Dear Sarah, I just left your play.

It’s Sunday. It might be the last nice day of autumn. I’m walking up 10th Avenue, arm-in-arm with a friend, feeling both supremely happy and utterly miserable, and it occurs to me that I’m still inside your play. 

In the off-world your characters inhabit, the tides have risen and claimed much of the States. They run from the floods. The corporations won; we lost. Still, in the Amazon warehouse parking lot, your characters flirt, cook, squabble, scheme and fall in love.

And then there’s me: I want to fall in love; there is a genocide underway. I want orange wine; my theoretical children may never have this same day I’m having.

I hesitate to call your play dystopian. I don’t know what that word confers upon a piece of art anymore. Things are so shitty right here, right now; we do not have to imagine a society in which great suffering and injustice take place.

Plays live in our bodies and return to us on the train platform, in the shower. They return in blips, sensations. This is how your play returned to me in the days after I saw it.

Dear Sarah, I saw your play three days ago.

Your play looks us in the eye and tells us yeah, they fucked us. Obviously. That can’t be a surprise to you. You don’t cloak it in mystery, you don’t milk it for suspense. You’re almost unbothered by it. Almost. Like when your late friend is late again and you miss the movie— resigned disappointment. 

I love that your play hates the world a little. All good plays do. Yet alongside this discontentment with the world lives a kind of affection for it, too. Our systems will fail us. Our modes of desire and community will not. This, I think, is loving the world.

JEN
This isn’t how I ever pictured things

ANI
How did you picture things?

JEN
Well little me was convinced I’d meet someone at eighteen

ANI
Oh really?

JEN
And they’d be a man
And the whole country would still exist
And the seasons would be in the right order
And I wouldn’t be this old
And it wouldn’t be in a parking lot

Nothing in this play has happened as it should: this is a world that has thrown Jen and Ani to the wolves, that has robbed them of any sense of security. 

And so falling in love becomes a meal and a middle finger and a small revolution. I’m not saying Jen and Ani aren’t lucky. We’re not lucky just because we still get to experience desire or because life persists. I suspect that your writing this play was an attempt to fall in love with the world again.

I wonder why you named one of your characters Sara.  Are you trying to imagine a world in which you survive? Are you playing “worst-case scenario, I’ll still be okay”? On second thought, don’t tell me.

Dear Sarah, it’s now been one week since I saw your play.

But before I saw your play, I read your note on casting. The following is only an excerpt:

“This play takes place 15-20 years in the future. All of the characters are queer. All of the characters are women, nonbinary, or trans. Most of them are over 50. As I was writing, I couldn’t stop thinking about the actors who have been pushed out of this business for looking too queer, too old, too fat, too disabled, etc. We have made these actors rare and that’s a tragedy. Please find them and cast them. I’m leaving the individual character descriptions as open as possible so that different productions can cast the particular humans who make each role sing—whoever you are, I’m searching for you.”

Two things are never a given, especially when you are queer: having a family and getting older. In the not-so-far-away future end times in which you have set your play, your characters are given both. It’s not a plot point and warrants no argument. You refuse to make it controversial. The play’s not about that; but it is the play.

Yes, your play imagines other ways of being, modes of pleasure, and strategies for survival. But it is also a declaration that everyone on that stage and all the ways they provide for each other already exist. And if we do the work of manifesting them, we have created another future. 

ANI
But anything we invent we can uninvent, right?

Or: We can’t uninvent the world so we must keep creating it.

Your beautiful play keeps shifting beneath me. 

James Baldwin said “I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive.” I know your play is not pessimistic. It’s frank, yes, about the direction we’re headed, but there’s a hum of optimism underneath it all. We often equivocate optimism with vacuity or intellectual indolence and I’d rather we didn’t. Maybe I’m just not ready to call myself stupid for believing things might get better one day. 

Your play is more interested in the kind of optimism which requires clarity about the values we uphold, discipline in how to enact them, and the courage to be truthful about the world as it is. It requires holding both our understandable vitriol toward the world while carrying a vision for how it could feel different. It is not easy. You are very clear about that. And you are equally insistent that it’s worthwhile and pleasureful and queer. Okay, you’re telling us, maybe things don’t get better. Our systems will fail us. We’ll be eaten alive. But if you search for humanity, you will find it.

The play shifts again. I don’t think you’re telling us to choose between optimism and pessimism. I think your ask is bigger: How might we ease into the tension between optimism and pessimism? Are we already doing it?

Today it occurred to me that I’ve never decided if I even want to make it to the next stage of the end times.

ANI
Maybe they turned everything around
Maybe it’s not the end yet
Maybe not

I don’t know. Maybe I do.