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The Walking Cure
Choire Sicha
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Each morning for nearly a month, the playwright Christopher Shinn has left his Lower East Side apartment and walked the four miles to Playwrights Horizons on West 42nd Street for rehearsals of his sixth play, "On the Mountain."
On weekdays that walk is interrupted in the East 30's for 45 minutes of psychoanalysis, which he has pursued, off and on, for nine years. His analyst takes the weekends off, but Mr. Shinn seems inclined to carry on without him.
On a recent Sunday, tromping through the remains of the previous night's blizzard, he said: "I had a horrible nightmare last night, about the theater that produced my last play. The artistic director discovered that I'd betrayed him. I think it has to do with a sense that I haven't been fully emotionally committed yet to this process."
That's an improbable fear. Mr. Shinn's first play was produced when he was but 23; that one and three since have had their premieres in London. "I didn't have to claw my way to peoples' theaters' front doors," he said. "I had one of the best 'ins' there are: good reviews in London."
Those successes created lucrative opportunities, but none appealed to him as much as the New Yorkspecific workingclass life of theater artists. In 2002 he left a writing contract with a cable network. "The thing about being a playwright is, you get better at it if you keep doing it," he said. "And the idea of stopping doing it, just as soon as I was getting good at it, seemed like a disaster to me." Last year, he was offered another wellpaid televislon job, in LosAngeles, but he declined.
"It was this period of time," he said, "that I got rid of cable, stopped buying CD's, stopped going to movies, stopped drinking at bars and quit smoking. I eliminated a lot of the pleasures of my life, not that they were necessarily healthful pleasures."' These financial necessities gave Mr. Shinn the opportunity "to go to a room and shut the door and figure out why I hated everyone I thought I loved, and hated myself."
(continued here...)
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