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What ICWP Means to Me

ON MISCELLANEOUS THEATRE ISSUES - by G.L. Horton

VC wrote: "While there are indeed 24 hours in one day, and while these people are remarkable and without a shred of a doubt worthy of their places in history--"

I haven't answered the ICWP question because it means so much to me I'm almost embarrassed to acknowledge it, and at a loss to express it fully.

I've been part of this list since the beginning, and never away from it for more than a week. It is the Great Conversation I dreamed of when a child bookworm: sensitivity and eloquence addressing the big questions, summed up as "How ought we to live?" Love and work, courage and kindness, the struggle to find a balance...... I feel for some of the people on this list a combination of the hero-worship I felt for my favorite authors when I was young and the occasionally exasperated tenderness I feel for my own family. I sometimes worry that I neglect my dear friends near at hand because these cyber friends are so vividly present in my imagination--- especially the ones I have met and can supply with faces and bodies and tone of voice. ICWP does make it too easy to relax into the bookworm's vicarious adventures and empathetic passivity. I can bustle about for months in the real world without hearing a discussion like the one going on here now--- and in truth, I seldom see one of this quality on stage. Much of the world has accepted Mamet's axiom that human intercourse is a Zero Sum Game, and bullying or manipulation the basic survival strategies-- they've given up on truth and beauty.

My play "Intercourse, Ohio" is about my idealistic freshman self going off to college hoping to join the intellectuals' Great Conversation about Truth and Beauty and finding Games and Gamesmanship instead.

In this wonderful list, when Gamesmanship rears its ugly head, somehow tact and humbleness and empathy manage to overcome it-- or turn it into a wry joke of a tactic.

I am perpetually grateful. When I count my blessings, this blessed list is a top item. (12/21/04)

 

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