So often the direction of my words is page to stage that when I had this opportunity to go the other way, I could not pass it up. So without further introduction, here, transcribed, is the curtain speech I gave for last Friday night’s performance of FourPlay: original works penned by four of Seattle’s emerging playwrights. (I am also including a link to the sound file at the end of this post, so that you listen to the actual speech if you care to.)
Hi everybody. My name is Paul Mullin and I’m a playwright here in Seattle. And I asked permission to record my little speech to you here tonight. I hope that’s okay with you guys. (I’ll set that right there. I hope I don’t walk on it. … I better pull out my notes.)
First of all, if you have a cell phone please turn it off. Especially in a place this small we can even hear like the little bleeps and bloops. It’s just distracting to everybody involved. So thanks for that.
So Jesse Putnam—and I think he’s here—there he is—is the producer of this piece, and about, I don’t know how many months ago (he’s a former student of mine) he wrote me an email and said, “You know, Paul, I want to produce some theatre. I got the itch. I’m thinking about some Pinter plays, or I’m thinking about maybe producing just all new work by emerging playwrights. What do you think I should do?” And before I could even get back to him he wrote me and said, “I decided I’m going to go with doing the four new playwrights.” Which was what I was going to tell him to do. So good choice.
And with that in mind, thank you for being here. You are on the right side of what is right now a very important and pretty avidly fought struggle for the heart and soul of theatre here in Seattle. Basically there [are] two camps. One camp thinks that theatre is so precious that it needs to be preserved at any cost. And then there’s another camp that thinks that theatre doesn’t need any preservation at all. It just needs perpetration. Because theatre will always survive. It’ll even survive these humiliating, soul-sucking, debilitating attempts of the first camp to preserve it. It’ll survive productions of Glengarry Glen Ross dressed up as a cogent response to the recent mortgage meltdown when the play’s not about that at all and the ironic fact is the recent mortgage meltdown that so drastically affected our country had its epicenter about a mile that way [pointing west] at the WaMu Tower in downtown Seattle. It’ll survive productions of plays called Rock and Roll set in London and Czechoslovakia, when rock and roll was born in America and the most recent, most important wave of rock and roll had its epicenter in… Seattle.
So theatre doesn’t need preservation. Trying to preserve theatre is like yelling at a bunch of kids to “Have Fun!” We just have to produce theatre, because theatre is produce. And you can freeze it, and you can can it, and you can genetically modify it so that it has a really long shelf life and can survive distant trips from places like New York and London but we all know that produce is best when it’s fresh and it’s local and it’s organic, like the theatre you’re going to see tonight.
So if you think what you’re about to see is precious, I would say you should probably just go home, because they just made it. It’s straight out of the still. It hasn’t aged in an oak cask. Okay? And if you’re here because you think what you’re about to see is important, I gotta ask you, how would you know that? They just made it. In fact … no one will know if what you see tonight is important for so long that by the time they know, it won’t be important anymore. So it’s a lot like life like that. Was today important to you? How do you know? What you know is that you lived through it. And it was important in that, right? And you’re going to live through this… hopefully.
And I hope you enjoy it.
love the speech, Paul...wording and context...great
Posted by: John Vreeke | 06/14/2010 at 11:08 AM
Thanks, John! Beer or coffee soon, yes?
Posted by: Paul Mullin | 06/14/2010 at 11:21 AM