The Questions That Won’t Let Go

Where does passion come from?

I’m doing a lot of thinking about that question lately, as I research the subject of passion for a book I’m working on. And while the answer is more complex than I can get into here … on some level, I think passion comes from a question, vision or idea of something that we get in our minds and then, for whatever reason, won’t let go. It pulls at us like a loose tooth our tongues keep returning to, urging us to follow it with an insistence that, if the path proves interesting, increases in intensity. In my case, for example, the very question of “where does passion come from?” has sparked a passion for finding an answer. Hence the book project.

But I recently came across another example worth reading about. In an article titled “Writing the Play His Curiosity Led Him To,” a New York Times writer described how the play The Whipping Man, now playing at the City Center in New York, came to be.

The play, set over three days in April 1865, as Lee surrenders at Appomattox, revolves around a Jewish slave-owner and two of his suddenly-free slaves, who were raised as Jews on his plantation, as they all try to figure out what to do next with their radically changed identities and world. All this amidst the drama of the slave owner needing an emergency amputation, and the irony of the three men facing the start of Passover together just as the slaves win their freedom.

The play, which was “developed over two years …  and many rewrites” from a 20-minute one-act play, marks the New York debut of its 33-year-old playwright, Matthew Lopez. He wrote it in between office jobs after failing to make it as an actor in New York. And since the first performance of the finished play was in 2006,  that means he began working on this project at least seven years before it hit a New York stage. (The emphasis just to point out, once again, how long the uncharted road can run through the woods before getting a glimpse of sunshine on it.)

But what I find most interesting about Lopez’s story is his answer to the question “What made you write a play about Jewish slaves and slaveowners at the end of the Civil War?” He said his family was a bunch of “Civil War buffs,” so he grew up reading a lot about the conflict and its impact on everyone involved in it. And, he said, he became fascinated by the question of how a person coped with sudden freedom, and the sudden change in identity that came with it, when they’d been a slave all their life.

“Before and after, there is no clean break,” he said. “How do you make that psychological change?”

It’s a question that has particular relevance now, as Tunisia, Egypt, and perhaps Libya and other Arab nations attempt to suddenly transform themselves after decades of authoritarian rule. And it’s a question that applies to more than just slaves. Long-time prisoners have been known to break parole on purpose, once released, because they don’t know how to cope with freedom after so many years of regulated incarceration.

Freedom, for all we dream of it, carries with it equal parts of responsibility. A free life is also an empty page that we have to fill with our own creations. And if we have no experience in drawing our own paths and artwork without strict guidance, having that responsibility suddenly thrust upon us can be overwhelming. Which is why, in some cases (see: Russia), the result isn’t all that pretty. It’s also why the psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in Escape from Freedom (written at the outset of World War II), that for all people talk of freedom, humans often feel more comfortable with totalitarian rule.

So I agree with Lopez that the question of how someone goes, overnight, from being a slave to being a free person is a compelling one. But while that question intrigues me, it doesn’t intrigue me enough to dedicate years to exploring answers to it. Not so Matthew Lopez. For him, that question became the “question that wouldn’t let go.” And the result is a critically-acclaimed play debuting in New York.

Why does a particular idea, question, or vision take such irresistible hold of one person and not the next? Ah … as my entrepreneur friend K.R. Sridhar would say, “there’s a bit of alchemy involved there.”

Passion. Alchemy. Freedom. Curiosity. They all take us down unexpected and confusing paths. But they also, as Matthew Lopez is discovering, can lead to some really interesting and terrific places, if we have the courage to plunge into the woods they urge us to explore.