Ten Amazing Productions in 2024

Ride the Cyclone

One of the issues with being in a holiday production is that you can’t see anyone else’s holiday production. Especially when your show has eight performances a week. However, I did get out to see as much as I could throughout the year. Here are a few of those, presented in chronological order.

Ride the Cyclone (Beck Center for the Arts) I knew this musical by reputation, or rumor, as it has a great following among young theater people. The subject matter is quite upsetting: five high school kids are killed riding a roller coaster and remain in limbo while they debate who has lived the least, and that person gets to survive. But what the show really is is a chance to defend who you are, and to have acceptance for who that is.

Clue: High School Edition (St. Paul Central High School) Visiting my brother and his family in the Twin Cities, we went to the Guthrie to see Bill Irwin’s solo performance On Beckett (which we had previously experienced online during the quarantine) and I also got to see my niece in this high school play, based on the 1985 film. Like a lot of people of a certain age who didn’t watch this movie incessantly on cable, I don’t “get” Clue. But a tightly choreographed high school production just pops, packed with a variety of great roles for teens to play.

Funny, Like an Abortion

Funny, Like an Abortion (Cleveland Public Theater) There is a bill set to be introduced in the South Carolina statehouse to make abortion a capital crime. Rachel Bublitz’s hilarious and harrowing two-hander that unfortunately continues to be relevant. The CPT production was audaciously animated, concluding with a direct appeal to vote, and I will assume everyone in the audience did vote, though we can’t be certain for whom.

The Toothpaste Millionaire (Talespinner Children’s Theatre) Theater is a collaborative art and there is little more satisfying for a playwright than watching a play you have written coming together the way you hoped it would. This production was playful, colorful, energetic, animated, intelligent and fun. We’ll destroy Capitalism some other day, for now it is a treat to see a lively story about pre-teen kids taking down Big Dentafrice.

The Golden Girls

Standing at the Sky’s Edge (Gillian Lynne Theatre) We saw a few shows on our recent visit to England (more on that here) but this one made a deep impact. I’ve fallen in love with the recording and the music of Richard Hawley, and the braided storyline was a major inspiration on a piece I am currently writing.

Last Ship to Proxima Centauri (convergence-continuum) We need more science fiction plays. The Liminis was just the perfect space to mount Greg Lam’s claustrophobic play set in the deck of a ship arriving late to the landing party, you could fairly smell it.

 
The Golden Girls: The Laughs Continue (Hanna Theater) Between this and Oh, Mary! (more on that show here) I have decided I need more drag in my life. I was fortunate to catch a slice with my friend Adam Graber while he was in town playing Rose in this drag tribute to a very popular television program I have never watched. He was able to not only give me the deets on the source material, but also the history of this touring production which has become a big part of his life for the past two years.

Acts of Clay

Acts of Clay (Wizbang Theatre) You been to Wizbang yet? In addition to their own circus performance work and other non-traditional theatrical offerings, just before spooky season, they were host to this collection of brief horror plays by Stuart Hoffman in the manner of the Grand Guignol: tales of treachery, the supernatural, the grotesque and also humiliation and cuckoldry.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Great Lakes Theater) We’ve been taking our kids to see theater since before they could write. One of the first show we took our eldest to was Into the Woods at GLT, and I was very excited about taking them to see this fall’s production now that they are an adult – but they were even more jazzed to see the show that was being performed in rep with that one, because Midsummer was the very first play they ever saw. During the performance I sat next to their girlfriend who had never seen this Shakespearean play and it is truly wonderful to get to share a story like this with someone new.

Two Shakes

Two Shakes (Goldhorn Brewery) I had the great pleasure to read a new script by Luke Brett with the playwright himself before an excited and lovely crowd; Two Shakes is not mere bardolatry, but an insightful investigation of who we are when we are young, what we become when we are old, and even the value in vanity.

There are already several shows I plan to see in the new year, and as I have intimated, there is a new piece I have been creating this year. I have had three private readings for it since last spring, each time giving it a new edit, and now I am struggling to decide if I should self-produce ("stop me before I self-produce again") so if you or someone you know want to be a lead producer on a new work, hey. You know where I am.

Seriously, as far as my own work in theater is concerned, the new year is a mystery to me. And for the first time, perhaps for ever, that is entirely okay.

Last Ship to Proxima Centauri (revisited)

Kennedy Kanagawa, Marcy McGuigan, Tom Ford
(Portland Stage, 2022)
Photo by Mical Hutson

For five years, I read a full-length play each day in April, selected from those available at New Play Exchange. This year I have too many other obligations to make that commitment. I am drafting two new pieces for school and will be re-drafting an existing script for End of Play, a writing initiative created by the Dramatists Guild.

Reading one hundred and fifty new full-length plays, though … and during the Trump years? It was inspiring, and in no small part stimulated me in my own craft. Rarely, however, have I had the chance to see any of these works on stage, in development or in production.

So, I was thrilled when playwright Greg Lam posted photos of the set for his play Last Ship to Proxima Centauri being constructed at Portland Stage, and when it was announced that the piece would be available for streaming near the end of its initial run!

In brief, Proxima Centauri is about that time in the not-too-distant future when Earth has become uninhabitable and hundreds of ships set out on a two thousand year voyage to reach a potential new home planet. That this last ship is the only one to arrive that launched from the United States, arriving over a century after everyone else, complicates their arrival.

The concept works very well as a play (as opposed to a film or any other media) as it has one set – the deck of an interplanetary vessel – and only five characters.

Spoilers Ahead

Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Jamal James
(Portland Stage, 2022)
Photo by Mical Hutson

The inhabitants of this new world, descendants of those who arrived from nations historically oppressed by the American empire, are not happy about being inundated by 100,000 largely white newcomers. Having survived and created a thriving system of shared sacrifice, what would it mean to admit a vast number of new residents who would no doubt insist on things to be the way they were back on Earth?

The philosophy behind this saga is a nightmare for many white Americans, what they might deride online as “the future that liberals want.” And it points up the errors in the logic of American exceptionalism. Freedom to do or say whatever you choose is a decadence that can only be afforded the powerful, and being white in America is power.

Our so-called freedoms, of speech, of religion, of guns, these freedoms exist so long as there is a power structure to defend it. Without that, no one would survive. Civilization defines humanity, and without that white Americans are just animals; screaming, crying, angry animals.

The performance is available online through Sunday, April 3. For those in the Cleveland area, you might be excited to learn the acting company includes Tom Ford, who has been a much-beloved player on the stage at Great Lakes Theater, where he played Sweeney Todd, Henry Higgins, Monsieur Thénardier, and so many others memorable roles.

"Last Ship to Proxima Centauri" by Greg Lam continues online from Portland Stage through April 3, 2022

Play a Day: Last Ship to Proxima Centauri

Greg Lam

For Friday, I read Last Ship to Proxima Centauri by Greg Lam and posted at New Play Exchange.

So-called “cancel culture” is the phrase used by those who feel threatened by the idea of one being held accountable for one’s own actions. Tearing down a Confederate statue is not erasing history, it is no longer accepting the adulation of bad history. The history remains, but we will no longer allow it to be held up as an example of good behavior.

How will future generations judge us? Four, five mass shootings in the span of one week? And we remain indoors, we aren’t in the streets, we have not called for the resignation of every elected official for their refusal to act? What does that say about us? Are we not all responsible?

Lam’s play Last Ship to Proxima Centauri is fucking hilarious, and deeply troubling. And fucking hilarious. What if the Americans were the last to arrive at a planet already resettled by all those other survivors of our dying planet, none of whom are of European ancestry? Why on Earth (or Yeni Dünya, the “New World”) would they not be less than happy to see us?

“They all had guns. And they shot all the blacks all the time.” That is our history, as it is remembered. Any argument to the contrary begins, “Whatabout ?”

What keeps this play charging along are those gut punches Lam includes, without additional commentary, suggesting that the 100,000 Americans held in stasis for the 2,000 journey include some “very fine people” or when the one BIPOC American who is received during the ship’s crash landing defends the reputation of white Americans by stating that “most of my friends are white.”

It’s devastating, devastatingly funny, and now I need to write my Senators.

Who should I read tomorrow?

See also: Last Ship to Proxima Centauri (revisited)