Play a Day: Salvage

George Brant

This morning I read Salvage by George Brant, whose work is available on New Play Exchange.

A full-length play but a swift read, an artful three-hander for women. There is an ethical dilemma involved, as writers all we see and hear and experience form the basis for our work, but how much of what defines us doesn't belong to us alone?

Or at what point do we say, you know what? Fuck it, I'm a writer. I'm writing this.

Anyway, there are consequences to absolutely everything, aren't there. So, you know. Fuck it.

Salvage will be produced at None Too Fragile in Akron next month and so I asked George if I could read the script. The piece was originally commissioned by Theater 4 in New Haven, a company co-founded by my friend Mariah Sage, and she and her husband Bruce Seymour have co-penned a new work, The Tongue That Tells Me So, which receives a workshop production this weekend at Cleveland Public Theatre.

Tonight I will be attending The Tongue That Tells Me So. Perhaps I will run into George there.

Play a Day: Encanta

Shawn C. Harris

For Wednesday I read Encanta by Shawn C. Harris, available at New Play Exchange.

This is an absurd tropical adventure with amorous pirates, heartbroken witches, and murderous church ladies. Our heroes literally dance on the edge of a volcano.

They dance on the edge of a volcano.

The stage directions make the audience complicit in the action of the play. We are beachcombers, members of a costume party, a mob of kidnappers. I want to see the production where these things actually happen.

The piece wears its inspirations proudly, though I am curious as the whether the pirate Penzima and the sorceress Katrina are an intentional nod to Petruchio and Katherine, because they certainly could be.

This morning I woke from a particularly vivid dream; we were in a small club where Bryan Ferry was performing, He was seriously old and unshaven, and writhing on the floor. He found a fat potato chip and crushed it in his fingers as a metaphor about love.

Play a Day: Seeds

Donna Hoke

"Yesterday, we didn’t know anything about him, and today, I don’t know anything else."  I could have written that once, but I did not. That is from Seeds by Donna Hoke which I read today and is available for download at New Play Exchange.

In the past three days I have read plays about sex, death, and childbearing, each unique and original works, all of them touching on aspects of the human experience I can entirely relate to.

I think this is why I am doing this.

At that point in my life, when we were breeding, and we were surrounded by a cohort of likewise single-minded colleagues, getting on with our lives with also focused and engaged in the act of procreation, gestation, ideally successfully birth and the rearing and care of entirely helpless infant humans.

Except for those who did not, could not, or could not yet conceive or bring to term a child. There have been plays on this subject. This one succeeds in that it is not about that one thing, but how it affects all things, past, present and future combined, and that the more control you believe you have over the creation and development of life, the greater the chance for disillusionment, heartbreak and loss. Who, after all, do you think you are? God?

AIDAN: I have a son.
ALICE: Always.

Thank you for this.

Play a Day: Death and Cockroaches

Eric Reyes Loo

For Monday morning I read Death and Cockroaches by Eric Reyes Loo, available for download from New Play Exchange.

Eric tells a semi-fictionalized version of the death of his father with humor, honesty, and a surprising number of dicks.

I have a homoerotic dream last night and wake up to read a play that includes a wall of dicks. That part was odd, but not unsatisfying.

People keep telling me how lucky I was my father suddenly dropped dead one morning. It's not actually the kind of thing I like to hear, because I am still in the I'd rather he were not dead at all yet stage.

However, these sentiments are offered up from those whose own fathers lingered in dementia, Alzheimer's, or in the case of Loo's father, a poor heart that took its time to stop.

In the immediate aftermath of my own father's death, my mother second guessed her own decisions in the minutes, the days, the months before he died. Part of my job was in telling her there was no right decision, what has happened, happened.

I felt a great deal of sympathy for the Eric in this play, it's his story and he presents himself as a deeply flawed person. But he's the one who is there, in the same city as his parents, who are presented here as having very challenging personalities, and he has to cope with them, and the hospital, the health care providers, the hospice staff, his brother - the responsible one who lives in another city.

I can sympathize. I can also breathe a shameful sigh of relief that I didn't have to deal with any of that.

Play a Day: This Is How You Got Me Naked

Catherine Weingarten

This morning I read This Is How You Got Me Naked (a sexxxy comedy) by Catherine Weingarten, which is available on New Play Exchange.

God, I needed this play this morning. Weingarten writes entirely absurd but plausible Millennial dialogue with absolutely no shame.  If I didn't know any better, I would think this piece was written specifically to piss off my Baby Boomer colleagues.

Every generation tells their story of longing and unrequited romance. Every subsequent generation has their opportunity to say, yeah. That's not it.

Several years ago I was lurking in a coffee shop on a college campus, trying to think of what to think, when a cohort of young people settled in nearby and just started talking. I wrote some of it down. It seemed so random, like randomness for its own sake.

If I'd been paying better attention I would have followed the narrative, and not been distracted by the intentional distractions. I want you or I think I want you and in any case I don't want you to think I want you at least not until I know you want me. There's a million plays right there.

When did we move from friends with benefits to hookup bros?

I'm old.

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.