I spent the first week of June reading pulpy novels and staring at the sky. I was pretty unwell, exhausted even. A sure sign: the steadiness of my artistic diet waned much like my actual diet. Crispy tofu, literary fiction, and arts criticism felt beyond me. So I took a week of vacation house-sitting at a friend-of-a-friend’s house on Vashon Island, lulling myself into rest with the formulaic lilt of romance novels. 

I’m a bit of a self-judgemental snob about my taste for romance novels. I have a little journal where I log all the art I see, the books I read, and I don’t write down these bodice-rippers. Blah blah blah I’m politically opposed to these novels’ formulas, but the predictable repetition really helps soothe the exhaustion. In my March art round-up, I wrote about Renee Gladman’s artful, experimental, metafictional My Lesbian Novel; I admire her appreciation for the often-badly-written genre. I read eight in fourteen days, repeating the cycle of longing, conflict-inducing plot device (fake dating, high school enemies), slow and cute falling in love, a crisis (someone freaking out about commitment, a lie being exposed), self-actualization, reunion. This pattern plays out in a number of settings: cowgirls (both cowgirl/cowgirl and cowgirl/cowboy), reality television, Hollywood, a small-town bed and breakfast, a beloved New York Queer bookshop, and more. 

This month, I read two romance novels set in the theatre, both of which reminded me of my favorite (non-romance) novel about theatre. Jen Silverman, a prolific and excellent playwright, published the novel We Play Ourselves in 2022; it’s an ode to the theatre, but also an elegy for when it breaks your heart, for when you have to flee as far west as possible to escape it. Mid-pandemic, after moving home to Seattle post-Chicago, post-art-heartbreak, a friend texted me recommending the book. “I think you might…relate to it,” she said gingerly. 

We Play Ourselves is about Cassie, a playwright who flees New York after her debut (Sarah Kane-ish) play is eviscerated by a New York Times review (leading her to enact some WILD bad behavior; no spoilers). It contains one of my very favorite descriptions of theatre’s effervescence (I once read this aloud to a friend in a bar and they asked “Are you sure you didn’t write this?”)

Making a play, she says, invites everyone to “gather close and peer at my naked heart,” but that naked heart will be protected by “the architecture of the theatre.” Oh, this makes me grieve my performance practice and long to revive it! Silverman calls this a “constant longing…the sort of longing upon which you build an entire life.”

It is also the sort of longing that can explode an entire life (I learned this the hard way). Cassie, the novel’s heroine, sleeps with her movie star leading actress and tries to kiss her (French, very classy) director. After running away to the West Coast, she joins up with a quite exploitative documentary director, unable to step away from the temptation of artistic fame, needing someone who can “bring me up the ladder with her, out of the darkness, back into a world in which I am a person and not a punch line.” 

Ultimately, Cassie surrenders to the consequences of her actions, relinquishing her entitlement to fame, and returns home to her parents’ house in New Hampshire and gets a job at CVS. Her mom hoodwinks her into writing and producing the Easter show at their church, and Cassie spends weeks obsessed with building grotesque puppets of sheep, Jesus, the Easter bunny—all made of felt, googly eyes, loose screws, torn canvas, broken plastic forks. Though she should be writing child-friendly Easter pageant dialogue, she’s blocked. For example, all she can write is,

Instead, all that she hears is the grotesque voices of these strange puppets, and she begins writing all of it down on a scroll of receipt paper at work. The Easter pageant that emerges is a morality play whose characters include “no-eyes” (one of the puppets), Leonard Cohen, Jesus, and a “sortof” version of her artistic nemesis. Its prologue reads, 

I read the book around holy week in 2022, when I joked that I “went to church for the first time.” I’d been attending a (gay, lefty) church online ever since I went to their civil disobedience training in the height of the 2020 uprisings, but that Easter Sunday marked the first in-person services; I’d obviously entered a church before (I was baptised, for the love of God!), but that Sunday, I was attending my (weirdo, come-as-you-are, Commie) church. It felt like a resurrection—from the solitude of the pandemic, from the art-heartbreak and the love-heartbreak, from the gets-dark-at-3:45pm Seattle winter. The agonies of those few years had forever changed me, but I was still myself upon arriving. Silverman’s book felt auspicious. 

My relationship to Silverman’s novel is personal and profound, lashed tightly to my theatre love and grief, to a period of suffering, transformation, and renewal—which is why I find it so funny to read two romance novels that feel like We Play Ourselves in drag. First, I read Broadway-musical-playwright Chad Beguelin’s Showmance (incidentally, what I call the early romance between María and me. She resents this, imagining that the phrase indicates a flash-in-the-pan, whereas I know of at least a dozen decades-long “showmances”). Showmance features Noah Adams, a Broadway playwright also eviscerated by a shitty Times review, who also flees West, this time to his hometown, the (too-cutely titled) “Plainview, Illinois.” There, the local community theatre has decided to mount his flopped, experimental, King Lear musical adaptation (It’s set, as so many theatre artists joke about dumb Shakespeare adaptations, in space; this is almost an in-group cliché!). In the process, Noah re-meets his high school bully, a strapping just-out-of-the-closet volunteer scenic carpenter. The earnestness of the heartland, a hometown boy, and community theatre help him forget the glitz and politics of New York, lick his wounds (among other things!), and rediscover the real magic of theatre (a close corollary of the Hallmark movie “real spirit of Christmas”).

I also read Amy Spalding’s In Her Spotlight, the story of Tess Gardner, a closeted Hollywood starlet famous for playing the (Marvel-coded) “Princess Platinum,” but who craves to return to her roots as a theatre actress. She is set to star in Homecoming, a world premiere by a young woman playwright. An American family drama called “Homecoming” is another theatre cliché, though this fictional playwright feels Clare-Barron-coded (I wrote about Barron’s flee-West family drama You Got Older here). However, on the first day of rehearsal, it comes out that the director has been #metoo’d, so a young, wunderkind, queer, next-big-thing director is flown in from New York to take over at the last minute. That director is Rebecca, who Tess fell in love with over a decade prior, during an intense affair at summer stock. In We Play Ourselves, while her play is in tech, just after unrequitedly professing her love to her director, Cassie self-destructs by fucking the married Hollywood starlet lead in her play. In one scene, they fuck in a bathroom stall in a journalists’ lobby on their dinner break from a tech rehearsal. They get back to the theatre more than half an hour late, a sin that might as well get you shot. After rehearsal, while smoking a cigarette in an alley behind the theatre, the director tells Cassie, ”Never sabotage yourself to punish someone else…Never when it comes to your work.” 

Spalding’s novel, unsurprisingly, is less complex. Tess and Rebecca flirt and fuck, there is a relatively minor betrayal which Tess must move through in order to finally come out of the closet and fire her homophobic publicist. The show goes to Broadway; Rebecca wins a Tony; they live happily ever after in Tess’ mansion (sorry for the spoilers! I know you didn’t see that coming!). 

For most of my twenties, forever intoxicated with the high of making plays, consistently betraying myself for the ever-moving goalpost of “making it,” my exhaustion felt bottomless, like no amount of rest could end it. Like Cassie, I had to let it all go, praying that I might someday be resurrected. Years later, in so many ways, that prayer has been answered. Now, after five days of reading the same story over and over, walking on the cold Pacific-Northwest beach, staring at the sky, I feel like myself again: I actually want to make a bean salad with lime and cumin dressing, I can bear to respond to my texts. Most importantly, I’m reading interesting things again: a bellwether of my well-being. 

So June’s art roundup is the diary of a fallow period. Next month, I’ll tell you about the more intense reading I've been doing since returning from the island: David Marx’s Blank Space (which I thought was kinda…whatever…but I kept thinking about it for days), and the anthology Diversity of Aesthetics, which is blowing my mind. In the meantime, my friends, rest and let the summer renew you with whatever art, whatever calming repeating formulas will help.