Stories and the events they describe are not the same, though we often conflate them.   The world is vast, inchoate, endlessly multivalent.  A story is a handful of elements lifted out of the infinite swirl and presented as “what happened.”  It is a collection of random elements grouped together and shaped into an arc of cause and effect (this led to this led to this…).  It is an assertion of pattern.  It’s not hard to understand why we crave these structures of order in the world.  Even when they are frightening, heartbreaking, or unsettling, they give us a framework for considering the world. 

A great storyteller draws us into a story with the authority of her idiosyncratic worldview.  We enter the world of David Sedaris or Flannery O’Connor or J.D. Salinger or Jane Austen so that we can view world through the brilliant and particular lens of their consciousness.   When we enter a story we accept the singular consciousness of the teller as the frame, as a given.

Plays, on the other hand, contain stories, but the frame is expanded to show us that a storyteller exists in a context alongside other people who have different stories, and in a world with complexities beyond the comprehension of any one of them.   Great plays never, ever entrust their truth, their meaning, to their characters.  Characters, of course, have worldviews, often compellingly stated and sometimes containing wisdom, but always the play knows more than they do.  It is this mechanism that draws us into a play.  We’re hooked by the limitation of a character’s view, not its authority.  Oedipus knows his curse and he knows for absolutely certain that he has avoided it.  If someone asked Oedipus, the young man, to tell the story of his life, it would be a story of how he escaped a curse.  And we can see why he believes this.  We see that he has actually been thoughtful and diligent in his actions.  But, the play tells us, there’s more to Oedipus’s story than he can possibly know.  And this is what makes it theater.  The play is a play because it shows us that his ideas about the world are insufficient.  

If ethics is the field that asks how we ought to live and what we owe to one another, then theater’s answer lies in its insistence that no single version of events can be counted as truth.   Theater seeks not a single truth but a field of truth.  It offers us a way of framing things that don’t align, of holding in our view the confusing and elusive fact that everyone else has a consciousness as complete and worthy as our own, and the ability of any one of us to consider the world is limited in exactly the same way.  Not one of us can see over the next hill, into the heart of the person standing next to us, or into the future, even though each of us at some time or another is full of presumption to the contrary.  This is the essence of theater.  It is a map of the democracy of consciousness.  It is a map of humility.  It is a map that leads us to connection by way of our shared confoundedness.

It may sound as though I’m advocating some manner of theatrical constraint, which couldn’t be further from the truth.  I do say that for theater to be theater it must operate according to these principals.  But that’s not a prohibition.  It’s an operating principal and it not allows but invites endless formal invention.  I offer two examples:

When Anna Deveare Smith performs her recreations of interviews, she assiduously reproduces all the myriad nuances of the person’s presentation, coughs, stutters, interruptions and tangents. We listen raptly to the narrative – but we never forget that there is a person creating who lives inside a physical body, which is situated in an actual place, speaking at a specific moment in time.   We see minds darting from place to place, sometimes confused, sometimes illogical, sometimes distracted, vain, tired, busy… By including the quotidian physical life of her speakers in her recreations shows us people seeking understanding, rather than mouthpieces for the play, offering them.

Our Town offers a dazzling example of the formal acrobatics that flow from this principle.  Though Wilder labeled his lynchpin character the Narrator, the play would not endure if he were, in fact, a presenter and explainer.  But what Wilder actually gave us is an extraordinary and exquisite theatrical construction, the searching voice of all human wonderment in the guise of a man. 

Both my examples involve the solo voice and this is not a coincidence.  Solo voices are common in contemporary theater and the formal challenges of theatricalizing them are considerable.   Documentary theater often attempts bypass (or reject) the rigors of theatricalization and meld the genres of storytelling and theater, allowing the speaker to speak in the authoritative voice of the play.  I understand the temptation.  The topics of these pieces are always worthy and often urgent.   But when a piece conflates stories about the world with theatrical representations of the world problems arise.  We have an implicit understanding of the rules of engagement when listening to a storyteller (or a reporter).  But the metaphorizing glow of a theater stage lifts the speaker slightly above that set of rules. And yet these pieces are also not operating as theater.  In the absence of a truly contextualizing background the stories these characters tell us are offered to us as “truth,” to be credulously swallowed whole.   I don’t think it’s a coincidence that ethical questions often come up around these very plays. 

Theater breaches its own ethical code when it trusts the narrative of one or more of its characters to convey the ultimate meaning of the play and therefore vests an individual with higher knowledge than individuals actually have.  Whatever else this principle is for, above all else it serves the art.   Picture, if you will, Willy Loman’s solo show about himself and his career.  No, better yet, picture two solo shows.  One is the version this athletically self-justifying, fatally unreflective man would write about himself.   This is a show in which a robustly jovial guy shares all the secrets of being a great salesman and tells us how those secrets can be applied to the rearing of fantastic sons.  Now picture Arthur Miller’s version of this same solo show.  We see Willy delivering perhaps the same monologue he would write for himself.  But we know that Miller would find the theatrical devices to show us the things Willy can’t see about himself.  Which show would be captivating?  Which show would be more “true”?

Until about 7 years ago I was still planning on another career if I could just figure out what it was I really wanted to be.  But finally I gave in and admitted it.  I love the theater.  It’s not a choice.  It was something I was born with.  And now I can look back and see the tendencies all along: the made up performances for family, friends and at my synagogue; my decision at age 12 to make myself the kind of girl about whom others would say, “she’s the funniest girl I ever met. ” And I remember the year after college when I was living at home and working in a luggage store to save money so I could move to New York and I got cast in a production of Cabaret at the local community college.  Suddenly I  felt like the world had returned to color after a summer of black and white.  Because I was in a play.

            It was in college that I discovered my true home.  I was dazzled by life in the theater department.  I had spent a long childhood consciously counting the hours to adulthood.  I just knew when I went to college things would be different and so they were.  In the Fine Arts Department I met artists for the first time.  People devoted to unconventionality and invention. We went to our classes in the day, rehearsed all evening, then stayed up all night prowling around the Fine Arts Building.  We tried on all the clothes in the costume shop.  We wrote our overdue papers in the Green Room.  We lay on the floor of the glass walled lobby and talked and laughed for hours.  The department was made up of gay men, the women who pined after them and me.  To be honest, I pined after some of those clever, clever boys too.  There were no other lesbians in the theater department.  There were no other lesbians anywhere in theater as far as I could tell. 

            In my Senior Spring the mainstage show was William Inge’s “Picnic.”  During the preceding three and a half years I had honed my talents playing an array of bit parts as old women, neighbor ladies and the occasional animal.  I had been told by the head of the theater department that he couldn’t use me in bigger roles because, in his indelible words, “you just don’t convey any sexuality on stage.”  I was told I was a character actress which I later decided was really a code word for “lesbian.”  I was told there would probably be no work for me in the theater until I was 40 at which time I might be suitable for mother roles.  I was told in order to be employable I needed to either lose 30 pounds or gain 100.   Needless to day “Picnic” looked like my big chance.  The lead role was Rosemary, an old maid.  Finally a lead for a lesbian!  But the part went to a skinny, straight sophomore and I played Mrs. Potts, the elderly neighbor.  I had no actual scenes, just crosses where I would utter quick but pivotal phrases like, “I baked a Lady Baltimore cake!”  At the end of the play when all the women sit in the yard, devastated because the young man who had wandered into town and given them reason to live had wandered off again I had my big speech:

He walked through the door and suddenly everything was different.  He clomped through the tiny rooms like he was still in the great outdoors, he talked in a booming voice that shook the ceiling.  Everything he did reminded me there was a man and the house, and it seemed good....  And that reminded me... I’m a woman, and that seemed good, too. 

            It occurred to me that spring that this speech summed up everything I might ever be given to do in the theater.  It had been made clear to me that I would never be adequate to play a wife or a girlfriend.  I could play neighbor ladies, and eventually mothers.  My job would be to reflect upon the actions and importance of the male characters.  I would never play a character who grapples with work or love or friendship or politics or religion or sex or power.   Theater seemed so compelling to me, so powerful and that spring it was clear to me that that power to affect, to transform was in someone else’s hands and the best I could ever hope for was to catch a ride on someone else’s view of the world.

            I moved to New York had moderate success in productions such as “Trees,” a musical about a bunch of trees who wanted to become Christmas trees and conveyed this yearning through songs like Diddidly Doop De Doo Kind of Christmas and Ach du Kleiner Christmas and the Light Opera of Manhattan’s heartwarming seasonal favorite, “Babes In Toyland” in which I played a doll, and a lollipop.  Then in 1985  I saw the Split Britches Company perform their play “Split Britches” and everything changed.   I couldn’t imagine how such a thing had been created.  It seemed like it must have sprung fully formed from their heads -- it was so beautiful and complete and so utterly unlike anything I had ever seen before.  It was strange yet totally familiar.  Funny and heartbreaking and so sexy.  It was non linear - that blew my Midwestern MIND.  And - they made it themselves.  To me this was a revelation.  It turned out in order to perform you did not have to psych out the mind of a casting director so he would think you were the suited to play Tree Number Four.  It turned out you could make your own show. 

            Through Split Britches I found my way to the WOW Café.  My work at WOW challenged every rule I had learned about theater including the part about learning your lines before you went on stage.  The work there was a beautiful mess -- largely created by women who had never set foot in a theater class so they had no concept of how things were supposed to be done.  It was free from political or aesthetic agendas and fueled by the wild excitement of an audience who had never seen themselves reflected.  Shows in which you could fall in love with the characters and the actors and not have to think, “what if she was a lesbian?”  They were all lesbians.  At WOW even the women who weren’t lesbians were lesbians.  Shows were put up in a months or sometimes a few days with sets and costumes made literally out of trash from the streets.   They were full of magic.  I remember late one night sitting in the first WOW space, a tiny storefront on East 11^th Street, in the hush of a New York blizzard and watching out the window as a woman danced for us in the snow under a streetlight.   Never rehearsed.  Never done before.  Never repeated. 

            I learned to be a lesbian at WOW.  Through our plays and variety nights and rent parties and fashion shows and retreats and staff meetings full of lesbian “process” and lots of lesbian drama, we made a place in the world where it was taken for granted that girls like other girls and we could drop the explanations and justifications and become fully human. 

            I justified leaving behind my ambitions for a conventional acting career by telling myself that by doing my own work I could move back into the mainstream on my own terms but I was just rationalizing.  I never thought that would really happen.  Friends of mine took seminars which told you exactly how to make a career in the theater.  You read Backstage every week, went to all the auditions you could and sent out regular mailings of postcards with a montage of photos in which you alternately looked excited, studious, working class and sexy.  I did buy Backstage most weeks but I never went on auditions.  All I did was go to my various temp jobs and hang out at WOW. 

            When I did my first solo shows there, a friend of mine, an older woman who was a theater reviewer gave me names of a handful of women producers to invite.  They produced on Broadway and Off-Broadway and some of them were lesbians.  They’re not interested in this work, I told her.  People from uptown, they don’t understand what we’re doing down here and their not interested.  She said, “You’re scared.”  I told her she didn’t know what she was talking about but some years later I realized she was right.   I was afraid of rejection because I had been rejected.  I came from a world that implied and sometimes told me directly that I was not feminine, not sexual, not attractive, not funny and not interesting since male experience is universal and female experience is not only trivial but generally whiny and that goes double for lesbians. 

            I began to perform all throughout the East Village in the many, many performance spaces that existed in the mid-80's.  A small group of us from WOW seemed to share an artistic affinity and were interested in making a show that could tour and so began The Five Lesbian Brothers.  We began to acknowledge our ambition – something we had not thought about before.  We told ourselves we were just having fun.  Just doing it for ourselves.   We said broader success was not available to lesbians.  In some ways that was true.  There was and still is a prevailing assumption that lesbian work will be didactic, boring, self-righteous.   The Five Lesbian Brothers have often quipped that we’re going to call our next play, “Big Heavy Handed Message from Five Angry Lesbians who are too Ugly to Get Men – An Evening of Song.”  But certain doors were opening to us.              We were in the right place at the right time and my solo work and the work of the Brothers began to reach a professional level at the very moment when some mainstream theaters were opening their doors to lesbian work.   We learned then that part of the responsibility for bringing lesbian work to a larger audience lay with us.  We would have to learn to open ourselves to these opportunities and set aside the fear that if we dared to reach for more we would be once again dismissed as being incapable of conveying anything of worth or interest to those that count. 

            My solo work and the work of the Brothers received professional recognition beyond what had been available to lesbians who came even a few years before us.  Still, I could write a long and bitter book full of offers we would have had if we were not lesbians.  But mostly I feel grateful.  The sit coms and movie deals we never got definitely would have made us a lot richer, but an easier life isn’t necessarily more interesting.  Because no one else cared about what some crazy dykes on East 4^th Street were doing every night we made work that was unselfconscious and vibrant.  We got to make theater that felt like it mattered. 

            I love working in the theater.  I love it. I love it. I love it.  Sometimes when I’m on stage I feel seized by the joy of it.  Sometimes, when I’m working on a piece and things are going horribly I still feel grateful that I get to be miserable in a rehearsal room rather than at a temp job.   It took me a long time to admit to myself that I cared about the theater.  After my years perusing the NYU Continuing Education Catalogue trying to find my true career it turns out I’d already found it.  I am what I really want to be – a lesbian writer and performer.  For such a long time I felt I was wandering aimlessly through my life until I finally realized I’d been moving with great deliberation in a straight line toward a goal I hadn’t known existed until I got there.   What luck.

Larson himself was not from Lansing, but from a much smaller Jewish community, actually – Battle Creek. But his father, Mordechai Larson, was a distributor of beverages and young Lars traveled with his father on many occasions and so had great firsthand familiarity with many towns in the region. [[MORE]]In stories such as “The Gaon of Luddington” he lifts the veil of time and reveals for us the rhythms of Jewish life as it existed in the Midwest in the late 1990's with descriptions such as this:

The Luddington shul was rife with the usual squabbles. For instance, Zalman, the town periodontist, thought that the greatest portion of the congregation’s wealth should be allocated to the hiring of a permanent rabbi, while Shmuel, the town dealer in pre-owned Hondas, would slam down his fist in board meetings and raise his voice, threatening to quit if the greatest portion did not go to the building fund. Every autumn a heated disagreement would break out between Yonkel, the town psychologist and Mendel, the other town psychologist, as the time neared for the festival of Succot. Each year Yonkel insisted the community Succah should be framed with aluminum while Mendel would declare Yonkel, “an idiot not worthy of his place on the ritual committee” because Yonkel would not accede to Mendel’s belief in the superiority of PVC.

Arguably, the greatest of Larson’s stories is “Ryan the Yeshiva Bucher” which is set in the classroom of a Lansing Hebrew school, described by Larson as follows:

The young Jews of Lansing were given instruction in three areas: Hebrew, sometimes taught by people who actually spoke the holy tongue; Synagogue skills, in which the

children were instructed in the ancient traditions - when to sway and bow, stand and sit, and mumble convincingly as if they actually knew any of the prayers. And, of course, the youngsters were tutored in the great history of their people. That course was entitled: “How Your Ancestors Suffered And What Makes You Really Think It’s Going To Be Any Better For You?” for which they utilized the renowned text: “Seven Hundred Really Bad Things That Have Happened To Jews In History - An Introduction For Young People.”

The story centers on the somewhat buffoonish character of “Ryan Goldfarb.”

[Ryan] was widely thought to be a doltish boy who had never properly learned his aleph bet. His classmates sneered at him behind his back and wagered about whether his studies would continue long enough for him to accomplish his bar mitzvah, speculating derisively that even if he managed it he would not actually read from the holy scroll but memorize his portion off a cassette tape. When he missed one Sunday morning no one paid much mind. When he was again absent the following Wednesday afternoon it again passed unremarked. After a few weeks there was some speculation that his father was on Sabbatical but no one knew for sure and soon Ryan Goldfarb was forgotten altogether.

When Ryan suddenly reappears he shatters the calm of this insular world with the tale of what he has seen on his travels.

[Ryan’s] voice held an uncharacteristic sobriety that hinted at the weight of what he was about to impart... “I have been with my parents and my sister, Courtney Shoshana, to a place called New York City. There I have seen such wonders as you will never believe. We made the journey by car. Many roads were traveled and many tolls were paid. For two arduous days we traveled but we have a new Honda Odyssey and my sister and I watched many videos which greatly eased our agitation. Finally we arrived. In the land of which I speak, New York City, there is a region called the Upper West Side. What I saw there made me doubt my very senses. Thousands of souls reside there. And everyone is a Jew.

At this his classmates broke from their circle of rapt attention. They scoffed and knocked him about on the head, for his doltishness was well known. “Everyone?” they sneered. “Ha! Impossible!”

“No. Listen to me,” implored Ryan Goldfarb. “I have seen it with my own eyes. It is a

land of so many Jews that in every store Kosher food is sold.”

“Kosher food in every store! No wonder even the most ignorant gentile refers to you as an oafish dolt. Everyone knows you must drive two hours to suburbs of Detroit for the purchase of Kosher food.”

Ryan Goldfarb persisted. A fire burned in his eyes. “I swear it. If every word I utter is

not the truth may I be struck by a computer virus that will eradicate my entire hard drive.” A small voice piped up from the back of the crowd. “Perhaps he means hot dogs.” It was Steven Weinshank, a sickly, pale boy with a gentle soul who always sought an end to squabbling. “Even here you can buy packages of Kosher franks at the ShopRite next to the Barnes and Noble, where the scholars gather.”

“No, no. Not just hot dogs,” said Ryan. “Empire chickens, both whole and in parts.”

At this Elana Axelrod rent her Britney Spears t-shirt and began to weep. Josh Steinborn removed his walkman and eyed his returning classmate with skepticism.

“All Jews, you say. I don’t believe it. How many in the Hebrew Schools? In our grade? On a Wednesday afternoon such as this? How many would there be?”

“In the Hebrew schools!” Ryan Goldfarb exclaimed, “Not just the Hebrew schools! The public schools are full of Jews. Why, I have heard it told that the schools are closed for Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur.”

The children began rocking back and forth, wailing, “Lies! He is possessed!” they cried. “What sort of demon has overtaken him?!”

“That’s not all,” the boy persisted, “Alternate Side Parking is suspended.”

The weeping grew louder. “What is this Alternate Side Parking?” they cried.

“I do not know. But I have seen it written that it is suspended – even on Succot!”

At this Cheryl Rabinowitz swooned and fell to the floor a dead faint.

So incomprehensible was his story that the children fell about in a frenzy. They wept and pinched themselves. They wailed that surely Ryan Goldfarb had been possessed by a dybbuk for what sane person could imagine such things? Only a demon could put such visions into the head of a young boy. But Ryan swore to them - “If all I’m telling you is not true, may my grandparents never give me that Nintendo Game Cube!”

At this, Josh Steinborn pushed back his stackable molded plastic chair and approached Ryan Goldfarb. So extreme was his anger that the wispy hairs which had recently sprouted on his upper lip trembled with rage. He stood before Ryan and demanded, “What is your friggin’ problem, dude? A town where everyone is a Jew? I seriously doubt it.”

Larson’s powerful story comes to a narrative and spiritual climax with the children’s visit to the part-time town rabbi, Menachem “Phil” Wasserman, who had problems of his own:

A dry chuckle emerged from the rabbi, carrying a hint of the bitterness which sometimes came upon him and caused a sour taste to rise in his mouth when he thought of Chana Berkowitz, his fellow student at rabbinical school. How often he had wrestled with his resentment of Chana for securing a top position at a gay synagogue on the North Fork of Long Island! The question that had so often tormented him rose up unbidden in his soul, “Why, Lord, could you not have made me a lesbian?”

Though so much more remains to be said about Larson and his work, my space ends here. It is my fervent hope, however, that the platform provided by this fine magazine will spark the wildfire of popular and scholarly attention so deserved by this Jewish genius of the heartland.