The theater minor at Yale required me to complete a senior project. For most students, that meant having a solid role in a Chekhov play at the Yale Dramat. I wanted to do something different, more daring, more experimental: I wanted to create and perform my own one-woman show.
My faculty advisers shot that idea down as too ambitious, but somehow agreed to let me write a play that I wouldn't star in. Despite the fact that I hadn't written a play since high school. Despite the fact that I dropped out of the Yale playwriting class after one or two sessions. Despite the fact that all I wanted to do and all I actually had done at Yale was act, act, act.
Writing a show met with Conspiracy's approval. He was harshly critical of my acting, but more encouraging when it came to writing or directing. He used words like "waste of energy" to describe the same performances that earned me solid reviews in campus newspapers.
So I wrote.
On Conspiracy's typewriter, with him enjoying a ringside seat to my stunted creative process. I was so insecure, I didn't write a single sentence without asking his opinion. His "creative input" overrode my own ideas.
The result was a stilted, pedantic, wordy, plotless mess of a play filled with spotty characters giving long-winded political speeches about why Yale sucked.
But the fun didn't stop there.
I had to give a public reading of my play, and Conspiracy had more great ideas.
He suggested letting Tragic, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, direct. Tragic was talented, charismatic ... and a crack-addicted, schizophrenic panhandler. She often begged outside of Wawa, a convenience store located one block away from the institution where she had long ago earned her MFA.
Conspiracy saw her as a victim of Yale racism. She had gotten into trouble for refusing to play a role that would have required her to engage in onstage nudity or sexual innuendo with two white men. She had gotten her degree only by switching from the acting program to the directing program.
Now, she was trying to get clean and go legit. She stopped doing crack and started taking thorazine for her schizophrenia. The results were eye-popping: In about eight weeks, she went from an emaciated 100 pounds to borderline obese and borderline sort-of-sane.
My play reading became Conspiracy's community-service project to help Tragic reignite her former genius.
The result was painfully – no, make that devastatingly – embarrassing. Tragic, in a bright blue dress, occasionally saying inappropriate things in a loud voice. Conspiracy nodding his head like a proud papa. My faculty advisers clearly wondering who these colorful, pungent New Haveners were and why they were playing the starring role in my senior project.
The play was so bad, my faculty adviser decided not to even try grading it until I rewrote it. That was my task over the Christmas holidays.
I went to visit my mom, leaving Conspiracy in New Haven.
There, from a safe distance of several hundred miles, I rewrote the play. It was still bad. It was still pedantic. But it more closely resembled a play, with defined characters and a plot line. I was far from happy with it, but I knew in my heart that it was better than my first draft.
Conspiracy and Tragic dismissed the new draft as a watered down, whited-out version that "your teachers made you write."
The experience was so demoralizing, it took 10 years before I had the courage and confidence to write another play.
