Kindness

We went to see In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) last night at Speakeasy. It was a good production with strong work by the women in the cast, especially Lindsey McWhorter and my friend Anne Gottlieb.

I was thinking about what it was that I found so appealing about Sarah Ruhl's writing, and it occurred to me that she refuses to recognize the existence of evil in people. Stupidity, stolidness, selfishness and myopia, yes, but not evil, and not hatred. Her empathy is so great that she really is able to see and express every single character's point of view and to make us appreciate their need to be understood and listened to.

This is quite interesting to me, at the moment, as I delve into the world of Cherry Docs - which is full of evil. Reading Frank Meeink's book Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, the amount of evil and hatred perpetrated by almost everybody is stunning, and very discouraging. It is indisputable that there is way too much senseless cruelty and brutality in the world, which people inflict on one another for no good reason. But Sarah Ruhl has the ability to see and explore areas of the human experience that are just as urgent, compelling and universal, but are concerned with need, love, and - and to me this is the actually the most salient - just plain confusion about what the heck is going on in our lives and what we should do about it.

I often like to say, and I'm hardly original here, that drama takes place at the fringes of life - you need a good crisis to make a good drama. But Ruhl manages to make compelling drama that exists more in the middle - where people are mostly okay, but still profoundly lost in the daily effort to live. It touches me just as deeply as the most extreme tale of human suffering and redemption. Almost more so, because it's more like my own life. Not that I've had much experience with the electronic stimulation of the quelque chose...