The mysteries of "success"

When I look back at my long career, one of the more interesting puzzles to me is the total disinterest by the local theater community in what is clearly my most critically successful play -- and this at an international level. I speak of Famililly:

Winner of the 1997 "Crossing Borders" international new play competition and the 1998 Buckham Alley Theatre Playwrights Competition. Also the highest ranking stage play in the 1998 New Century Writer Awards and a finalist for the 1998 Oregon Book Award.

Perhaps the most impressive of these awards is the New Century Writer Awards, which was a big deal at the time, but made no sense since all forms of writing were in competition with one another, an apples and oranges affair if ever there was one; nonetheless, the play was the highest ranking stage play and something like 8th or 9th overall (it was a long time ago). You'd think being a finalist locally for the Oregon Book Award might result in a look by a local theater company. Nope. You'd think its theme -- it's about "family values" from the point of view of gay parenting; its theatricality -- it's set around a costume party on the Bicentennial, with some of the "founding fathers" on stage; its small cast (3M, 3W) would make it attractive. Nope. Nobody in Portland gave (gives) a rat's ass about the play.

Fascinating. But I suppose it shouldn't be. A large part of "success" in the theater world, as in many places, spins around networking and I've been out of the local loop for some time now. I was very much in the loop in the 1980s but only because others, not myself, were serving my interests, in particular the three directors and theater critic to whom I dedicate my recent collection 8 Oregon Plays. I actually didn't do much networking at all; these folks more or less came to me. It really was a matter of being the right person (a playwright writing "Oregon" plays) at the right place at the right time. I got to experience "success," at least from the point of view of a big fish in a small pond (in the 1970s, I'd been a small fish in a big pond on three different occasions, i,e, Best American Short Stories), so I had something with which to compare later experiences of marginalization.

I don't see any way to make sense of any of this. The opposite of success is not failure but invisibility, and neither experience seems to have as much to do with me as with the environment surrounding me. Contests, it turns out, are really about judges, as I learned when I started judging contests myself. Pity the screenwriter who writes horror scripts and has yours truly for a judge! To repeat a story I love to tell my students (I'm big on Reality101 when it comes to writing in America), I once was one of three judges charged to give ten scriptwriters a fat fellowship, selected from 70 finalists. In each of our individual "top ten" lists, not one writer appeared twice! We had no agreement whatever! This is the truth about literary competitions, my friends.

It's easier to embrace the fact that "success" is a crap shoot when you are not being selected, of course. In fact, winning an award is as circumstantial as not winning an award. It doesn't mean you're "good" when you win any more than it means you're "bad" when you don't win. No wonder the first thing Yeats said when being told he'd won the Nobel Prize in Literature was ... How much?

The only sane attitude to take in the fog of all this was expressed by J. D. Salinger:

An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.

Amen, amen.