HOW MUCH TRITENESS?

When people ask, “If you could be 18 (or 25, or 12, or whatever) again, would you?” — for me a panic-inducing question because it contains hundreds of questions within it — I always say, “God no!” But, buried for the last three years in the journals and letters and ephemera of my youth, I’ve kind of fallen in love with my 18-year-old self. The world was cracked wide open and I was ready for it, all of it. I was preoccupied, obsessed every moment, with clearing all the accumulated Midwest bullshit and getting on with my life as an artist. I had no patience.

One regret, I guess, that I have, though, related to the question of returning, is that back then, through college, my twenties, especially my late twenties when I started working with theater artists downtown, I had opportunities all around me — in that DIY scene, people were making theater everywhere, putting on their plays, devising performances, adapting, appropriating, experimenting, in their apartments, on the street, in tiny storefronts, abandoned buildings, vacant lots, everybody was up for something weird and new — but I didn’t initiate much of anything. I’m not saying any of it was easy to put together, but you could do it. If you had an idea there were venues, collaborators, an audience. You could try stuff. It’s not that I didn’t have ideas of my own, but they weren’t concrete theatrical ideas. They weren’t “I want to try this on a stage.” I depended on other artists to come in with the framework and then I could contribute. I had tons of ideas, but they were more theoretical than theatrical.

I’ve had, continue to have, a rich and varied career, a huge success by the standards I set for myself as a kid (luckily those standards did not include financial rewards), but something nags at me. I missed a world of opportunities. I could have pushed myself, demanded more of myself as an artist and thinker and writer to find ways to theatricalize the stuff in my head. Now that world of freedom and experimentation is gone. We all turned 30, the rent went up, we had to make more money or leave New York, every marginal, liminal, derelict space was bought up and developed decades ago. Downtown disappeared. If anything like it exists now, which I doubt, it’s not accessible to me.

So maybe I lied, maybe I do wish I could return, but not to my younger self, just to the circumstances of my young life.