“Who are you writing for?”
A respected friend of mine asked me that after reading my new play, Wiser than the Night. As it happened, Pat and I were discussing that very question over breakfast that very morning. It’s a good question, I suppose. Maybe even the only question. I’ve always believed that writers must always write for themselves, then hope for the grace of kindred spirits for readers, however few those readers might be—or in the case of a play, however small the audience.
As I worked on this play, I found myself thinking about what Simone de Beauvoir wrote about Sartre’s The Flies (a play I’m pretty obsessed with):
“The real function of the theater, Sartre thought at the time, is to appeal to those who share a common predicament with the playwright.”
Sartre’s “predicament” was that of a patriotic resistance fighter in Vichy France. My predicament is that of a 70-year-old man who has lived through enough of this split second we presume to call “human history” to be puzzled by its fruits, staring down the barrel of an awful future for humanity.
The action of Wiser than the Night ranges from the 18th-century Enlightenment to the election of President Ronald Reagan. Its characters include an elderly Russian dancer who survived the Russian Revolution, and also Catherine the Great and the French philosophe Voltaire.
“Why Voltaire?” I’ve been asked.
I was raised to revere the influence of Enlightenment thinkers on the world of ideas, especially our civic values and our systems of governance—and Voltaire is the Enlightenment personified. Like a character in my play, I find myself wanting to ask Voltaire, “What went wrong?” How did an epoch that began with the United States Constitution and the French Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen bring us to the ascendency of Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump?
I don’t have an answer to that question, but in my own mind, it’s what Wiser than the Night is all about. And it’s a question that must be asked.
If only I can find an audience, however small, that shares my “predicament” …
—Wim
Download a PDF of the play Wiser than the Night HERE.
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