Play a Day: Peter Cratchit, Esq.

Kerr Lockhart

For Tuesday, I read Peter Cratchit, Esq. by Kerr Lockhart and available at New Play Exchange.

A sequel to Dickens's classic, the son of Bob and Emily Cratchit is the director of the charitable organization left behind by Ebenezer Scrooge. Lockhart creates snappy, witty conversation, and peoples the story with characters original and familiar, a celebration of the world of non-profit and the pople in it.

This Christmas fable takes place in the middle of August, something I can entirely sympathize with as I, too, have to begin celebrating the holidays in my own way at that time of year, sending the guidelines to our holiday writing contest to Cleveland public schools in the middle of summer.

Who should I read tomorrow?

J. Todd Adams as Bob Cratchit
(Great Lakes Theater, 2014)

Play a Day: Drowning Ophelia

Rachel Luann Strayer

For Monday, I read Drowning Ophelia by Rachel Luann Strayer and available at New Play Exchange.

Water is a powerful agent. It is a lubricant. It is an adhesive. It can cleanse. It can kill you.

The use of actual water onstage can be as disorienting as nudity. Each, handled in appropriately, can take you out of the production.

Because water is an uncertain element. You can slip. You can fall. And then there's the whole just being wet part.

In Bloody Poetry, as John Polidori I had to enter wet. I had fallen out of a boat (offstage) and had to enter dripping. For Lysistrata, buckets of water were dumped on people, so much so that one hot weekend an actual fog was generated onstage due to the water and the heat.

That last production was produced at Cleveland Public Theatre, where I have seen a great deal of water used on stage, in Melissa Crum's haunting production of The Drowning Girls, and in several of Rayond Bobgan's devised works. I recall Open Mind Firmament, which concludes with W.B. Yeats (Brett Keyser) sweeping torrents of water into the air, caught by the light, sweeping in fractured arcs.

Hamlet is an inscrutible play. Shakespeare is usually pretty straight-forward. If someone is sad, it is because we just saw what has made them sad or, failing that, they will just tell us why they are sad.

Hamlet, the man, in spite of all his talk, leaves things out. Or he doesn't make sense. We are missing bits. Unfortunately, trying to divine his motivation has made people question the motivation of everyone else in this play, in spite of their more traditional Shakespearean behavior.

Ophelia tells her father that Hamlet has courted her in "honorable fashion." We should believe her, but few do. His smutty talk at the play leaves many to assume they have had sex, but it's his smutty talk. Later, she sings bawdy songs which many take to believe as commenting on their carnal experience, even going so far as to suggest that she is pregnant. Shakespeare is usually more unfront about such things.

Why does Ophelia go mad? It is because her lover rejected her and then murdered her father. Her lover murdered her father, Occam's razor.

Strayer's Drowning Ophelia is a survivor's tale, of a woman's journey to rise above the brokenness and betrayal one feels when abused by a beloved family member, one whose departure makes confrontation impossible.

Ophelia never had the opportunity to confront her abuser, and so Hamlet gets to move forward feeling as though he got something wrong and feel bad about it. Strayer's protagonist also grapples to attain peace through action, fighting madness, and we are left to hope that she some day will.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: The Great Porn Caper

Bryan Stubbles

For Easter Sunday, I read The Great Porn Caper by Bryan Stubbles and available at New Play Exchange.

Bryan is a prolific playwright from Utah, currently staying-at-home in Jakarta (or so he claims) and a social media gadfly who has often promoted my schtick at his blog, Unknown Playwrights, which you should visit and often.

I am a big fan of his research into theater posters from across time and space. Theater posters still promote interesting and evocative graphic design, as movie posters absolutely no longer do.

The Great Porn Caper is a playfully sordid road trip for disaffected Post-Millennials (can we stop saying "Gen Z" for God's sake) which roils with absurdity and loopy wordplay while also taking the piss out of Neo-Nazis, white trash, and Donald Trump, or did I just say the same thing three times.

I would love to see a production of this play, preferably in a storefront theater with like twenty folding chairs for seats, and not just because I want to see young people in swimwear although that is part of it.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Marginalia

Katherine Gwynn

Traditionally, I provide a bonus post on Saturdays in April. One post is for having read a new play, the second to reflect upon a play that is currently in production, that I have just seen, or maybe even a production of my own plays.

Not so this April. I have seen plays, recorded to be broadcast on screens. My wife and I watched Lauren Gunderson's I and You at the Hampstead Theatre, we saw that on Instagram last week.

My daughter and I watched the "Great Performances" broadcast of Ken Logan's Red, starring Alfred Molina. My daughter is a visual artist, I thought she might be interested, and I am glad to say I was right.

Those are the plays we have seen in April, 2020.

For Saturday, I read Marginalia by Katherine Gwynn and available at New Play Exchange.

Gwynn celebrates marginalia, those notes found in the marins of printed works, as well as the illustraions created for illustrated manuscripts, as well as those who dwell on the margins, the powerful women, the knowledge-seeking women, the men who would live in sbsurvience to women, those who would seek non-heteronormative relationships, and the transgendered who seek to be seen for who they truly are.

Today, and with plays such as these, those historically in the margins move onto the page itself. In the 14th century abbey which is the setting for Gywnn's drama, this journey is only beginning.

The playwright also celebrates passion; passion for books, passion for reading, passion for writing, and passion for passion. It is a lively little abbey, peopled with charming characters, each seeking their own garden of earthly delights. If only the world were more like this Benedictine cloister.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Inherited Traits

Nick Malakhow

For Friday, I read Inherited Traits by Nick Malakhow and available at New Play Exchange.

When I was a senior in high school I took Psychology. Learned a lot of things that were not helpful. You are warned not to self-diagnose, but hey. Seventeen year-olds, what are you gonna do?

We had to write a term paper. I asked, as a joke, if I could write about parapsychology. Probably heard the term first in Ghostbusters. The teacher was a gadfly, he said sure.

So I asked for a suggestion, because I didn't really want to write about ghosts or anything like that. He told me to write a paper on astral projection, so I did. He even recommended others teachers I could speak to as subhects. That was crazy.

What I most learned through my brief study was that I can respect those who have experiences that defy modern scientific understanding. I also came to understand and appreciate that I am firmly grounded in this reality and that I will never be able to open my mind to have such experiences.

Or maybe that's not true. There was a period in college where I was separated from my physical self and at that time, perhaps. I was leaning into the Dreamworld and finding I could spend some time there.

If this all sounds silly to you, congratulations. You are firmly grounded in this reality.

Malakhow spins a tale of ghosts and relations, for it is the ghosts of relations who haunt us the most.

These past few nights I have been thinking of mom before sleep, and feeling quite melancholy. It comes at me with surprise, and quite hard. Only at bedtime, though. There's too much to think about during the day.

Isaac in the play Inherited Traits is also haunted by his mother, who she was or is. And by her literal astral self, who can only see so far herself, even in this state.

I always wonder, does Hamlet's father know everything once he's dead? Does he understand the past? Or is he still limited by his own experience being murdered, and the seeing his brother and wife together in the aftermath of his death? If we do have life after death, what is the extent of our consciousness?

The narrative in this play has tension and humor, an ingithful view into generations of shame but also care, and a lot of open wounds begin to heal.

Who shoud I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Aliquippa

Lydia Valentine

For Thursday, I read Aliquippa by Lydia Valentine and available at New Play Exchange.

Lately I have been made aware of the use of board games to illustrate to young people (and not young people) the concept of instutitional racism.

One example, in brief: Four people play Monolpoly. Actually, two play, and two watch. The two people playing move around the board, accumulting property and wealth.

After maybe a half hour to forty-five minutes, the other two are invited to join the game. Two people have all of the wealth and property, and the other two have nothing but are free to move about the board, scraping together cash and paying rent for everything. Got it? That's America.

With her play Aliquippa, Valentine has composed a painful and joyful family drama of tragedy and hope. Four generations of Lockwoods aspire to difficult dreams in a nation where the rules remain set against African Americans. The playwright neatly weaves issues of economics, chemical dependence, and raising non-heteronormative children, providing each of her characters the opportunity to have a voice, doing so with a great deal of warmth and familial humor.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Sources: 
Using Monopoly to Introduce Concepts of Race and Ethnic Relations by Warren Warren, The Journal of Effective Teaching (2011)
The Disturbing History of the Suburbs, Adam Ruins Everything (2017)

Play a Day: Be a Mensch

Daniel Takacs

For Wednesday, I read Be a Mensch by Daniel Takacs and available at New Play Exchange.

Four years ago, which may as well be a lifetime ago, we were talking about four hundred dollars. As in, what percentage of Americans are four hundred dollars from crisis. That that is the line between moving forward, and total disaster.

Asking for charity has less stigma than it used to. It still has a stigma, no question. But how many people do you know have been assisted by a Go Fund Me page - maybe set up by someone on someone else's behalf - to get them through a difficult economic time?

Socialism remains a dirty word, state-sponsored socialism. But we practice private socialism every day. Targeted assistance. I give my money to help the people I know. But it's not much. It's never enough. Imagine if we all gave to help everyone. But Americans don't want to help everyone, because we hate those other people.

Now, to family. Whether we're teaching Salesman or Glass Menagerie, we ask the question, what do we owe family? Do we owe them anything? What do they owe us?

Takacs has created a modern sit-com with Be a Mensch, a Jewish Glass Menagerie (complete with fragile unicorn) in which the eldest son is also faced to choose between his family and self-determination, dominated by a larger-than-life absent father figure. Only in this case Abram is not dreamily self-involved as Tom Wingfield is, but harshly realistic.

It's a coming of age story, one with a much more satisfying, if troubling, conclusion than Tennessee Williams's memory play.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Sources: Could You Come Up With $400 If Disaster Struck? Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR (4/23/2016)
The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans by Neal Gablet, The Altantic (5/2016)