I hope to find time to write a post recounting this year's Edwin Booth Award, which was presented to the extraordinary Charles L. Mee on Monday May 3rd at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. For now, though, I'm posting the text of my remarks (as prepared, not precisely as delivered).

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In a particularly self-indulgent blog post a few years ago, I wrote that I needed to stop falling in love with the gorgeously fractured shells of broken men. I don't mention this out of a need to confess my extended emotional adolescence, or to offer a glimpse into my romantic travails, but because I was reminded of this post recently, while reading a passage from Chuck Mee's beautifully written memoir, A Nearly Normal Life.

Reflecting on how his struggle with polio has influenced his work, Chuck wrote:

I find, when I write, that I really don't want to write well-made sentences and paragraphs, narratives that flow, structures that have a sense of wholeness and balance, books that feel intact. Intact people should write intact books with sound narratives built of sound paragraphs that unfold with a sense of dependable cause and effect, solid structures you can rely on. That is not my experience of the world. I like a book that feels like a crystal goblet that has been thrown to the floor and shattered, so that its pieces, when they are picked up and arranged on a table, still describe a whole glass, but the glass itself lies in shards. To me, sentences should veer and smash up, careen out of control; get under way and find themselves unable to stop, switch directions suddenly and irrevocably, break off, come to a sighing inconclusiveness. If a writer's writings constitute a "body of work," then my body of work, to feel true to me, must feel fragmented. And then, too, if you find it hard to walk down the sidewalk, you like, in the freedom of your mind, to make a sentence that leaps and dances now and then before it comes to a sudden stop.

Aside from the gorgeously rendered prose, what struck me most about this passage was how much light it seems to shed on Chuck's plays. In many of them, of course, he takes this process a step further, shattering not one crystal goblet but several, and throwing in bits from jelly glasses, stained-glass windows, and cathode ray tubes.

Postmodernism, and the pastiche technique that characterizes it, are often criticized as being so referential, so soaked in irony, and so mistrustful of narrative that such works are unable to engage with emotion, with politics, with history. They are accused of being all surface, all product, and largely without conscience. If ever there was evidence that this need not be the case, it is the playwright we're here to celebrate tonight.

While it is difficult to apply any one phrase to all of them, Chuck's plays are often deeply personal, highly emotional, politically engaged conversations with, and meditations on: history and fantasy, war and peace, love and loss, art and life. His writing is marked by restless intelligence, relentless curiosity, and genuine compassion. Yes, he challenges the metanarratives of history and identity formation, but he does so in a way that respects and glories in story and experience, opening up the narratives—personal, cultural, historical, political—not to destroy them but to give them room to breathe.

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When I saw True Love at the Zipper a million years ago, I didn't know much about Charles Mee. A friend of a friend had gotten his first off-Broadway contract, his first Equity show, and a bunch of us went there to support him. While I imagined myself an adventurous theatregoer at the time, the truth is I didn't have much of a context for the play.

But I knew I hadn't seen anything quite like it. The mix of high and low cultures, the on-stage rock band, the explicit references to Greek tragedy, the collision of a working-class vernacular with Chuck's trademark flights of philosophy and poetry, and my long-haired young friend roller-skating around the stage, and then dancing naked with the actor playing his mother, all on a set designed to evoke a run-down garage, "an abandoned gas station." Once I knew the playwright's name, of course, it was everywhere. True Love, First Love, Big Love . . . 

There's a joke in there, I'm sure, but I'm also sure someone else has already made it better than I would have, so I'll skip it.

Years later, I saw Chuck at a Prelude festival, here in this building. I was a new PhD student here, and my friend and classmate Kenn Watt—who we'll hear from a little later—was directing a play called Gone, by Charles Mee, whose work I knew quite well by this time, though I wasn't yet referring to him as "Chuck." After we watched the work in progress, the director, the playwright, and the cast took some questions. Chuck was very open about the fact that Gone was unlike anything else he'd written. He wasn't sure what it should look or sound like on stage. He wasn't sure it could work in performance. But he liked and trusted Kenn, and the enthusiastic young actors of the ensemble, and he was excited to see what they would come up with.

Everyone I know who has worked with Chuck—directors, actors, playwriting students, academics—talks about his generosity in that regard. Every time a playwright throws a fit about over-reaching directors as if railing against "activist judges," I think of Chuck, who writes his plays to be directed, who is not afraid of losing his identity as an artist just because someone else asserts theirs. He knows that his plays are not "finished' as written any more than the material he drew on while writing was "finished" when he found it.

They're broken. They're fractured. They're fragmented. They leap and dance before coming to a sudden stop. They're heartbreaking, and funny, and challenging. Sometimes they succeed spectacularly. And sometimes, frankly, they fail. 

Because: like the artist who wrote them, they're too smart, too ambitious, too interesting, and too beautiful to be perfect.