In Communication junior Seth Garben’s world, what’s commonplace isn’t what needs to be told through art. The kind of story he sets forth in his plays takes the surreal and the unusual and combines them to make a piece that presents a million different feelings and realities at once. To compare his works to art is to suggest the creative combination of many bits and pieces — a collage. “The more colors you have, the better you’ll be able to express the image in your head,” he says.
Speaking with Garben is akin to watching or reading one of his plays. When you meet the man, you drift out of reality and into a world of thought. During his three years at Northwestern, Garben has written three plays and a web series, all influenced by early 20th century existentialist thinkers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and the melding of that school of thought with the so-called “theater of the absurd.”
After entering the 11th grade, Garben’s first insight into the wonders of the world of playwriting came when he picked up a copy of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (an author he still lists among his greatest influences) on a flight to Montreal. “I kept reading it over hypnotically and realized that I would like to write like this guy,” Garben says. And soon enough he was writing his own plays — the first a short piece titled Just Passing By, which got him to the semifinals of Stephen Sondheim’s Young Playwrights Inc. National Competition in 2009.
His first endeavor at Northwestern came in the form of a play titled All in All performed by Qua Theatre, a group of Garben’s own invention along with his friends, Communication juniors Marek Pawlowski and Desiree Staples. According to the writer himself, the play was “almost incomprehensible,” especially for audiences who could only work with the text for about an hour. It only found clarity through hours of rehearsal and “trying to make sense of it.”
This year, Garben has written two shows with similarly surreal and at times incomprehensible themes. The Butterfly of Constantinople and The Good Dog both appeared on stage during Winter Quarter, and each followed suburban families with their own toils and conflicts. The former, Garben says, was influenced by Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, a play filled with absurdity characterized by non sequiturs and offbeat language.
This style is one that characterizes much of Garben’s own work, including The Good Dog, which takes the phrase “bad dogs aren’t born, they’re made” literally when Harold, the father character, concedes to being pushed around like a metaphorical dog saying, “I’m a dog. I’m a good doggy. I can roll over. Do some tricks. I’m a good bow-wow. Ruff ruff,” before lashing out against his family that is constantly trying to change him.
All of these works clarify the essence of Garben’s work — a critique on the uninspiring realism of a lot of pieces of theater and literature. Reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass as a child, Garben became enamored with the nonsense language and surrealism of Lewis Carroll. This early fascination gave him the license to pursue his own form of creative expression that encouraged thought that deviated from the norm. “It’s when you say ‘no’ to something surreal, you cut off such a creative part of your brain that needs fostering, that needs care,” Garben says.
On a recent trip to England, inspiration struck once again. Traveling along Portobello Road Market, Garben happened upon some used book stores. In one, he found The Divided Self, a book by Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing who had studied the case of a young boy who, when his mother passed away, began dressing up as her to connect with his father. Garben’s play, inspired by the case, is called Mother Becomes Him and made it to the semifinals of the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Contest.
But aside from being an avid playwriting competitor, Garben is all about creating plays that are insightful and fascinating. By his own estimation, it’s the undiscovered mind that is the true bearer of great thoughts, and that is what he wishes to tackle in his writing. “I like to be surprised by what comes out from the subconscious. Because I think that’s where it is,” he says. “That’s where the surprises come from, what goes deeper than thought.”
In the end he makes a product based on the concept of creating a perfect image of the subconscious and conscious mind, an existentialist’s dream. “I’m taking things from everything that I’ve seen and heard and read about and felt and thought. And I’m just cutting them up and putting them on a piece of paper.”
A collage of thought.