Around the time I began workshopping my senior thesis play, Glenn, I received the sudden news that my grandfather had passed away. I remember receiving the call on the floor of the library, surrounded by papers, occupied only with answering the question of how to fix this messy little play. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. His mental decline had appeared out of nowhere, but the two week odyssey to his final rest was closely documented by my mother. Yet, his death was, nonetheless, a major shock. In the middle of all those pages I had become so invested in, I suddenly felt incredibly small.
I told my professors what had happened, and that I would need time off. They were supportive, and offered me all the space and time that I could need. I returned to my home, and joined my family to grieve.
Glenn had already been a play about grief. From its first draft to its final reading, it was based around the image of an already grieving girl nursing a dying giant head. And while it was inspired by the death of my grandmother, when I returned to New York and reread the script, it read stale. It felt fake, as if mocking me for believing I understood death. And the challenge of rewriting the script was no longer about making a play that “worked” - it became about doing my feelings of grief justice. When I next came into class, I came in with one hundred new pages.
This was my new rewriting process. Every day, I would put myself through a schedule from hell: wake up at four in the morning, go to the library, work until my first class began at nine. When I finished my last shift at my job in the library, it would be around nine at night. I would take the elevator to the highest floor, and then continue to work until midnight when the security guard would kick everyone out. I looped through this so that I would produce at least one hundred new pages of material to review and workshop with actors each week. It wasn’t as if the plot of the script changed - that was largely set in stone. Yet, from the logic of each argument to the interweaving of Hindu mythology, I forced myself to consider and agonize over each line.
Process is a strange thing. In visual art, process art emphasizes the action undertook to create the work of art. Consider Jackson Pollock, dancing maniacally around a canvas, tossing paint at it until the work becomes its own. In that case, it is the physical act of creation that finds itself at the center of attention, rather than the artwork itself. Other artists engage in the genre through textures and layers - the material nature of the piece implies the action the artist engaged in. In a sense, the very body of the artist and their physical movements are present in the artwork.
With writing, there is no physical process at play. Instead, what is engaged is a form of mental or emotional processing. For example, John O’Hara had a specific method for writing: each night, he’d write until his back began to hurt. He’d then sleep in, eat late, drink hard, and then begin to write again. Though not per se emotional, he had a mental pattern through which he engaged his writing, and it reflects in the way he structures his plots.
Yet, for me, the workshopping for Glenn was intensely fused with the emotional processing of my grandfather’s death. The rotation of writing exercises, rewriting entire sections from scratch, plotting out the play in miles of beat sheets, scribbling and scribbling and scribbling - this all became a pattern through which I understood the sudden disappearance of a loved one. And it was obvious to those around me. One of my professors even tried to tell me to slow down, to attempt to separate the script from the event, but it seemed impossible at that point. The script could not exist without being tied to this emotional effort that I still deeply needed.
At the final reading, I heard the whole play aloud without any intention of editing for the first time. From the tone of the audience, I could tell there was a great deal of confusion. An exorbitant amount of details had been ingrained in the plot for no reason other than my own emotional instinct. Why did The Giant spend a third of the play hallucinating? Why was there this focus on it never raining? Why did Karna speak so much about never having a home? Yet, my family - my mother, father, and sister - understood. They knew how each detail was plucked from our shared experience and from the grief at having to lose my grandfather. In the audience of confused listeners, three people joined me in a sense of closure. And it was all that I needed.
In the field of playwriting, scripts are always in state of rewriting. You don’t stop working on a piece, you shelve it to come back to later. But the truth is, I know Glenn is finished. When I read it, I can’t help but see its patchwork nature, as it ties together all these different exercises taken to comprehend my grief. From rejections it received from numerous theatres, it is mainly not understood. But that is because it was a year long journey through which I grieved and felt and learned, culminating in a performance where I got to share one last moment of grief with my family. It can never be relatable to a larger audience - but it is my grieving process, and gave me and my family the closure we needed. I don’t need anything more from it. I am forever proud of it.
I loved this. That you wrote for yourself and are not bothered that outsiders couldn’t understand shows your reasons for writing are genuine.
And I could relate to the story, the process and the event very viscerally.
Wonderful work, Kanishk! Keep them coming.
Through your words I feel your pain, your passion, oddly enough your healing (rather your resolution with reality) and your evolution through it all. Keep the ink flowing. We are richer for it.