Sander
Hicks Graduation Tribute
Speech
Delivered 10/8/03
by Todd London, Artistic Director, New Dramatists
I
want to take this opportunity to talk about Sander,
to pay tribute to his time and work and growth here.
I’m tempted to shave my head, run around the room
and bang out a neo-punk ballad in praise of him, but
I can’t do it in the way Sander can, so it would
just make me feel old, which is how Sander has often
made me feel. Old and envious, of his youth, his brash
artistic confidence, his raw talent, the size of his
personality. The only satisfaction I personally take
in seeing him graduate is that it proves time is passing
and even Sander won’t stay young forever. That’s
the satisfaction of envy; There’s a more generous
satisfaction that comes from liking the guy so damn
much: the satisfaction of knowing we’ll hear about
everything you encounter from here on, ‘cause he’ll
tell us–in plays, in songs, in who knows what’s
to come. Sander’s ongoing autobiography will continue
his creative energy is inexhaustible, not because he’s
young, but because putting his ideas and words into
the world is breath to him, the pumping of blood.
Sander
is a big guy with a big presence, and he’s had
a huge impact here, made his mark in so many ways. He’s
held numerous readings and events in the space, taken
part in our Composer-Librettists Studio, the inaugural
season of our new play lab, PlayTime; he’s helped
out with our Writers’ Benefits, usually behind
the bar or at the piano, rabble-roused at writer meetings,
and, most memorably, gone with us for five summers on
our retreat with the Lake Placid Institute of the Arts,
where he’s something of a legend, and not just
for smashing the propeller off a motor boat in the fog.
I
have a particular fondness for Sander, a particular
debt of gratitude that I don’t think he knows about
but that I’ll reveal to you now, though it’s
somewhat embarrassing to do so. I began working here
in 1996, a month after Sander began his residency, and
someone on staff hastily threw a party to welcome me.
The pathetic fact is that almost no one came to the
party and that included the playwrights here. Specifically,
only two writers showed up, one, Murray Mednick, happened
to be staying in the building on one of his periodic
trips from L.A. The other playwright who showed up for
the new guy, was Sander. He came to welcome me, and
I’ll never forget it.
And
I’ll never forget something else that happened
that evening. Sander and Murray started talking. Murray,
approaching 60, was our oldest writer at the time, and
Sander, at an obscene 23 or 4, was our youngest. Murray
had been one of the pioneers of Off Off Broadway in
the ‘60s, and Sander was this wild kid, fresh out
of the New School, cutting his own path on the Lower
East Side, publishing radical writers, poets and lyricists
as part of a press he began while working at Kinko’s,
writing his wild plays and packing them into a van with
some friends to mount at colleges and parking lots and
bars across the country. Bookends of the past forty
years, Sander and Murray may have had as much in common
as any two playwrights at New Dramatists, and they showed
me, because they were all the community I got that night,
the power and reach of this community.
Sander’s
work is like the last verse of the Hokey Pokey: you
put your whole self in and you shake it all about: and
this whole self for Sander, aka Sealove, as he appears
barely disguised in most of his plays, is a lot. There’s
the stuff of family life as he moves from the suburbs
of Virginia to life in NYC, and when he returns home.
There’s the deeply personal, as he transitions
from adolescence to young adulthood and, especially,
in the later Sarcoxie
and Sealove, as he becomes a central player
in an excrutiating, almost unimaginable episode of American
power politics. There’s economics: Marx, neo-Marx,
post-neo Marx, market capitalism, management theory,
World trade and motivational speaking. There’s
politics, new left, old left, right-wing market-driven,
self-interest-driven, personal, and office politics.
There’s philosophy, Hegel, as interpreted differently
by everyone who’s never read him and some who have,
and Kierkegaard, and Werner Erhard and Punk. There’s
god everywhere, the god of the gospels, the god of Nietzche,
the Catholic god, lost god and found god. "Kick
Ass," they sing in church in SEALOVE, MANAGER,
"God is kick ass/When you say God/I say kick ass!"
It’s all shook up and all expressed in the unique,
clipped, vivacious, intellectual lyricism of Hicksian
prose.
Sander
is Kick Ass. No other way to describe him. He came here
raw and fresh and is leaving a lot wiser, but just as
raw and nearly as fresh. "To be audacious with
tact," Cocteau said, "You have to know how
far to go too far." Sander makes me think of those
words, because he’s always on the edge of too far
and yet manages to be both tactful and respectful in
his audacity. He’s been our Millenial Alpha puppy,
running rampant through the house, leaving promotional
materials behind. Now what he’s leaving behind
is a one of a kind body of work, a lot of affection,
and the imprint of his energy and originality. Sander,
on behalf of everybody here, the writers, the staff,
the board, thank you for the gift your boundless creative
energy and your singular voice. Here’s hoping that
the whole self you bring to everything you do will always
feel like a wholeness of self and a wish that as you
journey to the farthest edge of too far, you’ll
fly.
—Todd
London, Artistic Director, New
Dramatists
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