Essay: go and write a play about it
the revenge story behind Come Again
Essay by Alex Tutton
Once, during a particularly bad breakup, an ex yelled at me:
“Go and write a play about it!”
to which I replied:
“I won’t give you the satisfaction!”
After that, I didn’t write anything for two years.
When I picked the pen back up, what came out was the first scene of what would eventually become Come Again, a play that opens this week (June 8!) at KXT on Broadway. A cop and a woman sitting in a nondescript room. The woman, Sal, is reporting her boyfriend, Dan, as a missing person. It suddenly all felt like a bit too much: too many plot holes, and too many questions that I didn’t have the answers to. I didn’t want to deal with it.
It took another two years for me to write anything more.
When I picked the pen up again, I wrote the final scene. From then on, it all suddenly became so easy. I don’t know what happened, but something clicked. It was as if the plot lay before me and all I had to do was piece it together.
I wish it was that easy.
Nobody tell my ex, but I ended up writing a play about it.
I’ve been writing Come Again on and off for the last eight years. This play has been a marathon and I’m starting to feel the burn just as we’re about to cross the finish line. Thinking intensively about this play for all this time has been exhausting. Draft after draft, migraine after migraine. Considering the viscosity of yoghurt and the heavy thump of a cast iron frying pan when it hits the floor. Remembering frustrating conversations with police and Googling IVF so much that I kept getting ads for pregnancy tests a year after I finished writing it. It’s been a slog.
My characters are rarely works of fiction. They’re almost always saying and doing things I wish I could do. They’re braver than me, they’re funnier than me, and they’re filled with a lust for life that I lack. They are walking daydreams.
They are also full of qualities that I’m scared I possess. There is a brashness in Sal, a serious anxiety that appears in her partner Noni, and an eternal impatience in the police officer Hicks that all come from my own self-conscious worries. I can’t help but insert myself into my work. When so much rides on the likeability of your characters, is inserting yourself permissible? Even when the work eventually morphs into something foreign and new, is that enough to draw the line between fiction and inspiration?
In a similar way, every plot I’ve written has been driven by memory. They come through in fragments and they are inherently sensory. When trying to remember a specific conversation, I couldn’t tell you what was said or how it was said, but I could tell you about how the sun streamed through the window or how the blister on my heel started to throb halfway through. The sensation commits the interaction to memory, which then connects it to a feeling. I remember the vibe – the way it made me feel – in addition to the sunlight and the blister. Details of the conversation, not so much. Maybe that’s why I specifically became a playwright. Maybe that’s why I am so comfortable with dialogue. I can fill in the blanks, and control the narrative.
In Come Again, we cut backwards and forwards through time. We come in halfway through and leave before the encounter is done. You’re only seeing what I want you to see – only what is necessary for the story to continue. A handy trick but also something that mimics the nature of memory.
This experimentation with form has made things both easier and harder to manage. Easier because I didn’t have to create the material, and harder because we still had to pin down what was left unsaid. When talking with the cast about this, I gave a lot of uncertain answers, leaving things up to their interpretation. I was essentially asking them for the answers because, even though I’m the writer, I still feel that someone else wrote it. Someone unknowable. Someone unreal.
I sometimes feel uncomfortable with being a person in the world. At times, I would like to be invisible, to be unknowable. Like a god, or the wind. I have chosen to be an artist – the irony isn’t lost on me.
This disconnect really scrambles the brain. I’m writing my own experiences but I am ashamed of them at the same time. When I write about them, there’s a level of separation there that I might be able to deal with. I can think about it because it’s no longer mine – it’s the play’s problem now. It becomes intellectualised; playwriting as amnesia. It’s on the page and not in my memory and when it’s on the page, I can rewrite it as I see fit. I can change it to fit however I want an audience to see it. Maybe I am a god. A false god.
Through those eight years of writing, I never saw the truth of Come Again until the first read. It wasn’t until then that I finally saw the shape of it and it really was the beginning of a rollercoaster. It’s the nervous chatter with your neighbour as you’re locked in your seat. It’s the first chug and clatter of the cart. It’s the eternal rise to the peak. It’s the stomach drop when your body realizes that it is falling. And, worst of all, the camera flash for the gift shop photo. You’re in motion but there is no final destination, no great traversal of space. I can’t help but feel underwhelmed.
The process of writing this show has fundamentally changed me. Yet when I read the script, I’m thrown back to when I first started writing it, as if it is possible to exist as two separate versions of myself at the same time. I’d written the play out of spite to change something about myself, and I’ve ended up exactly where I started.
Come Again plays at KXT on Broadway until 17 June as part of TAPE OVER festival. Find tickets here.
Alex Tutton once took $300,000 off a man, married a fighting game champion and pretended to “run into’”Toby Schmitz when they knew he was at The Little Prince in 2011.
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