It started at a party. Experimental playwright Justin Maxwell explains how he was drawn into the inspiring and chaotic life of one of the world’s greatest artists and how this led to the creation of his innovative Edinburgh Fringe show Exhausted Paint: The Death of van Gogh.
Sometimes you shoot yourself in a field near Auvers-sur-Oise
Years ago, a charismatic dude at a party tried talking me into writing a play about Van Gogh. He was inspiring enough that I bought a copy of the old painter’s letters. Then I read them. Then it was too late. I was inspired, and I began the journey of writing Exhausted Paint: The Death of Van Gogh.
If you haven’t read Van Gogh’s letters, you’re missing out. Turns out the painter could write, too. It was powerful to see him explore his own obsession with craft. He talked about the tiniest choices in the craft of his painting. He talked about building individual daubs of paint by swirling colours together, not mixing to make a single colour, but swirling to make a multicoloured, layered glob of pigments that he’d apply to the canvas with a palette knife. That was an artist that knew their craft. When I got through the early drafts of Exhausted Paint, I made sure each line swirled in syntax, like Van Gogh’s daubs swirled in colour. It helps that often I write dialogue with line breaks, a surreptitiously evocative tool that I brough over from my poetry days.
Fortunately, as a playwright, it’s my job to inspire. Van Gogh could work alone, wise playwrights should not. As a writer, I am an artist who works in language. In dramatic writing that means a host of other artists will mediate my language onto the stage. As I type this, I can hear Drew Stroud running lines with Penny Cole in the rehearsal studio behind me – they’re at the dynamic place where actors and director are integrating words, motion, the body, and the voice into a singular presentation. I’ve inspired them to work very hard, and I think Van Gogh would be proud of that. I’m perpetually humbled by it.
Van Gogh’s love of craft and his desire for control of form produced amazing art. The fact that he couldn’t control his life off the canvas is where the drama comes in. I can control my words on the page, and make them inspire, but the actor and the creative team mediate the words into the world. As artists we can control our art, but not much else. Sometimes it works out well. Sometimes it works out to quiet fulfillment amid much compromise. Sometimes you shoot yourself in a field near Auvers-sur-Oise. Exhausted Paint is about the contrasting control of artist over art and artist over life. Thus, this play is an emotional biography instead of a historical one.
Like most writers, I believe form must fit theme. So, when I started writing the show, I needed to think about how I could manifest control, or the lack thereof, on the stage. From that, a wheel. Something spinning, something uncontrollable, something paradoxically associated with both fate and chance. Scenes connected thematically instead of narratologically — a wheel covered in totemic objects. The actor spins the wheel. Each object on the wheel connects to a scene. The object that stops closest to the audience indicates the next scene. Like Van Gogh painting and painting with masterworks piling up in his bedroom, the actor keeps spinning the wheel. No control over the outcomes, just desperately returning to the action—hoping for an outcome out of control. Every night a different show, a different sequence of objects determined through the character’s doggedness and the wheel’s inherent randomness. It works out well … for the audience. Still, his dedication to craft inspires.
Just over a year ago, I published a book about playwriting, The Playwright’s Toolbox. It’s an approach to playwriting inspired by Van Gogh’s thinking about painting. I wanted to offer writers a dynamic, diverse series of exercises to help an individual author strengthen their craft. So, I got over 50 playwrights to contribute skill building exercises. Writers can come to the book to gain the skills they need to make the art they want to see in the world, to make their art, their way, on their terms. Vinnie wouldn’t have settled for anything less.
So, I wrote a play about Van Gogh. Come and see.
Justin Maxwell's Book:The Playwright's Toolbox: Exercises from 56 Contemporary Dramatists on Designing, Building, and Refurbishing Your Plays
