Some notes on Corsicana.
I went to go see Corsicana, the new play from Will Arbery (Heroes of the Fourth Turning). It is definitely a play you should see if you can swing it, is the short take. I will probably try to see it again myself.
But I did want to type up some thoughts about it here, partly because I really left with no idea how this play is going to be received. This isn’t a “review” and I am not holding myself to the standards of a “review” (no script or written notes or whatever). Finally, I just want to say: this play is really funny! People laughed a lot.
Corsicana is a play with four people: half-siblings Christopher (Will Dagger) and Ginny (Jamie Brewer), family friend Justice (Diedre O’Connell), and local artist and weirdo Lot (Harold Surratt). Christopher and Ginny’s mother has died, and he has moved back home to Corsicana, Texas in part to take care of Ginny, who has Down syndrome. He teaches film classes at community college and would like to make a horror movie, but, as he comments, vaguely, “it’s so hard.” Ginny is in mourning and Christopher, overwhelmed and also in mourning, has an idea: what if she and Lot worked on something together, like a song?
This premise initially feels like an excuse to get these people together to have semi-abstract conversations, seems to go away entirely as the play goes on, and then is revived, improbably and gloriously, toward the end. The dialogue is very attuned to, on the one hand, the real awkwardness of conversation, and, on the other, cerebral flights of imagination, in a way that creates a play that feels naturalistic and very not at the same time. That’s kind of a nice way to spend time in itself but I also think it plays an important role in something the play is trying to do, which is kind of obvious (“the way the play is written matters”), but, well, we’ll get to it.
Corsicana is, very pointedly, not a play “about” Down syndrome, and lightly satirizes the very idea early on when Lot asks Ginny if she might like write a song about having it and she instantly shuts him down, first by reciting a clearly often-said speech in a tired, stagey voice, and then, when Lot still doesn’t get it, just shutting him down flatly. Ginny and Lot both resist making anything that’s simply therapeutic, simply autobiographical, simply on message, but it takes Lot a moment to recognize this quality he has in her. (Indeed, I think it’s fair to say, he doesn’t really welcome the idea of recognizing something about himself in Ginny, at least initially.)
In some ways, Corsicana is not “about” anything, and makes fun of that idea in a separate scene where Justice attempts to summarize something she’s writing by saying it’s “about” a serious of increasingly baroque subjects until finally concluding, “it’s about Texas.” Similarly, the decision to name the play after a place instead of a character or a thematic concern or what have you keeps the “about”-ness ambiguous; a place is a layered thing, without a simple meaning.
All this said, one conversation that is repeated throughout Corsicana is the idea of needs vs wants, or rather, who is allowed to have wants, and not just needs. Lot proposes to Ginny that they both belong to a group of people who aren’t allowed desires, because they are difficult, and thus even a desire that can’t be fulfilled is treated by those around them as something that is really an outsider’s prerogative—not whether or not you get to have it, but whether or not it’s legitimate for you to want it. Ginny later echoes this conversation when talking to Justice, commenting that she has desires she knows will not be fulfilled (like motherhood), but that these desires can’t be taken from her.
Lot contrasts himself and Ginny against “styrofoam people,” who, being simple, are allowed to want whatever they want without difficulty. But everybody in the play, as becomes clear, is much more comfortable with giving care than receiving it; nobody really wants without struggle. Everybody’s more and less special than they think—there are no styrofoam people, and also, you are probably more predictable and mundane in what you desire than you’d like to be. Some of the play’s conflict comes from other people being unwilling to consider a disabled person’s desires being honored as anything other than a predatory threat.
But some of it just comes from people freaking out about their own wants.Once again I feel like this is connected to my impression that Corsicana deliberately refuses “about”-ness, opting for a kind of obdurate complexity about its characters and itself until the end. Part of living among and loving other people is loving and honoring their difficulty, which is not the same thing as rolling over for it. Indeed, there’s a lot of conflict in the play: Christopher and Ginny have the kind of fights siblings have in which neither is really right but there’s three decades of history, Justice is manipulative, Lot is explosive, and so on.
To go back to my observation that the play has this curious mix of natural dialogue and very abstract conversation, I think this also goes along with this celebration of difficulty, stubbornness, irreducability, opacity—that when you might expect the play to settle firmly in one mode, it darts to the other. Without the script it’s hard to check this but I feel like one of the common questions people asked each other throughout Corsicana was “what are you talking about?” And well, yeah. What else are we asking each other?
It’s interesting to put Corsicana alongside Matthew Gasda’s recent play Dimes Square,
in which thirty-something New Yorkers argue about art and play out personal dramas, partly because it feels like the sort of piece somebody in Gasda’s play might say people don’t really make any more, or couldn’t make now, or whatever. Certainly part of Dimes Square’s acid pleasure is the knowledge that the sum total of what anybody in this play could produce is some version of itself, that they are people who have chosen to become mediocre and shallow, and so forth. I am oversimplifying slightly.I liked Dimes Square, but it’s very much about things, which is part of what also makes it feel, I think, a little sterile. All of its observations about its particular milieu seem right, sure, but is there something to do beyond observe, or…? It reminded me a lot of a movie like Metropolitan, but while the Metropolitan kids are kind of admirable, their older counterparts are sort of sluggish and stupid.
What I’m saying here is not really a criticism of the play as such, but thinking about how I feel like I can enjoy a million things like this, but I couldn’t really say that about Corsicana, which is not “like” anything. I’ll always sit down for something about the way intellectual mileus are self-satisfied and run to seed and yet we don’t want to leave them. But Corsicana is, what? Western gothic paranormal humanism? Whatever it is, I want to see it again.
I’m trying to be vague because the play has only been running for a few days but, to be clear, this isn’t about people having sex.
Also named after a location, we note, mostly so somebody else won’t.
What about the filmmaker character, you ask. I don’t know, what about him.