100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater by Sarah Ruhl (review)

It is said never share the stage with children or animals, but what about writing a play with them? This is the premise of Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater in which she postulates on the joys and horrors of being a stay-at-home mother and a playwright. Just as Ruhl makes metaphor real and the real metaphoric in her plays, she also does so in this series of free-association short essays—some of which are one word in length. Part theory, part battle-cry, part personal narrative, and most certainly a commentary on theatre in the twenty-first century, this quirky manifesto of sorts is a must-have on the shelf of anyone aspiring to be a theatre artist. From the whimsical beauty of an umbrella on the stage to a commentary on the importance of how community theatre is shaping our artistry, Ruhl muses on new ways to envision a life in the theatre.

Reminiscent of Robert Edmond Jones’s The Dramatic Imagination, 100 Essays is a treatise from one of the twenty-first century’s greatest playwrights on what it means to be a theatre artist, a human being, a parent, and a force to be reckoned with on all fronts. Through this imaginative collection, readers can better understand the point of view of one of our most fascinating playwrights. Many of the essays are posed in the form of a question that Ruhl does not answer, but simply riffs on freely. There is both brilliance and banality that will amuse, inspire, anger, and, occasionally, feel forced, yet it is inspiring to hear these contemplations, which are both intensely personal and vastly cultural.

The work is highly topical in the current discussion of gender parity in the arts, especially theatre, an issue that Ruhl wrestles with on more than one occasion by examining what it means to be a parent and a working artist: “When I looked at theatre and parenthood, I saw only war … I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it might be for a writer who is also a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion … life, by definition, is not an intrusion” (4). The work is timely, as evidenced by the first panel on “parenting and playwriting” at the Dramatist Guild Conference, as well as the reinvention of playwriting retreats to be more inclusive of women with children by the International Centre for Women Playwrights and the Women’s Project. In some ways, this volume is a call to shift the paradigm of how women playwrights write while at the same time a provocative examination of the possibilities of theatre.

Ruhl crafts her examination as part ode to the love of playwriting and part cautionary tale to young playwrights to not let “experts” influence or alter their work too much, as the experts may have missed the point the playwright was making: “If I were to choose a course of study for future playwrights (and future citizens), it would be juggling” (84). Ruhl believes that we follow Aristotelian ideology of a good play because it is easiest to teach; she argues for an Ovidian writing style in which the genuine narrative form is the art of transformation.

Ruhl speaks a multitude of times about her exhaustion with the idea that contemporary drama requires putting forward a thesis, and believes that the importance of knowing nothing is underrated. She pleas for a new way to think about narrative: “Do we think the arc is a natural structure because of the structure of the male orgasm?” (16). Her desire is that playwrights be less concerned with pleasing...