2005 Laura Pels Keynote Address

On May 23, 2005, at Curtain Call, A.R.T./New York's annual celebration of Off Broadway, acclaimed playwright Jon Robin Baitz delivered the Laura Pels Foundation Keynote Address to a group of 500 artistic directors, theatre artists, funders, administrators, elected officials and members of the press. Mr. Baitz was introduced by fellow playwright John Guare. Below is a transcript of his remarks. We are grateful to The Laura Pels Foundation for sponsoring Curtain Call's Keynote Address.

Mr. Baitz's Remarks:

May 23, 2005

I've done two terrible things already today. I didn't shave and I didn't change my underwear because I was working with my director all day. I have this play in previews at the Roundabout with Doug Hughes and so I feel scruffy and I could be run over. I've brought shame to Cybil Baitz on Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills, which I guess I've done before but...

And then my printer printed a minuscule version of what I wrote. [Holds up copy of his remarks printed in a tiny font.] And then as I was leaving the house tonight, this terrible, terrible, terrible thing happened. I read a quote from this great new little book [called] On Bullshit. And it's just beautiful, but it ends with this statement that the greatest form of BS is sincerity. And I'm all earnest here tonight, let me tell you.

[Laughter]

I'm really honored to be your keynote speaker. I was really touched to have been asked. And for years, I've worried about what happens to me when I'm asked to speak before a crowd, because I know that the idea is that I'll be sort of charming or something. But really, what happens is I think I become truculent and I forget the subject and I get awkward and then I worry if I have too much product in my hair and there's stains on my suit. Or I come off as sort of, like, more insouciant than I really feel. And I don't even know what that means anymore. And sometimes, I don't know if I meant what I just said or how to say what I mean.

But recently, what's been happening, which is very nice, for those here who are younger than me (which is probably a lot of people now), but this mellow 43-year-old has been catching up to and beating up the arrogant boy. And the 43-year-old is very, very gratified to be able to say, thank you. The people who make the theater work in New York are heroes. And that's the subject of my address.

But first, I would like to thank Laura Pels and Diane Morrison [Executive Director of The Laura Pels Foundation] for all they do and for having me here this evening.

It's seldom that a playwright has the opportunity or the clarity to express gratitude to those who put on plays. And often, to be a playwright, or maybe just this playwright, is to be put upon, tortured, ungrateful, paranoid, scheming, covetous, unreliable, shifty, to not return calls, shallow, inattentive. I think I'm leaving many things out.

For those who have seen that side of me, I apologize. As Jessie Jackson said after [the infamous] "Himey Town" [incident], "God has not finished making me yet." And I use that all the time and I think it's the greatest quote of the 20th Century, actually. And you could use it for anything.

[Laughter.]

But since I'm up here apologizing, I thought, well, let's be megalomaniacal about it. And on behalf of all playwrights who have been shitty to producers and to the people who fund things and who sweat in funky offices and who don't get anything near the gratitude that they deserve, I say, "God has not finished making us playwrights yet." And I wish that the RNC and the Catholic Church, CNN, and the DNC, not to mention the Republican Party, could say that, once in a while, "God hasn't finished making me yet."

[Applause.]

I have a complicated perspective right now. A couple of years ago, I was somewhat heartbroken and I decided to spend more time in my hometown of L.A., and maybe spend some time working in Hollywood. And in doing that, I discovered what an easy fit that was for me. Away from New York, I had a lot of time to think about what made me. And I thought about things that I had seen as a very young playwright, The Mahabarata at BAM, Aunt Dan and Lemon at the Public, Cloud Nine at the Lortel, Six Degrees at Lincoln Center, the first Sweeney Todd, Assassins at Playwrights, and not to mention Charles Ludlam and Richard Foreman and the work of the late, great, lamented Harry Kondoleon.

And away from New York, I took stock of how, when my first play was done at Second Stage in '88, I was welcomed so warmly by people that I admired, Lanford Wilson, and Terrence McNally, and Mr. Guare.

In 1986, I moved to New York. I was invited by New York Stage and Film to come up to Vassar for the summer to work on a play. And I worked on two plays, The Film Society and then A Fair Country. John Shanley came up to me one day - I had been following him around all summer, he was just a rock star to me. And I was following him around and he was trying to talk to girls and I was always in his face. And one day, he just grabbed my stomach through my T-shirt and he said to me this thing, he said, "You have to stop following me and learn how to be your own man."

[Laughter.]

And it's something that I thought about recently and I guess, maybe, he was saying that the romance of theater was one thing, and the costumes are one thing, but owning one's place in it is something else. I think that's what John was trying to say to me. And I thought about that a lot when I was in L.A. missing New York and missing the theater.

And in my little exile in Los Angeles, I worked on movies. And I also worked on this play, The Paris Letter, that I'm doing now, and Chinese Friends, which I did a year ago at Playwrights Horizons, knowing how flawed it was, though it was nicely pissed off, too. But I had to do a play and I had to remember what it was like, even if it didn't work, I had to come back home. And missing New York was killing me. I had no idea what I had walked away from.

Recently, working on a television show, I thought of the late, great Clifford Odets, who is a hero of mine. In particular, I thought about his last years, the rough ones, the ones spent in Hollywood - and I wondered if I was coming to remind myself of him. (The show I worked on was "Alias," which my friend, Ron Rifkin, who is in The Paris Letter, is one of the stars of, and he insists that he's not a villain, but he is.)

But Odets wrote a bit for TV before dying a very hard death of cancer at the hospital that I was born in, in Hollywood in 1963. And I think about that, I think that maybe he never got over the shame of his HUAC testimony. People who know him tell me that Kazan gave him really bad advice or rather, good advice for another Kazan. But Odets wasn't Kazan, he was Odets. In other words, a moral authority and a guiding light and a great writer, which is a holy thing. I can imagine Odets life out there and what he was missing, because I was missing it, too. He was in the Flats of Beverly Hills and he suffered and he had insomnia.

And he painted, and his son gave me one of those paintings. When not writing plays, Mr. Odets spent a lot of time with watercolors. [His son gave me] this beautiful, little painting of a scene, and it is not just a random scene, it's a scene in a decidedly New York office. And there's little typing on it, a little, typed story. It's an urban story. It's a New York story. It takes place in summer and it's about interoffice romance. It's a little play. And I thought he wrote it to try and reconnect and he drew it to try and reconnect to the thing that happens in the theater, where things get put together in front of you.

I thought about it a lot while I was writing for "Alias," where everyone was very kind. The staff writers welcomed me and, in fact, they wrote all the scenes with explosions and cars and lasers because I didn't know how. And even though my name is on it, there were lots of sections that I couldn't handle.

But I got to write stuff for villain/not villain, Ron, and for villain/not psycho villain, Joel Grey, which was so much fun. It's an odd show because really, you've got Ron Rifkin and Victor Garber and somebody like Joel Grey, I mean, the only thing missing is Lea Delaria.

[Laughter.]

Anyway, Odets, in his terrible last few years in the sun, as he died, he could only eat ice chips. And I wondered how much he must have missed Manhattan and the first read through of a play. And the time when you move out of the rehearsal hall and into the theater, did he miss it as much as I would? And how do you do both?

The theater may be marginalized, as everybody keeps telling us. But it's about dreams and shadows and the passage of time and secret histories and blood knots and madness and political outrage. It's about actors taking pauses to collect themselves and about funny makeup. And the slight of hand magic of good lighting. And those are the things that I missed so much. And it doesn't take any money to do it at all, or so we tell ourselves deep, deep down. You can do it in your kitchen. Well, maybe you can.

Anyway, I've been back for a bit and looking to buy a place because I don't have one anymore here. I am lucky enough to have a friend who lives in Barcelona who gave me his keys here. And I'm not sure that I can afford Manhattan anymore.

But I think about Odets and the theater and how much I love it. And how it's time to embrace that as a grownup. I owe so much as a playwright, whose work was embraced when he moved to New York, to Ulu Grosbard and Andre Bishop, to Carole Rothman and Robyn Goodman, and to the late, lamented, Circle Rep, to my peers who inspire me.

Tonight, the theater company, I helped start, Naked Angels is celebrating its 20th anniversary. And they're having a gala to try to raise money to produce a season of new plays. And I'm thinking of all the money that Naked Angels was given by the many organizations represented here tonight. And the work that got seen because of that, the plays by Peter Hedges and Richard Greenberg and Kenny Lonergan, performed by great actors who grew up as artists working on plays, produced with help from many of the people here tonight.

Last fall, I wrote a play for the Tribeca Theater Festival called, My Beautiful Goddamn City, in which I stated that New York is not America, New York is its own country. And I do believe that.

[Applause.]

Because it's here that new American plays are celebrated. And for now, the - Oh, God, I can't read my writing.

[Laughter.]

Oh, yeah, this is the thing where I talk about how the regional theaters have failed us. Well, you know, when I started writing plays, I don't mean to go on for too long, or to age myself too much, but when I started writing these things, you know, you would maybe go somewhere and work on them, the Seattle Rep or, oh, there's so many of them.

And so few theaters around the country have the temerity and the courage to produce new work. And they scavenge what they see here off Broadway or off, off Broadway and, obviously, from Broadway. It's a tremendous abdication, which we don't experience.

And so sort of, in closing, I want to say that what we are in New York is a capital, it's the cultural capital of a nation that's thirsty for an alternative culture. It's the culture of the people in exile. And as our society continues to resemble a cross between "American Idol" and "The Apprentice," it's in the theater that the great secret history of people is explored and revealed. And it's in the theater that we remember the unspoken languages of complicated things.

America needs a theater and so I propose that as of tonight, we refer to New York as our national theater. It is, from basements to the Beaumont, our national theater. And to all of you who make that possible, I say, thank you. If there is to be a vital, angry, serious, curious theater, it's because of what you all do.

And to finish up, backstage, just to give you an example, John Guare and Laura Pels just fixed the first act of my play for me.

[Laughter.]

Good night and thank you very much.