His movies of course were great, The Princess Bride basically raised me. His later appearances on my favorite shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Howard Stern Show were always good and more recently I respected him for hating Trump. But honestly, I didn’t think about him that much.

Now I think about him all the time. Everyone does.

Why?

I asked my therapist unanswerable questions about the Reiner murder: Why, of course, but also were they awake? What about eye contact? What were his like? Rage? Remorse? Thousand-mile stare? And what about their eyes? Fear? Shock? Pleading? Love? There is very little that would stop me from loving my two kids. And for me, the most painful question of all: Did they speak to him? Did he speak to them? When? How much? And what words, specifically?

But judging from reactions online, I’m a bad person for thinking about the unthinkable. Online, people appear to fall into two camps about this horrific murder: The Curious and The Shamers.

The Shamers express a performative moralism toward The Curious. The Shamers tell The Curious that they should stop thinking about the unthinkable, that we Curious are disgusting for wondering why, how and what.

But I am a dramatist. So I am beyond curious–— I’m hungry to understand how a man got to the point, mentally and physically, where he had the will to kill his mother and father and went through with it. People just don’t do that. But yet, it looks like he did. So it’s natural for the general public to ask questions about something so unthinkable.

But maybe the Shamers are right and I’m behaving like a groundling, or worse, a real yente as my Jewish grandmother would say. But I can’t help it, I’m curious.

I’ve always been very curious about death and murder stories. Believe me when I tell you I’ve watched every true crime doc on every streaming platform. It took me a full year to shake what I imagined were the exchanges of fretful glances between those people on the Titan submersible in their final moments. I know, I know, they were billionaires who chose to seal themselves inside that stupid tin can. But my rabid curiosity superseded my bias of the rich and I read and watched everything about that story.

Obviously, my curiosity isn’t limited to the rich and famous. The shootings of everyday civilians in the US are forever stuck to my consciousness. My oldest kid was born the week of Sandy Hook in 2012 and he was in 4th grade when the Uvalde 4th graders were murdered. My imagined visuals of those events, those final moments, will never leave me. Nor should they.

Side quest: Is Senator Lindsay Graham curious like me? Does he think the unthinkable? Is his mind capable of it? Does he have an imagination at all? When Mitch McConnell blocks gun control bills, does he feel a pang of guilt when kids are murdered? Mitch McConnell has kids, believe it or not. Does he wonder what those victims saw and felt? Does he feel bad? Ever? Even for one minute? Surely you don’t have to be a dramatist or a creative or an artist or a writer or a musician to imagine these things, right? I’m not even talking about empathy, which I know Trumpers struggle with. I’m just talking about a mental picture. That’s it. I know these Republican senators are human because they appear to be sentient. So they must have the capacity for mental visualization, right? These are not rhetorical questions. I really am curious about their minds. But I digress.

Anyway, I went to lunch today with my friend who has been a great supporter of my work and of the arts and theater in New York in general. We had a great, long convo at a cafe on the Upper East Side.

We left eventually and walked up 2nd Avenue toward the subway.

“I can’t stop thinking about the Reiner murders.” I said. “I don’t know why.”

“I know why,” my friend said. “It’s Greek.”

My synapses fired.

“Go on,” I said.

“Well, the Reiners were our version of royalty, right? You had the Hollywood legacy with Carl, then Rob, then the troubled son.” She went on. “You even have the king and queen.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Barack and Michelle Obama were supposed to visit the Reiners at their house that night.”

“Oh…” I said. “It is Greek.”

Thinking the unthinkable is what the Greeks did best.

They went beyond just thinking about it—- almost all the Greek tragedies have intra-family murder.

Quick reminder, although if you’re a subscriber to Theater is Hard you probably already know this:

In Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Orestes kills his mother Clytemnestra.

In Sophocles Oedipus, Oedipus kills his father Laius (unknowingly). His Electra is again the story of Orestes killing his mother. Then Sophocles’ Antigone of course is about two brothers killing each other and the sister who has to deal with it.

Euripides, my favorite Greek playwright, tackled matricide in his version of Electra and Orestes. Euripides pushed the unthinkable even further in Medea—- we all know what the mom does there. Same in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis when King Agamemnon kills his daughter so the gods kindly change the direction of the winds so the Greeks can sail home from Troy (where the Greeks brutally murdered all the Trojans, as Euripides brilliantly unpacks in The Trojan Women, which I adapted). That changing-of-the-winds storyline appears in all the versions of the Oresteia too, I think.

There are more of course, but those are the ones I know off the top of my head (with a touch of internet confirmation).

These plays were written 2,500 years ago, by people just like us (more or less). So I think thinking about the unthinkable is embedded in the homo sapien’s very DNA. It always has been. And I think this is why I am curious— why we all are— about the Reiner murders. I really don’t think it’s a petty need for salacious details or tabloid fodder. I think it’s an ancient pull to know.

Then there’s the final scene of Euripides’ The Bacchae, which I think is my favorite Greek play. The final scene goes like this (although, again, if you’re a subscriber to Theater is Hard you probably already know this:)

Agave has been running around naked in the mountains of Thebes with Dionysus, the multi-gendered god of wine and theater. Agave is in a frenzy of ecstasy and hallucination. In this state, she kills a lion with her bare hands, tears off its head and puts the head on a stick. She returns from the mountain, proud of her kill. Slowly though, and with the help of her father Cadmus, Agave sobers up and realizes that it’s not a lion she’s killed, it’s her own son, Pentheus. That it’s his head on the stick. Agave howls with remorse. With an afflicted mind, she killed her own son. And rather than be executed, she is exiled out of Thebes, a fate worse than death for the ancient Greeks. Her punishment is survival. Her punishment is thinking about the unthinkable.

I think what Euripides is saying here is that we are capable of the unthinkable and that maybe we should think about it. Maybe we can understand our species better. Maybe it won’t happen anymore.

I think the way the surviving Reiners phrased thinking about the unthinkable, which is now their reality, was really good: “We ask that speculation be tempered with compassion and humanity.”

Theater is hard, compassion and humanity is in its DNA.