Back Story: August 2007

The issue here is, of course, one that I struggle with constantly when working on our plays: the conflict between the universal and the particular, between our personal histories and the histories we read in textbooks. That is to say, a lot of what interests me about the mission of The American Story Project is how the lives of individuals can be understood in the context of larger historical progress. My stance has always been that History with a capital "H" is driven foward by the trials and tribulations of personal history, that our struggles form some sort of irresistable foward progress.

As such, I understand that my incessant synthesis of the particular with the universal isn't always the best (or theatrically speaking, most dramatic) idea. Nor is it a belief that always ends in illumination or profundity. It tends towards the didactic and the pretentious. I know these things and I'm beginning to understand the dangers involved in this kind of history and these kinds of stories. But what I don't understand is why telling the story of Mathew Brady precludes telling the story of the unsung Civil War, why a story about a historian who is obsessed with celebrity, afraid of losing his wife, and losing his eyesight can't also be a story about how his sense of history is myopic, populist and unwilling to grapple with the grim and violent realities of war. I think there's a certain symmetry to it. And I don't think these are two issues that can necessarily be separated. But then again, I wrote the thing.

Now, I understand saying that these parallels aren't fully developed or realized (one of the problems we knew going into this play was it was divided into two distinct sections: first, "Brady," then "Brady's lecture"), or that the subtext of these layered stories is misleading, unfair, or idealistic (my sense of historical responsibility isn't for everyone). I've come to terms with how Daguerreotype tends to celebrate the achievements of dead white men (though I don't think I necessarily let Western hegemonic patriarchy off the hook either). I'd even allow that these concerns can make the play boring (I did catch more than one audience member yawn). But what I can't yet accept is the idea that I have to choose. That I can only tell one kind of story at a time, that I have to choose between the particular and the universal, between the tragedy of Mathew Brady and the tragic era he lived through. Maybe it's the failed novelist in me (as opposed to the historian, the playwright, the dramaturg, or the journalist), but I thought that this was the whole point of telling stories like this; I always thought the whole point was that it should be both.