Here Are The High School Plays! (Revisited)

To paraphrase what a traffic court judge once said to me, this blog has hair on it. Which is to say, it’s been around a while. When I began this blog on January 1, 2010, our kids were six and four. Now the younger one is entering his junior year at the University of Cincinnati, the elder just graduated with honors from my alma mater, Ohio University.

Seven years ago, I wrote a post about the kinds of plays being produced in American high schools. The elder (Zelda, I will name them, they are an adult now) a freshman in high school, was in their first evening of one-acts, which included Don Zolidis’s omnipresent 10 Ways to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse. Later that year, Zelda would play Poppy in a very good production of Noises Off.

One of my biggest regrets, if not theirs, was that they were cast as Celia in As You Like It their junior year, a production cancelled due to COVID-19. I hope to someday see them do Shakespeare.

Most plays chosen by high school drama departments, be they contemporary, classic or sometime in between, aren’t about high school students. I have been led to believe teens don’t want to play teens, they want to be something other than who they are. It is also true that many shows that have featured teenage characters feature poorly drawn teenage characters (I’m looking at you, Bye Bye Birdie.)

Recently, however, there have been several musicals that have broken through, due in part to their freshness and accuracy in addressing the concerns and interests of modern young people; musicals like The Prom, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and Ride the Cyclone. And in just the past few months, I have had the chance to take Zelda to see two recent plays that are very present and particular to the current moment.

The first was last spring’s Dobama Theatre production of Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, an 80 minute play about a competitive high school travel girl soccer team (I think I got those adjectives in the right order). I read it in 2020 and I loved it – as a soccer dad, I felt it rang with truth – and I thought, oh man! Zelda needs to read this! Then I thought again. They were in the thick of it, and this story might come as an unwelcome intrusion.

"The Wolves" by Sarah DeLappe
Directed by Nell Bang-Jensen
Philadelphia Theatre Co. (2020)

I did watch a production of The Wolves produced for Zoom in late 2020 by the Philadelphia Theater Company, which was surprisingly effective given the limitations of the technology. When Dobama announced their production, I thought, perfect! I can now take them to see that. It had been over four years since the quarantine-era match that took Heights out of the playoffs, and the flagrant foul that took our child, the keeper, out of the game.

So we attended the performance together. I was sure Z would be particularly drawn to the character of 00, the goalie for the Wolves, and in this production played by Jasmine Renee, who is also directing The Right Room for BorderLight this summer. Z said they loved the show, and also that they never need to see it again. I don’t know it, but I get it.

More recently, we saw John Proctor is the Villain on Broadway. The moment they went on sale we got tickets – I just had to take the family to see this show. And then I got very concerned. I loved the script, I also loved the Performing Arts Academy production two years ago, But … Broadway? Would it work? Would it be successful? Would the market bear a play about the very real concerns of people who were not yet adults?

The marketing campaign was interesting. I kept getting texts that were written (I guess) like an actual teenager was sending them. I forwarded one to the rest of the family and Zelda thought I’d been hacked.

Long story short, the production is not only successful but very successful, and nominated for seven Tony Awards. Having seen Oh, Mary! last fall, this is only the second time I have had the chance to see two Tony nominated shows before the awards drop – the first was two years ago when we saw Merrily We Roll Along and Purlie Victorious on the same weekend in late 2023.

The evening we attended John Proctor was a Tuesday night, and the place was packed. So many young people! So many young women! Attending a play! And they were rewarded, too, as the entire company who played the teenage characters signed everyone’s program at the stage door.

This is a fascinating time in American theater, where challenging new ideas are making their way onto professional stages across the nation. That the voices of young people are represented with honesty and accuracy, and in a way they have not been before. Will plays like The Wolves or John Proctor is the Villain supplant chestnuts like Twelve Angry Men or The Crucible on our high school stages? And would it be such a terrible thing if they did?

See also: 

Here Are The High School Plays! (2018)

Play a Day: John Proctor is the Villain

"Oh, Mary!" at the Lyceum Theatre

Cole Escola in "Oh, Mary!"
(The Lyceum Theatre, 2024)

Last month, my wife and I took a whirlwind, twenty-four hour journey to New York City. The past several years, since the quarantine, we have tried to get back at least once a year. Life is too short and we have the miles.

Why now? For my birthday she got me tickets to see Oh, Mary! Cole Escola’s outrageous, ahistorical comedy, centering on the character of Mary Todd Lincoln. I have had a fascination with this show (and Escola) since it opened Off-Broadway earlier this year, a fascination bordering on obsession.

Clips of the show and interviews with its creator had popped up on my socials, and I followed the show as it went from the Lucille Lortel to the Lyceum, a Broadway upgrade for an absurd, profane and deeply queer little drag show.

I was shocked when I received her gift – I hadn’t thought to actually see it! A limited summer run had been expanded into November (and just announced, through January) and anyway, I was thrilled. My love takes me to the best places.

We’d fly in Saturday night, stay in Times Square, see a Sunday matinee and pop out again that night. I worried that on a Sunday matinee there may be an understudy (spoiler, there was not) and things being how they are, we were both concerned about the dependability of air travel, but there were no unpleasant surprises there, either.

I have never stayed in the Times Square district before, my spouse is always very good at finding places in interesting and much less absurd Manhattan neighborhoods. But it’s not like the 1970s, our room was immaculate and stylish (and tiny, of course, who cares) set high above the chaos.

Riding along on a carousel!

We dropped our bags in our room, freshened up and sought out The Rum House for cocktails, live jazz, and the most expensive dish of mixed nuts. The band was lively and engaging, a trio of men all somewhat older than myself, piano, trumpet and washboard, that last doubled as the singer, a scruffy ringer for Bobcat Goldthwait with beard and pork pie hat. The drinks were creamy and excellent, she watched the crowd and I kept an eye on the passersby on 47th Street.

No one smokes. I watched maybe a hundred people pass by the window, none of them were smoking, it really is amazing.

The next morning we were able to lie about a while and relax and talk (there is no one I would rather do nothing at all with) before having brunch at the hotel and taking a walk up and out of Times Square and into Central Park.

There are those who refer to NYC as an urban hellscape, but all I could see were families playing, folks running or biking, musicians and magicians, all on a bright beautiful late summer day.

There was a meadow, too, like a natural, untended meadow we found, one that has been recently established, and walked through. It did my heart good.

We had a moment of crisis waiting for a ride on the Central Park Carousel when I casually mentioned that Trump owns it – I don’t remember where I heard that – so she did some research and found that thought Trump Organization had once paid for maintenance of the carousel, following the events of January 6, the city broke all financial ties with the former president.

We took a delightful spin on the carousel.

Caption: Romeo & Juliet, 1995

The Lyceum is the oldest, continuously operating Broadway theater, designed in the Beaux-Arts style, which basically means its very fancy, ornately decorated and very fussy. The lobby and staircases feature photographs of the many storied entertainers who have played that stage over the past 120 years – but also, if you are paying attention, you will notice there are also currently photos of Cole Escola starring in fictional productions of Doubt, Fun Home, Romeo and Juliet, and many others. Captions attributed to the artist explain how each of these shows were complete economic and critical disasters.

Several of these photos were also on display above urinals in the gentlemen’s toilet.

Oh, Mary! Is about a frustrated former cabaret singer trapped in a loveless marriage to a closeted man who happens to be Abraham Lincoln and she the sixteenth First Lady of the United States of America.

When Seth Myers asked them about how much research they had done to write the script, Escola replied, “I did less than no research. I actively forgot things I knew about Mary Todd Lincoln.”

They went on to stress that the show is a comedy, and that they wanted it to be accessible to everyone, that there are no “in-jokes” about the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, though there is one big “in-joke” where the audience discovers the identity of the acting tutor Lincoln has hired to occupy his manic spouse.

Post-show cheeseburger.

Cleveland playwright Thomas P. Cullinan wrote another chamber play about the life of Mary Todd. Mrs. Lincoln premiered at the Cleveland Play House in 1968 and, like this newer play, was also held over six months due to its enormous popularity. That is where the similarity ends, however, as Mrs. Lincoln (starring Evie McElroy in the eponymous role) is a psychological drama about the years after the assassination when the historical Mrs. Lincoln was institutionalized.

Plain Dealer critic Peter Bellamy was effusive, calling Mrs. Lincoln, "an absorbing, engrossing and literate play" adding that" nobody could portray the mercurial Mrs. Lincoln with more theatrical effect that Evie McElroy. Her performance is a truly great one."

In his review for the Cleveland Press, Tony Mastroianni called Mrs. Lincoln, “an evening of theater that is both entertaining and informative.” And it is informative, indeed. It is a challenge balancing the forward momentum of a plot with facts.

From Mrs. Lincoln:

MARY: I’d as soon dine with Billy Herndon as with that man!
SALLY: Now who’s Billy Herndon?
MARY: My husband’s law partner.

Escola said they didn’t want to be writing jokes thinking “that’ll get a laugh because that’s where she was born!” Or because that's her husband’s law partner! I get it now. Of course, Cullinan was not writing an historical comic play ... but I have, or I have tried to. And mine are all a bit too heady.

From These Are the Times:

VOICE: Looks like you’re quite a baseball fan!

CHILD: You see this letter “C” on my cap? That stands for Cleveland, and it’s a logo I can be proud of!

VOICE: And HOW!

Cringe. I'm working on that.

The fictional protagonist of Oh, Mary! fares much better than Cullinan’s factual one, achieving her dreams of returning to the cabaret stage, though, who knows? Maybe she has also gone mad. But what a way to go!

My wife and I were both also delighted with Conrad Ricamora, who plays Lincoln starting at an eleven and going higher from there. The entire ensemble is a master class in comic tropes and timing. I'm so glad I got to see this show.

GUESS THE SHOW: 

A. "The character of Mrs. Lincoln is at once tragic, funny, pathetic and unbalanced."

B. "An acting style that’s as expressionistic as a silent movie or opera ... while at the same time imposing an almost balletic control over gesture and pose."

C. "There were times when a movement or intonation reminded me of the late Ruth Feather ..."

Sources:

"Mrs. Lincoln's Torment Staged" by Peter Bellamy, The Plain Dealer, 11/2/1968

"Mrs. Lincoln's Fascinates Through Fresh Viewpoint" by Tony Mastroianni, The Cleveland Press, 11/2/1968

Late Night With Seth Meyers, May 7, 2024 (NBC)
Cleveland Arts Prize, Thomas P. Cullinan (Literature, 1971)
"What Makes ‘Oh, Mary!’ One of the Best Summer Comedies in Years" by Jesse Green, The New York Times, 7/11/1968

Guess The Show:

A. Mrs. Lincoln (Mastroianni)

B. Oh, Mary! (Green)

C. Mrs. Lincoln (Bellamy)