The Past is a Fiction

Since we've been rehearsing Tejas Verdes mostly in Brooklyn, I missed out on my daily ritual of reading The New Yorker on my jaunts into Manhattan. And even though the actresses in the show grumble about coming out to Park Slope, I consider myself lucky when I have my subway reading time.

Before rehearsal today, I read a piece about Gordon Bell, the Microsoft engineer who has been described as "the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers". A certain section struck me as having to do a lot with theatre in general and the production I'm working on now in particular.

Memory revises itself endlessly. We remember a vivid person, a remark, a sight that was unexpected, an occasion on which we felt something profoundly. The rest falls away. We become more exalted in our memories than we actually were, or less so. The interior stories we tell about ourselves rarely agree with the truth...In the novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell writes, 'Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.'