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THE CEILING


While I was writing Waiting for Gadot, the Unite the Right rally took place in Charlottesville, Virginia and a counter protester was murdered when a neo-Nazi terrorist ran her over with a car. The president blamed "both sides" for these events and Spike Lee dedicated the movie BlacKkKlansman in memory of the victim. I think my point is clear by making that comparison. In the wake of that incident, my image of Waiting for Gadot changed and while I'm sure I didn't create a work of art on the same level or with the same spirit or message as a Spike Lee joint, I was inspired by my anger at the time to investigate an idea further.

I think the saddest feeling right now in 2020 is that it doesn't seem like America has progressed much from 2017 or even 1992. It will be two weeks ago tomorrow that George Floyd was murdered by a police officer with his knee on the unarmed man's neck. As you know, there have been protests and riots in the wake of this. The president's reaction was to tweet about shooting looters. In the wake of the pandemic, the world we are living in has seemed surreal and these events certainly haven't done anything to bring us back to what we think of as everyday normal life. But that doesn't mean that these situations aren't due in large part to the ways that we live our everyday normal lives.

"Write about yourself" is an age old adage, so perhaps it's a writer's job to examine how everyday normal life for that writer impacts the world at large. That said, it's difficult to create conflict when you are writing about yourself, because it's never easy to admit to your worst thoughts or desires. It is no easy task to examine what role we as individuals have played in creating the horrible circumstances we find ourselves in as a nation. In THE ROOF, Bruce became obsessed with the bad things inside himself and lets them take over, but we all play a part through our actions, beliefs, and lifestyles in creating our society. We have to find ways to address the bad things we cause in a safe and productive manner. In doing so, we can only hope that if I'm looking back on this moment when I'm writing my next play, I can see the change that has come to our country.

I had the thought to listen to John Mayer's album Continuum today because somehow one of its song had gotten stuck in my head yesterday. It wasn't the first track that I had found myself singing a few lines from, but when I put the record on and "Waiting on the World to Change" started playing, I realized how it fit with my feelings on the time. Not in the sense that we are just waiting for change--we can be the change we want to see in the world, but in that we have to wait and see. This anger we have now at racial injustice and police brutality needs to have time to become something more than a passing emotion. For me, writing a play is a way to try to turn that emotion into something more stable than my feelings or thoughts--I know that I'm an out of sight, out of mind person. We need to keep a goal in sight and a dream in mind to see change actually come out of these dark times.

In THE ROOF, Bill and Sarah talk about the idea of memes, the actual concept Richard Dawkins coined that very few of us had much understanding of before it became associated with internet jokes. I don't really understand memes. I don't really understand Dawkins, either, but that might be pretty obvious. I just liked the idea of the meme as a parasitic idea. Perhaps in this time of the pandemic, we can actually weaponize revolutionary parasitic ideas like black lives matter, crime can be prevented in non-lethal ways, and people are not different due to their skin color. It's sad to think those ideas can lead to revolutionary change in America still, but perhaps the way to look at it is as an opportunity: we can get better, and we will, because we must.