So. Going back to The Play. My Dear Director passed the script along to her priest, who liked it enough to approve the staged reading in the church. He did ask for certain changes, though, which seem reasonable. Can you guess?
Yes, the characters in my play swear. They say fuck and shit and gd-damn. They don’t swear a lot. They aren’t inventive or startling in their profanity, but they speak modern English, and they are under tremendous strain, so they swear a bit. The rector asked for the removal only of the word that begins with an f (second letter uck), which was mostly not a big deal. There were nine instances, altogether; five of them were in Satan’s visit to Ishmael, one was in the phrase fucked up, two were fucking used as an intensifier, and one was an interjection. One of the intensifiers was actually difficult, as it was a sort of sudden outburst of intensity, such as people denote with the use of a profane intensifier, so I wound up with a sort of inarticulate groping for words rather than the blurting of profanity. I prefer the profanity, but it won’t wreck the play. None of the individual instances in Satan’s dialogue were difficult to expunge, but I was a trifle concerned about the cumulative effect. Still, it’s a church. And the rector is (for all intents and purposes) the producer. And I’ve got the file with the fucks in it, for if we ever put it on in a theater.
In fact, my Dear Director, after re-reading the thing, decided that under the circumstances, and with the audience that will come to a church to see a play based on Scripture, we risk losing them to the distraction of their own reaction to the one that starts with an s and the one that starts with a Name of the Divine. So. Out they go. This is substantially harder. I should point out that my Dear Director did not say that the (mildish) profanity was bad, or that it wouldn’t work in another situation, just that her sense of the audience is that they will find it easier to focus on the play, the characters and the situation and all, if they aren’t startled by hearing Bad Words in Church. I could argue, but (and I think I have said this here before), she has much, much, much better judgment than I do for what Works. And what Works is what will work with that specific crowd in the specific circumstances. So, out they go.
There are fourteen instances of shit, of which four refer to actual, you know, shit. Goat shit in the first instance. I could probably just globally replace shit with crap, except in the two instances of shithead, which could be… um, well, I’ll have to work on that. They are both Satan abusing Ishmael, and I will need something that ideally mixes contempt, vulgarity, and an imputation of stupidity. Read my lips? As I say, it’ll take some work. As for the gd-damns, there are only two of those, both of which were put in to replace the vehemence of uses of fuck, so I’ll have to figure something out for those, too.
Gentle Readers will understand that this business pains me. I like profanity. I am not, by blog standards, a particularly profane writer, but when I cuss, I enjoy it. I am interested, intellectually, in the whole idea of profanity and Bad Words and their uses and differences, and have written about that a few times unrelated to anything at all. When I wrote dialogue with Bad Words, those were the words I wanted. It’s not only that these characters, as I imagine them, curse, each in a different amount, and that cursing is part of their language, which after all is the only tool I have for making them. It’s also that I want the words—all the words—to have an effect on the audience, as well, and when Satan calls Ishmael a shithead or describes Abraham’s knife as a big fucker, the audience should react to that. The problem, though, is that the audience won’t necessarily react the way I want them to react, and the circumstances of the reading affect that, too. Feh.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
This is fascinating–thanks for posting it!
I’m a big believer in that distraction theory. If a particular word or phrase is essential to the artistic integrity of the piece, in the judgment of the author, then sometimes it’s worth standing firm (even in the face of losing the opportunity to have a piece performed or published or whatever); but a lot of the time, I think it’s worth taking into account the question of whether the audience will be so distracted that they’ll miss the whole point of the piece.
On the other hand, I’ve seen that argument used to support the notion that (for example) there shouldn’t be gay characters in science fiction, because “normal” readers (that is, straight readers who’ve never knowingly encountered a gay person) will be so distracted by TEH GHEY! that they won’t appreciate the story. So I guess partly this kind of artistic decision depends on what audiences the author wants to cater to. If you care about how a particular audience will react, then it may be worth doing some editing to avoid distracting them.
And one nice thing about your particular instance is that, since it’s a performance piece rather than (say) a story in a magazine, there will be other opportunities to stage it for other audiences. Perhaps you could do a reading for skinheads, say, in which you add a few dozen instance of “fuck” to avoid distracting them with the clean language. 🙂
(Um, for any skinheads in the audience, I should note that I’m making a reference to The Skinhead Hamlet, not making any statements about actual real-life skinheads.)
The thing about the distraction theory is that it takes skill (or judgment or experience or talent or whatnot) to know when a word or phrase (or a gay character) really is distracting and when it isn’t. The audience does have a lot to do with that, as you and my Dear Director advise, but there’s also just a basic does this work aspect.
I should have added, in my note above, that the main purpose of the reading (from my point of view) is to test to see what works. My Dear Director’s point, and I don’t think she’s wrong, or not entirely wrong anyway, is that if the audience is thrown by the Bad Words, I won’t be able to tell if the rest of it works, and that’s what’s important. My concern is that particularly in the Satan’s appearance with Ishmael, which I am already a little concerned about because of Ishmael’s character, doesn’t work, will it be because the audience is missing the shock of the Bad Words? Or because there’s a more fundamental problem? And how will I know?
Still, I think my Dear Director is right, and I have defuckified the thing, unshitted it, and gd-damned bowdlerized it, and I hope to fucking gddamned shit it works.
Thanks,
-V.
I had an interesting experience, vetting my burgeoning novel to a friend of mine, who pointed out that my characters said “fuck” a fuck of a lot. It was true, they did. A different experience, some years ago, included an acquaintance talking about music, saying that anything worth saying could be said without profanity, and that he preferred his music not to contain it.
Now.
That acquaintance is a racist, a redneck, and a self-avowed bull-headed conservative who intellectually recognizes the error of his ways but refuses to change them, for he would feel uncomfortable with other beliefs. Which, frankly, is a weirdly clear-headed thing for such an entity to recognize, or so it seems to me, but there it is.
But there are a lot of racist, redneck, bull-headed conservatives out there, and I would like to sell to them, as well. After all, their children might read the book, and maybe they’ll be better for it.
So, what I’m doing in my novel, and what I do in my songs, is to eschew vulgarity unless I want to startle the reader. For, you see, I was also an actor and a director of the stage, in my undergraduate years, and one simply doesn’t put a GUN on the fucking STAGE.
Unless you’re going to make use of it.
peace
Matt