The next literary movement?
A few weeks ago, I read an article by Greta Rainbow in The Dirt entitled: “Where will the next literary movement come from?”
I was highly impressed by this article, which name-checked a lot of writers and publications that I hadn't really heard of. It was a whole world, revealed by this article, that had essentially no overlap with the literary world that I personally inhabit.
Take for instance this paragraph:
When I asked people where the next literary movement would come from, Maya Martinez is a name that kept coming up. Theatrics, her debut collection out with Ben Fama’s Wonder Books and distributed via independent release platform Metalabel, is the surrealist, Valley-Girl-accented real deal answer to the 21st-century Cookie Mueller. When I tell her as much, at the launch party for volume 5 of The Whitney Review of New Writing, she says, “And to think that I could’ve been living in a truck.”
It's no surprise that I haven't heard of Maya Martinez, because I usually haven't heard of up-and-coming writers. But I also had never heard of Ben Fama or Wonderbooks or Metalabel or the Whitney Review! And I definitely had never heard of Cookie Mueller, I had no idea who that was. From googling, it seems like she was an actress in John Waters' films and that she was also an author. No doubt I should know who she is. But I was fascinated by the fact that she was dropped as a reference—that there's a whole scene of people for whom that name immediately means something.
Obviously, I ordered Maya Martinez's book Theatrics, which I am told is a limited release of only 500.
I felt very special. That might sound facetious, but I do indeed feel special! Like...how many people are reading this book by this very important new author? Not many! Certainly I am one of the first to write about it online.
The book came a week ago. It is sixty-six pages long. I think that these are the scripts to various shows that Maya Martinez has performed onstage, presumably in New York.
And I am fairly certain that I enjoyed reading this sixty-six page booklet. Certainly, I was a fan of at least one of the plays, which is entitled “Hole Play”.
Hole Play
This work is about a girl who seems to be in her twenties who is standing in the parking lot of a strip mall in Florida. She has just purchased an angel-and-devil paired Halloween costume for herself and her friend to wear, and she's on the phone with this friend, Janine, talking about the costume.
During this call, she encounters a hole in the parking lot, right next to her car. The hole seems to be somewhat mystical in nature. It's not a regular sinkhole, there doesn't seem to be a bottom to it.
Yeah this hole is liiiiike I would say maybe a four feet by four feet hole? Fuck if I know the diameter of anything anymore thinks for a second Yeah I would def say four by four feet, aaaaaaaand seemingly endless. listens to Janine again... Mmmmhmmm, yeah Janine I did spit in it….and nothing! like no echo!
Anyway, she keeps trying to describe this hole to her friend, and her friend sort of gets it, but maybe doesn't, and in any case her friend is unclear what she's supposed to be doing with all this information about the hole. The protagonist becomes increasingly frustrated, trying to make her friend understand:
PLEAAASE There's a fucking seeeeeeeemingly endless hole in the Party City Parking lot!!! Say it five times fast Janine! there's a fucking seeeeeeemingly endless hole in the Party City Parking lot!!! And you know what else!? No one seems to give a fuck about this hole. There's no cones, no tape. No neon signs. People are just parking around it all willy nilly!
The main character is obsessed with this hole. It's all she wants to talk about. And, okay, but imagine you're the friend on the other end? What're you supposed to do? You're wondering if Halloween is still on. You're interested in hearing about the hole, definitely. But...then what? What happens next? You can sense Janine’s confusion, even though you can’t actually hear her side of the conversation:
No no I'm not gonna jump down some hole when I know we have a party to go to Janine! Yeah, yeah, I'll be home in time to get ready for the party. Yessss! We'll both look hot and have fun! Wait, but, Janine, do you believe me? Like as my friend, do you?
The whole performance is great, very well-textured, highly readable. I would love to see this play in real life. Both characters seem so sincere, so genuine—yes, they’re concerned with appearances because of course you are, everyone is concerned with appearances—but they’re still alive to the world, still able to get excited about things, still able to respond to each other. It feels both true and aspirational: this is how young people are, and it’s how they should be.
The other really good play is called “The Play”
In “The Play”, two women discuss their biggest fantasies. Except they're not sexual fantasies, precisely, although sex is definitely involved. The question is: what are their desires? What would they want in an ideal world? And meanwhile they're interrogating and judging each other for these desires.
LAMB: My fantasy is that people come to see me and get lost in the image and become infected by me.
PIG: Infected?
LAMB: Yeah, infected. They shed their fear and go on to unlearn toxic shit and infect everyone else too.
PIG: Ok, so you’re fantasy is you’re a common cold, but you spread love?
LAMB: Whatever! You asked me!
I also found this play to be very good. It had that same mix of sincerity and insecurity. Each girl wants to be seen and to be understood, but they also want their friend to approve of them. This creates both a boldness and a hesitance, a constant sallying-forth and retreating, that I found quite engaging, especially because you can sense that both characters are fundamentally quite good-natured.
The preface tried way too hard
These two plays accounted for about half the book’s length. I enjoyed them a lot. However, the rest of it was less engaging.
Honestly the thing I liked least was Chloe Watlington’s preface, which I found to be over the top—way too much praise, too much preamble. It starts off with references to Slavoj Zizek, David Lynch and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. When it finally started talking about the work itself, I was left a bit adrift, wondering what exactly I was about to read:
Martinez’s good pictures do not stop at the border of kitsch and avant garde like David Lynch. David Lynch is a brilliantly shocking film-maker, but his films always give me the impression that he is yanking the lever of a slot machine to find the luckiest sequence at the limits of creativity. Martinez kranks harder. Theatrics says, Look, the limit does not exist.
There’s a reason that debut works usually don’t have prefaces. It’s because this level of rhetoric comes off as trying to hard In this case I was thinking, I don't even know who this author is! I invested $23 into them without ever reading any of their work, and now you're going to make me read another five pages about how great they are? Come on, just let me read the actual work first.
Several of the other plays in the booklet felt a bit hollow. One was called “Stage Directions For A Car Crash” and it seems to be about a woman getting into a car crash, but then somehow a song from the musical Annie is involved as well. The other is called “I Lived How I Died” and seems to be a monologue where a woman recites some self-empowerment cliches (“I don’t know if I want to live long, but I long to live.”) But maybe I’m just not the audience for that sort of thing.
However, with Hole Play and the other play I liked, I did feel like I understood the appeal, and I highly approved.
That's pretty good for a sixty-six page booklet. If a friend invited me to see a Maya Martinez play, I'd probably go.
So what?
When I described this booklet to a writer friend, they said, "Okay, but what happens next? What's the point of putting this out?"
I think the point is that if you're doing plays, eventually the play is over. People might say, "Oh those were good plays", but it's kind of hard to get buzz for a play. Unless some big outlet writes about your play, what evidence do you have that you're any good? Of course, maybe someone important went to your play, and they can get you some worthwhile opportunity down the line. There is definitely an intangible buzz that builds around a good play, I assume, where people say, "Oh that person is good. Better than other playwrights." But it's hard to know if that intangible buzz is real. Maybe it also just dissipates.
So you put out a book, and then there's a record of what you did. Now people can talk about the book. The book is your calling card to get other kinds of work. This kind of thing seems to work best if you're in New York, because what matters isn't how many people read your book, but that they're the right kind of people.
In this case, because it's plays, there's also the option of getting a gig writing for TV or film, or work as an actress. Hollywood seems to still have an inferiority complex—they put playwrights and stage actors on a pedestal. So you can monetize your play-writing buzz in Hollywood.
But I’d be lying if I said that I understood exactly how it works! I've seen this kind of thing happen for years now—people turning niche, indie buzz into big careers. Usually there's not much evidence of this online. It's a very off-line sort of activity. That's the whole point: the right sort of people already know about you. Then, all of a sudden, you get hired to write a TV show or you get a book deal, and only then does the general public hear about you. Because until then, you haven't really been writing for the general public at all, you've been writing for your friends and (hopefully) for influential people who can do something for you.
I have to say, I came away from these two plays with quite a good impression. The women in these plays are young, but they're not jaded, they're not empty or anhedonic. They're just like all of us when we were young—we were full of life, full of vitality! There's so much doom and gloom about young people now, but are they really so bad? They seem exactly like us! I mean, honestly, what is the difference?
Of course maybe that's not the right thing to say either. I am sure young people today would like to feel there's a huge difference between them and us. Probably there is. But what I did enjoy most in these plays was the vision of youth: it's not just insecurity, it's also freshness and joy and vitality.
Yes, you're very invested in slutty Halloween costumes, but you're also capable of getting worked up about a really huge, weird mystical hole that's appeared in the parking lot next to your car.
The Samuel Richardson Prize
Hello friends! Just a reminder here that the Samuel Richardson Prize for Self-Published Literary Fiction is still open. Deadline for submission is July 31. And contest guidelines are below:
P.S. I am disgustingly stressed over a deadline for my nonfiction book, What’s So Great About The Great Books? (out from Princeton University Press next year, unless I completely blow my deadline) and as a result I will be taking next week off from this newsletter. There will be a post in two days, on Thursday, June 26th, but after that the next post for unpaid subscribers won’t be until Tuesday, July 8th.
Oh no, never read the introduction! They're always so bad, you are not a baby bird you don't need pre-digestion
I'm a playwright and it's great to read something interesting about the form. No one writes about it (except you) so thank you so much. I was astonished and interested by the idea that knowing the right people might be the most straightforward path to success. I don't think you're wrong, especially nowadays and perhaps in the U.S. My success was because I wrote plays like this young woman's hole play that felt alive when they were performed by great actors. Something zippy and real and visceral translated to the audience. So they came to see the next one. And that did the same thing, and so on. I learnt how to tell a story in 3D and although the plays are mostly all published and that's why they are done around the world, the actual making of me, the playwright was done by sitting in the audience and feeling where and when the audience seemed to suspend disbelief and get inside the moment. The key to becoming a playwright is creating the feeling for the audience: "What will happen? Will the girl be swallowed by the hole? Will she get to the party? I don't want anything bad to happen to her! What if I was in the city and a hole appeared like that?" That's the trick to being a storyteller in any form, but perhaps especially in writing theatre.