Why Art?

A recent GIA survey asked members to identify the most difficult challenge in their grantmaking work. Responses indicate that a common difficulty is "making a case for the arts in very difficult times," or "not being able to forcefully articulate the 'intangible' benefits of the arts." Helping members make stronger cases for arts giving was identified as important GIA work by over 80 percent of respondents. At a recent gathering, arts funders in Los Angeles wondered, "Why do we seem unable to be articulate about the value of art? Is there something inherent in its value that makes this difficult?"

These questions lie behind the establishment of this column — “Why Art?”

Honing the Soul
Excerpts from an interview with playwright Ruth Margraff

Joan Channick: You append subtitles to many of your works: Red Frogs is “a burlesque mirror for the summer purgatorio.” Are you reluctant to characterize your work as plays?

Ruth Margraff: Each play is a new world for me and a new form, so the subtitles characterize what kind of form I'm exploring in a particular piece. Red Frogs is a new exploration for me, because it's the first thing I've written in twelve years that doesn't have music. I had originally subtitled it “a slapstick mirror for the summer purgatorio,” until I realized it was a burlesque instead of slapstick. I see all of the pelvic thrusts and stances of the body and the glances that are part of the way the language could be spoken as burlesque.

You say that Red Frogs was inspired by Aristophanes' The Frogs, Dante's Divine Comedy, Karl Marx, Charlie Chaplin and the Iraq Liberation Front. What are the common threads among these disparate sources?

Well, there really aren't any common threads, because it's “a ruthless critique of everything existing,” to quote Marx. In writing this play, I was trying to figure out if I was a Marxist or not.

Teaching at Long Island University in Crown Heights, where the entirety of my class told me that they had had restraining orders on husbands or boyfriends, I realized that I knew very little about the real world. Visiting my mother, who works in Bosnia, in 1999 and 2001, I suddenly saw the devastation of a contemporary war, and I struggled to understand how that could happen during my life. I think normally, as Americans, we don't think past the ‘70s, if we're my age, and we don't have any sense of “realism” past 200 years. I wanted to go deeper and break down all of those walls of privacy that I had felt before, because I suddenly felt myself a citizen of the world.

So, are you a Marxist?

I read Marx as poetry and maybe that's as blasphemous as Mabie Main gets at the end of Red Frogs. Placing a theory on a working class that can't quite grasp it is problematic. If Marx were to be updated in some way, or if we were to consider the labors of people more valuable than the capital of excess, then maybe we could find a better way of attributing value to things.

You teach playwriting and screen-writing. What are the challenges and satisfactions of teaching?

It's very exhilarating to have intimate and extensive dialogue with my students. I've always wanted to have a formal exchange of ideas with other artists. I don't teach in that depository method, where you deposit meaning into the receptacle minds; I like to set up problems that we rotate on their axes.

Unfortunately, people who work in any sort of experimental art have to work twice as hard to defend what they're doing and to find a critical way of presenting it to other people. Teaching has been wonderful for that. I think that my existence inspires my students who are attempting to write in non-traditional forms or trying to be brave; they see that I'm able to live and breathe. I try to value work that isn't necessarily mainstream.

What's your perspective on the state of new play development today?

I really hope that our American theater can be a little bit more like some examples of theater that are coming from Eastern Europe, like Dah Theatre from Belgrade, and like Theatre Hohgaku, that is comfortable in rehearsing very rigorously and in a new tradition. So many mentorships and training programs emphasize the entrepreneurial skills needed to be an artist. But artists need to spend time alone in a room where it is just about the soul of the work, about rigorous sweat and labor and honing whatever is in your soul. I think that's crucial to new-play development.

Let artists be independent, let them choose their collaborators, let them choose the subject matter that they're inspired by — and let them change their minds.

Excerpted by permission from the November 2002 issue of American Theatre magazine, published by Theatre Communications Group. The same issue published her recent play Red Frogs, discussed here.

Ruth Margraff is a founding member of HERE Performance Center's Opera Project in New York. She was “born and raised all over Ohio and Michigan” and now teaches playwriting at the University of Texas, Austin.

Joan Channick is deputy director, Theatre Communications Group.