The Long Goodbye
IT’S A TRUISM SOMETIMES ATTRIBUTED TO DA Vinci, W.H. Auden, or Paul Valery, sometimes about painting, sometimes about poetry, and it goes like this: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
Anyone who has ever tried to write a play will understand. You will never feel completely satisfied. There will always be those lines, speeches, or turns of plot that you know you didn’t get quite right. So the question won’t be whether to abandon your play but when: When do you admit you’ve pushed the thing as far along the asymptotic curve towards its Platonic ideal as it’s going to get and vow to do better on the next one? While this question is always operant, it plagued me very specifically on and off for three years, and then another four, regarding Completeness, my play about university science nerds maybe falling in love.
was born when I was offered a commission by the Sloan Foundation, which supports plays that deal in some way with math and science, at a time when, as it happened, I had an idea for one. I’d become fascinated by a wellknown problem in computer science (well-known to computer scientists, that
