Tomorrow is the 100 Words event at the Soho Theatre in London with the National Youth Theatre, and I’m looking forward to it. As a playwright, it’s my (voluntary) job to show up at 9:30 on a “bank holiday” Monday with myself put together and cogent – this after a weekend of city living supported by the wiles and general inconsistencies of other “theatre practitioners” and their physical and emotional needs. That is to say, this weekend I celebrated two birthdays with friends – one Saturday and one Sunday, and both were as you might imagine theatre people celebrate.
One of these parties was a western-themed crawl across London, people dressed as cowboys wielding toy guns. We fit in at Soho, where cowboy hats are still acceptable and even encouraged on a Saturday night, but elsewhere there were looks. At one point we wandered into Charing Cross, and I was amazed at how much like an American mall it was. Were we in England? Are these… tourists? Yes, we were. And yes, they are. We were suddenly in the middle of a garishly lighted, hyper-secure stronghold of… something, and I was the only male in our party without a cowboy hat or a provocative leather duster. I hadn’t dress up for the west. I am from the west. I am from “where the west begins” (literally my home town’s motto), and I grew up with real, living cowboys on the fringes of my experience. And these are not Brokeback cowboys. They aren’t always genteel (though some certainly are), and most of them aren’t gay. They tend to shout at people playing dress up from their enormous trucks, and they actually do listen to that kind of music (also: Pantera). It’s not in our imaginations. I am from a magical place where decent cuts of meat aren’t prohibitively expensive and everyone who holds down a professional job can afford to buy their own home. I have heard cows moo and have nearly run into deer on cold highways. I am literally a slice of the “American west.”
And Monday morning come 9:30, it will be my job to support, as a playwright, a learning project for young people “that explores how the essence of a language and culture can be captured in just 100 words and provides a linguistic and cultural bridge between the UK and China.” This act of writing for a blog I mean to treat as a centering, pulling my mind from thoughts of birthday parties and cowboy hats. This is an exercise and a communiqué. It’s almost ten PM here in south London, and I’m staring at Soho’s website ruminating on their (I pray rhetorical) question:
“Can we explain who we are in 100 words?”
My formal study of Wittgenstein tells me no, but the poet in my heart (let’s call him Steve) says otherwise. Steve knows that a hundred words can be powerful. The Gettysburg address was notoriously short. I don’t know how many words precisely, but short. I remember hearing somewhere that it was short.
That complete thought from the Soho website reads:
“Can we explain who we are in 100 words? Young writers from Britain and China will be given the challenge of doing just that.”
I imagine one of those announcers before a boxing match reading that. It sounds something like this:
Can WE explain… who WE are… in 100 WORDS? YoungwritersfromBritain and Chiiiina will be given the CHALLENGE of doing just that. Coming up next! Okay, that’s just my corrupted, televisual imagination, but there is something weird and happily sadistic about challenging young writers (generally sensitive types) to explain ourselves in the coffee-fueled AM culminating in work that will be shown in the bar-driven PM. “Hey, You. You’re a writer. Are you doing anything? No? Do you want to? Come here and write us something. Something short! NOW!” Of course this is great. This is exactly what we want to hear! We’re not used to this kind of thing. Usually we’re told to wait. No, no… wait. Rewrite that. I’m not convinced. How old are you again? No, no… I’m not sure about that. Are you sure you’re twenty?
Okay, that’s just my corrupted, televisual imagination, but there is something weird and happily sadistic about challenging young writers (generally sensitive types) to explain ourselves in the coffee-fueled AM culminating in work that will be shown in the bar-driven PM. “Hey, You. You’re a writer. Are you doing anything? No? Do you want to? Come here and write us something. Something short! NOW!” Of course this is great. This is exactly what we want to hear! We’re not used to this kind of thing. Usually we’re told to wait. No, no… wait. Rewrite that. I’m not convinced. How old are you again? No, no… I’m not sure about that. Are you sure you’re twenty? The unspoken code in London’s new writing theatrical community is: if your plays aren’t what is wanted at the time (for whatever mysterious reason), wait, but if you’re saying what’s saleable or within the artistic line that a given theatre is after, they’re going to viciously market the fact that you’re 19, assuring all ticket-holders of 1. a lofty beneficence and 2. your precocious ability to put words on the page – hey, even if it’s clunky, he’s only 20. That’s the cynical feeling we young writers sometimes get, if you’d like the truth of it.
So it is a pleasure to know that many, many young playwrights will be involved in this project and told, positively, to get something done and up when so often there’s a hedgy kind of “wait and see” attitude. I think that’s a practice which will benefit new arts theatre generally – speedy delivery, not at the cost of method but the same way that jazz music is made. You learn your instrument (for a writer it’s language, for an actor the body), then play with it without inhibition or self-censorship. You explore. It’s simple. And it doesn’t really matter what age you are, really.
I’m looking forward to working with the National Youth Theatre. I bumped into some of them before a performance last Thursday, and they were literally aglow with excitement and energy. The Hallmark card practically writes itself: “Your future starts now!” They are literally embodiments of their adolescent states. I’m wondering what’s on their minds, because the troubles and aspirations of a twenty-five year old playwright is, thinking back on my time spent being fifteen, surely different. Maybe? I know ten years is a long time.
I am not from England, as mentioned, though being here I do have an insight into London and the UK which is perhaps uniquely colonial. For instance I’m fascinated by the term “bank holiday Monday.” I’d like to see a Theatre Holiday Tuesday or an Arts Holiday Friday. I’d like to see the banks and the theatres switch places for a day. Imagine it. Pure chaos. Pure, pure chaos. Just think of the hats we could sell in that one day. We’d make a fortune then lose it at the track, then default on our mortgages and wonder how on earth that could happen…
My word processor tells me everything before this paragraph tallies about 1050 words. So tomorrow we’ll try to narrow it down to 100, forget to remember Wittgenstein (or the opposite), and go to work creating a short piece of work.
Kevin Anthony Kautzman,
London, 2007
