LOCAL STORY on Indie Theater Now

Indie Theater Now has been creating an on-line collection of plays, and today LOCAL STORY is live on the site.

You can read it for a pittance. Then you can dream of tiny Betsy and learn the sort of local history that they don't teach in school.

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Angels Fall - by Lanford Wilson

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

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.)

The Pain and The Itch - by Bruce Norris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Fat Men In Skirts - by Nicky Silver

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

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

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

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

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.

Trojan Barbie - by Christine Evans

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.

Hysterical Blindness - by Laura Cahill

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?

The Lesser Magoo - by Mac Wellman

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.

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

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.