David Hirson has written two plays – and only two: La Bête (1991), an extraordinarily peculiar tour de force in rhyming verse that actually reached Broadway before flopping and is often done by the braver regional theaters, and Wrong Mountain (2000), a bitter but brilliant piece on devoting your life to the wrong goals (i.e. climbing the wrong mountain).
There must be a story there, though an Internet search doesn't give me clarification, only more mysteries: a young playwright, no longer really young; two brilliant but extremely bizarre plays that got a lot of attention, if not quite what you would call success, and were published together; and nothing else. He apparently shows up at festivals and such, and you can't help thinking – how peculiar does he seem there, how does he justify having just a play a decade? Is there going to be a third play in his career – around 2009, at this rate? Will it be brilliant, will it be a success, or another complicated tangle of success and failure? Does he do any minor plays at all, does he ever sketch anything, or does he burn everything peripheral before anyone sees it?
Of course it's plausible, given the monumental nature of each of the plays, for him to take that long writing each of them – it just seems so bizarre that each is so huge, so ambiguous in its relation to the current American stage; you would think they would be either simply failures by an obscurity, or near-successes by someone who has written other things that didn't do even that well. Because both plays are also sort of about bad art, about people who devote their lives to the artistic and either fail or do something worthless with it, the resonance is especially disturbing.
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As I try to work my way through the presentation I must give next week, which is embedded in the subject matter of the book I am promising to write during my 2008 research leave, I find more and more things wrong with it, things that just don't link up, or make the sense I had formerly asserted, or really seem to matter at all. And, in the middle of the night, as I get more and more stressed, I am wakeful because I can't help thinking that the planned book, itself, might be – before it is ever written – a load of nonsense, a pointless exercise. That it is not a book I can make sense of, not a book I can do well – nor a book anyone would really want, even if it could be done well.
Wrong mountain: the idea that you would spend enormous effort and all your ability to make something, and it would be forgotten, not because the world is unfair and people are unkind and you aren't properly appreciated, but simply because the thing itself is junk.
And if you know that a difficult piece of work is not going to be worth doing – and know, not merely in the context of the usual insecurities of the writer, but because you realize how essentially unimportant the shards of your life are, to other people, and even to yourself – how can you possibly make yourself actually do it – actually scale the side of that mountain?...
Of course I have spent most of my life driving myself to make some kind of book, and of course have long realized that such drive, such obsession, is no guarantee that anything larger I might finally, someday, finish would be any kind of success. But thinking it through this way: to do your best, and realize that it isn't really very good: this is something we can easily imagine happening to other people, even to most other people, given human limitations; but to experience it happening to oneself – especially in the face of all that has been given up, all that has not happened in the place of this thing, that is not in itself particularly good – this is so huge, so appalling in its entirely plausible and ironic finality, that it is almost impossible, emotionally, to compass....
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