Play a Day: Running On Fire

Aurin Squire

For Saturday morning I read Running On Fire by Aurin Squire, which is available on New Play Exchange.

Plays about running are weird, because running is weird. A race is comprehensible, but "going for a run" can be entirely alien to someone who does not do that. It can appear the most trivial of athletic endeavors, and I say this as someone who desperately loves running.

But the act of running carries weight, because while running for sport is completely passive and innocuous (no contact, no competition, running for running's sake) most other examples of running are fraught. It is the result of fear or aggression. Running at something, running away from something.

I am a runner. I run every other day. I have run three marathons. I have kept a running blog since 2006. I am a white male and have never been jumped, catcalled, or been implicated in a crime while running. I have runner's privilege.

Squire's play presents a "town and gown" conflict, centering around an announced university-sponsored marathon which will monopolize a city park, a park which was recently the site of a sexual assault. One of the disheartening and unfortunately very real elements of the narrative is how far people of privilege will go to maintain normalcy in the midst of a crisis.

Numerous people of privilege have been made aware of social injustice as a result of the election. They ask each other, publicly, what action they should take. Too many follow the path that they had already set for themselves, and work to fit progressive action into their normative, daily existence. But there's no reason we should have to cancel the marathon!

And you know what? We always get to keep the marathon.

Play a Day: Rosalynde & The Falcon (BONUS)

Photo: Steve Wagner

I am not only a reader of plays on New Play Exchange, I am also a contributing playwright. Tomorrow night my new work, Red Onion, White Garlic opens at Talespinner Children's Theatre (TCT).

Since 2012, TCT has created professional productions designed for an audience of children and their families. They have a five-play season, four mainstage shows and a touring production, and each script is an original adaptation by a Cleveland-area playwright.

Red Onion, White Garlic is a collection of Indonesian folktales, woven together into a single narrative. Featuring a company of five women, the performance includes wayang kulit and sendrati (shadow puppetry and dance drama.)

Four years ago, TCT produced my play Adventures in Slumberland - adapted from the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland - and more recently, Rosalynde & The Falcon.

Inspired by Shakespeare's As You Like It, I also borrowed heavily from other tales like Snow White and Robin Hood to create a female protagonist who, instead of serving, cleaning up after or falling in love with any of the men she encounters in the forest, she becomes their leader, and eventually the ruler of the entire kingdom.

It's a short play, written in trochaic octameter, clocking in at around an hour. If you do read, please consider leaving a recommendation ... and thanks.


Performance rights for "Rosalynde & the Falcon" are available from Next Stage Press.

Play a Day: Use All Available Doors

Brittany Alyse Willis

One week, seven plays.

This morning I read Use All Available Doors by Brittany Alyse Willis and available on New Play Exchange.

The story takes place on a train, part of DC Metro. It is a conceit I envy, one setting that can accommodate countless stories and characters. I have dreams of taking advantage of our own public transit system, such as it is, but on a snowy April morning am resigned to two-person dialogue, me and the boy.

DAD: My new play opens tomorrow. I am nervous.
SON: As you should be.

Seriously, that's how my eleven year-old talks. Exactly like I do.

My wife remarked this morning that I seemed unhappy. She assumes I did not enjoy the play I just read. "No," I said, "that's not it. I liked the script, I like it a lot. There are unhappy conversations, and I am dwelling on those."

Hell is other passengers.

There are also moments of magic and grace and absurdity. Any time strangers begin dancing I am happy.

Real life intrudes. It is hard to concentrate when your President just pulled his first large scale airstrike with no clear explanation or strategy. This country is a fucking nightmare.

"Dad says stories were greater than facts."

Willis's play plumbs those points of transition, because its not where people believe they are, we believe we are where we were or where we are going, in transit is not a real place. It's like what my wife calls Airportland, the theory that all airports are really one airport, you don't actually exist in reality when you are inside Airportland. anything can happen, though usually nothing ever happens.

Stasis. The waiting.

Has anyone ever fallen in love on the subway?

Play a Day: Zamboni Godot

Ayun Halliday

This morning's read was Zamboni Godot by Ayun Halliday, and available on New Play Exchange. Last night we saw Jonathan Richman at the Grog Shop, so between that, my lucid dreaming and this play, my brain is pleasantly baked with absurdities.

I am a great fan of Ayun and her work, her books, (Peanut, The Big Rumpus) her zine, (East Village Inky) and her writing and performance as one of the original members of the Chicago and New York Neo-Futurists.

Members of the Neo-Futurists have employed a technique of deconstructing classic play texts to comment upon modern issues and anxieties. In this work, Halliday's protagonists are waiting everywhere, in the emergency room, at the amusement park, at the BMV. Beckett's original is only a template for Halliday's spare and insightful examination of every contemporary indignity, or perceived indignity.

Zamboni Godot is hilarious and "100% Bechdel Test Approved!"

Play a Day: Rare Birds

Adam Szymkowicz

Yesterday, my friend Tracey Gilbert posted a review for Rare Birds by Adam Szymkowicz which is currently being produced by Red Fern Theatre. I held onto the review and bookmarked the play at New Play Exchange for this morning's reading.

This is a story of cyberbullying, the narrative is familiar -- every generation has its movies about conflict in high school -- but the tools are modern. My own children are slouching toward high school and I am not unaware of the uneasy and permeable borders between them and the outside world.

When I was a teenager, most kids sitting lone in their room would be alone in their room, with only perhaps a old-fashioned telephone to make connection with any of their peers. When my children are alone in their room, they have the illusion of privacy, but their phones and screens mean they may as well be in the middle of the street, they can be everywhere at once.

Szymkowicz presents a world of cruelty, not without its motivation, but with the violence and abuse that seems random until you understand its origins. The tale could easily end tragically without a fortunate puella ex machina which is the fantasy of every straight, teenage boy.

Reminds me of the tagline from the Mortified podcast, We're freaks, we're fragile, and we all survived. Except we didn't. We didn't all survive.

Charged.fm says Tracey is "magnificent" is the Red Fern production at the 14th Street Y in NYC, which does not surprise me because she totally always is.

Play a Day: The First Time

Tracey Conyer Lee

This morning I read The First Time by Tracey Conyer Lee. This is my first exposure to her work. Last night I was casting about on New Play Exchange and I found her solo performance Standing Up; Bathroom Talk & Other Stuff We Learn From Dad which she performed a few years ago at the New York Fringe.

I may come back to that, I guess I decided I wasn't in the mood for a solo piece? Reading all these plays is inspiring, which is the point, but I am also trying to get something down on paper myself and reading others' dialogue is helping with that mindset. What do we talk about when we talk?

One thing that struck me about this play, which focuses mainly on five individuals, it how each of them are incredibly forward, it was bracing. I remember first experiencing Death of a Salesman and while I know this is kind of the point, it was irritating, so irritating, that no one said anything they were actually thinking, or that no one was listening to each other. Each of these characters are unafraid to express what they are thinking, at that moment, and there is great energy in that.

There's a moment in this work, in a place at a time, which brought me right back to my own childhood. It made me question so much. That's where we are now. It occurred to me this morning that I knew everything when I was twenty, and how much less I know today. Soon I won't know anything at all. It is making me a better writer.

Play a Day: Greyout

Whitney Rowland

This morning I read Greyout, a one-act by Whitney Rowland. We met in Valdez last summer, and though she made time to attended and comment upon my play I was unable to attend her reading of this play because I was in rehearsal for another reading, which was disappointing. Reading this work feels like I have taken care of some unfinished business.

A twenty-page excerpt is available at New Play Exchange.

May I ask once and for all what the hell "one-act" means? The title page said one-act and I was relieved to see that, based on the number of pages this play is indeed one act long. But theater companies around the country insist on advertising one-act festivals that are, in fact, festivals of ten-minute plays. Ten minutes is not an act.

Deep breath. Okay.

What are the consequences of bad memory, of bad wisdom, and how best to present them on stage. Going into dark places for writing is very challenging for me, because I am not sure what I will find there. Maybe I am worried I will find myself.

Unbearable horror and sorrow, leavened with seriously dark humor, just this side of guignol. Would like to have heard the comments after her reading, I would like to ask her about that.