“Sure.”
“Now, your musical. I just finished reading it and ran straight to the phone. Tell me about your process. The language. Where did those words come from?”
“I uh…I mean…I wrote them all.” That’s not what she meant—obviously I wrote them. I had submitted them as my original work, for Christ’s sake.
“How did you come up with the dialogue?” she clarified, all eager curiosity. I fumbled for an answer, found none to offer. Now I know, looking back, the script I’d submitted featured blunt exclamatory dialogue inspired by Yoruba incantations, as I’d heard spoken in my living room and read about in mom’s books. The clear, intentional tonality of the babalao; the declamatory, intense cadence of prayer. But I couldn’t parse it then, which strand of my work—of me—came from where. It was too complicated and messy, all the disparate parts coming into and out of me without any clear traffic pattern. My first language was English, my second Spanglish, my third Spanish, and my fourth a bookish rudimentary Santería-Lukumí. But I had no vocabulary for this vocabulary. I told Paula the truth.
“I don’t know,” I said. She could feel it, too, how she was asking me to describe the whole chasm when I was only midway across the bridge. She was probing an instinct player about mechanics. She broke it down.
“Ogun. Tell me everything. How did Ogun come to be a part of your life?” I began to understand. The musical I submitted with my grad school applications centered around an Ogun shaman. I told Paula a bit about my mother’s spiritual path. I was careful not to use the word “Santería,” which was still misunderstood and villainized at the time. Lukumí was a ceremonial practice, I told her, whose prayers and stories had influenced me, given me access to a vocabulary of power outside the language of the everyday. Mom had gifted me books, I told her. Books I studied, underlined, and savored with a flashlight after Philly had gone to bed. I had been to ceremonies, I told her, and felt the dynamic interplay of the unseen and seen, the ancient and now, the material and ineffable. Bodies in the dark, breathing in communion—was that not mom’s living room? Was that not also theater?
“How soon can you get to Providence?” she asked. “I’ll drive you to Horseneck Beach. You must smell the Atlantic soon, while the air’s still cool. There’s this third-generation Portuguese joint—do you like feijoada? If we have time, I’ll drive you up the hill to Little Italy. There’s a café with west-facing cast-iron benches. Mafia retirees eat pistachio gelato and watch the sunset. Crash on my sofa for a night, let me convince you to make Providence your two-year home. Listen, I so hope you’ll join my workshop. That you’ll come teach me how to do what you do.” Teach her? When I couldn’t yet name what I did, even in casual conversation?
She picked me up from the train station in a sweet little matchbox, clouds reflected on the platinum hood. Not a scratch to be seen on the vehicle. A Honda Del Sol, fresh out the dealership. Inside this two-seater was a woman in a sun-faded Cape Cod tee whose original color was no longer discernible. The neck boasted holes and frays, all unironic. The T-shirt, unlike the pristine car, had been in rotation well beyond its years. It had, no doubt, been unfashionable when first purchased. Her mismatched style put me at ease. “Playwriting can get you this!” Paula said, drumming the dash. The odometer readout was just three digits long.
“Do you listen to music when you write? Here’s the playlist for my latest.” She spun the volume knob loud—Bonnie Raitt perhaps, but I was hesitant to ask—and sped me through the New England city, heavy-footed, rolling right past stop signs, pointing at historic landmarks, double-parking to sidebar on local tidbits and oddities. She was a lithe conversationalist, lacking in pretension, all curiosity and exclamation points. During anecdotes and townie gossip, she lowered the volume knob. During quiet stretches she turned it so high North Philly ghetto blasters would kneel in homage. She was hell on wheels, decked out in dad jeans, with a kindergarten sparkle in her eye.
“Questions! What do you want to know? I’m sure I’m forgetting stuff. Shoot!” Here I drew another blank, unsure what one ought to ask when choosing a grad program.
“Do we get electives?”
“Take any class at Brown you like. Or take zero classes, just attend workshop, write your plays, and hit the beach all day. Or the dive bar. I’ve had folks do it all sorts of ways.”
Creative Writing was in a new glass box, still under construction, at a prime location across from the historic main quad. It was a source of great pride to Paula. Opening a freshly painted door, she went in search of hard hats, then called me inside. Construction dust filled my lungs. Windowless dark swallowed me as Paula fumbled along the wall for a switch plate. “I thought they put the controls here. Lemme try upstage. Aha!” Fluorescents blinked on and she apologized: “We ran out of budget to get faders on the houselights.” Here it was, the new black box built from her fundraising. Brown protective paper still lined the glass balcony partition. Sleek wooden seats awaited their first audience. It was intimate enough for poetry readings, flexible enough for small-scale theater. There was even a narrow backstage crossover and a dressing room, two things my musicals at Yale had lacked.
“Can you see your plays being produced here?”
“Yes, Ms. Vogel,” I teased, using her last name.
“Do me a favor,” Paula said. “Write a full-length play in forty-eight hours and bring it on day one. Any forty-eight hours you can scrounge this summer. On your honor. It sounds daunting but the freedom will surprise you. Leap of faith. The record holder is Nilo Cruz. A hundred and twenty pages off of two days’ work. If you do that, I’ll produce it in this space.” Writing 120 pages, even without a deadline, seemed unfathomable. “Writing’s a muscle.” Paula beamed. “It gets stronger.”
Labyrinthine unlevel hallways deposited us in the building’s historic wing, home to Paula’s fourth-floor office. Out-of-print playscripts wallpapered the room’s dollhouse angles. Certainly, the office had once been an attic. She found Night Train to Bolina and gifted me the paperback. “But it’s your only copy.” “Bring it back to me.” She winked. It was the published play that had resulted from Nilo Cruz’s two-day cram session. Paula stacked a few others in my arms—all by former students, all with legit barcodes and Library of Congress numbers. Some even had that natural-edged paper that was, as bucket lists go, the closest I came to dreaming big. “Read them on the train ride home. I’m curious to hear what you think of Nilo,” she chimed. Homework was piling up before I had accepted Paula’s offer.
There would be no tuition, she reminded me. Workshop participants received two-year stipends, enough to cover rent and groceries. We would get paid to earn our master’s. The expectation was that for two years this would be our center, our daily bread and vocation—that we would not only steep ourselves in the mechanics of playwriting but live the lives of full-time writers. A privilege and rarity even amongst pros.
Where to next? Antique shops? The Pawtucket Red Sox served a mean dirty-water dog, should we catch a night game? There probably wasn’t time to swing by the Cape. Had I been? “There’s a good turkey club across from the Orleans windmill. Then you walk to the public beach and dip your toes in the bay. When’s your birthday? Perfect, turkey clubs in September!” We drove north on Hope Street and she ranked the passing Thai joints. “Spring rolls or summer rolls?” she quizzed. I preferred pizza rolls at the Chino Latino by Titi Ginny’s. “Ooh, I gotta stop for this!” Paula parked smack on the yellow lane markers, blocking traffic, blinkers on, and rolled down the window. “There’s the cemetery where Edgar Allan Poe proposed marriage! But he was a drunk and his fiancée ditched him before the wedding. Are you into ghost stories?” she asked. My life, I told her, was pretty much one nonstop ghost story. “I knew it, I could tell by your writing! Brown is teeming with spooks. Once a year, I bring the writers out to my Cape house and we stay up telling ghost stories and roasting marshmallows.”
We decided on Horseneck Beach. On the way, she declared I must be fed. A roadside food truck had a sign whose phantom letters read creamery. Paula was more unguarded than the squealing teens clumped at picnic tables. “You’ve never had moosetracks? I get to introduce you to moosetracks!” She bought me a lobster roll and an ice cream cone and we listed first shows seen, favorite plays read, poets adored. Formative words were recited from memory. Whan that abril from Canterbury Tales—I could still remember the first sixty-four lines. I segued into Shange. Fewer words, they cut closer to the bone. i found god in myself / & i loved her / i loved her fiercely. We talked smack about ghost stories we might tell and ghost stories still grappled with. Paula named a brother lost to AIDS. She brought Carl to the conversation not as a victim but a beacon. She smiled, youthful and affectionate, recounting his final days. I wondered if she knew about my family. I’d not mentioned Tico or Guillo or Big Vic in my application and became suspicious that she was manipulating me, that she had looked me up somehow. But I realized, no. We’d simply been alive at the same moment in history, tapped by the same forces.
In mind of my cousins so unexpectedly, that old Six Flags trip came roaring back. The sense of anarchy and anticipation as I rode with my idols, wild wise beasts. Their joy was an F.U. to a hateful world. For each ounce of damage, they had two of life force. Paula was like them. If that Providence afternoon were to turn some humiliating corner, like getting my first period in a parking lot, I trusted Paula to joke till I chuckled and buy me the best bodega maxipad around.
“So? What’s the verdict on moosetracks?”
“I mean, the peanut butter cups…”
“That’s the clincher,” she said with a smile. We sped off toward Horseneck with the windows down. In the parking lot, brittle seashells gave way beneath our sneakers. Though the spring wind sliced through my fleece, I peeled off my shoes and socks, left them at the car, and dipped my feet in the tide. The Atlantic gulped my ankles. A burning thrill. On the beach, we did not talk. No sound, save the loud ocean and barks from an off-leash retriever. Paula hovered back by the driftwood. High-tide baptisms, she intuited, are wordless ceremonies.
Why do I get Sterling Library and Nuchi doesn’t? As I waded in the New England Atlantic, the old refrain was no longer taunting. It held new clarity. Though no answer materialized, the conundrum approved of my current coordinates. Paula, and the ocean, seemed like good places to search.
“Don’t worry about it,” Paula said as I attempted to clean my feet in the parking lot. The Honda Del Sol had not yet been to the beach. It was high time the passenger side got blessed by Horseneck. So I pulled my legs into her new ride and sand cascaded to the floor.
* * *
—
I had already interviewed at other grad schools. Eduardo Machado, a cantankerous Cuban refugee with a three-day beard, ran the Columbia MFA. As I reached his office, before I made it to my seat, he blurted out “three things to know.” One, I was accepted. Two, he might quit any day, depending on what he ate for breakfast. And three, Columbia was no place for me. “There’s too many students paying thirty thou a year, these rich kids living in two-bedrooms on the Upper West Side. Sorry if you’re rich. Are you? I didn’t think so. You don’t write wealthy. Anyway, my students invite me over for wine or beer, I can’t even go, it’s so fucking depressing. Where else did you get in?”
“Brown.”
“Go to Brown.” He had the look of an underweight sleep-deprived rhino. “Forget New York. Ten years in this city and your veins run cold. Go write your plays. Delay the inevitable. Give yourself a few years, then move here and let the critics slaughter you. You’re a Puerto Rican playwright,” he said, “unprepared for the hostility you’ll get when putting these people onstage. This naïve vibe you got? Guard it, do not squander it. I can hardly touch a fucking pen without breaking into hives….Therapy’s not covered by insurance….I couldn’t step foot in my own tech rehearsal last night, I just walked around Hell’s Kitchen chain-smoking. Then finally, I sneak in the back to see. Five minutes of this abomination and I grab the god mic and yell HAVE YOU READ MY FUCKING PLAY?”
“What’s a god mic?”
“The PA system.”
“So everyone heard you say that?”
“I’m not allowed back to my own rehearsals.” There he stopped. He would discuss the matter no further, except to tell me that I would receive a partial scholarship at Columbia and it was in my best interest not to take it. Unburdened, having gotten that off his chest, there were more important things to chop up. Things like Ogun, things like Lukumí and diaspora. Things like, what was a West Philly pipsqueak doing putting taboo shit out in the open? White audiences would be disgusted, Latinos would be pissed. This gruff Cuban playwright—all machismo, all bravado, storm-battered and down for the count—was thoroughly versed in los santos. Cuba, of course, was the Caribbean fulcrum of Yoruba influence. But to me, this chat was revelatory. It was the first adult conversation outside of Philly I’d had on the topic. Finally, I didn’t need the word “Santería” to help a stranger locate my mother. Finally, I did not need to be a tour guide through my life’s basic corridors. I loved him for it, this train wreck of an artist. His gruff, brash manner. The bitter air quotes his voice hooked around “Catholic” when he said the word. How my depth of knowledge demanded his attention. It was invigorating, the notion of two years as his apprentice, two years of conversation on things that had only existed in mom’s living room or in books. But his math was spot-on. I was too green, he was too bitter. That he told me so is a generosity I’ll never forget. He wished me a great career and all at once seemed to curse it, too. Then he saw me to the door.
Broken Language
The first thing Paula Vogel did was dispel me of the notion that I must be loyal to English. Language that aims toward perfection, she told me, is a lie. Shakespeare knew this, she said, and broke English until its dictionaries grew by a thousand entries. Tennyson knew it in 1835 when he, the Great Poet, used one word to express a vastness. Break, break, break. Paula told of a German cab driver who asked his fare where they were heading. To an audition, it turned out. Can anyone go? the cabbie asked. He parked, memorized the sides, landed a role, and grew angry. The theater lied, he decided. Characters spoke in flowery poetry—peasants and judges had equal vocabularies and elocutions. In reality Berlin schools didn’t give day laborers like him the tools to express themselves. So he became a playwright, his characters often rendered mute by their misery.
“Your Spanish is broken?” Paula said. “Then write your broken Spanish.”
* * *
—
I was, compared to my cohort, woefully unprepared. I’d read (and forgotten) one Ibsen and zero Chekhov, names they cited with a worshipper’s reverence. My classmates had been theater majors and were hard-core literati out the womb. They had professor fathers and journalist mothers. Some had professional productions under their belt. They cited, with self-deprecating nostalgia, the seminal titles on their parents’ bookshelves. Which Jane Austen had been their first, which Nabokov they’d read too young. These authors’ names were familiar, but I’d never read them. Well into my twenties, I didn’t have an excuse for my ignorance of Western literature beyond the twelfth-grade Norton Anthology and three college lit courses. Foolish me, thinking I had mastered English and the Western Canon, all because I could size up one Duchamp, all because I knew which Chopin note required fourth finger or thumb, all because an English professor had once tried to poach me, over expensive lattes, from the music major. At Brown my deftness, which had previously felt accomplished, was revealed to be a sliver view.
I felt newly cagey about the living room I’d left behind. There was no Henry James lying around mom’s, so I had no idea why I ought to roll my eyes at mention of his name. I had never chanced upon a salacious chapter of Freud because Pop had neither a room labeled “study” nor bookshelves inside it. W
here my cohorts’ childhoods were spent peeking into sexual psychology books, mine was spent standing in mom’s altar room, lifting a sopera lid with reticent fingers. The things I’d glimpsed too young—my version of Freud—didn’t easily cut into the double-dutch game of their chatter.
Most of my classmates grew up making school or community theater and were well versed in popular classics—a fact they admitted with rehearsed embarrassment. They knew which playwrights were déclassé: most. The Greeks merited consideration. Stoppard, fuck off. (I’d read both and couldn’t parse that hierarchy.) August Wilson? Purple. Albee? Overconfident. (I’d read neither.) They could barely tolerate writers they full-on admired, like Tony Kushner. The few playwrights I claimed as influence—Ntozake Shange and Arthur Miller—hardly earned me looks of admiration. “Quaint,” their tight smiles seemed to say. Gaining theatrical fluency was the reason I came back to school, so I kept a mental to-read list, regardless of their verdicts of worthiness. For four years, I had been beholden to Yale Music’s aesthetic hierarchies. This meant unlearning merengue, un-remembering that Fourth of July dance party, turning Ramito’s seis con décima into a dorm room hobby. At Yale, music was not for dancing (except baroque gigues). Music, furthermore, was not a social or community endeavor. Music, above all, need not sound good so long as its construction, philosophy, and intellectual acumen was sound. For four years I’d compartmentalized bomba y plena while pulling all-nighters on twelve-tone rows. If I repeated that at Brown, giving The Academy a corner office while relegating local flavor to cramped cubicles, I knew I would spend two years resenting playwriting just as I’d spent four in a lover’s quarrel with music.
My classmates proclaimed adherence to various schools. Theatre of Cruelty, Language Playwrights. I nodded but in truth knew what neither meant. During workshop, one classmate whined that his dramaturg had caught a misspelling on his playscript. “Misspelling!” he fumed. “That was an intentional stylistic strategy. I do not make typos.” As he said it, my rough draft was being circulated for workshop. I stiffened. With Spanglish and Yoruba braided through my dialogue, spell-check was hardly an ally. Autocorrect sabotaged my sentences daily. Plus, Yoruba words, on their passage across Atlantic waters, islands, and centuries, had picked up various spellings. The one I referred to as Yemayá was also, according to my personal library, Yemonja, Iemonja, or Yemoja. The Orisha of lightning might be spelled Shango or Changó.
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