Dear Microsoft Word:

I’m a simple man. I don’t ask for much. Many moons ago, when I was but a wee dramaturg, I mindlessly accepted that many of the words I wanted to type—not the least of which, my last name—were unrecognizable to you. In an act of faith, I moved on from the acute sense of unacceptance, right-click on the infamous red squiggles which underlined my words of choice, and in an act of defiance, clicked “ignore.” By the time I got to college, I grew braver still, skipping past “Ignore” on the drop down menu and added words to the Microsoft Word dictionary. I accepted for a long while that the words I typed were beyond your recognition. “My language is just too academic,” I assured myself.

But today is the day the right-clicking and ignoring stops.

“Why,” you ask? What could bring a reasonable intern such as myself, a lover of language, to such an adamant refusal? The outrage began when my colleague, Directing/Producing intern Sarah Wansley, dropped off an article on “Shavian Style” for our Mrs. Warren’s Profession Audience Resource Guide with our Literary Manager, Carrie Hughes. As an introduction to her article, Sarah observed that besides “Shakespearean,” “Shavian” is the only adjectival form of a playwright’s name that Microsoft Word recognizes.

Impressed and amused by Sarah’s discovery, Carrie shared this information with my officemate, Producing Associate Adam Immerwahr, and me. Ever the skeptic, Adam opens up a blank document in Microsoft Word and begins challenging Sarah’s claim. “Pinteresque!” he exclaims while typing furiously, only to be defeated within seconds when the red squiggly line, the ultimate sign of failure, appears upon his screen. From our respective desks, Carrie and I wrack our brains for playwrights with well-established names and sufficiently distinct styles to warrant such recognition. “Wildean!” I shout as I reach for our list of classic playwrights, determined to find at least one more, while Adam, turned to the Greeks. “Sophoclean?” Fail. “Euripidean?” Fail. “Aristophanean?” Fail. We move on. “Pirandellan.” “Marlovian.” “Sondheimesque.” Fail. Fail. Fail. “Brechtian!” I declare triumphantly before turning to Adam and Carrie, eager to have them affirm my discovery. But no. Fail. I brush it off. What should I expect from a program that doesn’t even recognize verfremdungseffekt?

Distraught but relatively unscathed, I look up to the shelves next to my desk which hold archival binders for plays previously produced at McCarter. Then, I see it, there out of the corner of my eye, A Seagull in the Hamptons, Emily Mann’s adaptation of Anton Chekov’s play: “Chekhovian!” The suspense is almost unbearable (is Adam typing slower than before?) but then…yes! Chekhovian is the third, and, it seems, final adjectival form of a playwright’s name your program accepts. Victory!

Or is it?

What kind of world do we live in where only three playwrights are deemed worthy of their own adjective? Not Brecht? Not Sondheim? Not August Wilson? Not a single writer who isn’t white, male, and, at the time of this blog entry, less than 148 years old? Not a world I want to live in, Microsoft. Not a world I want to live in.

And thus, the right-clicking continues, name by name, eagerly awaiting the day I can type “Aphrabehnian,” “Wassersteinian,” “Zimmermanic,” or “Vogelian” without so much as a second thought.

Impatiently yours,

Patrick McKelvey

Literary Intern
McCarter Theatre

This entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under General, Playwright's Pen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.