Daily Plays

Deadlines

2012-02-02T10:41:00.002-05:00

I have a post up over at the Coyote Commission Project Blog.

You should read it.

Here.

Excerpt from a new play...SACRIFICE

2011-11-20T13:16:00.000-05:00

In case you missed the current issue of The Dramatist - which, I know, you may have, but you would have missed an excerpt of my play. And that would be too bad - so here is the excerpt.

The full play - will be coming soon to a reading or workshop or production near you, contact me if you want to make that happen sooner than later...

SACRIFICE takes place in South-East Iowa. Emmie's been brought from the city to her grandmother's struggling farm by her father, an un-employed truck driver.

4.

EMMIE (16) and MONTGOMERY (14) are target shooting with the rifle. Cans lined up along the fence posts.

EMMIE
Underneath the flat flat flat are downward holes. Mole hills. Filled with ugly. Filled with crazy. Filled with you kill us or we’ll kill you worse.

MONTGOMERY
How’d you get so smart?

EMMIE
I wouldn’t call it smart.

MONTGOMERY
What would you call it?

EMMIE
Wide-eyed and hungry.

MONTGOMERY
I don’t know these things.

EMMIE
You never had crazy in your house. You live with crazy in your house you might end up with the eyes you need to see what’s going on behind things. Under things.

MONTGOMERY
Teach me.

EMMIE
People only learn what they need to learn.

MONTGOMERY
Maybe.

EMMIE
You don’t think so?

EMMIE nails her target.

EMMIE
It’s how it is. You learn cause you need to figure things out to survive. Like if you’re stuck in a house with creepy old dudes wanting to teach you stuff. And most of them you figure out quick – don’t have anything you want to learn. You do anything you can to be away from them. But some of them – well, few and far between, but – some of them are just sad guys who know too much.

MONTGOMERY
I know about that.

EMMIE
You do not. There was this one guy, used to party with my mom. They call it a party but it’s no fun really. Anyways. He wanted to protest the missile silos. He’d camp out on the prairie. Just sit out there with a sign that said ‘no.’ Claimed he was there for a whole year. Some people would bring him food and visit with him, but mostly people threw shit at him and yelled.

MONTGOMERY
What’d he teach you?

EMMIE
Patience. C’mon. We need to practice.

MONTGOMERY
I didn’t get my turn.

EMMIE
You don’t need to know this – you’ve got other things to figure out.

MONTGOMERY
Like what?

EMMIE
Like how far you’ll go. Like whether you’re ready for what I’ve got planned.

MONTGOMERY
What do you have planned?

EMMIE
Figuring it out. So that guy right? Who sat in front of the silos?

MONTGOMERY
Yeah

EMMIE
Well nothing happened. They still built them. There are still missiles in the ground not far from here with their gyroscopes revolving ready to go. So he didn’t get what he wanted.

MONTGOMERY
They saw him.

EMMIE
As a lame ass loser. Somebody to kick who didn’t kick back.

MONTGOMERY
Emmie?

EMMIE
What?

MONTGOMERY
Who are you fighting against?

EMMIE
That’s what I need to figure out.

MONTGOMERY
Maybe it’s not like that – maybe there’s not really one person, or one thing to fight.

EMMIE
There’s gotta be.

MONTGOMERY
My mom says there isn’t. She says it’s all wrapped up together – fight down one thing and something else grows up.

EMMIE
Like the hydra.

MONTGOMERY
Uh - maybe -

EMMIE
Do they even teach you things here? The hydra. Hercules had to destroy this thing with like seven heads, but each time he cut one two grew in its place.

MONTGOMERY
What’d he do?

EMMIE
Killed it. With the help of his friend. He’d cut off a head and his friend would burn the neck so nothing would grow.

MONTGOMERY
So you need me.

EMMIE
Probably. Probably I do.

EMMIE considers MONTGOMERY for a moment. MONTGOMERY is nervous.

MONTGOMERY
What?

EMMIE
Well -

MONTGOMERY
What?

EMMIE
If there’s no one thing then you’ve got to find out everything you can about what there is, find the weak spots.

MONTGOMERY
My mom says it’s no good to fight.

EMMIE
What do you do then?

MONTGOMERY
Love. Pray. Mostly love. Mostly people need to be loved.

EMMIE
Easier to run.

MONTGOMERY
My mom says you gotta deal with yourself where ever you are. Gotta make where you are right. Running just makes you tired.

EMMIE
That’s a lie. Running makes your heart strong, makes your legs last forever. That’s the kind of thing you need these days. Your mom doesn’t know. Nobody knows. Not really.

EMMIE takes aim at the cans. Hits them all, one by one.

So I'm working on this collaborative project...

2011-11-15T09:49:00.001-05:00

That is described quite finely on HowlRound from the Producers Perspective...

And through the year will also be described from the directors and the playwrights perspective.

We're in the thick of it now.

And its exhilarating.

Firsts

2011-11-05T10:38:00.001-04:00

I'm also posting at the Coyote Commission Blog.

Writing about starting writing...

click here:

http://coyotecommissionprojectblog.blogspot.com/

it's a music & reading experience combined.

Dramatist Guild Fellows Event

2011-09-15T10:34:00.002-04:00

September 19

NYC

Dramatist Guild Fellows Night of Excerpts
Playwright's Horizons

7pm

I'll be presenting a scene from THEN AND NOW

featuring:
Sarah Kate Jackson
Chris Kipiniak

directed by:
Kyle Ancowitz

These other talented folks will also be presenting work:
Masi Asare
Chisa Hutchinson
Anna Jacobs
Peter Lerman
Bill Nelson
Adam Overett
Ayanna Saulsberry
Ken Urban
Stefanie Zadravec

The evening is free and open to all and there is a reception after.

Angels Fall - by Lanford Wilson

2011-07-31T13:39:00.000-04:00

Commissioned and presented by The New World Festival, Inc. in Miami Florida in 1982 and then moved intact to NYC in 1983 Angels Fall is a character driven 2-act play that takes place in an isolated mission in the northwest of New Mexico.

The characters assemble there - all except the parish priest on their way to somewhere different - because the roads are closed. Through the first act it is learned that there has been an accident at a near-by uranium mine, though then, as now, it's unclear who is being honest about the extent of the danger.

No, no, it sounds very minor. We're not that close. People all over the country are going to be terribly disappointed. They'd rather have a big gaudy cataclysm. They've been preparing themselves for years.

Each act is a single long scene. Each character carries their own story and these stories at times collide with others in the odd group - other times they burden only themselves. Themes of the divide between rural and urban america, between the university and the 'real' world, between the call to serve and the call to profit snake amidst the characters as they shelter in a tiny church under skies that may or may not be poisoned by radiation.

Reading the play I started listening to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska also released in 1982. There's something about this time - I was a kid then so my earliest memories are of watching the news from our green & orange canvas couch and trying to make sense of what rising unemployment meant, what was happening in DC with the rise of the homeless population, intercontinental ballistic missles and Reagan smiling reassuringly over all of it. Seems like the rifts and fractures that Wilson captures so elegantly in this sweet breath of a play have only grown over the years, into chasms and canyons so wide that we can barely see the other side.

Tiny lines such as,

I-40. Used to be Route 66. I think they do those things deliberately. Don't want us to get too attached to anything.

are slipped into the simple plot of individuals whose journeys are interrupted by the terrible, and common, disasters of the nuclear age, simply waiting together before they continue on into their disparate lives.

the four of us - Itamar Moses

2011-07-27T16:01:00.000-04:00

I've been away from this. I've been reading, but mostly unpublished scripts. And I've been writing. And the teaching. That's also been happening. But, happily, I started reading plays just to read and the first one I picked up off the piles around the house was this. And dear oh dear am I glad I did. For the play - but also the afterward, which is right up there with the forwards that are included in many of Tennessee Williams collected plays.

The Four of Us is a two character play, David and Benjamin. It follows their friendship from their time at music camp as teens on through their twenties when they are both writers - a novelist and a playwright. It unfolds in nine scenes which move back and forth in time - in one scene different times for each character. Simply, the story is one character sells his first book and starts his professional life with acclaim and cash as the other works, finding some success later with a play written about his friend and their relationship.

I do try in these posts to give a nuts and bolts response. To withhold criticism and praise. There's plenty of that in the world and I'm interested in looking at how the play works, how it's laid out and how the story is told. To be primarily objective.

Being objective with this script is less about description and more about acknowledging the clean economy and simplicity at play in each scene which culminates in a perfect theatrical moment.

(and perhaps the subject matter and the perspective on writing and successes and friends and the frustrations of writing plays is all just hitting its target audience right here at this spot in my heart, but I'm guessing most readers of this blog may share a similar spot.)

My reading...

2011-04-10T00:39:00.002-04:00

7pm
Monday.
April 18, 2011.
Julia Miles Theatre
424 W. 55th Street
N.Y.C.

You are invited to attend a reading of:

THE HEART IN YOUR CHEST
a dystopian romance

Written by
Kristen Palmer

Directed by
Julie Kline

Performed by
Bobby Moreno
Alfredo Narcisco
Chris Stack
Jelena Stupljanin
Sue Jean Kim
Travis York

“This man has no eyes - this man’s heart is broken - and you – you can’t stop us.”

Wine will be available.

RSVP to krispalmer@gmail.com.

We hope to see you there.

Space provided through The Women’s Project Lab.

Seascape with Sharks and Dancer - Don Nigro

2011-03-15T13:47:00.000-04:00

A play with a long production history, Seascape with Sharks and Dancer was first done at the Theatre Barn at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1974. It went on to productions at the Denver Center Theatre (1982) and the Oregon Shakespearean Festival (1984). I wonder if plays are allowed to knock around for so long these days, if the original production date is noted and then the play tossed backwards because it is somehow magically stale. But that is a side question.

The play is for two actors, a man and a woman. It takes place in the living room of a beach house. The opening image is a woman, Tracy, wrapped in a towel on the couch, coming out of a dream into Ben's house. She's washed up onto shore and Ben has taken her in. Over the course of 2 acts, with 2 scenes in each act, a relationship evolves, is consummated, and deteriorates into an uncertain detente with a great deal of uncertainty on both sides.

The first scene is getting to know each other, uncovering some of where she might have come from. Tracy evades and tells stories that feel true but unreal. Ben care takes and coaxes her down, and puts up with a lot of abuse from her. By the end she comes to bed with him.

The second scene is the morning after, a relationship is negotiated - with barbs and hesitant offers. Names are exchanged and intimacies and their playing of house is underway.

Act Two opens two months later, same couch, Tracy is breaking the rules and has become a wearer of frumpy nightgowns instead of nothing under towels. Playing house has led to actual difficulties and the remainder of the play is these two flawed, un-moored characters navigating the uncharted waters of intimacy and vulnerability.

It's quite simple really. It's often ugly and occasionally beautiful.

This Playwright's To Do List

2011-02-13T10:13:00.001-05:00

So, elsewhere on the web there have been assertions that playwrights are disconnected from their communities and the nuts and bolts of theater-making. This may be true in some cases, but not amongst the majority of playwrights that I know who work hard to develop and maintain collaborative relationships and embrace opportunities to make locale/company specific theater.

Thinking personally about what I'm up to...

~ Directing/Creating a play with young people at a local youth theater to teach them about all aspects of making theater through a specific project.

~ A commission with an Independent Theater I've collaborated with before.

~ Writing a play for a group of local teenagers to perform as their final senior project with a local youth theater.

~ A play about agricultural policy and the disappearing "middle" in America.

~ A play about delusions, theater and death.

~ A play about Emma Goldman, American Anarchist and Art-lover.

~ Participating in two writing groups and one theater-making group on a regular basis.

~ Teaching Artist work as it comes up.

~ reading scripts for an independent theater company, as a dramaturge for playwrights, and for myself to know what's going on out there on the page.

~ attending 4 - 10 performances a month.

~ a constant stream of applications, queries, updating and staying on the look out for opportunities for the plays already written to find their ways in the world.

And most recently wrote two site-specific plays for Independent Theater companies, attended rehearsals and collaborated with the actors and directors involved.

There are times I've been an actor, a director and a producer - as well as a light board op, sound op, stage manager, assistant stage manager, costume assistant, backstage crew, electrician, grant writer, publicist, etc. etc. But now the title of Playwright focuses my work for myself, and hopefully indicates to others that I create theater - on the page, in the room, and in front of an audience.

Phaedra - Racine, translated into English verse by Richard Wilbur

2011-02-07T08:28:00.000-05:00

I am not a scholar of French Theatre, this might actually be my first reading of a classical French work, so please feel free to fill in my gaps and clarify my misunderstandings. My first question after reading this is what was Racine up to - writing this very Greek feeling play after Shakespeare and the Renaissance playwrights had opened up wildly divergent ways of telling a story? Is it an emulation of the Greeks, where this story originated? Or is it the type of play being written in this era? I’ll read more and find out.

Also, after reading this I saw that Adam Bock has a version of the story set in modern times, which I’d love to read next, and also Ted Hughes has a translation.

The story. Phaedra, wife of Theseus, is cursed with an unquenchable desire for her step-son Hippolytus. She resists her lust with every fiber of her being. Before the play opens she’s had him banished and removed from her sight. Theseus, a wandering hero and a philanderer, is off on another adventure and sends Phaedra to the country village where Hippolytus now resides. Phaedra withdraws from society and wastes away from the toxic mix of guilt and desire.

News is received that Theseus has been killed, during a romantic escapade perhaps, and a glimmer of possibility kindles in Phaedra’s mind. Perhaps she and Hippolytus can rule together, perhaps all will be well. But, as Phaedra declares her love to Hippolytus, he announces his love for the banished princess Aricia, whom he plans to make his queen. Phaedra is crushed, in suicidal despair. It turns out Theseus is not dead, he returns to find his house in disarray. To spare her mistress from torment, Phaedra’s servant devises a plan where they will accuse Hippolytus of accosting Phaedra with unwanted advances before he has a chance to humiliate Phaedra. Theseus is enraged, refuses to hear Hippolytus’s protestations of innocence and banishes him. He dies, Phaedra poisons herself and to make some amends for his rashness Theseus forgives Aricia the sins of her fathers and restores her to her rightful throne.

Over five acts through dialogue made up of declarative speeches and monologues delivered by characters to question their own motives and understandings of events, the story unfolds and moves inexorably towards its classically tragic conclusion. Reading it I found my own sense of the romantic to be so ingrained - and my sympathies so with Phaedra - that when Theseus was reported killed I celebrated with her, and believed in the possibility of these two young people to be brought together. This isn’t the outcome, instead, despite Phaedra’s attempts to resist temptation and manage her own impulses she cannot and they lead to her downfall.

New Design

2011-01-30T18:41:00.001-05:00

Hello all,

So I'm re-doing this site to serve as a place to find information about my plays and projects - as well as other people's.

I am feeling pretty remedial at this, so please forward any suggestions or thoughts my way!

Thanks. And yes, I am also planning to get back to reading & writing about plays very soon. I had to take a break to get into my own work for a while.

Now I'm thinking I can handle both again.

Kristen

The Pain and The Itch - by Bruce Norris

2010-04-16T15:10:00.000-04:00

Premiered at Steppenwolf then Playwrights Horizons, The Pain and The Itch is a satire of liberal suburbanites so focused on their correctness they don't perceive the rot in their own house.

It unfolds in two time periods. A present time, an afternoon in January and the past, the previous Thanksgiving evening. In the present parents Kelly and Clay are recounting the events of the previous Thanksgiving to Mr. Hadid. Their daughter, 4, wanders in and out and their baby cries occasionally. Kelly and Clay try to tell the story in the best possible light. The action fluidly shifts into that past moment. In addition to Kelly and Clay, Clay's mother Carol, and brother Cash are also present for the holiday meal. Cash has also brought his young, eastern european girlfriend.

In the first scene Mr. Hadid is visiting and Clay and Kelly play host. A tone is set, Kelly and Clay avoid getting to any point by talking about themselves - establishing their world-view (their 'type') - and more importantly a mystery is planted that isn't revealed until the final scene of the play. The incongruity of Mr. Hadid, an older man in a skull cap, a recent immigrant, in the suburban living room of these young parents who are prattling on, asks a question - and the rest of the play un-ravels the answer.

By moving between the two time periods there is the occasional relief from the claustrophobic thanksgiving meal this family is attempting to have. These scenes are pitched high, the conflict and animosity burbling up and the 'pain and itch' of the title growing, literally, more insistent. Before it is too much though the play leaps back to the present. The parents re-telling their side of the story and Mr. Hadid calming listening, quietly - non-judgmentally - taking in this young couple.

And the mystery unravels by the end. And really, the effect is more horrible than you were expecting. Satire indeed. And a condemnation of particularly strident attitudes.

The Typographer's Dream - by Adam Bock

2010-04-03T14:32:00.000-04:00

Produced in NYC by Clubbed Thumb in 2003, The Typographer's Dream has three characters who speak directly to the audience (most of the time.) They talk about their jobs.

There is a Typographer, a Geographer, and a Stenographer.

There are 76 scenes, some very short, some not so short. They talk about their jobs, defining these three, specific lines of work. They talk about how their jobs have changed over the years. How they relate to their jobs, how much is work and how much is business. How much pressure they feel. How they fell in love with what they do - and fall out of it.

They encroach on one another, commenting on each others lives, on choices they should or should not make.

The language is precise. The rhythms of the play are specific. A casualness set out from the beginning lets this sneak up on you until by the end - the specific has begun to encompass the world and the reach of each of their experiences and perspectives, which may have seemed narrow at the outset, resonates with the weight of the changing world and particularly America's place in it.

Kissing The Floor - by Ellen McLaughlin

2010-03-20T20:29:00.000-04:00

Published in the 2009 New York Theater Review, McLaughlin states in her introduction,

Kissing the Floor is the ninth play I've written that is directly inspired by a Greek text, and though it wanders farther from its source than any of my other work, it is still along the lines of a modern rendering of the Sophocles. I've always approached the adaptation of Greek plays aslant, privileging intuition over intellect and allowing the plays to disturb and disarm me before I make any moves to find my on way in.

She continues to provide a fascinating narrative of the process of thought, feeling and intuition that led her to the play. (I love introductions, I may be a playwright and reader of plays today because I poured devotedly over used bookstore finds of Tennessee Williams plays with his fabulous, heart-rending, poetic words to his readers tucked like a love letter into the books.)

In this re-telling the focus is on the children of Oedipus and Jocasta - dead before this play begins. The girls, Annie and Izzie, and the twin boys, Paul and Eddie. Izzie, becomes the guide through this world of the destroyed, broken family, she is the one who seems to have chosen life, despite the cursed pair who created her. Because she's chosen this, she tries to reach a hand out to Annie, who may, perhaps, also be able to let go of their origins and have a life of her own. Annie though, refuses.

Annie wants to stay by Paul, save what she can of her brother. Here, McLaughlin departs from the Greek original. She leaves the brother alive - and instead chooses to make him morally despicable in such a way that Annie's pure devotion to her brother, only because he is her brother, is less heroic and more a death-wish, a refutation of life.

Using a hypnotic, recurring childhood game, where Annie guides her siblings into imagined worlds, demanding them to describe what they see, McLaughlin takes us into the world of these grown children. Annie's quest to save and protect her brother - cursed and reviled for what he is, Izzy's attempts to bring her sister into the light, into the world of the living, Paul's inability or lack of interest in changing - no matter what his sister sacrifices, and a brief appearance by Eddie (the twin) who tells us the Oedipus and Jocasta story, set before the 1929 Wall St. Crash. His story comes mid-way through the play in the form of a 3 page monologue, it brings back the original horror of the old story which then colors the continued attempts of the siblings to achieve their goals, providing a context that elevates the stakes and darkens all possible outcomes.

The Long Christmas Ride Home (A Puppet Play with Actors) - by Paula Vogel

2010-03-18T10:22:00.001-04:00

The Long Christmas Ride Home was first produced in 2003 in a co-production by The Long Wharf Theater and Trinity Rep, it moved to NYC later in the year.

In her introduction Vogel cites a misunderstanding of Bunraku puppet theatre as a starting point for this play, and the feeling of church pageants in church basements and community halls. As there are puppets, singing, and dancing in the play it makes sense to encourage a DIY ethic to theatres considering mounting a production - and it places it in a very specific realm for the reader.

The play can be performed by six actors. A male and female narrator, who give voice to the puppets and whose bodies provide visual reference points for the mother and father. The puppets, operated by actors, are the three children in the family. Additionally there is the Minister, who takes on other roles as needed.

It is Christmas. The family is in the car traveling to Christmas service at the Universal Unitarian Church. The internal thoughts of each family member are shared with us by the narrators who describe, take voices, and perform their own physical roles as mother and father. We learn the secrets, that aren't very secret. Particularly Dad's affair.

They arrive at church and pile into the service, there is singing, there are thoughts - the other woman is across the room, and the minister shares a slide show from his recent trip to Japan, Woodblock prints of the Floating World, an era in Japanese culture seeking to embrace the pleasure of the ephemeral flesh without guilt, to find beauty in the commonplace. The service concludes with a moment of spectacle - a Nativity Scene performed in dance and puppets.

The family travels to their Grandparents, where tensions bubble over while presents are given, a really wonderful scene. Each one more laden than the last. Finally a breaking point - Grandpa confronts Father about his philandering, calls him a "kike" and they lock arms to wrestle. The family bundles out of there and back into the car. There is a beautifully poetic visual moment leading from the youngest girls understanding of what happened at grandma's - and then, the moment that cracks everything open. Dad smacks mom across the face.

From here the play shatters. Each puppet child's thought at this moment is shared and then the puppeteer is broken from their child to become the adult. Each grown child hits a wall, each unique, each a line sketched from that moment, that Christmas -and each are saved by a breath from their sibling. The one who died young, the one who didn't grow older.

The Ghost of this one gets the penultimate moment, creating a folktale that could be as old as any story told in our culture, but beautifully was made right here in front of us. And then, Dancing, and the beauty of the commonplace. But before the play is done we are returned to the slap, and the moment after, and the family holding their breath as one, before they can start to breathe again.

Vogel's accumulation of images, ideas, and language that finds manifestation in character, dialogue, story, situation, spectacle, dance, music - every tool the theater has to offer is saturated in the play which is more than anything here on the page, and infuses every moment with it's animating breath.

Good Boys and True - by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa

2010-03-10T15:14:00.000-05:00

First produced by Steppenwolf in 2007, then in NYC at Second Stage Theater in 2008, Aguirre-Sacasa's play Good Boys and True is a play that works kindof like a funnel, or more precisely like a corkscrew sea shell (I'm sure there is a technical name for this) - you're going down a maze, it starts at a clear point and then opens further and further out implicating more and more in it's scope, but still keeping the main thing hidden in it's shell.

So. First Act, not broken into scenes, but rather just slipping from one place to another without a break - often using these shifts to nice effect to highlight how different characters are in different situations. We have Brandon, a clean-cut, football and basketball player giving a tour of his school, a private school outside of Washington DC. What a nice boy (we think). Then we have his mother (a doctor) and his coach meeting because coach found kids watching a video tape of a boy having sex with a girl, possibly forcing her, certainly she didn't know she was being filmed - the boy's face is not visible, but from the back - it could be Brandon. What a terrible boy (we think). Then we slip to the next scene between his mom and her sister (who teaches at a public school - on principle) and their discussion leaves us wondering - is he a nice boy? is he a terrible boy? Then he enters and mom confronts him. He says no way was it him And he got into Dartmouth on early decision. What a nice boy (we think again, and it's reassuring)

From here each scene builds further by the end of the first act we know the facts of the situation, but it is the truth of the situation that is dangled until the end. And in pursuit of that each scene brings in new questions often by revealing old secrets - the entitlement of the private school students, what students who are legacies are really inheriting - the violent stories of the past - the present, exalted positions of the perpetrators, the school culture and the wider privileged culture promoted by parents defending their children, pushing their children down a particularly narrow road. Tucked into scenes between Brandon and his best friend is the seed that holds the truth of this nasty situation.

In the second Act, we are introduced to the girl in question, lawyers and media are involved, and futures are at stake. The layers of bigger and bigger questions accumulate and widen the scope of the play's grasp. With the mother we follow the search for the truth and seek a moral stance - with Brandon we are further and further shut out as he shuts down, waiting for his father to come home, to understand and to make it all go away. The end is a little scene, breezy - a glimpse of teen-age awkwardness finding a friend to rest on, to trust. But this is a flashback and as we know, there's no path back after this.

The Dew Point - by Neena Berber

2010-03-08T21:18:00.000-05:00

The Dew Point premiered in 2001. It's a 2 act play with 4 scenes in the first act and 6 in the second. 5 characters, three women and two men. In a quick nutshell, Mimi is engaged to Kai, remains friends with Jack, a former lover who cheated on her, Jack is dating an actress 20 years his junior and starts a thing with Mimi's friend, Phyllis. From here a play investigating friendship, marriage, attraction, manipulation and how rot seeps into things and destroys things over time, spiderwebs out through each scene - culminating in a choice and a release.

The opening image is Mimi staring at a chair and Jack watching her. It's an arty chair. Jack made it specially as a wedding gift for her and Kai. Mimi is restrained in her praise, Jack is needy for it, for her excitement, her approval. And it's pointed out, a single chair is an odd gift for a couple. Most of the play occurs in Mimi's apartment so the chair remains present and potent throughout, and is brought back explicitly into play in the penultimate scene.

It is a very clean play. The characters each work, their jobs play into the fabric of the action and propel decisions and attitudes. A couple moments of scenes from the past interject themselves, giving glimpses into Mimi's state of mind, what she is attempting to balance, to move forward through, until it all comes crashing down.

Jack, the irrepressible womanizer, artist, self-centered, self-justifying cad at the center of the storm, remains true to his nature throughout. Baffling and troubling as it may become to those around him.

And there's a lot of funny parts too.

And its' a New York City play, about New York City people. A little diorama of a world in an apartment and everything it takes to make those little worlds, keep them together, and all the little fractures that persist no matter how much plaster you slap up there.

The Pavilion - by Craig Wright

2010-02-26T10:40:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I assume things. Like my friend Kyle. When first introduced I thought he was a Marine Biologist. Turns out he's a theater director (among other things), but it may have been a year before I really figured that out. I have a stubborn mind. (not stubborn enough to read through more than four plays by Howard Barker, but more like I get fixed ideas that are tough to dislodge) The Pavilion fell into this mind trap with me. I always thought it was an elaborate, site-specific, epic sort of play - and therefore, because it is a play that is performed often, I was like Wow. They are doing that big ol' play? well not exactly.

First produced in 2000, The Pavilion is a two act drama set in rural Minnesota at a high school reunion. The two main characters, Peter and Kari share a past as high school sweet-hearts, 'the cutest couple' in fact, and made choices then that have kept them apart - until now. A narrator character steps in as a cast of other guests at the reunion, and acts as a sort of Stage Manager, as in Our Town, adding a larger philosophical dimension to the drama between these two characters who find themselves in lives that feel like they've gone off track ever since their senior year.

In the first act we learn somethings about what drove them apart, a lot about each of their current situations and watch Peter try in vain to get Kari to give him the time of day, just to talk, to put to rest some of what's been left broken between them. He fails, she explodes and the act ends.

The second act begins with Kari in a more forgiving mood and though there is no easy reconciliation there is some real peace found - and the other characters played by the narrator reveal in snatches of conversation a bit of the sorrow of many lives, feeling narrowed by choices, by age, by dis-contentment - these finally take over and finish off the play in a monologue of disconnected phrases, all painfully specific to what's gone before - and feeling universal.

The title of the play refers to the location of the reunion. An old Pavilion in town that has played host to all major community events. It is slated to be burned down at the end of the night, to make room for a concrete amphitheater that will host a summer concert festival. This metaphor - the past being burnt down for the present - the sense of life disappearing around them - being at sea in a country that paves over its past for a buck given the slightest opportunity - looms over the play, and gives the simplicity of the story being told it's location and weight, out there on the plains. Under the stars.

The Gaoler's Ache For The Nearly Dead - by Howard Barker

2010-02-15T17:02:00.000-05:00

Continuing reading Barker today, while waiting for an oil change. A TV blaring a game show. I'd even thought that today wouldn't be a bad day to sit in a waiting room. The Olympics are on. That'll be just fine. But, they weren't on at the Toyota Dealership, and one woman who responded, 'on this is alright' when asked about changing it or turning it off prevented deliverance for the crowded room. I struggled to focus on this play, wishing for a culture that respected some silence and had fewer commercials.

Smaller somewhat than the other two read & written about here. The play is set during the french revolution, an alternate history of sorts. The King is beheaded early on and the queen and her son, now the king, are consigned to prison. Where a face through a door, the goaler, watches all. He's been told to report that he sees mother having sexual relations with her son. And over the course of his surveillance he sees just this, a progression of their physical closeness. The queen is brought in front of the crowd - the 'Moral Public' to be tried and he is called to report this observed transgression. He refuses. He says he saw nothing. He says he was told to see it, and so he saw it, but that is not the truth. The play ends with the prosecutor for the people kissed by the queen, his mouth filled with monarchical spittle, and then pushing the young king around on his rocking horse.

The play takes the notion of the queens body not being her own, but belonging to the people - also the obsession with that body and it's wastes, it's sexual activity - and combines it with the watching of her, the prying into private moments and turning that out for the public to see. It makes me think of Karen Finley's work (just reading the review of her new piece, The Jackie Look, in the Times) And about celebrity culture, the people peeking into every aspect of those lives - waiting to take down the figure for any transgression that offends it's "Moral Sense" but it is the obsessive attention of the people that bestows the power in the first place.

And to further confound any interpretation or moral sensibility the queen did lie with her son, at his incitement - him being the king and therefore able to claim any act as his own. Messy Messy Messy. The Crowd in the play a character unto itself, without lines but creating the music, the underscoring of energy throughout the piece. He uses the stage to present simultaneous action - things happening in the private space of the bedroom then the prison cell, while the public metes out its punishments and asserts its unassailable good.

Apologies for incoherence. I am faced with a sense that my political understandings have been shaped too long by this American binary system, that I am looking for the clear point of view, the which is right/left, which is progressive/conservative and Barker is not playing that game. Not at all. And so struggling on. Another tomorrow...

Seven Lears - by Howard Barker

2010-02-08T20:47:00.001-05:00

Continuing a week of Barker, maybe longer...

Seven Lears takes as its starting point the wonder about the mother, the queen, Lear's wife. How she is never mentioned in Shakespeare's play and why might that be? From this Barker spins a play in seven parts. Seven stages of Lear's life, from child, to youth, to warrior, to king - to just before the play that we know begins - and we are presented with a portrait of a king's education.

In his telling Lear was the youngest of three brothers, and when playing in the castle came upon the jail with the prisoners rotting and tortured. He is disturbed by this and rolls the implications over in his mind, while his brothers want to go play football. Outside his brothers throw themselves over a cliff and Lear is left to grow up the king. He's provided with a tutor, the Bishop, who's goal is to learn the compassion out of the future ruler. From here a portrait of a coddled ruler arises, one whom everyone agrees with and protects from his own stupidity. (although pre-Bush - there is an eerie familiar echo of the young man raised to claim power and to never doubt himself) He falls in love with a girl, Clarrisa, who insists on truth, no matter how awkward or painful. He marries her and she proves herself to the backbone of the kingdom, the sense behind his petulance - and though eventually she betrays him by loving another, she is honest throughout. It is this that is repressed and why she is erased from Shakespeare's King Lear.

There's a theatrical freedom in Barker's work that I'm finding exhilerating. The daughters clamouring for consummation so that they can be born, Regan describing her unwillingness to come out of the womb into the vile world. A collapsing of time so that in one scene a baby can grow into a young woman in a fluid, coherent, dramatic rush. Additionally the bald speech of the characters and the chorus, a frankness about power and the insecurities that power nurtures amongst the annoited. The sense that on this stage, the bare and ugly truth will be said aloud and wrestled with. It is vastly different from our naturalism, from the carefully, unfolding conversations where truth is peeled away - instead it is the widest scope possible shoe-horned into the finite space of the play. And within the object of the play one crystal can be examined, one that replicates itself out endlessly to form the world around us.

The Bite of The Night - by Howard Barker

2010-02-05T15:48:00.000-05:00

I've been reading this play for a week. On and off. I should go back and read it again, to grasp, to wallow in it, to follow the fissures. What I think I will do is forge ahead and read more of his plays. Develop my muscles. Some sort of a training program.

My God.

Shakespeare is alive today. Just as difficult, epic.

There's a scene at the end where Helen (the one of Troy) who has been central to the play - an object of desire, be-armed, then be-legged - and then at the end strangled, but not dead - so they shovel dirt in her mouth until she is silenced. Trying to write about this play I feel like that. Like there is dirt shoved in my mouth. That this art is not reducible to description.

This play is hard work. Barker is hard work. The antithesis of so many discussions about what plays are these days. He has his own company - maybe still does? - in Sheffield, U.K. The Wrestling School. I had the good fortune to see two plays there in the early 90s. Both difficult, challenging, furious theater.

In a pathetic attempt to describe - the play is in 3 acts. It is set in Troy. A mythical Troy. There are 25 plus characters, including Helen and Homer. There are soap-boilers, old ladies, scholars, students, soldiers, children, archeologists, daughters, sons, husbands, wives, laborers, officials, Kings, poets, and queens. There are prologues. Many scenes in each act. There are big images, horrible violence, diatribes, betrayals, over-lapping times, philosophical actions and digressions, political screeds. Troy after Troy is built and destroyed with different leaders and different morals. Desire remains and the danger of desire - embodied in Helen. Homer wanders through, an impotent old man. It's an over-whelming play, and I need more muscles to really write about it.

He begins with an opening prologue, delivered by a soap boiler. It seems as good a place as any to start this week (maybe month) long reading of Barker plays, so here you are:

MACLUBY
They brought a woman from the street
And made her sit in the stalls
By threats
By bribes
By flattery
Obliging her to share a little of her life with actors

But I don't understand art

Sit still, they said

But I don't want to see sad things

Sit still, they said

And she listened to everything
Understanding some things
But not others
Laughing rarely, and always without knowing why
Sometimes suffering disgust
Sometimes thoroughly amazed
And in the light again said

If that's art I think it is hard work
It was beyond me
So much of it beyond my actual life

But something troubled her
Something gnawed her peace
And she came a second time, armoured with friends

Sit still, she said

And again, she listened to everything
This time understanding different things
This time untroubled that some things
Could not be understood
Laughing rarely but now without shame
Sometimes suffering disgust
Sometimes thoroughly amazed
And in the light again said

That is art, it is hard work

And one friend said, too hard for me
And the other said if you will
I will come again

Because I found it hard I felt honoured
(First Prologue)

And so do I.

Fat Men In Skirts - by Nicky Silver

2010-01-27T09:47:00.000-05:00

The earliest of the published plays, and it feels it, very raw, loud when it wants to be, little restraint - working exactly right for this play's brutal cri d'couer.

I'm interested in Silver's structures. Each of these plays contains itself in minimal acts and scenes with a clear this then this logic to them. In Fat Men In Skirts this means three acts. The first act, set on a deserted Island where Phyllis and Bishop have survived a plane crash. Five years pass on this island, some flashbacks - and shifts to present day - introduce Norton, Husband & Father & Philanderer, and his developing relationship with Pam who, by the end of the act is pregnant. Phyllis and Bishop cannibalize those killed in the crash and the act ends with the final transgression, of Bishop raping his mother.

Move to Act 2 and Phyllis and Bishop have been rescued and returned home to Barton. Phyllis is shattered and Bishop a nightmare of a teen-ager, abusive to all and bringing his mother single shoes in a sort of tribute. Barton tries to maintain something, Pam is around, posing as the maid so as not to raise suspicions. Horror ensues to end the act as Bishop continues the customs of the island in this nice upper-middle class home.

Finally Act 3 and Bishop is in a prison for the criminally insane. The dead return to speak and an inmate develops a crush on Bishop. Driving this scene is an interesting structural choice. He's killed his father at the end of Act 2. That was seen and was goaded on by his mother. But in Act 3 we learn that he's also killed Phyllis. The scene unfolds with no explanation of this - and at the final moment the characters from the asylum change on stage into Pam and Nestor (speaking from the dead) and the death is played out in conversation with them all.

Pterodactyls - by Nicky Silver

2010-01-25T23:21:00.000-05:00

I love reading multiple plays by one writer. Obsessions and patterns emerge, but also each play's unique way of weaving the material, texturing it. It's the same but different.

Pterodactyls premiered in 1993, so before The Food Chain (1994), and before Raised In Captivity (1995). Can I comment here on the remarkable a play a year run at the Vineyard, and that there are cast over-laps - particularly Hope Davis who seems to have been in each? It feels earlier though - it feels messier, it takes on a thousand things and lodges itself in a family that nobody is going to escape from clean.

A long first act (summer) followed by a second act comprised of two scenes (fall and winter). I think I say messier because it's got that fluidity of monologues and lines spoken out, of characters following their own paths through the same landscape, without a sense of any imposed structure. It follows its own logic and it works. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that many playwrights start this way, there's a breathlessness, a scrambling to keep up with yourself and get it all down exactly as it is felt in early plays. Maybe. And then things develop, new muscles grow, new concerns. Not that the development is a bad thing, absolutely not, but it can be kindof an awkward period. A bumpy-skinned, gangly adolescence after the effortless simplicity of a child's access to whatever well writing comes from.

Back on track. In the first act, Emma brings Tommy home to meet her mother. He's a waiter, they're going to be married and Grace, Emma's mother, disapproves because he's not good enough, but relents enough to give him a job as a maid, complete with uniform that Tommy is happy to wear. Todd comes home after a long absence and informs them that he has AIDS, his father insists on calling him Buzz and wants to play catch, his mother refuses to engage with the information. Through monologues and flashbacks stories from this family emerge while in the present there is a willful refusal to listen or to engage with one another that propels the action into the second act where the consequences of the first act gain stakes and significance as the wedding is planned and Emma is pregnant. The final scene is almost a coda, each character holding on to their crutches and defenses as faded as Mrs. Havisham's dress and as precious to them. Throughout the play, Todd has discussed dinosaurs, excavated bones from the backyard, constructed a skeleton of a baby Tyrannosaurus, and this image gives the final monologue the final kiss of the play.

I would have liked to have seen this one back in 1993. I would have been a year out of high school, my head dripping with Very Important Political Playwrights as well as the primacy of devised work over text. I have a notion had I seen this the rug may have been pulled out from under me a few years earlier than it finally was. (In a production of Hurricane by Erin Cressida Wilson, 1997). But, as it was, our paths did not cross back then - NYC was not on my radar in those days, baffling but true - and I was somehow insistant on reading up on Performance Semiotics instead of new work. Maybe all this blogosphere stuff can introduce some plays and points of view to students at impressionable ages. That would certainly be a good thing.

The Food Chain - by Nicky Silver

2010-01-24T13:04:00.000-05:00

I found a collection of his plays downstairs in the unpacked boxes, so there will be a few more of these. Excellently there was an introduction to this one. I love introductions written by playwrights. I think it was reading Tennessee William's introductions to his plays that lodged somewhere in my head and launched this path that I am on. Wrestling with this form, this way to make theater.

Silver's introduction describes graduating from the Experimental Theatre Wing at Tisch/NYU and then having a situation where he could put up his plays as he wrote them. He did this for five or six years with some plays going on to further life, but others just existing there in that moment. Excellent. I always imagine writers coming out of nowhere, they don't. And they don't just start writing masterpeices. Probably the why the current climate is so tricky for new writing - when there are so few resources and so much risk involved with putting anything up - how do you just do something. The situation Silver describes, of a theatre just handing over whatever un-booked time there was to him for free, seems like a by gone time. One more reason rising property values is a bad thing for artists.

So, The Food Chain unfolds over three scenes. The first scene has Amanda on the phone with Bea. Amanda's husband of two weeks, Ford, left to go work on a film right after their wedding and Amanda has called a suicide help line and gotten Bea, a particularly self-centered counselor on the line. Amanda tells her story, describes her distraught state and at the end of the scene Ford returns, into Amanda's arms and offers no explanation - while Amanda works to squelch any recriminations she may have. In the second scene, Otto is in Serge's apartment trying to win back his love. Otto eats constantly and is over-weight. Serge is a runway model - and is waiting for his true love to return - trying patiently to get Otto to leave. Over the scene it's revealed that their relationship Otto is mourning was all of two dates a couple year ago. At the end of the scene a phone call. It is Serge's love saying that he's not coming. In the third scene, Serge turns up at Amanda's apartment seeking the love of his life, Ford. Otto follows Serge in and Bea, the phone counselor turns up angry with Amanda for hanging up on her. They fight over the beautiful reticent Ford's affections. Throughout Ford speaks no more than a 'Well" and a couple "Uh-Huh"s - finally finishing with Amanda and Serge agreeing to share him and then going to have awesome sex, while he eats the last of Otto's food.

In this published version, Silver's offered two endings -dramatically different in action - centering on Otto's response to the final relational configurations.

Looking at it, each scene is so cleanly driven by needs, objectives and obstacles - with stories and coincidences flying off the energy that the action creates. Particularly scene 2 which is the simple acting exercise where one actor wants to stay and the other actors wants them to leave. Here though, written and given huge life, this simple conflict is spun into yarn that weaves the whole cloth of the play.

Next in this collection, Pterodactyls.

Raised In Captivity - Nicky Silver

2010-01-19T18:01:00.000-05:00

Another shocking gaping hole in my play-reading life. Nicky Silver. Other than this one, just read today (by the fire, very nice) I'm shamed to say I'd only read Free Will and Wanton Lust, and that only because we were producing it. Which is probably one of the very best reasons to read something.

So, 1995 this opened at the Vineyard. It's in two acts. The first act has 8 scenes and the second is two scenes. In the first we meet Sebastian, estranged from his mother and twin sister, he's disconnected from himself, from his feelings, from others. Through the play he tries to connect with a convicted murderer, through letters and a hustler that he feeds - and re-connect with himself by shedding his therapist. At the end of the first act, a violent attack, brings his mother to him, back from the dead, to describe the truth of his father. In the second act Sebastian has been taken in by his twin sister and her husband, who has quit dentistry to take up painting - only with white paint. His sister, Bernadette, calls his fired therapist for help (throughout she has been punishing herself for her failures, forcing penance - not washing, stabbing herself, gouging out her eyes) the therapist agrees to help and stays - discovering a resemblance between Bernadette's husband and her own, dead one. Sebastian only speaks to the baby.

To untwine this wicked stew of past crimes, inherited pain, guilt, failure and grief, Silver lets each character find his or her unique redemption. And the redemption often lives in letting go, setting another free, and finding an honest way to grieve those loved and lost.

The pace is fast, in the first act scenes tumble one on top of the other creating a pile that suffocates the main character. In the second he struggles to get out. In writing about it, I'm focused on Sebastian - it is his play - however it's not in a lead kind of a way. Each of the other characters have their own stories and arcs - but these each relate - not story-wise, but thematically, to the pile that Sebastian's trying to crawl out from under.

and any play that can reach the end with "I miss everyone." as a line well earned is one that I like a lot.

Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You In The Closet And I'm Feelin' So Sad - Arthur L. Kopit

2010-01-17T19:29:00.000-05:00

1959. Harvard. Undergrad Arthur Kopit writes the play that will launch his career, and defines a generational response to the horrors the world has faced. Well, maybe not the last statement, although the glowing introduction in my copy may have you believe this.

Written in 3 long scenes. Oh Dad, Poor Dad... introduces Madame Rosepettle and her son Jonathan Rosepettle. Madam travels the world, having adventures, with her husbands taxidermied body and her submissive son in tow. Jonathan, called constantly by his father's three names instead of his own, is confined to his rooms in various hotels and busied with his coin, stamp and book collections - terrified of his mother he dares not cross her.

When his eye is caught by Rosalie, who he watches with his telescope that he made from glass and tubing in order to get a better view of an airplane passing overhead, his mother breaks from tradition and invites her up in order to show her son what a lame slut she is. This doesn't happen, Rosalie connives to make a key and return to rescue the young man and make him her husband.

She has a chance, because earlier Jonathan has listened to his mother tell the story of his father and her plans to keep him sheltered forever. But - the seduction is too much for Jonathan, the corpse of his father falls out of the closet and...horrors ensue.

As Madam cries when faced by the horrendous scene, ending the play, "What is the meaning of this?"

There's a clear voice here, a slap-dash comedic style dancing across the page - easily imagined on stage - set-pieces ( a chorus of bell-boys attending to Madam's every whim, her stuttering son following her with a pad and pencil - a seduction by a girl dressed in crinolines and red-cheeks). A world in a Havana Hotel room, overlooking the bay, with a silver, siamese cat eating, pirahna and two Venus Fly-Traps (to add to the list of terrifying females of the play...), a boys world - a fun place to visit, perhaps, but also a world that's going to turn on any one of us without a dick.

I've been reading a lot of works by young men in the 50s at the moment. It's an odd time and the works share a similiar voice. A self-conscious attempt to be modern. Attitudes towards women laden with tradition, expectations, conflicts and eagerness. Either a complete disregard of family - or a total dependence on them. I imagine these young men, children born after the war, cherished new hopes after the dark days of rationing and daily news briefs - sent off to school, given every advantage, and charged to make the world new. There's such self-confidence, bravado in them - is this typical of boys of 20? is it just that this era published them, celebrated them young? or is it unique to a period desirous of erasing the past, stepping into a new future, with a new vision of America and the world?

And that's my digression for the evening. On to the Golden Globes and a bottle of beer. Tomorrow I think I'll read something newer. Consider the present. Where we are. What we want now.

Tattoo - by Rejane Desvignes and Igor Bauersima

2010-01-03T20:39:00.000-05:00

Published in Theatre Forum #35, and translated from the German by Neil Blackadder, Tattoo unfolds in a modern, European city. Fred and Lea are broke artists, Fred is working on a novel, Lea is a discerning actress. Their old friend, Tiger, now a big deal in the art world turns up one night and over comments about his completely tattooed body being valuable, illicits a promise that the couple will take care of his body when he dies. He will have it plasticized and they are to keep it, never sell it.

And that's the beginning of a play questioning what the responsibility of an artist is and what an artist can and can't do for money. The plot of Contempt is referenced throughout as the play unfolds...Tiger is killed in a freak accident and his assistant plasticizes his body and deposits it in Lea and Fred's house. They now have an object, that they do not want, stuck in their home, over-shadowing their relationship - that is also tremendously valuable. What will they do?

This play was written in 2001. It is pointed out in the preface that a couple years after the play was written a man's tattooed back was sold online, with the stipulation that he display it 3 times a year as long as he lives, and once he dies his skin goes to the buyer.

Specific music, video projections, art installations, off-stage voices and a plot saturated with moral quandaries about money and art accumulate to create the world and gist of this play.

A Witch In My Heart - by Hilda Kuper

2010-01-02T19:33:00.000-05:00

Written by an anthropologist in 1970 who lived with, researched and wrote about the Swazi People, "A Witch In My Heart" tells the story of a woman, the third wife of a son in his father's house who is barren, but loved most by her husband. He goes to the city (Johannesburg) to earn money to pay the medicine man to help her bring a child, and while he is away his other wives spread the seed of the idea that she may be a witch. When the second wife's child, a son, is still born, she is blamed and is expelled from the home. Her husband is jailed by the Afrikaaners, finally having his freedom bought by a friend. He returns home to find his love gone, his baby dead, and no life there for himself. He exiles himself from his people, going to live among strangers instead of the family that failed to care for his beloved in his absence.

Hilda Kuper was born in Rhodesia, later moving to South Africa and pursuing her work as an anthropologist. This is her only play. According to the preface it is required reading for students in South Africa. It feels accurate and throughly presenting its subject. Each character represents a side of the story in their traditional role and how their feelings guide their touting or flouting of tradition.

I picked it up at the used book store because I hadn't come across any african plays written by a woman. This, clearly an outsider looking in, and making a good faith effort to record what she's seen - in complexity and without judgement. I feel the steady hand of an academic here with a protocol for speaking of another culture. It creates for some stilted dialogue and clearly exemplary situations, however I close the book feeling like I've been privy to a world far from my own...and sometimes that's enough.

If you have an interest in this one, it's out of print, but I'm happy to send my copy to the first request.

Serjeant Musgrave's Dance - by John Arden

2009-12-18T17:49:00.000-05:00

First performed at the Royal Court in 1959, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance (An Unhistorical Parable) is described in Arden's preface as being a realistic, but not a naturalistic play. It is set in England during an unspecified time, somewhere in the second half of the 1800s, in a Northern town governed by a mayor who also owns the coal mine, the only place of work for the people there. The mine has been shut down and the people being warned not to strike, to be patient, times are hard all around. But this is a secondary concern.

Structured in three acts, the play begins with Serjeant Musgrave and his men preparing to cross a river on a barge. They say they are out recruiting volunteers for the queen's army, they have boxes of rifles and a gatling gun along with them, and the three soldiers are devoted to their Serjeant. Once in the town the powers that be there - the Mayor, Parson and Constable are worried that the people will riot before the telegraph lines are fixed and they can send for the dragoons. They learn that there are soldiers seeking new conscripts coming to town and plan to enlist their help in getting some likely trouble-makers from the union drunk and conscripted before they start anything. By the end of the first act we know that the Serjeant and his men are not all that they seem.

In the second act things ratchet up a bit. The girl at the bar visits the soldiers at night, leading to one of them wanting to run away with her, abandon whatever plan the Serjeant is hatching, and when the others get wind of this he is accidentally killed. The frayed edges of the soldiers are showing, we learn they are haunted by something. Still they keep up appearances, give the coal miners a good time at the pub, eventually helping one of them get free of the constable when he comes back to steal the Gatling gun and start a riot. The Constable and Mayor are on high alert, worried that they'll lose control - and in the early morning hours the Sarjeant suggests they start their consciption rally - give free beer to the people and convince them to join their ranks rather than fight with the Union.

All setting up for the third act. Here the plan is unvieled, and we learn what's been haunting the Serjeant. They'd been sent to occupied countries, colonies of the crown, and after a young man was shot in the back by the people of the occupied town - they were ordered to, and carried out, a massacre - including women and children. The Serjeant's plan as he talks about the merits of serving for the crown, and displays the rifles and the Gatling gun are to turn the violence on the people. He's killed 25 people in a foreign land, in retaliation for the death of one of their sons, therefore to set the balance - and to show the people what is being done in their name - by way of bringing a stop to war - He will turn his guns on them - specifically the Mayor, the Constable and the Parson - since it is for their concerns they've gone to kill for the army.

I'll stop there. Just to prevent a spoiler. Outside of the story, the play uses songs - english folk songs, and moments of human kindness broken by authoritarian or mission-driven action. I'm left with a sense of the simplicity of the Serjeants plan - bring the carnage home and the people won't support wars abroad anymore - and the ultimate failure of his plan because of the humanity of his allies.

It would be an interesting play to do now.

Trojan Barbie - by Christine Evans

2009-12-17T16:34:00.000-05:00

Trojan Barbie was performed at ART (recently I think) and is published in the current issue of TheatreForum, the sub-title or description is: "A car-crash encounter with Euripedes' Trojan Women."

The characters are Hecuba, mother of Polly X and Cassandra and mother-in-law to Andromache; along with the royal family is a chorus of women Clea and Esme. Helen (of Troy), Menelaus, Helen's slighted husband and possibly Talthybius are also from Euripedes play. Additionally here we have, Lotte, a British holiday-maker and doll repairer; Mica, Officer in Blue, Jorge and Max from the conquering army; and Clive, Lotte's fantasy partner. Race is not indicated for the women, however the men of the army are indicated as Latino, African, and African American.

The play is set in a present and past that has encrouched on the current world. It takes place in a real Troy as well as the mythic one - with action occuring in Britain at Lotte's doll hosiptal, and a refuge camp where the women are being held indefinitely by the conquering army.

The play opens with Lotte making plans for her singles tour to Troy which is followed by a monologue from Polly X where she relates visiting an art museum, after the looting everything of value had been taken leaving only the contemporary art. She relates her plans to become a sculptor and to make 'Trojan Barbie' a huge heart made of smashed up dolls. As she commits herself to her art and to revenge, two soldiers appear and drag her away.

The next scene deposits us squarely in the refuge camp. Hecuba is grieving and a camp guard is spinning the 'strategic plan' ad infinitum. Interspersed is Lotte, packing essentials for her trip abroad. Cassandra enters prophisizing destruction and Helen breezes through wondering why these ladies don't keep themselves up - the guards are so much more helpful when you're wearing a bit of lippy. It's a montage of tones and agendas and rising emotions, broken by an image of Lotte, carefully making her way towards them with her roll-on bag and map.

This is followed by what becomes a major strand of the play, Polly X getting drunk in the zoo with Max and Jorge. Polyxena, Hecuba's youngest daughter, we know from the old stories had her neck slit open so that her blood spilled over the grave of Achilles. Polly X, here a punky barely adolescent girl, gets drunk and treats her night out with the two young soldiers as a welcome escape from the camp. It's us who knows where this is going and scene after scene it gets worse, she's innocently crushing on the younger soldier, Jorge, while Max tries to get her to take her shirt off - this increases to its inevitable end which becomes the final image of the play - her standing defiant, her neck slit by the soldiers - with her vision of her sculpture "Trojan Barbie" behind her - herself one of the broken dolls.

Amidst Polly's story is Lotte and the women in the camp. Their world's overlap with Lotte being pulled into the camp by guards after offering comfort to Andromache at a cafe. Her protests that she's a British citizen and attempts to keep herself apart from the pain of the women in the camp - seem to work when she is suddenly called for by the Officer in Blue and removed.

Finally she is home, working on her dolls and reflecting on her adventure which was covered in the national press,

The only part that really disturbs me is, with all the media hoo-hah, they never asked about the women. About where they were taking them in the trucks. And I don't know how to find out. Nobody asked anything about the women. It was all focused on me, goodness knows why, I mean I didn't really do anything except manage to get rescued! Thank God. I guess in time everything will feel normal again, and the memories will fade, but it's like they just drove off into a big black hole or something, and that does distress me -
(Lotte, Scene 15)

At this point Hecuba enters as a bag lady screaming for her babies - the dolls Lotte is working on in her workshop. A man, recognizable from the camps, but now a hospital worker, rushes in apologizing for her, and bundles her off into the rain. And then Polly's final image amongst the dolls emerges.

The TheatreForum publication has photos from the production, which give some sense of how it can be laid out in space. The separate worlds melding into one another and characters from myth, present, and dream co-exist melding and sometimes taking over one another. Also, the images of the text - particularly the dolls, are documented. One particularly striking one is Andromache with her little boy, a child-sized doll with hinged joints and glass eyes.

And just as in Euripedes time, the play portrays the women and children of war - bombing campaigns, and liberations and spreading democracy - or whatever it may be called - that results in people consigned to camps, losing their lives and families, and asks the audience to see them, hear them and ask where they are, how are they living - where do those trucks go? And how are we complicit in this.

The Firebugs - by Max Frisch

2009-12-15T08:34:00.000-05:00

According to the preface Max Frisch was an architect who also wrote plays. He was born in Switzerland in 1911, living through both world wars. This play was written in 1958 and translated into English in 1960.

The complete title is "The Firebugs (A Learning-Play Without a Lesson)" except, perhaps the lesson that if two men come in your house and say they are arsonists, pack your attic with explosives and ask you for a match - perhaps they are what they say they are and will happily burn you up - despite how hospitable you are - because they want to burn you up.

The play is organized into eight scenes which take place in the Biedermann's upper-middle class home, in the living room and the attic. It begins with a short scene, Gottlieb Beidermann, a professional man lights a cigar and is surrounded by The Chorus of Firemen who deliver a choral song, probably spoken, about being ready to save the town. Biedermann complains that one can't light a cigar anymore without everyone thinking of houses on fire.

The next scene is longer. It takes place at Beidermann's house, his servant Anna is bringing his wine and Beidermann reading about the latest fires and how the arsonists get into people's attics by posing as peddlers. Then a peddler, Schmitz, comes to the door and insists to be let in, he says he's seeking Kindness, Humanity. Beidermann lets him in, and lets him stay in the attic. During this scene we're also introduced to Beidermann's wife Babette, who doesn't like the look of this at all. Her husband ignores her and the Chorus of Fireman end the scene, watching over the town.

Eisenring, Schmitz's partner turns up with barrels of gasoline which they are arranging in the attic. Schmitz worries that Gottlieb will discover them and call the police, to which Eisenring responds,

Eisenring
Why would he call the police?

Schmitz
Why not?

Eisenring
Because he's guilty himself - that's why. Above a certain income every citizen is guilty one way or another. Have no fear.
(scene 4)

And there's the crux of the play. These two men, revealed to be ex-convicts and certainly firebugs, are welcomed by Gottlieb into his home. Sure that he will be able to befriend them and show them what a great guy he is and then they won't burn him up. He lies to the police about what's in the barrels, he ignores his wife and servant who are increasingly distressed by these men, he has them to dinner - first hiding the finery to make them more comfortable - then dragging it all out at their request. He helps measure the fuse, construct the detonator and finally provides them with a match...all because they ask and he offers his help, however he can.

Class is discussed over the possibility of being 'nabbed' while stealing sawdust. Gottlieb observes that his "kind of people seldom get nabbed," to which Eisenring responds, "Because your kind of people seldom steal sawdust. That's obvious Mr. Beidermann. That's the class difference." Gottlieb then explains his view on class...

I don't hold with class differences - you must have realized that by now, Mr. Eisenring. I'm not old-fashioned - just the opposite, in fact. And I regret that the lower classes still talk about class differences. Aren't we all of us - rich or poor - the creation of one Creator? The middle class, too. Are we not - you and I - human beings, made of flesh and blood? ... I don't mean reducing people to a common level, understand me. There will always be rich and poor, thank heaven - but why can't we just shake hands? A little good will, for heaven's sake, a littel idealism, a little - and we'd all have peace and quiet, both the poor and the rich. Don't you agree?
(Scene 5)

During this monologue, he lights up a cigar. Eisenring's only response to his enlightened view-point is to point out that he shouldn't smoke in the attic because it is now filled with gasoline barrels, he then goes back to constructing his fuse.

The comedy and absurdity comes from Beidermann keeping up this hospitality and ruse of idealism, trying to show what a great guy he is. By the end, everything is burning and this PhD character appears trying to have his say. He finally gets it out and what he needed to say was,

I was intent on improving the world; I knew about everything they were doing in your attic, everything. The one thing I didn't know was this. They - they are doing it for the pure joy of it.
(PhD, Scene 8)

Up until the end Beidermann remains in denial, even while everything is blazes and The Chorus of Fireman are crying out in grief at the disaster. He points out quite logically, when his wife asks if he gave them a match - that of course he did, and that proves they weren't the arsonists. If they were real arsonists then they would have their own matches of course.

Jumpers - by Tom Stoppard

2009-12-12T11:17:00.000-05:00

So. I haven't posted in a while. I've been paralyzed by this play. Stuck. It's taken me days to finish it and I've pushed through - and what did I get out of the endeavor?

I'll try to provide a description.

Jumpers was first performed in London in 1972. There are two acts followed by a Coda. It starts with a musical performance by Dotty on the event of a victory in the polls by a Radical Liberal candidate. She's singing and losing the thread of her performance. A woman is swinging back and forth, losing an article of clothing each time and nearly colliding with the help. Then the Jumpers enter - a tumbling act. George, Dotty's husband, apparently trying to sleep in the next room calls for them to knock it off. The Jumpers are in a pyramid formation when BANG a shot is heard and the pyramid tumbles - a Jumper has been shot. Archie (later revealed to be Dotty's lover) tells her to keep the body out of sight till morning.

Dotty watches TV with the corpse on her lap. There's a program about a recent moon landing. The astronaut's left one of their own on the moon. It is morning and George is beginning his work. He is a moral philosopher. His work is to dictate his lectures to his stone faced secretary who doesn't say a word and records his every utterance. Currently he is working on, "is God?" He tangles through much logic, occasionally visiting with his turtle, his rabbit and his goldfish. He is occasionally interrupted by Dotty screaming out, 'Rape!' or 'Wolves!' which he ignores.

Eventually they come together over a game they play - she acts out titles for him to guess, i.e. she lies naked and still on the bed - 'The Naked and the Dead." She wishes for Archie, George suspects hanky-panky and she claims he is her doctor. They talk about the night before and there is some business with hiding the corpse from George.

A detective arrives at the door, Bones, who turns out to be a huge fan of Dotty - but also planning to arrest her for the murder committed in their home at the party. Eventually he gets past George to Dotty's room, the corpse falls from its hiding place and Dotty begins to seduce him. George discusses the philosophical work of the deceased jumper - also his colleague - and while Bones is in another room. Archie returns with the other Jumpers to remove the corpse.

And that ends Act One.

In Act Two Bones encourages George to help his wife get off from the murder charge by pleading insanity and continues his investigation - now without a body. Archie and Dotty carry on with their 'examinations,' and George and Archie talk philosophy, and the newly vacant Logic Chair that the corpse used to hold - and George is interested in. Through the scene George accuses Dotty of killing his rabbit - furious with her for that (in contrast to the total lack of emotion demonstrated for the dead Logician), I think she did kill his goldfish - and maybe eat it? (though I could be wrong about that) and then he discovers that he killed the rabbit accidentally when he was shooting is bow & arrow inside. As he finds the body he also manages to crush his turtle. His weeping takes us to the Coda.

The coda is a symposium in dream form where the question of "Man - good, bad or indifferent?" is discussed amongst Archie, George and Clegthorpe - the ArchBishop of Canterbury. This devolves into a performance by the Jumpers, a song by Dotty, a monologue by George about god and trains, and Archie asking us not to despair,

many are happy much of the time; more eat than starve, more are healthy than sick, more curable than dying; not so many dying as dead; and one of the thieves was saved. Hell's bells and all's well - half the world is at peace with itself, adn so is the other half; vast areas are unpolluted; millions of children grow up without suffering deprivation, and millions, while deprived, grow up without suffering cruelties, and millions, while deprived and cruelly treated, none the less grow up. No laughter is sad and many tears are joyful. At the graveside the undertaker doffs his top hat adn impregnates the prettiest mourner. Wham, bam, thank you Sam.
(Archie, Coda)

To which Dotty gets the last word, "Goodbye spoony Juney Moon."

The descriptions of staging and lighting are meticulous, a complex set is intricately described as well as how moments should bleed into one another or be separated. The rhythms of moments and characters create order from the slapstick and absurdist elements - and following the logic of the long philosophical passages is like chasing cats.

I'd say I should read it again to really grasp it - but actually I think I would much rather see it in action.

Hysterical Blindness - by Laura Cahill

2009-12-03T16:23:00.000-05:00

This premiered in NYC in 1997. It's set in 1987, in Avenel, New Jersey. I'm imagining a town with porches, houses close together, a dingy bar down the road and a Denny's out by the highway. There are six characters - Debby and Beth are the main focus, with Debby's mom Virginia as a counterpoint to their story. It's written in 14 scenes, mostly pretty short, that take place at a bar, Beth's house, Debby's house and one scene at the apartment of the man with Patrick Swayze eyes - Rick.

The play starts in a bar with Debby and her friend Beth drinking beers. Debby is telling Beth about how she went hysterically blind at work. Debby spies Rick at the bar and decides she's pretty much done for - although he seems less that aware of her. Beth needs to get home early to be with her daughter. Debby's sad pursuit of Rick creates the spine of the play. Her mother Virginia, a waitress at Denny's starts up a relationship with a widower who eats breakfast there. While her mother's relationship seems to have something tender and real about it, Debby's is all delusion. Beth sortof likes the bartender, but mostly daydreams of when they were kids, and the father of her daughter who took off long ago. Each woman waits for a man, and seems to be stuck without a man to take them out of their static lives.

Rick is finally egregious enough to get through to Debby that there is no relationship. And Virginia's widower keels over from a heart attack. Debby comes home to find her and her mother's house re-done with nice furniture. Virginia had been saving for something and finally spent some on herself. Though they are both a bit overwhelmed by the nice new home they tentatively settle in and the final scene, where Debby visits Beth and says she's signed up for 'Well Woman' we get the sense that she's making some changes for herself and may be leaving Beth and her daydream of getting some chairs, some beer, some Springsteen and partying in the yard all summer - behind her.

It's a play that relies on the specificity of the Jersey girl, the late '80s, and the low-rent mood pervading the script to take hold to work I imagine. The central metaphor of Debby's actual hysterical blindness - and the hysterical blindness of women waiting for a man to change their life - sets up the play and gives it its throughline.

I've got better access to plays now - any suggestions of published plays I should be reading?

Alone at the Beach - by Richard Dresser

2009-12-01T21:16:00.000-05:00

Premiered at the Humana festival in 1988, Alone at the Beach is an ensemble comedy in three acts. Each act takes place over a holiday weekend over one summer, Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day. It takes place at a house in the Hamptons. George has inherited the house from his grandmother and has brought on five people to share the house, selecting them on a first come first serve basis.

The first act has the characters arriving and sets up the 'how will these folks ever get along?' question, and a quickly developing romance between George and recently divorced Molly begins. The second act opens with George throwing a Birthday party for Molly - but she's gone back to her ex-husband who is coming out to the house with her for the weekend. Her ex-husband Joe also happens to be George's therapist - who's been unknowingly listening to the details of his ex-wife's affair with George for the past month. Drugs are taken, a three-some is initiated and a dog is run-over. In the final act some new alliances are made as everyone packs up for the summer. George and Molly re-connect at the end, they've made changes in order to be closer - Molly's planned to move out to the Hampton's full-time while George has sold the house to return to the city. Paths cross and continue to miss one another.

The title is the play - each character is alone at the beach - and though stabs at closeness are made, all pretty much end up alone at the end of the summer. It's kind of a mirror up to nature play. It is set in the late '80s, a particular time and place. The interest and humor is watching these strangers get to know on another, stumble on each other's personalities and try to come together over the summer. And then, kindof like the end of summer, the connections evaporate along with the season.

A Loss of Roses - by William Inge

2009-11-30T16:55:00.000-05:00

A flop on Broadway in 1959, Inge revised the script for publication. In his preface he describes this play as always feeling like a sure thing to him and when it was going up there was a horrible moment where he saw that the play on-stage was nothing like the play that was in his head - but that the revisions would correct this.

This past fall I got to stay at William Inge's house in Independence, KS as a writer in residence and read most of his plays there. There wasn't a copy of this play, but there was a poster for the Broadway production, starring a young Warren Beatty. I loved the title and as I got to know Inge's writing I wanted to find this one too...

And, reading it this afternoon, its fallen short of my high expectations. It's a two act play. In the first act we meet Helen and her son Kenny. They both work and contribute to the household expenses, lucky to have jobs during the depression. Kenny is attached to his mother and doesn't want to leave, recently having turned down a good job outside of Wichita. Helen doesn't want him to get too comfortable, wanting him to strike out on his own and get married someday - at the moment he's drinking and running around with the trashiest girls in town. Helen's getting ready for Lila, who used to help her around the house and with baby Kenny when she was a girl and who is now an actress with a travelling show. The show's gone under and the show people drop her off at Helen's while they look for work in Kansas City.

Later that night, Kenny puts some moves on Lila when he's drunk. The next morning, Lila tries hard to be good and impress Helen, and cover for Kenny. Somewhere in there we also learn that Lila was hospitalized after she tried to commit suicide after running away from her husband & his father - there's also a whisper of sexual abuse in her past - a past that Helen helped her to get away from. The Act ends with Lila resisting any flirtation with Kenny and him thinking he could get used to having her around.

In the second act, a month later, Kenny and Lila have some drinks and Kenny puts the moves on her. She likes him - maybe loves him but turns him down. Helen comes home and Kenny throws a fit and threatens to move out after his mother refuses to take an expensive present from him - a watch to replace the watch his father gave her. We also learn that Kenny's father died saving Kenny's life. Lila's show friend, who she's in love with, comes back with a promise of work - $100 a week. It comes out that the work is a for a sex show - and some blue movies possibly. Lila refuses and goes to Kenny for help and comfort. They spend the night together after he asserts his seriousness about her and his plan to marry her. The next morning Helen senses something's up and confronts Kenny, Lila's a wreck and tries to slash her wrists, Kenny decides its time for him to move out and he heads off to work. Lila sees a girl going to school carrying roses. She remembers her first day of school, giving roses to the teacher and getting whacked later for talking - and asking for her roses back. Her show friend pulls up and Lila goes off to her future with him.

The loss of innocence, the hushed tones when discussing girls with bad pasts, the committment in mental institutions, the longing for a man to come and save the girl - and the realization that he's not coming... these hallmarks of theatre in the late 50s/60s - or maybe just William Inge and Tennessee Williams - I'll need to read more to make an accurate generalization.

This one though - it's interesting to me that Inge would be more sure about this one than any other - perhaps because it is structurally pretty clean, the action/images/intentions dove-tail together and it is containable in the mind... and then its the ones that are messier - that make you afraid to share them - that are uncertain that have that thing that makes them bigger than themselves.

Look Back in Anger - by John Osbourne

2009-11-22T10:05:00.000-05:00

Look Back in Anger was first produced at the Royal Court Theatre, London in 1956. On the back of my copy it states, "The searing drama of the angry generation" and it fits into the British cinema of the time that was focused on these, angry young men.

The play is in three acts. Jimmy, an educated son of the working classes, is married to Alison, a beautiful flower of the posher set. They live in a flat with the bathroom down the hall and share their space with Cliff, who works with Jimmy running a sweet stall. At open Alison irons a pile of laundry for the men, she takes care of both of them without question or thanks, and Jimmy and Cliff read piles of Sunday papers. Jimmy berates Alison for her stupidity, for taking his insults and for settling for such a shit hole. He dumps his hatred of the upper classes onto his wife, who silently takes it. Cliff plays mediator and comforter of Alison. In the second scene of the first act, Alison's friend Helena arrives to stay. She's an actress and acts as a savior to Alison, who has told everyone except Jimmy that she is pregnant.

Helena encourages Alison to leave Jimmy, calling her father - a former officer who spent the last 3 decades before the war in India - to come get her. Alison goes with poppa and Helena moves in on Jimmy. So that the third act's opening mirrors the first except this time it is Helena doing the ironing. Alison loses the baby, returns one last time - Helena vamooses and Alison and Jimmy are back together.

This play holds a place in British theater as turning point of sorts, heralding the arrival of these new angry young men.

I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids. There aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you. About as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus. No, there's nothing left for it, me boy, but to let yourself be butchered by the women. (Jimmy - Act 3)

This speech of Jimmy's, among many others that he has, is the prism through which the play can be seen. A mixture of the aimless, young men after the war, under-employed and in a society going through a major upheaval. And the other huge strand of the play which is a view of women as life-sucking harpies.

As a reader I got pretty sick of reading this character's constant bitching about women, about his wife, about how stupid she is, about how she doesn't know anything about life. And sick of her subservient, helpless affection for him. That by the end of the play she comes back to him and they find their way back too each other through a little affectionate game they play of bear and squirrel. (yes, she is the squirrel) did nothing to alleviate my feeling of exhaustion with the narrative and the characters.

Now, I've striven to take plays on their own terms and freed myself from feeling the need to comment on the merits of scripts. And here is a play that yes, technically I can see how it works, the scenes all end on a cliff-hanger, the characters and their story serve as a mirror to look at a particular time in a particular society. There is a commentary on class, on British post-war society, on moralities and romanticism, and through the character of Jimmy it's all presented very 'in your face' and uncomfortably. And yet, I couldn't get past the sense of the women as functionaries and punching bags to serve the writer's central character. Even the unseen mother is depicted as a vulture, un-caringly waiting for Jimmy's father to die, leaving the young boy as the only one his father had to care for him.

And that's where the play gets really tricky for me. I feel like the play wants to be about the anger of a young man towards a stifling, class-based, moralistic society - but ends up being about a man angry at his mother and every iteration of her in his life. Which takes the teeth out of the play's posturing for me.

Round and Round the Garden - by Alan Ayckbourn

2009-11-19T18:36:00.000-05:00

Round and Round the Garden is the last of The Norman Conquests trilogy. Again, the same group, the same country house where the sibling's mother (who likes to be read racy novels and apparently carried on with all sorts right under their father's nose) is dying upstairs. The same weekend. This time they are in the garden, and appropriately, everything gets aired out - and there are a few rolls in the grass that shed new light on what was simmering under the surface in the living room and the dining room.

And it should also be said, the same structure in each play. Two acts. Two scenes per act. Each scene ends with the disaster or the cri de couer that propels the next scene - or at the end that sums up the entire play - from Norman's point of view - and really his is the one that matters since he's started all the problem that got the play moving, and ends the play by causing just one more catastrophe.

Earlier in this series I read an early Ayckbourn play, Relatively Speaking, a comedy of mistaken identities, marriages and infidelities - actual and suspected. The material here in this later play (1973) is similar, infidelities and marriages but this one has a much deeper tap root. There's a quiet pathos underneath the play as well as a delight in the ridiculousness of people navigating the confines of family and commitment. And maybe that's what makes the comedy successful, that we can laugh at these people condemned to each other's company, seeking to get away from one another by any means necessary and delight at the end when Norman, who's managed to get kisses from each of the women, as well as painted pictures of weekends away with them - and quite possibly the men as well - conspires to wreck the cars so that they'll all need to stay another day together.

Living Together - by Alan Ayckbourn

2009-11-18T18:10:00.000-05:00

Living Together is the second play of The Norman Conquests trilogy. It takes place in the Living Room, over the same weekend, with the same characters.

This one begins on Saturday evening with Norman sulking because his trip has been canceled, Reg dealing with the bags - and the game he's invented that he's hoping to play - and Sarah marshaling everyone around. As the plays pile up the sense that anyone has control over anything really does deteriorate, because we see what's happening in the next room when character's aren't around we see how little effect individual's attempts to control the situation have.

Married relationships take the foreground in this play. Particularly Sarah and Reg's union - with her constantly running him down and bossing him - dismissing his attempts to get everyone to play his game with him - and his general acceptance of her command. This plays counter to Ruth and Norman's marriage which although Norman seems unable to stop himself from suggesting a roll on the carpet or a get-away to Bournemouth to every lady present has an honesty and bluntness that carries them - and by the end, carries them through. In a way.

And it's a comedy. And it's filled with lonely and somewhat sad people trying to make the best of things.

Tomorrow I'll find out what's been going on in the garden.

Table Manners - by Alan Ayckbourn

2009-11-16T17:35:00.000-05:00

The next three entries will be The Norman Conquests. This trilogy (recently on Broadway) of plays each take place over the same weekend, with the same characters, in different areas of the house.

This first one begins with Annie and her Sister-in-Law Sarah. Sarah's just arrived with her husband Reg, to take over Annie's duties as caretaker of her & Reg's mother for the weekend. Annie is going somewhere... over the course of the conversation it comes out that she's planned a dirty weekend in East Grinstead with Norman, the husband of her older sister Ruth. Sarah is shocked! Shocked! she'd assumed it would be a getaway with Tom, the local vet and eligible bachelor who haplessly comes round often, but really has no game at all. Norman shows up on the lawn waving around his pyjamas.

By scene two Ruth, Norman's wife, turns up at Sarah's request - she's short-sighted and doesn't like to have been pulled away from her work. ...

There are endless miles of terrain between these individuals, and Norman - a seemingly happy guy who happens to be married to a woman with her own mind, that doesn't really include him very much - does and says the wrong things throughout and is weirdly successful at it. The two other women end up in his arms at different points in the play.

And, as this one is set in the dining room, much of the comedic engine is the attempt to Just Sit Down and Have a Nice Meal Together.

moments where off-stage business is alluded to - and where characters come in laughing or disoriented from something that happened in another room with another character imply that the next two plays will add more dimensions to this one. Though, this one does stand quite nicely on it's own.

The Lesser Magoo - by Mac Wellman

2009-11-13T10:13:00.000-05:00

The Lesser Magoo completes Wellman's Crowtet series. It is available at ubu.com for download as a pdf.

The Lesser Magoo opens in an office where Torque is being 'rogated' by Candle & Curran. A dressing down, an arbitrarily abusive interview? The nature of their work is alluded to, the Nature of Crowe's Dark Space, old feuds and traditions and the history of their people. In this invented history, which combines sheer invention with familiar locations and references all delivered as convention would dictate, there are objects and locations mentioned which will resurface elegantly later in the play. It becomes murkliy apparent that one wouldn't want to be identified as an unusualist. Something horrible happens to Torque off-stage. There are moments of stillness. Joegh Bullock is seen hanging in a closet, he held Torque's position previously but has, "suffered a fatal self-erasure." And an invitation to visit Moonhat is extended by Candle to Curran.

The next scene opens on Moonhat estate with many guests at a lawn party. They will drift in and out of the scene as necessary. There is occasional singing. Much attention paid to the young and beautiful Tessora. Aunt Sycorica is appropraitely witchy. A literary figure discusses his work loosely. There are discussions about 'unusualists' and much discussions about other guests. The ghost of Joegh Bullock wanders in asking to be noticed, only Tessora can see him. A crippled old philosopher, Foss, arises from his wheelchair and walks into the woods. A Corn Knife is discovered (like one described in the first scene) and hastily hidden away. The former Senator speaks at length - this monologue feels like a touchstone, in that it has a coherence and point of view from our world. He speaks of his exhaustion fighting off the Pentagon and the Department of Defense, the shame of all the money going to fight wars while schools and public resources diminish. He rails against the corporations suffocating the common man, while the voters vote for policies and politicians that help them do just that. Aunt Sycorica asserts that,

In my own country, in my own lifetime, people proceeded to be MAD... insane mind you, just in order to escape responsibility. (p. 60)

then the guests begin acting strangely...

The final scene takes place in the woods. Tessura has followed Foss and Curran has followed Tessura, there is talk of randomness and talk of death. From a distance, the literary figure (dressed as Bottom with an Ass's head) and the former senator watch the women. Tessura describes disturbing things she's witnessed her parents doing in the woods and her fears of becoming an unusualist when all she wants is a normal life. The Ghost returns and she sends him away. Foss, the now - not -paralyzed philosopher returns with a silver foot, Tessura glows, luminous and is ascended, screaming, into the night sky.

The play is language and tumbling stories/histories, rich, playful, nonsensical, rhythmic, allusive and elusive. Slippery nonsense and pained expression of futility of fighting the nonsense that passes for policy. Theatrical and resisting standards of traditional interpretation, The Lesser Magoo, feels tricky and at the same time explains many of its tricks in the text.. another play that begs another, closer read - and then another - and (one hopes) a chance to sit and watch in the theatre with a beer.

Delirium of Interpretations - by Fiona Templeton

2009-11-12T15:55:00.000-05:00

Delirium of Interpretations published in 2003 by Green Integer has the subtitle (of the predicament and the phenomenon of Camille Claudel). In Templeton's notes preceding the text she provides a short biography of Claudel, a sculptor who lived from 1864 - 1934. She began sculpting young, was a student and later mistress of Auguste Rodin. She separated from him, continued to make art and after the death of her father was committed to an asylum by her family, including her brother, the playwright Paul Claudel. She died 30 years later in the asylum, much of her work lost or destroyed.

The play is constructed from multiple texts. Actors speak in character, as historical voices, as actors performing actors, and as representatives of various forces in Claudel's life. The majority of the text is assembled from letters, descriptions of Claudel's and Rodin's sculpture, from biographies, from literature from the era, from the myths on which much of their sculpture was based, and Templeton's original writing. The script is presented with a side column where sources are attributed, often line by line.

The play is organized into a prologue, five scenes and an epilogue. Characters are indicated by letters rather than names - possibly to suggest their changing natures. For example, R is Rodin, male artist, and father (physically). Claudel's existence as a sculptor of great talent, the lack of definitive information about her life - sometimes she is portrayed as stalking Rodin - other times he is the one controlling and relentlessly seeking her. The judgment and ultimate imprisonment by her family due to the diagnoses "Delirium of Interpretations" which would now be referred to as paranoia - paranoia that may have been very justified according to some accounts collected here. The jealousy of her talent by the men in her life - Rodin and her brother - and how this led them to control her - as well as the resentment of women, particular Rodin's wife and her own mother. The position of women at that time, particularly women seeking to work, to create, to be valued for their art - at a time when art was an entirely masculine endeavor. All of this is reflected in Templeton's text through the multiple interpreters - a sense of the inability of one objective voice, an undermining of any singular narrative to explain the individual - results from the play's form and methods of construction.

The published version also includes photographs of the sculptures referred to in the play. This adds an additional layer to the experience of reading - as would seeing these in person. There are notes regarding the staging, direction, and the acting of the peice. Templeton explains her vision of the performance style, includes the audience placement and some moments of improvised experience in the forward and afterward. Her explanations ground the sometimes dense and difficult text into the larger aims of the piece as a theatrical experience.

Claudel is the only character granted a subjective voice throughout the piece. It is through her the audience experiences the narrative, which unfolds chronologically through her life. First the impulse to create, then the experience of being in Rodin's workshop, then the conflict with her lover, her work alone, then a scene of interpretations of Claudel's work, a final scene of interpretations of her - the doctor's notes and views of her in the asylum as well as her own accounting of her mental state and experience, and finally an epilogue "Death, Disappearance, and History."

Here's some text to end with - which will speak louder than my attempt at description -

Genius is PR, it's macho, meaning egotistic and exclusive, unable to differentiate from their own viewpoint. It's a reason for a lot of brutality, it's old-fashioned, it's the biography, not the work. It's not useful. Talk instead about foresight, both penetration and encompassment. The work. In the world. Excitement. The greatest talent is to make something of your talent. I expect craft from people I work with. Talk of genius avoids multiple respect for creativity. It suggests the inhuman. (Scene 4, Camille)

'Night Mother - by Marsha Norman

2009-11-11T09:39:00.000-05:00

Pulitzer prize winning play of 1983, 'Night Mother opens with a mother straining for some cupcakes on a high shelf and her daughter, Jessie looking for some towels that her mother doesn't want anymore and a big piece of plastic or garbage bags. Then Jessie is looking for her father's gun. We learn that Jessie has a wayward son and that they are getting ready for her mother's weekly manicure. And then, bottom of page 5, Jessie says, "I'm going to kill myself, Mama."

Through the rest of the play, which unfolds without a break, Mama tries to convince her not to and Jessie goes through a long checklist of things she wants to do before she goes. Getting the house in order for her mother, giving away some items, passing on information and asking some questions. We learn more about Jessie's life. That she's an epileptic, that she was married and had a son, her husband left her - and had been sortof selected for her by her mother.

Sometimes her mother goes to the phone to call - but stops herself. Jessie has said she'd shot herself immediately if her mom calls for help - still...

Jessie's thought through this and decided. She's been planning it. She's feeling good because she's decided to do this. Watching the mother you want her to stop her - to try harder to stop her - and you have the sense of helplessness, share the sense of helplessness to do anything.

And finally, Jessie does it.

The Convention of Cartography - by W. David Hancock

2009-11-08T11:52:00.001-05:00

The Convention of Cartography is a play for one person, with video and environmental elements. The first stage direction:

(Audience members stumble upon a very old Airstream trailer, sitting in the middle of an overgrown parking lot. A hand-painted sign above the door of the trailer reads: MUSEUM)

There are seats facing a video monitor, several objects with the label "SOME OF MIKE'S THINGS" and a woman selling concessions. She is the curator's wife, and takes part in the performance as well, helping with tours and taking over at set points.

The curator appears and begins his lecture about a man he knew. A poet and artist and drifter who left poems in random places for people find and made boxes - described like Joseph Cornell type objects - that he installed at various places - underpasses, in people's attic's, highway restrooms. A picture of the man emerges through the lecture - how he worked and his effect on the curator's life. Then we are told that when Mike was dying the curator traveled to be with him.

Video tapes of the curator and Mike's conversations from this time are shared. These are interrupted by the curator - occasionally adding context, or sharing Mike's art, describing his efforts to locate and retrieve some of the work scattered across the USA. There are moments that will be fast-forwarded unless the audience protests to see it. Other stories emerge, the story of Ida, the great-aunt of the curator - how he met Mike when he was living with her, UFOs, a man dying in the back of a greyhound bus. Mike does not often cooperate with the curator, setting his own terms for many of the sections. Objects are referred to in the stories and are then seen in the collections and available for the audience to handle.

Audience is invited inside the museum. Displays of work are described, as is the nature of interaction the curator and his wife will have with the visitors. A video plays, a close up of Mike talking about Ida. There are cards described that should be placed with the exhibits.

At finish, a box with a peephole and a penlight is available for the audience to look at one by one. It is "Ida's Wing" and they are told it was found in a retirement home in their town. The curator tells about the discovery and exits. Leaving his wife to share it and resume the tour.

The play has a distinct mood in it. A feeling of loss and the attempt to collect and locate the inexplicable. As a script for an installation/play it is so clear. I've often wondered when attending other similar-type events how do you record it? and this script feels like one answer to that question. Or just for reading and gleaning the potential experience that way.

I wish I could go visit this museum in an over-grown parking lot, outside of some mid-western town... and I highly recommend reading this.

a note to readers (11/1 - 11/8)

2009-11-04T16:16:00.000-05:00

I am traveling this week and not near the computer often. I am shifting to reading short plays for this week that is shorter on time. Longer plays will return next week.

Turn Four - by Crystal Skillman

2009-11-04T16:03:00.000-05:00

Turn Four, a short play published in Play A Journal of Plays is set during the last 20 laps of the Daytona 500. Three drivers in their cars, which are chairs able to shake and represent speed, are staggered facing the audience. They remain in the same position through the play. The driver's are Michael Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Dale Earnhardt.

The script is presented horizontally. The drivers speak to themselves and during the race and to each other over headsets. By laying out the script in 3 vertical columns a sense of the stage picture is conveyed through the visual organization of the text.

The historical events of the race are that Waltrip won and Earnhardt, Jr. came in second. Earnhardt was positioned for 3rd. Waltrip was driving a car owned by Earnhardt and this would have resulted in a 1-2-3 finish for the family. Earnhardt crashed and was killed on turn four in the final lap of the race.

Skillman imagines these final laps and the conversation between father and son, the tension of the three men vying for position, moments of recollection of their connections to racing, visions of victory, all building towards the final moments when Earnhardt loses control of his vehicle.

Icing: A Hockey Wedding Event - Sawako Nakayasu

2009-11-03T09:55:00.000-05:00

Icing: A Hockey Wedding Event is published in PLAY A JOURNAL OF PLAYS, issue 1, Spring 2003. It is a script for an event. It describes the lay out of the space, the areas inside and outside the main event space. What information the audience should have before hand. How admission should be payed and in what circumstances it should be waived. How attendees should be greeted. Characters are described with some of their actions, some of which are continuous throughout the event. There is a section of notes touching on music, dance, general structure (borrowed from weddings & hockey games).

Outside of the main event space is a Carnival, with participatory booths - fortune teller, walk-through wedding chapel, things that might be found at a carnival all with a wedding and/or hockey spin.

Then the script describes the Events of the event. These are organized into 3 periods, guided by an Announcer and a final section of "Falling." Language and elements of weddings and hockey games are re-configured and played with. There's audience participation. There are surprising interruptions, dances, fights, the marriage of hockey bags, a fight, the heart of "Ex-girlfriend #2" is cooked and served to a lucky audience member and "probably gets eaten with a little bit of sadness," among other things.

These events all take place inside a giant wedding cake. It ends when a giant knife cuts through, followed by a giant hockey puck, and the curtains "fold in and fall down over the audience. Music. End."

Sawako Nakayasu is a poet. I don't know if this event was ever staged. I would like to be invited if it is.

Redwood Curtain - by Lanford Wilson

2009-11-02T00:13:00.000-05:00

Redwood Curtain was first performed at Seattle Rep in 1992. It’s a three person play with three scenes and no intermission. It begins in the redwood forest outside of Arcata, CA. A man is urging his dog to kill an animal. A young Asian-American girl appears, she’s been watching him. He knows it. She talks to him, they wrestle a bit, he takes her wallet, she can control the elements. She is looking for her father, a Vietnam vet with mismatched eyes and an eagle tattoo. This man is a Vet, living in the woods, mismatched eyes and at the end of the scene she sees, an eagle tattoo.

The second scene is in the girl’s aunt’s car. She’s picked her up, is concerned and we learn that this girl’s been doing this a long time. We learn what’s truth and what’s lies about the girl. She is a piano prodigy, she was adopted by a wealthy family from a young Vietnamese girl who was paid $25,000. Her adopted father taught her and was depressive and drank. We learn that the aunt used to own a timber company that harvested the woods under guidelines approved by the Sierra Club, but she’s been bought out and the purchasers will cut down these 2500 year old trees. The scene shifts to the aunt’s home. The girl leaves for town. The man from the woods turns up and returns the wallet, all the money there – every picture and card examined and replaced. He departs.

The final scene is back in the woods and the truth of the girl’s parentage is revealed.

It’s such an elegant structure. Minimal characters, minimal scenes. An entire history – of the Vietnam war, the men damaged by it, the children left without fathers – is evoked as the backdrop and it provides this depth – along with the theme of corporate buy-outs of irreplaceable trees – that buoys up the simplicity of what we see at the surface. The iceberg theory of a play, its only 1/3 that we see. The rest is deep below the surface, signaling its magnitude with this little glimpse at the top.

Also, the back of the published play tells me that when this play opens on Broadway it will mark the fortieth production of Lanford Wilson’s to be directed by Marshall Mason. With that type of collaboration, does it allow him to trust his 1/3 at the top? To trust that the depths will be revealed by the director?

Miracle Play - by Joyce Carol Oates

2009-10-31T14:23:00.000-04:00

This one is published by Black Sparrow Press. I love their publications. As a high school student I had a few of Bukowski's books that they published with their rough cardboard colored covers. I picked this one up in a used book store pretty much because it was published by them and because I'd never heard of it.

And it's not anything like what I expected. I guess I thought, literary, magical somehow, rooted in emotion and character. Probably. Maybe playing with the form as a writer not typically known for plays might do. I was ready for a surprise.

So, Miracle Play, first performed in 1974, is an urban crime drama. It opens with Titus Skinner (29) getting ready to beat up his sometimes girlfriend, Beattie Roscoe (16) for stealing $500 worth of his product, heroin. The next scene has Titus's brother's face being scalded with boiling sugar water by Beattie's brother and his friend in retaliation. Then Beattie's brother and his friend are burnt alive by Titus. The play is the attempt to make a court case against Titus by the Prosecutor, a white man who promises a conviction if Beattie will testify against Titus. Titus is defended by Kidd, a white man, who uses Titus as a symbol of all that is wrong for blacks in America and fights to have him set free. At one point he is given $100,000 for Titus's defense, he says from gentle white people who want to help. Titus's brother gapes in disbelief, partly that anyone would give that kind of money to help his brother - who he knows is guilty, is a drug dealer, and is a threat to everybody in the neighborhood - but mostly he gapes that anyone would have that kindof money just lying around.

Now I suppose this type of material is used to fuel Law & Order and many other hour long crime dramas. But here, 1974, written by a white woman, writing an urban, black story - I wonder how it was received. I wonder how the conversations were different then. Was it praised for it's unblinking portrayal of black urban america? For her ear for how people talk? It's not sentimental. It's not looking to make heros of any of the characters, there's a tragedy to some - an innocence that doesn't last. And the dealer, Titus, has the last word - about growing up and expecting to end up in the electric chair, but now that states are doing away with that things'll change. Then to win over the jury with an act so impressive they'll have to let him go he sticks a lightbulb on his forehead and lights it up.

It's a play that feels of a particular time, the 70s, New York City - I don't know that it fits now - not that the story it tells doesn't happen anymore - but its not what theatre does, its what TV does. Though I doubt that is for the better - seeing how TV mines those stories for the salaciousness of actions rather than the motivations of the characters bound by themselves and their society.

I was looking for a surprise and I received one, all preconceptions over turned and in that Black Sparrow Press and Ms. Oates did not disappoint.

The Colored Museum - by George C. Wolfe

2009-10-30T10:57:00.000-04:00

Premiered in 1986, The Colored Museum is a series of pieces, monologues and scenes, that present a multiplicity of African-American experience, stereotypes and conflicts. Most have an element of direct address, involving the audience in the action and the character on stage.

The container for the pieces is a museum, each "exhibit" following after the next. The first exhibit is an airline stewardess welcoming us onto the flight, the middle passage. The audience is invited to put on their shackles and instructed that there will be 'no drumming.' A time slip occurs and we're plunged into a swirling recounting of moments in history, nearly overwhelmed, but still arrive, welcome to our destination. This is punctuated by a final image of two male slaves and a woman slave being welcomed with the canned pleasantness of the stewardess.

Ten more scenes follow, each vastly different than the last and accumulating meaning as they build on one another. The final scene breaks loose characters from previous scenes and they join Topsy Washington when she says,

So, hunny, don't waste your time trying to label or define me. ... 'cause I'm not what I was ten years ago or ten minutes ago. I'm all of that and then some. And whereas I can't live inside yesterday's pain, I can't live without it.
(Topsy Washington and cast, 'The Party')

Saint Joan - by Bernard Shaw

2009-10-29T17:52:00.000-04:00

First performed in New York in 1923, Saint Joan, tells Shaw's version of Joan of Arc. My copy has a very long preface delving into his interpretation of Joan. In the play she is an individual, committed to following her inspiration - manifesting itself as voices of Saints and God - she conducts herself in a manner appropriate to her calling. She is a leader with a passion for weapons and a vision of how battles are won.

The play is organized into six scenes and an epilogue. Shaw starts the play with her seeking the horse and men of a military squire in order to raise an army to crown the Dauphin and throw the British out of France. The sixth scene is the trial which results in Joan being burnt at the stake. The epilogue melds time, fifty years after the burning, when she was declared innocent of charges and 1920 when she was canonized as a saint. The spirits of Joan and others in the play return for this finale.

Shaw places Joan in the middle of power struggles amongst the church, the feudal lords and the king. As well as portraying a genius compelled to live and act powerfully and with clear principles, he uses her story to illustrate a moment in time when Nationalism was coming into prominence - the idea of the French and the English under a king - instead of the feudal system of whatever lord held power over an area.

Similarly to the play read yesterday, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a terrible thing - the H-Bomb, the burning at the stake of a 19 year old - is put on trial. And in both the individual, complex and human, faces the powers of the State and Morality - powers that don't hold real sway in the main character's struggle with their own powers.

This play, from the 1920s, is certainly using the theater to present an argument and reveal the motivations of those who wield power over others. I would say revealing hypocrisies, but Shaw goes to lengths to give everyone their reason for their actions, and in the epilogue we see some of the fall out - and weigh some of the possible outcomes.

Though Joan gets the last word,

Oh God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long? (Joan, epilogue)

In The Matter Of J. Robert Oppenheimer - by Heinar Kipphardt

2009-10-28T23:22:00.000-04:00

Published in German in 1964 and in English in 1967, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, uses primary source material from the hearings regarding whether or not to grant Oppenheimer security clearance in the 1950s (after the development of the Hydrogen bomb). Kipphardt condenses the hearings, re-organizing and editing for drama and clarity, but as he states in his introduction if it was a choice between drama and accuracy he went with accuracy.

It unfolds over two parts, follows the question and answer format of the hearings, with longer monologues interspersed between the scenes.

The most striking thing about this play to me was the power of the story that is within it. The slice of history represented as is, without frills or spin. The complexities of the choices physicists were making, responsibilities to humanity or to country, could withholding knowledge or even just enthusiasm be considered 'intellectual treason'? - and what did that even mean when the question at hand was developing a weapon with little tactical value, that could destroy the human race?

I am ashamed I'm reading this so late in my life. And its resonance with current events and questions lead me to suggest that a reading or a re-mounting of this play is in order. This part of our history is not yet grappled with and we're facing similar questions, a dramatic text exists that both cleanly presents an event - and vibrates with the existential, moral, practical and philosophical questions the fact of that event's occurrence creates.

The Road To Mecca - by Athol Fugard

2009-10-27T19:43:00.000-04:00

The copyright on my copy says 1985, it doesn't state where the play was first performed. The Road to Mecca, is a two act play with three characters. At open Elsa, a 28 year old woman from Cape Town, turns up unannounced at Helen's home. Helen is an older woman living alone in a small village 800 miles away from Cape Town.

Through the course of the first act we see the sculptures that Helen has been creating since her husband's death, and learn that the villagers have ostracized her for her choice to make these and not follow the conventional path of a widow, going to church and visiting with the other ladies of the village. Elsa is a teacher at a 'colored school' in the city and has had a rough few months, a tumultuous ending of an affair with a married man and she's up for disciplinary review for asking her students to write about equal rights in South Africa. We also learn that Elsa has been moved to come here unannounced in response to a letter she received from Helen which read to her like a suicide note. The pastor has been pushing Helen to go to an old folks home and a space is ready for her if she will just sign. Elsa pushes Helen to face the problems, start taking care of herself, and not give up and let them tuck her away.

In the second act the pastor arrives and the deeper conflicts of the situation are revealed. Helen nearly burned her house down and didn't move to save herself. Through the course of the second act Elsa and the Pastor vie for control over Helen's life, until Elsa withdraws angrily - she'd been inspired by Helen's pursuit of creating her sculptures, by her freedom, and is disappointed that Helen won't fight for herself. Eventually though, she does, explaining to the Pastor and to Elsa the significance of the sculptures, their ability to capture and play with the light so that it will never be dark. The pastor relents, and the two women are left alone together.

There are many stories told, the gossip is passed between the women, the exposition is revealed through their conversation, catching up and clarifying why Elsa has suddenly arrived. The version of events told by Helen in the first act are turned around by the arrival of the pastor in the second. Elsa has to deal with this shift, which she feels as a betrayal. The pastor pleads his case clearly and seems to be motivated by something more than pastoral concern for one of his parishioners. And Helen's voice is only finally heard in fullness and clarity by the end of the play, although there are slivers, glintings and hints throughout.

The background of a village in South Africa in the 1970s is deftly painted in the background, it does not dominate the play, but it is an essential part of it.

In the preface, Fugard talks about the woman and place this play was inspired by. He talks about feeling like it might be a play but not being 'hooked' quite yet, the fish weren't yet biting. When he learned that this woman had a strong friendship with a younger woman, a social worker from the city, then he said his bait was taken and he could write the play.

Dutchman - by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Imamu Baraka)

2009-10-26T14:49:00.000-04:00

First performed in 1964, Dutchman has two characters: a white woman in her 30s, Lula and a black man in his 20s, Clay. It takes place on a subway train.

There's a wordless prologue where Clay, riding the train, sees a woman looking at him through the window (she's revealed later to be Lula). Caught unawares he smiles, then tries to shake off the encounter. The first scene has Lula deliberately sitting next to Clay and starting up a seductive conversation with him. He plays along, tries to keep everything 'okay' and goes along with her flirting. She runs her hand up his thigh, and pretends to know everything about him - but is cagey when he asserts himself into the conversation, expressing interest or opinion.

In the second scene, she describes how they'll be at the party, how they'll be when he comes home with her. She goads him - wants to dance with him on the train, calls him names, calls his parents names - he finally snaps. Grabs her, hits her and speaks his mind to her and to all - lets her know he could kill her right there, but then no poems get written. When he is done, she stabs him, throws him off the train and the train and its passengers carry on. Another young black man gets on and a old black man does a soft shoe down the aisle.

The play barrels through - like a train - and is hot with its anger. The conflict is on the train and its in the space between the audience and the action, and the world and the theater, the forces colliding in the play are echoed out from the stage (or the imagined stage). And structurally it is simple. A conversation. One dominating, the other trying to maintain their autonomy in a one-sided conversation - then bursting - then being killed by the dominant conversationalist. It's wickedly simple.

A play that feels like an object. No explanation comes from it. It is itself.

The Fantasticks - by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt

2009-10-25T13:08:00.000-04:00

A Two -Act Musical, The Fantasticks opened in 1960 and kept playing until 2001 (I think). There are nine roles, a pianist & harpist and a simple set - a platform, a cardboard moon and some wooden swords.

It opens with Try to Remember, which always makes me cry and El Gallo, who serves as a narrator, sets up the young lovers kept apart by their feuding fathers. But it turns out the fathers have only pretended to be feuding so that their children will fall in love. They then hire El Gallo to abduct the girl so that the boy can save her and they can stage a reconciliation and everyone can live happily ever after. This happens, and under the moonlight the lovers kiss with their happy fathers by their sides.

Then Act 2 opens under the hot sun. All the flaws are present, the magic is gone, everyone fights, the father's re-build the wall but for serious this time. The young man is enticed to go out into the world and see what there is to see. The young girl is seduced by El Gallo and makes plans to run away with him. El Gallo abandons her, stealing her mother's necklace, and the young man returns, worse for wear - but comforts her and they fall back in love and the fathers reunite as well. El Gallo has the last word, having provided them with the pain necessary to live a happy life.

There's some unfortunate choices that haven't aged well - the abduction is more often referred to as a rape, leading to a whole song about the different kinds of rapes - all romanticized and separate from the current meaning and freight of the word - but jarring to this reader. And the insistence on Indians and Hispanics as the bad guys. It's a play that operates with fairytale fantasies and flips those on the audience and the characters in the play, so yes it' going to reflect the stereotypes as it does so...but, alas that those are our stereotypes and that these two choices bog down a play that has so many simple riches in a small package.

My mom tells a story of seeing a traveling performance of The Fantasticks performed in Johnson, Kansas - a tiny farming town - when she and my dad were living there. The community hall was packed with farm families, everybody in the area coming to see the play. I imagine a dark plain, a warm light from the windows of the hall and the songs drifting out across the empty town.

You Can't Take It With You - by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman

2009-10-24T15:44:00.000-04:00

A comedy in Three Acts it says on the cover and that's exactly right. Premiered in 1936, You Can't Take It With You takes place in the home of Martin Vanderhof in New York City "just around the corner from Columbia University, but don't go looking for it," according to the stage directions. (The stage directions have a great tone, like someone from that era is kindof chatting you through the play.)

Martin Vanderhof's family and assorted others live in his house and do as they will, write plays, make candy in the kitchen and fireworks in the basement, run a printing press and study ballet, among other things. As it's a comedy there's a love story running the plot - Alice, the youngest grand-daughter works as a secretary on wall street and is seeing the boss's son. The first scene of the first act introduces the characters of the house and sets the scene. In the second scene Alice and her beau, Tony, get engaged and plan for the families to meet.

The Second Act is the evening before the scheduled meeting - dance class is going on, a portrait is being painted, explosions from the basement - and Tony's well-to-do family comes over on the wrong night. Social discomfort gives way to grand mis-steps as the worlds collide, Alice breaks it off, the parents leave and before they can go the whole house is placed under arrest for the distribution of revolutionary slogans (Trotsky - he liked they way they looked printed) and the gun powder blows up in the basement.

In the Third Act, also one continuous scene, Alice is trying to leave for the Adirondacks, Tony is trying to win her back, the dance teacher brings over a russian Grand Duchess - now a waitress at Child's Times Square and dinner is being made though no one has an appetite. Tony's father comes to fetch him back and Grandpa intervenes, talks about people being able to do as they will - not spend their time doing what they don't like out of habit or expectations. He quit business 35 years ago and never looked back, the father comes around, reminded of his past wishes to play the saxophone and fly on the trapeeze. Alice and Tony are re-united and Dinner is served. Grandpa says the blessing, (this echoing a previous blessing in the first act)

Well, Sir, here we are again. We want to say thanks once more for everything You've done for us. Things seem to be going along fine. Alice is going to marry Tony, and it looks as if they're going to be very happy. Of course the fireworks blew up, but that was Mr. DePinna's fault, not Yours. We've got our health and as far as anything else is concerned we'll leave it to You. Thank You. - Grandpa, Act III.

Written and premiered during the Great Depression there are references to that throughout - a character on relief, a Russian Emigre inserting comments about the five-year plan, there's a sub-plot of 20 some years of back income tax owed by Grandpa - averted because they buried a man under his name a few years back. The house is filled with activity, all of it chosen and purposeful to the person doing it - some for profit, some for the sake of doing and the family both by birth and those who have just decided to stay seem to enjoy one another as they are. Even when they say their painting stinks its not to stop them from doing it, just a statement of opinion.

So, I teared up at the end. I always do. I've read this one before - got to be in it in High School - as the dancer - and it's a beauty of a comedy.

The Balcony - by Jean Genet

2009-10-23T19:09:00.000-04:00

Performed in NYC in 1960 The Balcony unfolds during a violent rebellion in an un-named city at an indeterminate time. It takes place in a brothel - or "house of illusions" where elaborate role plays are enacted. There are 13 characters in the play and 8 scenes.

The beginning scenes are of the role plays, The Bishop, The Judge and The General enact scenes of power and glory with the assistance of the brothel employees. Occasional reminders of the rising treacherousness of the world outside filter in. By scene four Irma, who runs the brothel is introduced. The Chief of Police enters wanting to know if anyone has requested him as a role to enact. This is the crux of the play - the symbols of power - and from here the plot kicks in resulting in a wicked reversal where the brothel is the only refuge from the bloodshed outside, and an Envoy uses the role-playing Bishop, Judge and General as symbols to trot out in front of the people, along with Irma as the Queen.

In the final scene the Chief of Police is satisfied as one of the leaders of the rebellion comes in and wishes to enact him.

There's lots of corsets, lingerie, horse play and suggestive moments. Irma has a device with dials and a view finder from which she can see all the rooms of the house. The fantasies of power and the realities of power come into conflict - the men playing at it so enjoyed the fantasy and the reality takes all the fun out of it. The Chief of Police, also referred to as the Hero, once emulated wants to be entombed with victuals to last him 2000 years.

It was kindof a hard slog to read this, I found myself skimming ahead then going back because I had no idea what was happening. Much of the play's power would be in seeing it, I imagine. (And I have seen it, years ago - but I only remember the opening scene where they chose to have the Bishop masterbating and squawking...)

There's so many different uses of the stage, actors playing mirror-images, the men and women of the brothel coming in and out of role, costumes and props - this is a different kind of theater entirely. And after pushing through, the ending was satisfying, the way the images and questions he'd been setting up from the beginning with the elaborate role plays and the setting and the secondary characters all fell into service of his vision, a "caustic view of man and society" according to the summary. Yet...

Yet I wonder what this play asks of us now? What does the General, the Bishop and the Judge look like to us now? What Queen could be trotted out to bring peace after the rebellion? Do we have these figures and how are they dressed?

The Search for Signs of Intelligent LIfe in the Universe - Jane Wagner

2009-10-22T12:21:00.001-04:00

In keeping with randomness, this was at the used book store and I picked it up. First performed in 1985 by Lily Tomlin, (written for her by her partner, Wagner) it is a multi-character play to be performed by one actress. It unfolds in three parts and our guide throughout is Trudy, a former design executive, now bag lady who's gone crazy - or sane as the play suggests. She's in touch with aliens and assisting them on their search to understand humans, her knack is to channel other people - bringing them to life on stage.

The first part of the play introduces several characters of different walks of life and experiences in the 80s in America. The second zeros in on a group of women who have been friends since the ERA movement and struggle with roles of wife, mother, lover, activist, career achiever. There are connections between the first characters and the stories told amongst this group of women. The final section brings more of the characters into connection and has Trudy saying goodbye to the aliens, reflecting in amazement on our shared humanity.

Philosophical, representing a broad swath of americans during a moment in time, reflecting on where society had come from in the 70s and what it was wrestling with now in the mid-80s, it was long running on Broadway and was made into a film in 1991.

And now, reading it, it makes me sad somehow. Something about the hopefulness of the play looking at a moment in history 25 years ago, and a sense now of the dizzy-ing scale of the problems in our country and our world. The play's central point of view, that humanity should be appreciated, standing back in amazement and awe (doing "awe-robics") at people's ability to cry, to get goosebumps, to laugh - feels hollowed out, its simple truth eroded away by blogs and self-help literature and whimsical art saturating the atmosphere and becoming comfortable, self-assuring, white noise - unable to effect change.

I am left feeling cynical and depressed. I don't feel a lack of awe, but I feel overwhelmed by a lack of power to protect what is awe-inspiring.

Old Times - by Harold Pinter

2009-10-21T12:27:00.000-04:00

Premiered in 1971 by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London. Old Times is a play in two acts with no scene breaks. There are three characters, Deeley, Kate and Anna.

In the beginning they are all on-stage, although Anna is in dim light. Deeley and Kate are married and awaiting the arrival of Anna, an old friend of Kate's. Her only friend she says. Deeley is curious. Anna arrives from her volcanic island where her husband remains in a white dinner jacket. She and Deeley speak while Kate becomes vague-er and vague-er. She relates the old times, when she and Kate were room-mates in London, rushing off to art events and working as secretaries. She and Deeley sing snatches of old songs back and forth. Kate goes to take a bath.

In the second act, Anna and Deeley are present. They continue the reminsce with shifts. Deeley claims to remember Anna, fragments of what Kate has related to Deeley return in Anna's mouth with shifted meanings. Kate emerges from the bath, relating her happiness about the country, how soft it is. The vying for dominance of memory in the room takes a turn, things are sexually charged in an indeterminable way and Kate relates a memory of Anna dead in their room, covered with dirt. Her body disappeared and Kate brought Deeley home, wanting to cover him with dirt - instead they got married. Silence falls. Each character finds a chair to rest on, Deeley shifts around. Black out.

Absurdity, the self-conscious use of language - characters commenting on words that they don't hear often, misunderstanding the object of sentences, using strange constructions. The careful placement of pauses, of stage directions, of laughter - that seems menacing though I'm not sure why. All this is what makes it Pinters. When I read him I rush through then go back. I am worried someone will be killed, someone will attack, no one does in this play at least. That feeling of dream permeates it though - as well as absurdity, but it's not funny.

How? How does is this acheived? a combination of detailed, slightly off monologues with the rigid, deliberate dialogue. The sense of things being said in an echo chamber, silence all around them, a cold space. The feeling that anyone could be lying, and that everyone probably is - but it's all amongst such normal activity. They've made a casserole for a visitor, what if she's vegetarian? Is she married? Why doesn't she bring her husband? These opening questions turn into - why does she space out like that? Is she ill? Is she dead? Does her husband have an on-going affair with this old friend? Are they humoring the wife? The slipperiness and dead creepiness of memory sneak in and no explanations are forth coming, for a moment there's a sense of releif after Kate finally starts to speak. But she doesn't really explain anything and in fact is pretty disturbing, and her husband starts to weep, and no one says anything.

It is its own little nutshell.

Blue Window - Craig Lucas

2009-10-20T14:53:00.000-04:00

Blue Window was first produced in 1984 by the Production Company in NYC. There's a note in the published copy stating that it was developed with the director and cast - which makes a lot of sense. The text is inter-cut and over-lapping. There are three scenes in the play, 7 characters. The first and last scenes take place in several apartments simultaneously and the second scene takes place in one - with all the characters at a dinner party.

Each detail adds to the overall mood of the play, a dinner party on a Sunday night, late in the second scene we learn that it is the nervous hostess's first attempt - a hurdle to get over - with the story about her life coming towards the end of the third scene. A couple studying Italian in preparation for a trip, a composer working on a song - later talking about music - these become aural elements woven through the dialogue. There is a song at one point, breaking out of the action. There is a terrible story told. There are couples trying to stay together, to fall in love again. There is too much punch drunk, a rambling conversation about O'Neill, a speculation about what if we were in a play right now.

A particular feeling of Sunday night, the dread of the week ahead, saturates the play and the final image of a window, each disparate conversation creating their own metaphor for the object creates the ending of our evening.

Lear - by Edward Bond

2009-10-19T11:36:00.000-04:00

Lear is a re-telling of the story of Lear, premiered at the Royal Court in 1971. With a brief passage before the cast list Bond reminds the reader that:

According to ancient chronicles Lear lived about the year 3100 after the creation. He was king for 60 years. He built Leicester and was buried under the River Soar. His father was killed while trying to fly over London. His youngest daughter killed herself when she fell from power. (Holinshed and Geoffry of Monmouth)

I took this as a reminder that Bond's intention is to take the same liberties with this scrap of ancient history as Shakespeare did - not to rewrite or comment on King Lear - but to create an entirely new play.

There are 53 named roles in the play and space for an assortment of soldiers, workers, strangers, court officials and guards to be represented as well. The play is told in three acts. The first two acts have 7 scenes each and the final act has 4. The principle characters are Lear and his two daughters, Bodice and Fontanelle and a Gravedigger's Boy and his wife, Cordelia.

Lear is building a wall. The play begins with a worker being carted onstage dead, an axe in his head, and a summary judgment of death by firing squad leveled on the worker who accidentally did it. The wall is a mud pit, the work is not going well, every one is sick and to boost production the worker is killed to keep everyone in line. Lear envisions a wall that will keep out his enemies - particularly the Dukes of North and Cornwall. His daughters have been inspecting the wall with their father and use the firing squad as their moment to publicly question their father's judgment, suggest that he is insane, and announce their plans to marry North and Cornwall. Then the battle begins.

In the first act war is waged, the sisters try to out maneuver one another and their father, their confidante is tortured - tongue cut out and ears poked with knitting needles so that he will not blab, they have their husbands killed and defeat Lear's armies. Lear wanders to the forest, starving, and is taken in by a Gravedigger's son, who has left his father's profession to farm on this patch of land. He and his wife (Cordelia) raise pigs, grow food and live peacefully. The boy takes in Lear, feeds him and invites him to stay, he relates the troubles that he's had since the wall has been under construction - people forced to work rather than take care of their families, the injuries and death - he and others have been sabotaging construction. There's a moment of calm at the farm, broken by the daughter's soldiers who murder the boy, rape his pregnant wife, kill his pigs, poison the well and haul Lear off to prison.

In the second act Lear is imprisoned, the sisters continue their pursuit of power and as Lear begins to lose his mind contemplating the depth of injustice, he is visited by the ghost of the gravedigger's son. He and the boy's ghost comfort one another - and Lear asks for his daughters to appear - they do, as ghosts- but also as visions of their childhood innocence and seeking comfort from Lear. He tells them:

I know it will end. Everything passes, even the waste. The fools will be silent. We won't chain ourselves to the dead, or send our children to school in the graveyard. The torturers and ministers and priests will lost their office. And we'll pass each other in the street without shuddering at what we've done to each other. (Act 2, scene 2)

The tide soon turns and the wife of the Gravedigger's Son, Cordelia, has organized a rebel army and comes into power. The prisoners are force-marched to and fro, many are executed - including both daughters, and Lear is left to go mad in the hopes of doing himself injury. A prisoner, hoping to be smiled on - puts Lear in a straight jacket and removes his eyes - but it won't hurt because it's 'technological.'

In the final act, Lear has become a prophet of sorts, keeping house at the farm, taking in strangers and writing letters to Cordelia, faithful that she can be made to see reason. Soldiers come, more are imprisoned. Cordelia has renewed the wall building effort and Lear is shot dead in the woods.

I didn't intend to do such a long re-cap of the narrative, but once I started I wanted to work through it - and there's much more in the play of course. Bond lays out in his introduction what his political beliefs are (socialist, with faith in art/humanity over technology), the questions he is wrestling with through the play, and how he hopes to inspire hope and effect change through his art. The play reflects this and lives in it, depicting the cycle of violence, the fear motivating those in power, the plans and designs for peace and security that lead further into repression, desperation and insecurity.

There are glimpses of ways out of it - the fragile moments of peace on the farm, of comaraderie amongst the prisoners, of the ghost daughters - even Bodice is given a monologue seeking a reason for her new found power leaving her more fearful and alone - but they are only glimpses quickly dashed by the arrival of soldiers, guards, even workers rushing to their own oppressors.

Bond consitently asks the question of who's laws? and in service of what? by presenting the arbitrariness and 'justice' serving whoever happens to be in power. Lear's former councillor turns up at the end, seeking deserters in order to bring them back and punish them. Lear condemns his 'views' that they deserve their fate:

O I know what you think! Whatever's trite and vulgar and hard and shallow and cruel, with no mercey or sympathy - that's what you think, and you're proud of it! You good, decent, honest, upright, lawful men who believe in order - when the last man dies, you will have killed him! I have lived with murderers and thugs, there are limits to their greed and violence, but you decent, honest men devour the earth! (Act 3, scene 2)

At this point Lear gives up and wants to be left to live in peace, in the woods somewhere, so he can grow old and clever as a fox. His wish is not granted.

Love Song - by John Kolvenbach

2009-10-18T10:22:00.000-04:00

Premiered in 2006 at Steppenwolf, Love Song is a comedy in ten scenes. It moves between Beane, a recluse, seemingly depressive and his sister and her husband, Joan and Harry, who try to help him amidst their busy lives. Beane comes home in the third scene to a woman in his apartment, wearing his clothes, she came to steal but there's nothing to steal and Beane is transformed by his contact with her. In their second scene together she tells him:

MOLLY
Do you understand who I am? The last one? The architect? I took his stereo, I Ripped it out of his bookcse, It has no buttons and it's also a satellite and a particle accelerator and no decent person could possibly afford this Object and I am Ripping it out of his bookcase, I've got my boot on a shelf for leverage. But then I notice something: Hold on a minute. None of the books have been read. No cracked bindings, Beane. Not a wrinkle. I burned his house down. I got some gasoline and a blowtorch and my vengeance and I burned it to the ground. I waited for him to come home and I watched the architect cry and I felt happy for the only time this year. Is who I am.

BEANE
I think that's reasonable.

He falls in love with her. He tastes things, he develops a passion for the world. His sister and husband worry but then are inspired to play hookey from work and fuck all day. But then it becomes clear she is imaginary and Joan encourages him to hold on to her anyway. Molly comes back to Beane, but Beane chooses to try the world, knowing that Molly will be waiting for him should it not work out.

It's simple. It's fast. It starts immediately with a wordless scene of Beane in his apartment with the walls closing in. The dialogue is swift, smart, current. Funny and sad and lots of love, lots of different loves loaded into a small set of givens. And totally theatrical. Only theatrical. No bones about it - and even if you could give it Jungian interpretation of meeting and integrating the shadow self, the anima to your animus or whatever - it doesn't fall into pretention. It sticks to comedy - quick characters drawn swiftly with few details and dealing with this - an awkward brother, a caring sister and how they will live in the world.

There's no rhyme or reason to the choosing of plays for this experiment. I'm reading one everyday. I'm apart from my book collection so I'm relying on what happens to have been ordered recently and what happens to be in the used bookstores of Atlanta, GA. I like this randomness. It is kindof the point, to read widely and try to write a response to them. I haven't decided if unplublished plays will be included. I read those too, but I'm leaving them out for the time being. In fact - even a new play like today's & Ruined I'm finding harder to talk back to. And I'm not sure why that is...so I'm thinking about that.

Ruined - by Lynne Nottage

2009-10-17T11:22:00.000-04:00

Ruined was commissioned and premiered at the Goodman Theater in November 2008, co-produced by Manhattan Theatre Club.

The first play of this series that left me crying. Every play I've ever read by Lynne Nottage has left me crying. It is a two act play, six scenes in the first act and seven in the second. It is set in and in the immediate vicinity of Mama Nadi's bar and brothel located in a small mining town in the Democratic Republic of Congo. At the center of the play is Mama Nadi and her girls, particuarly Sophie and Salima, whom she agrees to take on the first scene of the play. Salima has been kept by soldiers in the bush, raped repeatedly and Sophie is 'ruined' - taken by a bayonet. Men pass through the bar, a salesman related to Sophie and in love with Mama Nadi, a diamond merchant and leaders from both the rebel and the government armies. The play gracefully weaves information and stories from the war torn Congo - the mining, the soldiers, the treatment of women, the lack of security, the betrayals, the bribery and violence - throughout its unfolding plot and revelations about the characters.

In the introduction director Kate Whoriskey writes about travelling to Uganda with Nottage to interview women in refugee camps, Congo was not safe for travel. She states that the initial impulse for the play and their collaboration was a notion of adapting Mother Courage using the war in the Congo as a setting. Nottage had been an Aid Worker in the area and was responding to the lack of international attention to this areas on-going bloody war. After this trip:

Lynn was interested in protraying the lives of Central Africans as accurately as she could, and she found Mother Courage to be a false frame. She decided to abandon the idea of adaptation in favor of a structure that was true to our experiences in Uganda.

The structure of the final play is strongly narrative and emsemble. The priciple characters are complex and through the progressions of scenes we learn more and more about their personalities and motivations. There are no simple solutions here. An exception may be the Army leaders who present themselves as big men and seem to believe their own rhetoric, making them unreliable, scary figures who terrify those they are proposing to assist. The inclusion of songs sung by Sophie with words that speak of the abandon longed for by those drinking in the bar and patronizing the brothel, tap into a world beyond the world of the Congo, into a universal longing for oblivion and escape from the terrors of their lives.

Unlike Brecht's desire to maintain a critical distance and present his audience with opposing visions of truth, Nottage has a clear vision of her character's truths and their inability to fit into a this or that structure. Her stated committment is to

celebrate and examine the spectrum of human life in all its complexities: the sacred with the profane, the transcendent with the lethal, the flaws with the beauty, and the selfishness with generosity.

With rich characters, escalating tension, incorporation of song and dance, and a setting that brings the concerns of the play into one place Nottage writes for a stage where the pain and struggles of another place are brought into our theatres and demand attention for the least acknowledged victims of a brutal conflict.

So far my questions have been reflecting on what plays of earlier years have to say to plays today. This is a play of today, the Pulitzer Prize winner, and a play decided absent from TCGs recent list of the most produced plays of 2009-10. Is this because it is a large cast? or because of content? where does it fit in the seasons of those theatres large enough do it justice? (or am I just revealing my ignorance of how this all works and it's going to finally get it's Broadway run?)

Coastal Disturbances - by Tina Howe

2009-10-16T10:43:00.000-04:00

Produced at Second Stage in 1986 and then re-opened in 1987. How to begin to describe? The play is set on a private beach in Massachusetts during the last two weeks of August. Those two choices dictate much of the play - the closing of a season, the cold days coming in, the privilege of the beach members. The play is organized into two acts - five scenes in each, spread out through the two week period.

It opens with the two lovers of the play meeting - Holly, a young photographer having a nervous breakdown of sorts and Leo, a hero-like dream boat in the tradition of Tennessee William's young men - a surplus of energy, sex oozing from him. Leo's been hired as a lifeguard after a young boy drowned, he's immediately effected by Holly and their relationship forms the spine of the play. Surrounding that is a dear older couple enjoying their annual seaside holiday, two mothers and their children (7 & 8), and a second act visitor - Andre Sor.

The couple and the families provide the landscape feeling of the play, an accumulation of conversations and actions that ebb and flow throughout. The children are beasts, constantly fighting and harassing Leo - and creating moments where one of the mother's freaks out and shakes her son - stopping the action dead. The roles of the children are pretty great, precocious and central to the play, they must have found some remarkable kids to perform these parts - and it would pose a challenge to any production - that and the giant decomposing whale that appears for one scene in the second act.

But, the second act visitor. Only vaguely mentioned in the smallest detail by Holly as the source of her breakdown, he appears immediately after Leo and Holly spend the night together on the beach, and is exactly as she's described. He's the european, older, sophisticate to Leo's primal, virile immediacy. He wraps Holly around his finger only to explain that he'll have to leave for Europe soon and yes, her show he's promised her must be postponed yet again. He upsets Holly, casts a dark black mood over Leo - who was the bright light of the play, tells the tragic and slightly cliched story of his childhood in Brooklyn as a WW2 refugee, and disappears again. Light returns in the final scene with Leo succeeding in wresting Holly's contact information from her, helping the old couple set up their anniversary celebration and gazing happily at her address.

To me it was a satisfying read and I wish to I could see it in production. It's large cast may make that very unlikely, but reading it inspires me to apply to some MFA program in direction and take it on. I think it's the grace of over-lapping actions and conversations, the sense of a beach at the end of the summer and the ease that moments of imagination are embarked on - only to be interrupted by a child's scream or the arrival of an acquaintance. Also people are reduced to wild emotion on several occasions - laughter, attraction, despair, anger - that just flies out there and passes on as well. At many points Howe indicates the stage like a painting, fixing images in my mind.

Again, its a play that defies being 'about' something, has a large cast - including full-blown childrens roles, and I imagine it with high production values. So, considering now, where do these plays go now? Sneaky quiet ones that pack a lot in about the way we live in this world, but modestly keep that tamped down - as is appropriate for their characters and subject, is there room for that in the current theatre?

Relatively Speaking - by Alan Ayckbourn

2009-10-15T12:20:00.000-04:00

In his introduction Ayckbourn states that this play was written in response to a request from his theatre for a play that people on their beach holidays would enjoy when it was raining, before going back to their landladies. It's a comedy, two acts, two scenes per act, four actors - two couples that hinges on misunderstandings, lies and attempted cover-ups. None of the characters are particularly malicious, but nor are they above seeing gain from others confusions.

I laughed out loud quite a bit - and groaned some too. There's great layering and mirroring going on in the play. In scene one, morning, a girl is trying to get out of the apartment to visit her parents and her lover gets suspicious - the phone keeps ringing and someone hangs up - or she speaks cryptically only to announce a wrong number, he finds men's slippers under the bed, there are piles of flower bouquets stashed in the bathroom...her explanations are barely plausible - and then as she's about to leave - he opens a drawer to get something for her, pulls too hard and boxes of chocolates fly out. And then there's more.

Looking at it structurally - the first act sets up all the misunderstandings - and the second act unravels them. The fun is seeing who figures out what when and what they do with the information. And the character most reprehensible - the older married man carrying on an affair with the younger woman and continuing to bother her even though she's asked him to stop - is the one who gets the comeuppance - through his wife finally figuring out the truth of the situation, continuing the ruse and using it to her advantage - and for the young couple's happiness.

A perfect play for a rainy Sunday by the seaside. And after I'd like a glass of wine, a plate of oysters and my love to wittily banter with.

Then - questions for today - do we have light comedies? Are the stakes too high to write them? Do young writers write them - or avoid them, cause fellowship money, prizes, theatres who produce new writers don't typically do light comedies - and what's it matter? Are we losing something...or is tv full of this type of fare?

In this case the content is light - but all characters are treated with respect, are full and true, real emotion vs. manipulative lies are trotted out to solid effect - and it feels very human... that should have a place somewhere, but does it?

Or do we just do these old plays - and then it seems like these fine qualities are things of the past?

A Lie of the Mind - by Sam Shepard

2009-10-14T10:26:00.000-04:00

First performed in 1985 with a cast including Harvey Keitel, Aiden Quinn, Amanda Plummer and Geraldine Page.

A man, JAKE, comes home believing that he's killed his wife after she's taken up acting and oiling up her body and not thinking about him and he beat her up. BETH, his wife, is battered and left with a speech problem. Her Brother, MIKE, brings her home to recover with her mother and father, somewhere in Montana. FRANKIE, JAKE's brother, goes off to find out what actually happened, ends up shot in the leg and stuck on the couch at BETH's house. JAKE recuperates in his childhood room with his mother and sister, eventually escaping in the middle of the night in his boxers and an American flag to find BETH. He's captured by MIKE, turned into a draft horse and forced to apologize to the BETH.

Other things happen, a house burns, a broken family returns to Ireland, a half a deer carcass is flung on stage, a story of a father being run down drunk on the US/Mexican border, a box of ashes, glimpses of better times in the past, memories of a crazy mother, a suspected lobotomy.

Part of the reason I am doing this is my woeful ignorance of written plays. I just didn't read them, or did in fits and starts and promptly forgot. I'm trying to learn about the written play and find ways to talk about them - but also trying to discover what I like about them - what I don't - and what does dramatic literature have to do with anything.

So, Shepard. All that stuff is here, the west, the gender roles, the violence of men - the mothers opting out in one way or another. These are themes I have heard are in Shepard's work. No one has lied about that. Harvey Keitel must have been amazing.

The play is laid out in three acts, alternating between the two family's, BETH's & JAKE's, and their attempts to heal their children - and the secrets and conflicts that brings out between parents, siblings and the past. At root it's the draw towards one another felt by JAKE & BETH, he's battered her nearly to death and each act ends in them crying out for the other. By the third act she's planning to marry FRANKIE who's been trying to get away from her house but can't because his shot leg's infected and there's been a blizzard.

Something about the play left me outside of it. The tropes are known - drunk men, long-suffering wives, violence just under the surface -

You can't save the doomed! you make a stab at it. You make the slightest little try and you're doomed yourself.

LORRAINE act 3, scene 1

It feels like narratives I've been trying to get out from under. The story of the woman who wants to be owned by her man, that wants to save him and is destroyed in the process. Women who bemoan the fact that men leave and become shells because of it, or pour their energy into defending their boys. Wives who are described as all female - or all love. I think because of this I resisted the play.

And in relation to Behan's play, which seeks to entertain - falls all over itself to entertain - while skewering those with power, this is a totally different beast. The ante is upped through escalating physical and emotional violence and it is the characters in the play who skewer themselves. Finishing with imagery and a sense that the American dream, the myth of the romantic pioneer and American Macho is the target.

The most hopeful part is the sister and mother of JAKE deciding to burn down the house, memories and all, dance a jog and head to Ireland to look up whatever straggling ancestors they can find.

I guess I want to be past the stories in this play - I want America to be past these ideas of men and women. But in fact we're not and this line from the final scene of the play still holds as much - if not more resonance today:

Haven't you got anything better to do than to monkey around with weapons and flags? Go outside and make yerself useful.

BAYLOR, act 3, scene 4.

Exactly.

Richard's Cork Leg by Brendan Behan

2009-10-13T10:42:00.000-04:00

Performed posthumously in 1972, edited with additional material by Alan Simpson.

A couple of anti-fascists, Cronin and The Hero hang out in a graveyard with some prostitutes planning to disrupt the funeral of a man killed fighting the communists in Franco's Spain by shouting anti-fascist slogans. The dead man is The Hero's cousin's husband, she turns up with her daughter and everyone ends up at her house after a gun battle breaks out at the funeral. She holds a committee meeting instructing them about the evils of female's dancing, which is interrupted by police disguised as meter men - seeking The Hero who shot someone in the arse hole during the fight. They storm the house, the Hero flees and Cronin is killed.

The play is filled with songs, digressions, upside down language, and the occasional direct address. (during a sex scene the lights go out and it is pointed out that when the author wrote it, acts like that were not allowed to be performed on stage)

Here's an excerpt from a song from Act Two:

You'd think 'twas a crime to be human,
And go for a swim in the sea,
And dance with no clothes in the sunshine,
And drink foreign lager for tea.

To regard co-existence with favour,
And nuclear weapons with fear,
To want more return for less labour,
Fatter fish, cheaper chips, better beer.

Let the heroes all die for the people,
If that is what they want to do,
And we'll struggle on here without them,
I've concluded, now, frolics to you.

As a writer I'm looking at the play for its structure - for the way with a minimal bit of action - there is a huge amount of political commentary that is always on the side of the characters in the play. He is an equal opportunity offender, attacking all those in power and the hypocrisy of the English, the Irish, the Church, the Communists and celebrating the resilience and comraderie of the young, dispossessed and alive in the Graveyard where the play is set.

I wonder where contemporary examples of this are? It makes me think of Lanford Wilson's Hot L Baltimore (which I just googled - and apparently inspired a short-lived TV show). But anything more recent? Big casts, stuffed with politics and satire, songs and irreverence? That is not a family drama.

Behan is pulling from so many rich troughs and throwing them into his play (which, granted, he didn't actually finish - but Alan Simpson claims to be working from pretty complete notes & fragments - which on reading does seem true) I wonder what the American troughs are? Or if with the advent of entertainment culture and mass media outlets our ditches of riches have grown too shallow?

"[...] that the music hall is the thing to aim at for to amuse people and any time they get bored, divert them with a song or a dance. I've always thought T. S. Eliot wasn't far wrong when he said that the main problem of the dramatist today was to keep his audience amused; and that while they were laughing their heads off, you could be up to any bloody thing behind their backs; and it was what you were doing behind their bloody backs that made your play great." Brendan Behan