Commencement Address At Oberlin College
Oberlin, Ohio
May 30, 1994
Mr Linney has been described as "one of the American theater's most mysteriously buried treasures." He is notable for his portrayals of such figures as Lord Byron, the poet Anna Akhmatova, and Jesus Christ.
----------------------------------
Mr. President,
distinguished faculty and administrators of Oberlin College, parents and comrades
of the graduates, ladies and gentlemen, old friends, and - first and foremost
- class of '94.
It is a great
honor for me to receive this degree and make this speech. In the forty-one years
since I was where you are now, I have always been conscious of good days spent
at a good place. It is a complicated happiness, my sense of Oberlin, as much
visceral as thoughtful. Glad I came, but more than that: not just satisfied
but grateful, not just respectful but admiring, not just fond of what I liked
but of what I didn't as well. What I did like was a large and intricate four
year process, never quite completely understood, which made living more comprehensible.
Age burnishes this process. Time deepens its texture. It was for keeps, and
it endures in the mind and heart.
That said about
then, let me confess to considerable apprehension about right now. A commencement
ceremony is not a small thing. It is a real rite of passage, and deserves our
sober consideration. It is not so dramatic perhaps as Birth, First Love or God
save us Death; nevertheless, in its own way, just like those experiences, it
is the One You Get. I am aware of my responsibility to do my best to enhance
this once only moment in your lives. I will try to be more specific than a speaker
here I once heard say, "March on, Oberlin Students, life is hard but it is good."
I am a writer,
primarily a playwright. So I will talk to you about plays and playwrights, which
is what I know, and hope you will connect it with what you know about life.
Playwrights do
not dwell on the joys, opportunities, rewards, earthly fulfillments and spiritual
epiphanies that may lie before you. That is better accomplished by other artistic
languages, such as music, and dance, which express joy so well. Good plays,
which I learned to love passionately at this school, are about other things:
ironic outcomes and basic emotions, sudden reversals and spilt blood, all rising
out of human conflict.
Kenneth Tynan,
a British drama critic, said that every good play is finally about human beings
coming to terms with reality. Sounds obvious but it isn't. He meant real life,
as it is, as it comes to us, so often unlike what we think it is, will be, should
be, must be, or at least can be. We are so often wrong in our basic assumptions
about reality, we will give our full attention to any stage that puts before
us life as its characters misunderstand it, made plain, plausible and sensible
to us by its conflicts, sometimes delightful, sometimes bloody.
That is why conflict
between human beings is the eternal preoccupation of playwrights. It is one
thing in life none of us can avoid, in which everyone is always interested.
Starting in the family, of course, or lovers becoming the family, with the blood
relations that make up most plays in some way directly or indirectly (Hamlet,
Oedipus, Life with Father, A Raisin in the Sun, Joe Turner's Come & Gone, The
Sisters Rosensweig), conflict is seen as the household origin of global reality.
Like God's rain, conflict with our fellow beings falls upon us all. Sometimes
it hurts and that can be tragic. Sometimes it's absurd and that can be funny.
Sometimes it's both at once, all mixed up and that's life.
Example from a
playwright's notebook:
A well-meaning
friend of mine in New York rescued an afflicted neighbor who was bent double
with the pain of a kidney stone. "Call me an ambulance!" "I'll take you there
in a cab!" "No, the ambulance!" "No, let me do it!" My friend got his neighbor
into a taxi, and rushed him to a nearby emergency room he had seen. Very concerned
nurses and quite unusually attentive attendants appeared at once and quickly
took him into the depths of the hospital. Moments later, the suffering neighbor
came hobbling out again, still in pain, screaming "You fool, it's a lunatic
asylum." My friend took his friend to Bellevue. Now, anyone who knows about
kidney stones knows how much they hurt, but anyone who knows about life, knows
about mistakes, and how often and grotesquely we make them.
Most of the time
our human conflicts are really more mistakes than anything else. Somebody says
something we misunderstand. Somebody looks like an unconsciously detested aunt
or uncle, brother or sister, friend or foe from our past, and the chemistry
turns explosive. This was misplaced, nobody was very nice about that. As a famous
writer of aphorisms observed, "If only one side was right, no quarrel would
last very long." I would add, and they don't make good plays, either.
But many conflicts
do last. In good plays they are elemental. They cannot be easily resolved. Sometimes,
they can never be resolved, as when, in Samuel Beckett's famous play, Godot
never comes.
Of course, when
the play is over, the conflict also may seem to be over, resolved dramatically,
by Othello's suicide or the location of the handbag in which Oscar Wilde's Ernest
was born. But that, theatergoers know, is not so. They have looked into Shakespeare's
mirror, held up to their nature, seen themselves, and they will not forget what
they saw, because to recognize yourself in the conflicts of others is a shocking
recognition. What, me, ravaged by emotions like that? Falling in love like that?
Consumed with greed like that? Exploding with ambition like that? Treating women,
or men, like that? As pompous as that, as cruel, as insensitive, as dumb? Forever
missing the point, forever expounding the wrong issue, forever looking one way,
while running the other? What fools these mortals be? Not me!
But Shakespeare's
Puck was right, A Midsummer Night's Dream is not a dream at all; it is a comic
coming to terms with reality, and we are fools, sometimes honest and lovable
ones, sometimes quite noble and saintly idiots, who cause as much if not more
damage than the ugly and the demonic. Playwrights, perhaps from birth, certainly
from childhood, are connoisseurs of this conflict. It is what they know and
what they present to their often offended audiences, from Euripides to Shakespeare
to Moliere to Ibsen to Beckett. These writers for the stage know human conflict
for what it is and for what it does.
At its worst,
worked out to the end, it chokes rivers with the bodies of men, women and babies.
It blasts into rubble the homes of helpless families. It perverts neutral technologies
into worldwide killing machines and death camps. It decides who will live and
who will die.
At best, human
conflict also produces, in unarmed competition, health, knowledge, capability,
compassion and wisdom. It decides who will grow and how. Conflict is our life,
says Darwin as well as Sophocles, and we cannot escape it.
So what's this,
at a commencement ceremony? You know all that. I don't need to tell you what
you see on television, or who you don't like. You know conflict. You have by
now shared the experience of Natasha Rostov in Tolstoy's War and Peace, who
when she discovers there are perfectly fine people who just plain don't like
her - HER; darling, loving HER - she begins the real process of growing up.
Still, there may be a useful notion I can leave with you today, about conflict
with others, and how it is put on the stage.
Good theatrical
conflicts come from very basic emotions. Those we experience in infancy, or early
childhood, never completely outgrown by anyone. These basic emotions - fear
and rage when we are born, later desire, interest, envy, love, jealousy and
their many permutations as we age, are always ready to erupt again in our lives,
to convert wise counselors into raging babies. When you or I fly off the handle,
say and do things we regret, things that maybe can't be unsaid or undone, we
may not kill our wives like Othello, though some of us do exactly that; but
we are, like Othello, overcome by an emotion so underlying to our natures that
it shakes us as no other feeling can. This is the kind of emotion the connoisseur
playwright remembers in himself or herself, and puts into stage characters.
Often we surrender to these basic emotions in life, usually to our regret. But
not to know they are there, to deny them within us, is to be like a character
in a play. The large emotions will bide their time and erupt within us when
we least expect them to, and be all the more devastating, as they were with
Othello. The next time you meet him, ask him why he can't be reasonable and
simply ask his wife what all the trouble is, and avoid all that fuss. Othello's
answer may be your own.
Well, if this
is sort of the case, put to you clumsily but plainly enough: go see yourself
in a good play and then stay out of it, what is there in good plays that you
might well want to get into? Does the sun never shine on these platform fancies
of character and fate and coming to terms with reality? Of course it does, and
in the way the critic Kenneth Tynan suggests. For there is a beauty and a deliverance
in recognizing our conflicts in common reality, even when it is painful. These
moments of recognition are available to anyone who is alive. They are simple
and wide and broad and swept with fresh air. They heal, and the essential thing
about them is that difference, never better seen than on a stage, between our
understanding and our judgment.
The playwright,
after Shakespeare, who understood this best - that is, the space between understanding
and judgment - was the Russian writer of stories and plays, Anton Chekhov. It
seems to me that while we playwrights admire and revere many giants of the theater,
we most love, as you love a living being, Chekhov. I was introduced to Chekhov
here at Oberlin, acting in two of his plays, under the direction of our wonderful
director-teacher, Stan McLaughlin, whose memory I also cherish. Acting in Chekhov
later and adapting one of his novellas into a play, I felt as so many playwrights
do, that we know him as our friend. Unlike Shakespeare, who never spoke to us
directly, Chekhov in his letters and in the memoirs of those who knew him, is
very clear about lots of things, among them my subject, this space between understanding
and judgment. Chekhov would get exasperated with friends and critics (like Tolstoy)
who often lambasted him for not taking a position, usually a moral or political
one. "When I describe a horse thief," Chekhov would answer, "you want me to
say that stealing horses is bad. You want me to make a judgment. But I shouldn't
be doing that. I should be making you understand how a horse thief feels, how
he is, and let you make the judgment, if you must."
This is the point,
finally, of what I am trying, with difficulty, to say to you, Class of '94.
It is not easy to make it clear. Chekhov knew that while we must all make judgments
sooner or later, some even at once, it is always, always better to understand
first, judge second. The one should come before the other. This we do not always
do. We rush to judgment. We become fierce and vindictive and self-righteous.
We boil over with a fatal certainty that cuts off heads and gives power to Hitlers.
In a version of my own profession, we sit through technically brilliant films
that allow us, with the wronged hero, to rejoice in blowing evil people up.
"He's the devil, you can kill him," the oldest and saddest of all the constant
refrains of mankind, is polished up for us every day by Hollywood.
You don't have
to do that. There is a space between understanding and judgment. You have been
living in that space for the past four years, in a good school that understands
it and I am sure hopes you will always insist on your right to understand something
as deeply as you can before you judge it. That is what you have been absorbing
here. Let it be for keeps. You can live in a wider world where you can demand
the time to make up your mind, free from anyone else telling you what or how
or when or where. There is life, Chekhov's life, in this world after graduation.
Here, in the space
between understanding and judgment, the playwright is in his or her element.
In plays, conflict is caused by judgment without understanding, and we watch
it happen. A play can show you one, two, three, four or more characters at once,
all reacting at the same time. Poetry and fiction do many things plays cannot,
but here, seeing human beings jumping instantaneously to a wonderful or a terrible
understanding together, the stage is at its best, and for that, people love
it. So see a good play, watch for that, and get into it.
Chekhov died young.
He fought a long and bloody battle with tuberculosis, which as a doctor, he
always understood and never raged against. His last works, as he was leaving
us, are his best. He had become the playwright who would be most performed in
this century, again only after Shakespeare, and maybe the most beloved of all
playwrights, by his down to earth refusal to be pompous, by his devotion to
ordinary reality and by his hard work at the stubborn craft of making plays,
which eluded the great Tolstoy and kept many another genius at bay. He did it
by following his own advice. He understood us before he judged us. That was
Chekhov's guide. It is the guide of every good playwright. I hope it can be
yours in life. I like to think that Anton Chekhov would approve of that notion
today. Allow me to imagine how he would size us all up, me, too, and with a
wink at all of us, and with a gleam in his eye, say the only thing left to say:
"March on, Class of '94. Life is hard, but it is good." Thank you very much,
and the very best of luck to each and every one of you.
