NOT AN ELEVATOR PITCH
Several months ago, my friend Jimmy told he he'd seen the play Next to Normal, and that he wanted to see it again, with me. "I know it will have real meaning for you," he said, "and I want to be there with you."
I demurred. Jimmy has an unerring sense of whom and what I'll respond to, and I knew that if I passed up this opportunity, I'd probably regret it. On the other hand, a play about a psychiatric breakdown, in which a psychologist plays a large and not terribly sympathetic role, promised to be a busman's holiday. In addition, the general outline of the plot--a family that fragments after the death of a son--parallels the plot of my novel, which is kind of a raw topic for me right now.
So, week after week, I officially wanted to go, but had something more pressing to do. Finally, he emailed me: "Alice Ripley is leaving the show, and you've got to experience her in this role. We need to go right away." So we did.
Within fifteen minutes, I was sobbing, and the feelings didn't let up for the next hour and a half. Any comparison between the play and my book, or my life, went out the window. The play is its own world, inhabited by three-dimensional people who love and suffer intensely, and studded with pop-sounding songs that evoke primitive grief and devastating aloneness. It was a horrible experience, and I wouldn't have missed it--and I was and am endlessly grateful to have been able to clutch the hand of a dear friend who has shared many losses with me over the years.
Afterwards, I confessed that I'd found the plot description unpromising, and that I still had trouble with the idea of a pop musical about death, loss and mental illness. "I know," Jimmy said. "It sounds awful, doesn't it? And it would be awful if it wasn't written with complete authenticity--if someone set out to write a musical about a dead son and a bipolar mother, because they thought it had commercial potential. But this play works because it's so weird--because it's based in real feeling and experience, and it follows its own logic, and pulls you along."
I've been thinking since then about how irrelevant plot descriptions ultimately are, except to marketers. It almost doesn't matter what a book or play is "about"; what matters is what it means to the writer, and how well this meaning is transmitted to the reader. It would be hard to get me to a play about a guy who drives his girlfriend to suicide because he's fixated on his mother and can't make himself kill his murdering stepfather, or to read a novel about a woman who plots to pimp her boyfriend to a dying rich girl so they can inherit her fortune, either, if I wasn't aware of the beauty, intensity and authenticity of the telling.
Susan O'Doherty, Ph.D.,is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself,she specializes in issues affecting writers and other creative artists. She is the author of Getting Unstuck without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity(Seal, 2007). Her Career Coach column appears every Monday on Inside Higher Ed's Mama, Ph.D. blog, and she is a regular monthly panelist on Litopia After Dark. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.
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