Playwright's Perspective: Will Arbery

There’s a part of me that really wanted this program note to say: “Corsicana is a small city in Texas. This play is about four people who live there. Thanks for coming.” The end.  

But I suppose this would be the space to tell you — and I should probably tell you — that I wrote this play because I have an older sister named Julia who has Down syndrome. And that I’ve always wanted to create a play about what it’s like to be her brother. So I started writing this play which I’ve been writing all my life. For some reason, I made them live in Corsicana instead of Dallas. I made them Protestant instead of Catholic, and half-siblings, and just the two of them, instead of giving them six more siblings like we had. Then I added two characters, who I didn’t know much about, and who started talking to me in all sorts of baffling ways. A simple idea got more complicated. Which was always the point. Julia often gets pigeonholed — either as angelic or pitiable, limited or blessed. People tend to not consider her depression, desire, manipulation, ambivalence, sexuality. And anyway, I told myself to avoid soapboxes, so I’ll just say she’s one of my favorite people, and an extremely important part of the world that I was given.  

It’s weird to name a play after a place, and I can’t stop doing it. I spent a month in Corsicana once, in an old empty building on Main Street, where I was doing a writer’s residency. It was June and really hot. The building was beautiful, but I was afraid of it because it used to be the gathering place for secret societies. While I was there, I mostly thought about ghosts. I had a lot of nightmares. I didn’t write at all. I just stayed on my bed, watching YouTube videos and ordering too much Dominos. The air felt really thick. Later, back home, I realized that Corsicana was haunting me, and that I’d like to meet some characters in that thick air.  

Now, as I write this, in the weeks leading up to the first rehearsal — the jittery unknown — I’ve been thinking about access. Granting and then denying access, which is an impulse I often feel. I share so much and then I want to slam the gate shut. I’ve been thinking about the way Julia sings “O Holy Night,” making everyone shut up and listen and watch her, and then getting too nervous to start. So we all have to sing it together, trudging through the notes until we reach the time-to-shine part — “fall on your knees, oh hear the angels’ voices” — and that’s when her voice rises unmistakably above all of ours, and she finishes the song, and suddenly there’s a new thing in the air above our heads and we all get quiet.  

But writing this play, I was thinking more of the singing she does behind closed doors. The cool dances she makes up. The stories she whispers to herself. The stuff that’s hers and hers alone. I don’t have access to most of it. She doesn’t have access to my drafts and weird brainstorms either. And I think about half-written books that go unpublished. And I think about artists who obsessively create work, year after year, in near obscurity, and then their work gets discovered and fetishized and sold and recontextualized. This play pivots around that moment when something made in private becomes public. Does sharing a made thing take it away from the one who made it? Does articulating a feeling change the feeling? Is a person still the person they were, once they’re gone? What happens to my stories — which were never really mine, which I stole, and then doubled, and then doubted, and then doubled down — when they start to rattle around in your skull? Wouldn’t it be cool to be discovered as a fossil? Doesn’t finding a fossil feel like finding the person? Or are the bones just our projection of a person? Generic or specific, a or the — all gone into the thick unknowable.  

Anyway, this simple idea got a bit complicated. I’m gonna say this more for myself than for you: Corsicana is a small city in Texas. This play is about four people who live there. Thanks for coming.