#will arbery

Books that have left an indelible mark on my understanding of politics some way. My political development is unfinished, so this list is unfinished - I'm always open to suggestions

Capital Vol. 1, Karl Marx - unmasks the inherently exploitative social relations embedded within capitalism, critiques capitalism as ineffective/self-destructive (not just immoral)

Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty - there is no such thing as a "natural" social order, examines how inequality regimes have emerged and been justified across the world throughout the past 1000 years of history

Nixon Agonistes, Garry Wills - captures a cross-section of American politics over a short period, probing insights into the psychology driving political affinities, documents the evolution of the word "liberal" in American political discourse

What Are We Doing Here?, Marilynne Robinson - provides a constructive, anti-Hobbesian view of society

Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond - shows the extent to which poverty in America is a policy choice, harm reduction is possible without revolution

The Code of Capital, Katharina Pistor - a cursory overview of the legal strategies to insulate capital from any competing legal claims

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt - laziness and insistence on self-exoneration is often the psychological engine behind human wickedness and injustice over and above malice

Illness as Metaphor / AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag - shows how deeply ingrained prejudicial views of disability is within our collective language and psyche

Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West, Cormac McCarthy - violence has never been excised from politics, the invisibility of violence to the bourgeois is an illusion

Lysistrata, Aristophanes - unmasks the nature of gender politics despite its operation behind closed doors, imagines a project of mass organizing along gender lines

Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud - civility is unfortunately a tenuous prospect

Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Will Arbery - excoriates conservative psychological pathologies

Martin Luther King Jr

A Gift of Love - justice is love in public

Letter From a Birmingham Jail - there are contexts where civil disobedience is mandatory for the Christian, solidarity with the marginalized is always mandatory

The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot - progress is not inevitable

William Faulkner

Absalom, Absalom! - racism is an inexorable part of American capitalism, imperialism cannot be stopped until we are able to free ourselves of our disingenuous national myths

The Sound and the Fury - nostalgia makes you an idiot, unable to understand your present or to predict your future

Herman Melville

Billy Budd, Sailor - history is unavoidably malleable

Moby-Dick - a true-believer demagogue is worse than a cynically disingenuous one, democracy can be an ineffective antidote to a tyrant

Franz Kafka

The Trial - the very procedures instilled to protect (or at least mitigate) injustice can also exacerbate it

The Metamorphosis - modernity interferes with our ability to see and relate to others as human, liberalism's self-advocating and individualistic ethic destroys us from the inside out because it forecloses our ability to recognize this

John Milton

Areopagitica - freedom of speech is as much about the individual's freedom to render judgment on speech as it is about the speakers ability to speak, the problem with censorship is the top-down nature of it, not in the governed people's discernment of quality or value

Paradise Lost - similar to Birmingham Jail, the character of Abdiel represents righteous opposition to Earthly principalities

The Autobiography of Malcolm X - the psychological, spiritual, emotional toll that being black in America takes on a person, black empowerment is a necessary step towards black liberation

Ursula LeGuin

The Lathe of Heaven - structural reform can only be undertaken democratically, no change is without trade-offs so changes must be broadly accepted and supported by the populace who will inevitably bear the unforeseen burden that results

Heroes of the Fourth Turning

For me, that moment is about how far people are willing to go to see each other, which is an idea that comes up throughout. At one point, Lot mentions a journalist who has written about him. He feels like the journalist has shuffled him into their theory about how the world works. Do you worry about that when you’re writing?

WA

I do worry about it, especially because as a playwright you’re literally putting words in people’s mouths. That’s literally the job description. You’re also deciding what their deepest pain is and quite often putting them in situations where that pain comes to light and is heightened. I do feel very complicated about it, like I kind of just trapped these people in this world. So I always instinctively work in this feeling that they’re talking back to the confines of the play, sort of pushing against it and breaking it open. I think how that manifests is that there are always things in my plays that surprise me, and I keep that surprise in there. I don’t try to shape it into something I can understand. I keep things in plays that I don’t understand, or that I might never understand, or that I understand very slowly, sometimes long after the plays have closed. I try to trust my gut in terms of what feels true, and oftentimes a really scary thing is the truest thing.

KP

Is there a moment in this play that really scares you?

WA

The ending really scares me. I was worried about audiences walking away feeling like everything had been tied up. I don’t want to leave the audience with easily articulated takeaways. I also don’t want to leave them with easily articulated questions. I want to leave them with a feeling that they can’t shake easily. I was really worried with this play because it ends in a way that I thought might resolve things too neatly, and it’s only after a week and a half of performances that I’m realizing it doesn’t do that, hopefully. But it’s still very scary, and it remains very vulnerable for me.

...

Words are imperfect, not just because they can’t capture the fullness of what you’re feeling but also because each word in itself is a potential landmine that contains inside of it so many layers of meaning. In a way, words are fossils. They’re these things that have traveled through the centuries to reach this moment, and they’re haunted. So we have to use these imperfect, haunted things to say something scary. I think that’s all throughout the play, and something that I only could really access or think about because of my sister. She taught me so much about language. I have a big family, so I’ve had a lot of voices swirling around in my head throughout my life, but the way Julia uses language is so delightful, specific, and profound. She taught me from a young age to pay close attention to it, to every single syllable.

KP

You mentioned earlier that you mostly write for ensembles, which is this structure that diffuses attention across a group of people. What do you think draws you to that way of writing?

WA

When playwrights are getting taught, they’re usually getting taught the Aristotelian formula for what a play is. There’s a protagonist with a tragic flaw who discovers something that leads them to have a super objective. At the end, they either succeed or fail, and their tragic flaw plays some part in that success or failure. That formula is so ingrained in us as audience members that we’ve gotten really skilled at picking up the moral of the story, and I just think it’s a little stale. Focusing on one-protagonist problems makes it too easy to shoehorn art into simple questions of identity and social value. It has taken a lot of the mystery and unpredictability away from art. So I like having multiple voices, discovering play structures that are almost taking place within the dynamic of the Greek chorus rather than focusing on the protagonist over there. It’s much more interesting. That polyphony is mysterious and beautiful, and I just feel myself pulled in that direction.

KP

For me, the Greek chorus is totally inscrutable. They seem like they’re giving you a moral, and then they splinter in all these different directions.

WA

I’m always going to be more tuned into a play that feels like it surprised the author; there’s a sort of untamable force at work, and something unknowable informing everything. That way you really can hang onto every word. Even if you don’t have a grasp on the plot or you can’t pinpoint the structure, you’re still invested because you feel like there’s that active search for meaning, and that it’s coming from multiple directions. I think it’s possible to get an audience breathing and thinking in new rhythms. There’s a monologue that Justice has near the beginning of the play about this ghost that she’s been seeing. She talks about the nature of prayer being this cave or this bubble that you get into, and you can’t remember how you got out, but you know you were in there; and you can’t remember how you felt in there, but you know you feel differently now. That’s what I’m striving for.