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Moses on Moses Itamar Moses -- 11/09/2005  [ 1 ]What do you mean? I guess that it’s only in those private moments, where all those voices from the public sphere, real or imagined, are quiet, that you get any good writing, which is to say truthful writing, actually done. I was forced to learn this lesson. By bad reviews from critics, sometimes, or by bad reviews I gave myself, but most of all when I realized that the joke was on me: that being a playwright, out in the world, for real, is incredibly solitary. Writing is extremely lonely. Punctuated by these moments, when it’s going well, of feeling completely in it, and connected to everything, which is I guess the opposite of lonely. And also punctuated by brief periods of intense collaboration, when you’re actually in rehearsals, when you suddenly have this little family. But that ends. And it’s all the going back and forth between the lonely times and the collaborative times that can be difficult. I should add that I do love playwriting. I love the way it forces you to disagree with yourself, to come up with equally plausible and mutually exclusive point of view. To wrestle with yourself over everything. And I also love the way it then forces you to make a decision, to find a middle way, before paralysis sets in. If I could live my life the way I write plays, I’d really be onto something. You said you grew up in the Bay Area? I grew up in Berkeley. Which instilled me both with an uninformed liberal bias and with enormous skepticism of uninformed liberal biases. Berkeley taught me that tolerance can be a kind of fascism. Also, it’s gorgeous out there. And the food is great. I miss it a lot. Actually, Berkeley is a lot like dating an actress. It’s beautiful, and crazy, and you don’t want to leave, but, oh my god, you have to. So people leave? Well, no, almost nobody leaves. Most of my friends from growing up either never left the Bay Area or, over the course of the last ten years, gradually moved back there. I’m the freak. The feeling I live with almost constantly, that there’s somewhere else I’m supposed to be, or something else I’m supposed to be doing, is probably the result of my refusal to go home. So you left Berkeley, where you wrote your first play, you went to college, where you went to a lot of theatre parties, and then what? I came here. I moved to New York two weeks after I graduated. In retrospect, I don’t know what I was thinking. Oh, wait, that’s right, I did it for a girl. What’s with that? Actually, I’m pretty sure she thought she was moving here for me. Good communication. end of page 2 [ 2 ] read more ... [ 3 ][ 4 ][ 5 ][ 6 ][ 7 ] |
