Editor's Note

By Jim O’Quinn

Addictive behavior stalks the pages of this issue of American Theatre. Herb Lawrence, the brawling, never-quite-sober father in this month’s complete play script—Lucy Thurber’s compelling and abrasively funny family drama Scarcity—is an alcoholic whose beer-swilling threatens his children’s future. Tennessee Williams, whose once-obscure salad days as a playwright are examined in a scintillating critical essay by Randy Gener, was notoriously dependent on drink and drugs for much of his life. Irish playwright Conor McPherson, whose exclusive interview with play editor Cassandra Csencsitz reveals a coruscating self-knowledge, candidly analyzes the effects—not all of them damaging—of years of alcoholism on his creative life.

Gener speaks of Williams’s “yawning appetites for drink, drugs and writing.” In describing the addiction that once hospitalized him, McPherson allows that “I thought that you had to be drunk to take the sting out of life, the apprehension and regret, to get rid of that.” Both writers, who parlayed their firsthand knowledge of heavy drinking into indelible scenes in their plays, would likely corroborate Ernest Hemingway’s famous dictum that “An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.”

But do writers actually drink more than other people? Judging from the long list of American literary giants who have turned to the bottle—in addition to Hemingway, think Edgar Allan Poe, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill and Truman Capote, just for starters—it would seem so. What’s less verifiable is the long-debated contention that there is a creative connection between writing and drinking—that alcohol itself is a source of inspiration and imaginative energy.

In a 1987 book called How to Boost Your Brain Power, science writer Roger Yepsen calls alcohol a “gifted chemical,” and goes on to muse: “How is it that alcohol may help people stymied by a blank canvas or a sheet of typing paper? The answer may be in this drug’s special ability to simultaneously lower anxiety and increase arousal.” Ultimately, though, he concludes that alcohol’s reputation as a creativity drug is largely a myth: “It is downright dangerous to infer that heavy drinking is a key to artistic success, despite our many cultural heroes for whom alcohol abuse was a central and at times colorful part of life.”

The topic of the impact of alcoholism on creativity is one that McPherson, in particular, doesn’t shy away from. “Not drinking,” the playwright reasons on the eve of the opening of his whiskey-fueled drama The Seafarer on Broadway, “allows me the patience and energy to move on to other things.” McPherson’s insights are bold, self-revelatory, fascinating.