the insufferableness of writers
When we saw The Seagull earlier this week, and Hedda Gabbler last week, it got me thinking about the portrayal of writers onstage and in a dramatic context. One of the things we often assume is that the actual writer is using the writerly characters as stand-ins for their own selves. This would all be well and good, and persists in both literature and film as a pretty standard idea (this was one of the reasons Stephen King did not like Kubrick's Jack Torrance.) What I am finding in a lot of drama, this is less the case, or at least seems to be. I've written two play scripts (well one and a half technically) with writers as the main character. One was The Yellow Wallpaper, with a character that already existed. The other current play in progress features a writer clearing out a family home after her mother's death, which at the end of Act I finds herself not only convinced the house is haunted by her brother's ghost, but also is starting an affair with her high school love. Not exactly a model citizen.
In the Ibsen, there are two writers, the doting and sort of clueless husband who is a writer/scholar, as well as the lecherous and drunken past lover who has hand written a book of genius with another woman (who subsequently loses his manuscript and is convinced into suicide (though it may be an accident.) In the Chekhov, a more successful writer's mere existence terrorizes a young playwright at a lake house. The established writer who spends the first act bemoaning his own lack of really living in the moment, but who turns out to be a scoundrel in Act II. the younger writer, who has amassed his desired success by the second act is horrified by how fate has turned out for his love interest, who left with the older writer and was subsequently abandoned. After a rain soaked confessional on her part, the younger writer takes his own life in despair.
I've written before about the portrayals of writers in various genres. Film is one that is a mixed bag, when it comes to both fictional writers and those based on real people. Usually, the writers do not come off well or emerge triumphantly, which is saying a lot somehow about how most writers view their work. These thoughts are punctuated by seeing Hamilton, someone known for being a prolific political writer or pamphlets and documents that helped shape early government, Multiple times, characters ask, "Why do you writer like you're running out of time?"
Some of my favorite fictional writer characters are imperfect. Young Adult's delightfully maddening protagonist who seems on the verge of a breakthrough but then just isn't. The vampiric writers and creatives in the 'Double Feature' season of AHS. American Fiction's Jeffery Wright who writes a novel that checks all the boxes for what white audiences are looking for from black authors but in the process loses his own voice.
I've always said Hollywood loves movies about itself most of all, but writers also love to navel-gaze a little bit on their own, so too do I imagine playwrights....the results however, are usually not very favorable.
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