Sarah Ruhl, the Chicago-born playwright whose elegant, funny, thoughtful plays garnered her a MacArthur “genius grant” at the age of 32, hates the word “whimsy.”
That’s not something you might guess from the long subtitle and doodle-decorated cover of her first essay collection, “100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater.” The cover isn’t exactly deceptive, but, like much of the writing inside, it’s sly, in that Ruhl’s topics are listed in opposite order of importance, with the last two — children and theater — anchoring a buoyant collection that might otherwise border on the W word.
As it is, much of it reads like an attempt by a critically acclaimed playwright and accidental mother of three (her second pregnancy resulted in twins) to reconcile two halves of her life. “I appear to need to be alone in order to make things; it appears to be necessary to my survival,” she writes. “And yet my children appear to need me, always; it appears to be necessary for their survival. And yet for me to feel my sanity, these two practices, of motherhood and making things, so primary, need to feel as though they are compatriots.”
And yet … and yet … and yet. Ruhl’s humble essays, some of which are no longer than notes you might scribble on the back of a grocery list, don’t argue, but instead accumulate in little drifts around their topics: the virtues of patience; the elevation of lightness over heaviness, comedy over tragedy, and transience over excavation; and most of all, the importance, in both parenting and theater, of presence.
“I could lie to you and say that I intended to write something totalizing, something grand,” she writes in the first essay, called “On interruptions.” “But I confess that I had a more humble ambition — to preserve for myself, in rare private moments, some liberty of thought. Perhaps that is equally 7.” New paragraph: “My son just typed 7 on my computer.”
It’s as much a performance as a punch line. Ruhl is, in fact, attempting something grand — or at least, something equally “7.” For Ruhl, who rejects the capitalist language of narrative investment or “pay-off” in favor of Buddhist principles of attentiveness, patience is its own reward. Her heroes include eccentric German scholar Walter Benjamin, Japanese modernist Junichiro Tanizaki, and Ovid, whose “Metamorphoses” she adopts in place of Aristotle’s “Poetics,” dubbing it the “seventh form” of narrative structure. Miniaturists are typically infatuated with precision, but Ruhl prefers the sloppiness of play: “Failure loosens the mind; perfection stills the heart,” she pronounces. “More failure! More demand for failure! More bad plays! Less perfection! More ugliness! More grace!”
This is a political stance as well as an aesthetic one, although Ruhl avoids saying so outright, noting only that there are relatively few plays written from a mother’s point of view: “(W)e don’t have many playwrights who have also been mothers.” Before we think too hard about why, the essay is over, the rhetorical equivalent of ending a sentence with “7.” In another essay, when approaching an explicitly feminist statement, she interrupts herself mid-sentence, chiding, “Virginia Woolf said that Charlotte Bronte wrote badly when she was angry. Let me rephrase.”
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If one can’t help thinking that Virginia Woolf might have preferred universal child care to an aesthetic of interruptedness, Ruhl makes a compelling case for valuing the small in an artistic life rather than making room for the large in a maternal one: “Smallness is subversive, because smallness can creep into smaller places and wreak transformation at the most vulnerable, cellular level.” Ruhl may whisper, but her goal is still to wreak.
“Snow appears to slow gravity, so that we can see falling happen,” she says in one very Midwestern observation. It’s hard not to think of the beautiful, snow-blanketed ending of “In the Next Room, or the vibrator play,” which theater critics seemed to hate, but audiences adored. Anyone who makes lightness their calling card will occasionally find themselves skirting whimsy by a narrow margin.
Anyway, what Ruhl derides is not so much whimsy itself, but the readiness with which critics use it to dismiss women’s work. In combating this tendency, Ruhl opts for gentle subversions rather than radical revolution. One can hardly expect to see the effect of such lightness overnight, but let us hope that the change happens as quietly and inexorably as snow, so that one day we awake to find ourselves in a transformed landscape.
Amy Gentry is a writer living in Austin, Texas. She has a doctorate in English and writes a weekly column for the Austin Chronicle called The Good Eye.
“100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write”
By Sarah Ruhl, Faber and Faber, 219 pages, $23