Dear Friends,
For the weekly, longer-form essay, I’m sharing a piece on the really wonderful playwright Gina Gionfriddo. This came out originally, thanks to Billy McEntee, in The Brooklyn Rail - and I’ve made only a few small changes here, restored some cut sections, etc. The ‘Encyclopedie’ section here is meant to be a kind of personal hall of fame, celebrating various people (mostly writers) whom I’ve found inspiring and whose writing I would strongly recommend.
I’m also very happy to share that I’ll start doing work on a separate Substack called ‘Inner Life.’ This is in collaboration with
and . This has developed very organically. It’s felt that there was a group of people frequently commenting on one another’s posts, engaging with each other’s writing, etc. We wanted to see what would happen if we were a little less siloed in our separate Substacks and we’re hoping to create a hub for like-minded writers interested in - to choose a couple of words - aesthetics and inner life. Our first posts will come up very soon.Best wishes,
Sam
G IS FOR GIONFRIDDO
I think most people who write are familiar with a very particular, very annoying sensation – the writer (usually a generation older) who seems to have your beat covered, who is invested in your themes but has already addressed them with more skill and courage, not to mention success.
For me, starting to write plays in my late 20s, that figure, more than anybody else, was Gina Gionfriddo. I came across her in a database of plays that a friend in an acting MFA program shared with me – a motherlode of contemporary theater that I pored through to try to figure out what other playwrights were doing. She might not have been the absolute best – I thought Annie Baker was a genius and her quiet plays opened up thrilling new vistas for American theater; I was thoroughly intimidated by Mike Bartlett’s mathematically-precise cruelty – but the more I wrote, the more I found that Gionfriddo’s was the voice whispering over my shoulder, saying usually that such-and-such a passage wasn’t cutting it or that such-and-such a passage wasn’t bad, but, as it happened, she had already written it.
At the time, this is circa 2014, she seemed like the main line in American playwriting. She had been nominated twice for a Pulitzer Prize, had that nice combination of being transgressive but also more or less palatable for an uptown audience, and seemed to be heir to what I took to be the great glory of specifically the American theatrical tradition – the ability to deal with sex openly and unflinchingly and to explore all the dark corners of sexual desire. And then….what?
She had one more play produced, Can You Forgive Her?, which got some of the worst reviews I’ve ever seen (“we cannot forgive the play for a haphazard drama knocked together out of unbelievable situations”; “it looks like a play, talks like a play, and seems to want to be a play”; “Gionfriddo’s talky, tiresome didactic exercise is…a misfire on all levels”) and then she pretty much closed up shop. She had had a day job writing what she calls ‘murder television’ and she tunneled into that – writing for shows like Law and Order and The Alienist on TNT and working her way up to a credit as Co-Executive Producer. A film she wrote for HBO was dropped after eight (!) years of development.
For The Brooklyn Rail, I was asked to come up with a ‘timely peg’ to write about for Gionfriddo and there actually are plenty of them. After Ashley, first produced in 2004, astutely anticipated the explosion of true crime as a genre. The pained discussion of gender in Rapture Blister Burn speaks to what I think of as ‘Lana Del Rey feminism’ – the idea that there can be a feminism without either sanctimony or finger-wagging judgment, “a true feminism,” as Lana Del Rey put it, “where a woman does exactly what she wants.” And Gionfriddo’s tendency to see all of America as a giant reality show was more than materialized in Trump. But, really, what I’m interested in with Gionfriddo is the opposite of timely pegs – roads not taken, opportunities lost, the near-impossibility of making a career in theater even for a supremely gifted, widely lauded playwright.
Up to a certain point, Gionfriddo’s career unfolded pretty much exactly how an American playwright’s was supposed to. She grew up in Washington D.C. – “a really macabre little gothette of a child,” she writes of herself – went to Barnard, did an internship at Primary Stages with the idea of being an actor but switched after not too long to writing. (She can actually, she says, remember the exact moment when she realized she could be a writer – she had written a sketch for Columbia’s cable access channel and overheard somebody saying “Who wrote that? That’s really good.”) Mac Wellman – who truly was the fairy godfather for Gionfriddo’s generation of playwrights – suggested that she apply to Brown’s MFA program. She studied there with Paula Vogel, wrote plays that were incredibly dark treatments of the American nexus of violence and entertainment with their own mordant sense of humor. (Being funny was a late-breaking revelation for Gionfriddo – she claims that there was no sign of it in her childhood, in high school, or at college, but, she says, “I went through tough times medically and psychiatrically and became a gallows humor person at some point” – and that’s the first thing that anybody comes across in dealing with her writing, a sense that there’s absolutely no limit for what can be funny.) It’s characteristic of the responses she was generating at that time that one literary manager – from Chicago’s Goodman Theatre – contacted her regarding her play Blue Nation (about Kurt Cobain-obsessed teenagers cheerfully bilking a retarded man for his money) to say that it was a terrific play but not something that the Goodman “would ever do.” In the years after graduation, which she now remembers as a golden time during which she had the freedom to ‘doodle’ on her plays, Gionfriddo stayed in Providence, working in subsistence jobs, but managed to establish a kind of powerbase between the O’Neill Playwrights Conference and the Humana Theater Festival. After Ashley was, as Lawrence Harbison wrote, ‘the hit of the 2004 Humana Festival’– and, most crucially, was described in a New York Times article as ‘a genuine discovery.’ That review gave producers the nerve to pick up the play for an Off-Broadway run in New York.
With that, Gionfriddo was made. An executive producer from Law and Order was impressed by After Ashley and offered her a job (I picture this as being one of the most successful job interviews ever conducted – Gionfriddo claims that she knows serial killers “like some men know baseball statistics”). And After Ashley, Becky Shaw (2008), and Rapture Blister Burn (2013) all went on to have very successful, critically-acclaimed Off-Broadway runs, while both Becky Shaw and Rapture Blister Burn received Pulitzer Prize nominations.
And from there, naturally, Gionfriddo ascended to playwriting heaven. The Signature Theater has her plays in repertory, there’s a handsome anthology out of her collected works, she never had to worry about money again. Well. Not quite.
I don’t have any overriding theory as to why, from the peak of her success, Gionfriddo had only one more play produced and was then, essentially, booed offstage. There’s a sense that she was always a bit heretical – she dealt with female cruelty and manipulation in ways that audiences found uncomfortable but forgivable in U.S. Drag and Becky Shaw but were not willing to condone by the time of Can You Forgive Her? And it may just be a kind of iron law of American theater that at some point audiences turn on the playwrights – and leave it for another generation to rediscover the value in what they’ve discarded.
When that examination happens, this, I think, is what audiences and readers will find in Gionfriddo:
- That, more than any contemporary artist I can think of, her plays express the national and sexual neuroses of our peculiarly deranged era – and, in particular, the ways that shlock and prurience create their own twisted realities;
- That she dealt intelligently and very funnily with the dark side of female sexuality – rape fantasies, patterns of dominance-and-submission, the erotic thrill of violence, the ready-at-hand satisfactions of manipulation; topics that are verboten to most writers or are utilized for their shock value but are just part of the air that’s breathed throughout Gionfriddo’s fictional universes;
- That she figured out a playwriting technique for making theater a kind of funhouse mirror of the culture-at-large, with her characters always half in grim daily life and half off in some ghoulish fantasy, some reality-show-of-the-collective-unconscious – and that she was able to write characters who were both smart and verbally dexterous enough to understand how these different worlds inform each other.
Gionfriddo’s quartet of mature plays – After Ashley, U.S. Drag, Becky Shaw, Can You Forgive Her? (I’m excluding Rapture Blister Burn, which I don’t like as much) – all share very similar characteristics and strike me as inhabiting different corners of the same world. They start always in indeterminate moments – a mother and son talking over the television while the son is home sick from school; a man stuck while unpacking his mother’s boxes – and the class markers are always similarly unsettled (the ostensibly well-off are always hopelessly in debt, the educated are constantly envious of blue-collar workers with solid incomes, everybody is always looking to cash in somewhere). The feeling is of a society that’s deeply frayed – and comfort, peculiarly, comes from a fascination with horror and violence (but always just far enough out of reach that it seems cozy).
After Ashley, her breakthrough, opens with the mother, Ashley, and son, Justin, watching television – Ashley bored out of her mind by housewifery and eager to overshare her sex life with her son. That dynamic is abruptly undercut when the piously liberal father, Alden, hires a paranoid schizophrenic to do the yardwork and the schizophrenic, in short order, murders Ashley. Justin’s 911 call is sampled into a hit rap song and the event becomes just another made-for-TV crime story. Justin, now 17, is hit on by macabre-minded college girls, and Alden swiftly gets past any lingering scruples he has to host a crime-themed cable TV show. So, apparently, a windfall for everybody involved, except that Justin has this nagging feeling that “I don’t know what the aftermath of [the murder] is supposed to be but I don’t think it’s supposed to be a book and a TV show and a rap song and a girl in my room” – and decides that, to save his mother from the sanctimony blanketing her, he has to destroy her reputation, reveal her to be the cynical, funny sex maniac that she really was.
If After Ashley reads like a cry for help from a culture simultaneously overrun by sanctimony and by shlock, U.S. Drag is a giddy exploration, more directly farcical than Gionfriddo’s other plays, of what it’s like to inhabit that culture while almost perfectly unconstrained by integrity. Two attractive twins, Allison and Andrea, are on the make in New York City and refreshingly free of filters of any sort. The characters they meet on their merry way include a self-absorbed novelist (“like a never-ending cycle of oozing and tending”), a Wall Street banker who lets them crash with him on condition that they organize parties, which they have no intention of doing (“your problem is that you expect too much, we can’t be out all night and fascinating after we’ve been working all day”), and a coalition of the bored-and-lurid overly fascinated with a maybe serial killer. It sounds like it wouldn’t add up to much, but Allison and Andrea’s ids are so pure, are so guileless in their greed (“I want to do nothing and have money and have people know who I am”; “I can’t wait till I’m 50, I want a lot while I’m still pretty enough to enjoy it”) that everybody else they encounter comes across as self-righteous and self-deluding by comparison.
Becky Shaw is supposed to be Gionfriddo’s first fully mature play, with less of the cabaret feeling of the other two. I actually find it to be a bit sloppier – various subplots don’t really cohere – but the play has the most clearly defined conflict in any of Gionfriddo’s work. Sharp-witted, sharp-tongued Max is set up on a very ill-conceived date with Becky, a shy, pretty office temp whose life seems to have run aground. They’re mugged on the date. Max, who from the beginning had decided that Becky was beneath him, feels himself not at all obliged to return Becky’s increasingly desperate calls asking for help and support. “The next time you try to kill yourself I would like you to try harder” is only the cruelest of many cruel lines he has for her, but Becky, apparently timid and vulnerable, is curiously undeterred – and, in her way, even more ferocious than Max. “We have damage,” she tells Max. “People like Andrew and Susan will always run from us when we show them who we are. I see who you are and I’m still here.”
Audiences seemed to fragment into furious disagreement about Becky – the host of ‘Theater Talk’ doing an interview of Gionfriddo, announced, much to Gionfriddo’s surprise (0:53), that Becky was “a monster” – and the lesson, as I took it, was that audiences in an avowedly feminist era simply didn’t know what to do with a character who was shy but also manipulative, who used weakness as her strength. If audiences were hard on Becky, though, they were merciless to Miranda, the heroine of Can You Forgive Her? Miranda has, without doing anything particularly outrageous (“good schools and good living baby”), racked up an enormous amount of debt and is managing it through a pair of sugar daddies. She finds herself in a pickle – one sugar daddy chasing another – but the real issue turns out to be that the men in her life are, as she ages, simply losing interest in her. The play as a whole is basically a ganging-up against Miranda, who is smart, funny, in touch with her sexuality, but is badly out of step with the brutal financial realities of present-day America (“If you want to go two hundred thousand dollars in debt to be a doctor that’s one thing. If you want to do it reading poetry that’s something else.” / “I know, Tanya. I should be executed.”) To my mind, Can You Forgive Her? was a nice continuation of the themes of the rest of Gionfriddo’s work, just advanced to middle age, with desperation dialed up and with some unlikely, beautifully tender alliances made on the far shore of failure, but that’s the minority opinion. “Woefully underappreciated,” is how Gionfriddo, via e-mail, describes Can You Forgive Her?
In writing The Brooklyn Rail piece, I had really been of two minds about whether to contact Gionfriddo or not and eventually came up with a compromise – that I would write everything first, based on reading her plays, and then interview her basically just to check that I wasn’t heading in some wrong direction (I was starting to get concerned that I was having her stand in for something too sweeping and generic), but Gionfriddo’s reflections were clearly moving along similar lines. In talking about her career, her affection is reserved for the very beginning; that first moment backstage of the Columbia cable access channel; the production of U.S. Drag at Brown when she and the director were laughing so hard from the back of the theater that they were worried about interrupting the show; the years working subsistence jobs in Providence and just writing. And, from there, Gionfriddo says, there were a handful of very narrow, very lucky breaks that allowed her to have a career at all – the connection with the O’Neill, the connection with Humana (the fact that there was such a thing as Humana at that time to showcase new plays), the favorable New York Times reviews of After Ashley and then of Becky Shaw (“I’ve spent some time reflecting on that,” she says, “I don’t know that I have a career without the Times reviews”). And, from that, there was a period of five or ten years when Gionfriddo was one of the hip playwrights around – “At any given moment there’s room for very few hip female playwrights,” she says, “I don’t feel like it’s ten, I feel like it’s more like three” – and it’s far from shocking to her that she couldn’t stay in those good graces forever. There were a few life choices that led her away from playwriting – she had always written slowly and, once she had the ‘murder TV’ jobs and had made the ‘drastic’ decision to choose single motherhood, her pace slowed further – and then her plays, by the late 2010s, seemed to be out of step with the political climate within the theater world. “We had an unlikeable protagonist [in Can You Forgive Her?] and one of the reasons she’s unlikable is that there’s some casual racism, and we put that up right after Trump was elected and you could feel in the audiences that people had a zero tolerance for anything, it felt like a hair trigger for anything offensive,” says Gionfriddo. “My thinking was that I could write this character who was a little racist, a little this, a little that, but who by the end of the play is absolutely brought to her knees, constantly punished, but it didn’t work in practice.”
It's not completely clear to me, when talking to Gionfriddo, whether she views her playwriting career in the past or present tense. “I think there is a place for me,” she says, if she were to try to put up something new, but she caveats that by adding that she doesn’t have a new play and that her priority, since she’s had her daughter, is “frankly wanting money and health insurance and that kind of thing.” I think she’s annoyed that her playwriting career didn’t continue as the triumphal march it seemed to be at one point but knows not to be ungrateful for what she has achieved. She’s had virtually all of the accolades that American theater is capable of bestowing on a playwright. The Law and Order spinoffs may not be for everyone, but they seem to suit her Miss Marpleish streak. But, for me, talking to her and thinking about her, there’s a feeling of something ineffable that’s been lost and that goes well beyond Gionfriddo. Gionfriddo is as good as we have; a theater that can’t retain a talent like hers, that can’t properly reward her for what she’s accomplished, is a broken theater.
Loved this! And that's with no skin in the American Theatre game and having never heard of Gionfriddo.
The crack reaches much farther than the theatre. From what I can tell, most art forms relying on MFA programs are suffering from a similar ailment.
The one thing we know about the critics and the so-called "king/queen-makers" is that they are often wrong. Last night, I watched what I think is a new documentary on Leonard Cohen entitled "Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song," focused on that creation as well as his career. Surprising to me, way too late into the night when I shoulda been sleeping but couldn't stop watching, is that the president of Columbia Records hated the song, turned down the album and Cohen had to find a small, pretty unknown distributor. This, for a song and an artist whose contribution is now viewed by me and many others as inestimable. Gionfriddo should not give up. So, glad, Sam, to be a part of this new venture (in your intro) with you. xo ~ Mary