I Don't Patronize Bunny Rabbits!

Whenever I start thinking that I might be better off after all if I were normal, something comes along to reassure me. In this case it was Ramon Esquivel's new play Nocturnal, which had its premiere at Bloomington Playwrights Project last week. I saw it last night, and while it's not my favorite kind of play, it was well-written, well-acted, and well-staged.

Three of the four characters are boys, high-school freshmen out to have some fun by defacing the seniors' official prank, a sign with "SENIORS" painted on it. (Yes, "official prank" is deliberately oxymoronic.) Their outing is interrupted by a girl a year or two older than they are, who had briefly dated one of the boys the previous summer. The ringleader wants revenge, not only because the girl stole his thunder but because his sidekick betrayed his plan to her. Besides, revenge is the code of the macho-wannabe geek. Things escalate as the leader tries to act out his movie fantasies; dares are issued and accepted. Insecurities are exploited, expressed, and confronted. But these are good kids, "smart kids who went to a good school, who were brought up in two-parent families, and who lived in a safe neighborhood" as the playwright insists, and everything turns out all right in the end. (I hope that's not a spoiler.)

I'm not complaining about the play, mind you. As I said before, it's thoroughly well done, and it's the sort of thing that most people seem to like watching. But replays of the anxieties of adolescence are like nails on a blackboard to me, and I'm not entirely sure why, especially since they have no point of contact with my own high-school years. Okay, I was a smart kid who went to a good school, brought up in a two-parent family, lived in a safe neighborhood. I was something of an isolate, but I did have people I could hang out with from junior high school onward. Some of the kids I knew smoked, drank, fooled around (heterosexually), and drove their cars too fast, but I never felt pressured to do any of these things, or anything else I didn't want to do. The trouble was that I didn't respect myself, not that other people didn't respect me; they did, in fact, respect me, for which I'm forever grateful. But I never tried to cope with my personal fears about being a queer, being a sissy, being a bookworm, about being fundamentally unlovable, by trying to prove anything. If anyone had dared me to do something risky that I didn't want to do, I am pretty sure I'd have given them a chilly glare and refused without any qualms at all.

When I wasn't in school, I spent my teen years reading, writing, listening to music, and learning to play guitar. These were all things I wanted to do, and I enjoyed them. Learning to play guitar gave me some common ground with the kids around me, which was important because I didn't have any other. There were smart kids, but as far as I know they weren't interested in the books and ideas that interested me. Mine was a small school (my graduating class was 95, after consolidating three townships), so there just wasn't a large pool of people to guarantee any like-minded spirits to keep me company. That didn't bother me too much; I knew that when I graduated I'd go to college and enter a world that suited me better -- which is pretty much what happened, if not quite in the ways I foresaw.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like there had been some other serious intellectuals around. There was one girl I met in junior high school, really brilliant, but my social skills were too undeveloped to deal with a girl; I behaved churlishly and lost touch with her for a few years, until we met again at college. But she was much smarter than I, and her interests were in other areas; we never really became friends. The first real friendships I made, after high school, were with other pop-folk musicians. I now see that I was keeping my distance from all sorts of possible contacts. It didn't hurt (or help, depending on how you look at it) that my family lived in the country, which limited the possibilities of just dropping in next door to listen to the newest Bob Dylan album. Then I came out, and found that I could be as alienated in a crowd of gay people as I'd ever been in a crowd of straight people. Would it have helped if I'd met another gay kid in high school? What kind of friends was I looking for? I still don't know. But I'm raising this question because the next one is: if I'd found a circle of people to hang around with, what would have happened when the groupthink began, when someone decided it would be cool to take a risk for the sake of taking a risk -- jumping off a railroad bridge into a lake thirty feet below, for instance, on a dare -- or spray-painting the wall of the school, the sort of harmless pranks that normal kids do? I wouldn't have hesitated, not for long: I'd have said, "No, thanks, count me out," and walked away without looking back. I've never had any tolerance for practical jokes, which is another thing that makes me weird.

And I don't feel that I missed anything because of these gaps in my experience. On the contrary: if there were a God, I'd thank Her for sparing me such adventures. But so many people do seem to think that pranks and contests of pride, shaming and humiliating other kids (or being shamed and humiliated by them), the games of hierarchy and social-climbing, are essential parts of growing up, that I understand at last why I've always been an outsider, and always will be. And rightly or wrongly, I don't consider it a deficiency on my part. This, I think, is why Nocturnal felt to me like a skillful portrait of life on another planet, except that it's the planet where I live too.

Nocturnal was written with a teen audience in mind, though it clearly appeals to people of all ages. That's another issue. The playwright says, “Adults can influence, encourage, inspire and teach young people, but what happens when adults are not around? Nocturnal is a world without adults.” This immediately reminded me of my personal favorite exploration of teen angst, Daniel Waters and Michael Lehmann's great 1989 film Heathers. In one crucial scene, the heroine's mother asks her, "How do you think adults act around other adults -- do you think it's all one big game of doubles tennis?" The world of adults is too often a world without adults: of people who think that video games and romance movies are real life, who want to be in with the cool crowd, who'll do anything in order to be popular, and who'll happily sacrifice anyone handy in order to protect their pride. Who will teach the teachers?