Old habits die hard

Old habits die hard

By Emily Kaye Lazzaro

I started this project because I was bored.  The last two plays I wrote were about people being people, with human problems, like their families are falling apart, or their friendships can’t last, or they don’t know how to treat each other well.  And I decided that was boring!  So I started my new play, The Circus.  It’s about an elephant and a tiger and their trainers who run a very small mom-and-pop type circus.  The circus has money problems but they have a great opportunity coming up: an audition for a big circus that might hire them all and save them from bankruptcy.  But the elephant has reservations about the possibility of great cruelty to animals at the big circus, and she realizes that she has real power in their small circus, to be treated well, to have a say in her own life.  So the elephant decides to stand up for herself.  That’s as far as I’ve gotten.  

The play is about captivity and capitalism, mainly.  I wanted to write a play that could explore the notion that we are all trapped by our society, by our obligations, by our finances, and ultimately, by our mortality.  So that seems like a real departure from family drama, right?  

Funnily enough, not really.  Because try as I might to break free of my style of writing, the process seems to remain largely the same.  I write from beginning to end, chronologically.  The elephant and the tiger, though they are animals, are really people.  People I know, people in my own family, myself.  And the small circus I’ve created is really nothing more than a little family.  They care about each other and they hate each other, equally.  And maybe I’m discovering that that is what every play, every story, is about: the human struggle for happiness and understanding.  We hate how much we need each other, but we need each other all the same.