Embodied Writing
“One thing about tutoring,” Milo Cramer told me, “is that you commute a lot. You're traveling for hours, just to have this little bit of time with the student that's hypercharged, and then you're traveling back. You have a lot of time to reflect and process and prepare on the train.” Milo spent most of these commutes frantically learning math so they could teach it later that day. But one day, on their way to a favorite student, they found themself writing a song. “This is such a corny artist thing to say, but it felt like I didn't write it, it revealed itself to me.”
Tutoring afforded Milo the opportunity to visit the homes of many different families; which is to say, it offered them a window into how each family related to their socioeconomic status. Milo is particularly sensitive to this, having grown up in Connecticut, the state with the second-greatest wealth gap in the country (the first, of course, being New York). “Everybody has a different relationship to money,” they reflected. “There's people who have money and are proud of it. There's people who have money and are ashamed of it. There's people who don't have money and are ashamed of it. There's people who don't have money and are proud of it. And that's just feelings. That's all different from whether or not you can afford to go to the doctor.”
A tutor’s relationship to money and class is, in Milo’s words, a particularly “yummy disgusting mix”: whatever their financial reality might be, they must present as elite to earn credibility with their students’ (often wealthy) parents. “What's at stake is a grade, what's at stake is a child's mental health, what's at stake is if I have a job, what's at stake is if the family maintains the class ascendancy that they dream of having,” Milo said. “And what's also at stake is if we're teaching literature and history humanely.” But is it even possible to teach literature and history “humanely” in a climate that commodifies knowledge of these subjects as a means to class ascendancy?
Milo’s career as a tutor coincided with a period of prolonged writer’s block. They had just finished devising a play with New Saloon, their theater company with Morgan Green (director of School Pictures) and actor Madeline Wise. It was a stunning feat of linguistic athleticism called Minor Character: Six Translations of Uncle Vanya at the Same Time, in which Milo played Waffles. (Their ukulele made an appearance.) Minor Character had a run at Brooklyn’s Invisible Dog in 2016, and then another at the Public Theater’s 2017 Under the Radar Festival. “The dream was to be invited to tour Europe,” Milo recalled. “We did it at the Under the Radar Festival. No invitation to tour Europe came. We had spent so many years making Minor Character. That was the mountain we'd been climbing, and we climbed it. And there was nothing on the other side. I played video games a lot. To deal with my sadness.”
Part of what kept Milo going was their collaboration with Morgan – without whom, Milo said, “I would have quit theater when I was 23.” (A particularly poignant feature of this production is that Morgan and Milo were both Fellows at Playwrights Horizons almost ten years ago during the 2014-15 season.) Morgan was instrumental in shaping School Pictures into a theatrical event. She helped develop the show’s visual storytelling vocabulary, and encouraged Milo to meet with a New York Times education journalist who contextualized these students’ individual stories within the larger landscape of the New York City school system.
When Milo moved into their parents’ house in Connecticut at the start of the pandemic, they continued to tutor over Zoom, but the change in location allowed them to write more songs. In their Brooklyn apartment with thin walls and two roommates, self-consciousness stopped them from singing aloud. Here, writing songs felt more fun and less daunting than writing scenes. “It can be hard to sit down and write, but you sing standing up. It's like you're writing but you're standing up and wandering around. All of that stuff is physiologically very helpful. It’s like embodied writing.”
In some ways, “embodied writing” is a return to Milo’s origins as a theatermaker. As college classmates, Milo, Morgan, and Madeline all fell in love with the work of devising companies like 600 Highwaymen, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma. They modeled New Saloon’s generative process on these companies’ fluid collaborations. And while Milo has said that the year they spent as the Literary Fellow at Playwrights “taught me how to be a writer,” writing on their feet still comes as naturally to them as writing a script.
Writing for their own voice also freed Milo from what they view as an ethical quandary of playwriting: “Playwriting is puppeteering, and that's why it's so often problematic and offensive, because it's like pretending you, the writer, don't exist. I was having a really hard time putting words in people's mouths, which in part led me to solo performance. Being on stage is not coming from a narcissistic place. It's coming from a place of wanting to hold myself accountable.”
The process of creating School Pictures was inherently playful, which feels apt for an ode to coming-of-age. Milo brings to life not only the children we meet in each song, but also the joyful, curious, tender part of themself that is still a child.
