Big Ideas

By now, if you’ve been connected to the internet even briefly in the last 24 hours, you’ve seen—experienced, really—The Wilderness Downtown. What?  You haven’t?  I’m so sorry—go now and experience it.  You’ll be back in a flash, trust me—and if you don’t come back… well… it’s probably more important for you to see the source material for this blog post than my second-hand consideration of it anyway.  (But please do come back.) Okay… now that it’s just us who’ve been through that… visited that… oh, hell.  How do you even talk about it?  Is it a website?  Is it a music video?  Is it an old photograph album with pictures of your neighborhood in it?  Is it a place to write?  It defies description! What I loved about the Wilderness Downtown interactive experience, for want of a better term, was how personal it was.  By providing a small bit of information about myself—my childhood addres

Last night, while standing outside a theater waiting to enter, I bumped into an actor of my acquaintance—a woman with good comic timing and presence as a performer, at least from what I’ve seen of her work, which isn’t enough. I was on my way to meet the director of the show we were about to see, but I stopped to chat for a bit, and she took a moment to introduce me to two of her companions: “This is Gwydion Suilebhan,” she said, “a local playwright.” For some reason, the word “local” really landed awkwardly in my ear. I mean, I understand it—I’m a playwright, and I live in the area—and I hold no grudge against the nice woman who said it, but it bugged me nonetheless. The problem (for me) seems to be the implication that I’m “only” a local playwright: that my work is only (good? well-known?) enough to be produced in DC.  Never mind the fact that the implication is wrong—because my work has been seen in New