A History of Violence

"She ought to be slapped for writing it."

I had the pleasure once of hearing my play discussed by people who didn't know I'd written it.  Invisibility is a privilege of playwrights; actors are seen by the public, while we hide in the shadows.  Interestingly, the reaction (summarized in the statement above) was not the one that haunted my nightmares.  (I have a reoccurring dream of being condemned by the rabbi during Yom Kippur services.  I barely even go to services.)  The speaker felt that the play was anti-Palestinian; I'm not sure if she'd stayed for the second act or not.  I loitered in the hall where she was talking to her friend, trying to look casual.  I awaited my moment.  When the conversation seemed to be turning away from AK-47, I approached.

"I couldn't help but overhear you talking about that play*... I wrote it, and I was just wondering if there was anything you wanted to ask me about?"

Oh dear.  Much back-pedaling.  Much equivocating.  Many, many chances, all of which I took, for me to show off all the research I had done, all the care I had taken.  Some implicit apologies.  Some satisfaction.

I narrated this incident to my father later.  "Well," he said, "you're provoking everybody, kid!  Isn't that what art's supposed to do?"  I hear this a lot, and I suppose to a certain degree it's true, but it also seems worrying likely like a commonplace.  Is it my job to provoke?  Or is my play insufficiently clear, that someone could see it and come away with the idea that I was condemning Gazans and excusing Israel?  Artistically, I prefer to err on the side of obscurity rather than heavy-handedness, but the entrance of politics does complicate things.  I don't like to think of my play as being itself propagandistic, but if it can be read in the way that my critic in the hall read it, then it takes on some aspects of that genre, a notion with which I am not comfortable.

* A dirty lie.  I could totally have helped it.