Play a Day: 1980 (Or Why I'm Voting For John Anderson)

Patricia Cotter

For Sunday the last day of April, I read 1980 (Or Why I'm Voting For John Anderson) by Patricia Cotter, and available from New Play Exchange.

"It would be nice to change ... the world."

After all that has happened -- during the last one hundred days, and after the past thirty days reading plays about race and gender, about relationships and politics, comedy and tragedy, sex and terrorism, despair and hope -- it was only fitting I conclude with a period parable reflecting upon that greatest of American traditions, believing in a loser.

I am just old enough to remember John Anderson running as a third-party candidate for President, but not old enough to understand the implications. I started reading Doonesbury when I was twelve, just after Reagan was elected, so it wasn't until the book of recent strips came out that I became familiar with a certain phrase I have used myself once too often ... Mike is at a small phone bank in a dismal campaign office in New Hampshire, cold-calling for this doomed Illinois congressman, and he responds to a disinterested voter by saying, "Well, he's never heard of you, either."

We did win on November 8. We got the most votes. Can you be so right and still lose everything?

The four characters in Cotter's play, three women, one man of color, they each believe in the underdog, each for their own reasons, and they work for him but without the fire that the zealot possesses. Anderson's campaign was reactionary, as most third-party candidacies are. He was representing an opposition to Reagan, but as his positions were more similar to Carter's he was really saying, I'll do what this guy tried to do only better this time. It's not a strong message.

And Reagan was Reagan.

So concludes Reading a Play a Day in April. Thank you for following, for retweeting, for liking and for commenting. I have met several wonderful people, which only goes to remind me that there are so many more incomparable writers out there, producing great work that deserves to be read and produced.

Tomorrow the time I have used for the reading with be occupied with the writing. A page a day in May! Probably more than a page each day, but maybe not much more. I started something earlier this month and I have no idea where it's taking me, which is unusual for me, and exciting. I like the people, and what they are up to, and I want to know what happens to them. I am looking forward to that.

Scripts by David Hansen available to read on New Play Exchange:

• The Way I Danced With You
• Rosalynde & The Falcon
• This Is The Times
• I Hate This (a play without the baby)

Play a Day: Slingshot

Kia Corthron

For Saturday I read Slingshot by Kia Corthron, and available at New Play Exchange.

The hero of this play is a well-intentioned, kindhearted lawyer. That's not a punchline.

The premise is an accident, on-the-job, a young man falls from a height and is seriously injured. His father, who must care for him alone, solicits the services of a high-powered corporate lawyer who, for personal reasons, will work pro bono for certain cases.

I respect lawyers. I have friends who are lawyers. I do not make lawyer jokes. I understand that in the United States, the general degradation of the term "lawyer" among the middle-class has been employed for the benefit of the corporate class.

You know the coffee story? The MacDonald's coffee story? Of course you do. Frivolous lawsuit. Adam Ruins Everything did a piece on that lawsuit recently, you should see it. But I already knew the real facts of the case, because I hate urban legends which perpetuate stereotype and ignorance, and when I hear tales where a corporation is the victim, I am naturally suspicious.

Politicians write laws. Lawyers interpret and defend the laws. We need our lawmakers and law interpreters to be educated, experienced, and competent in writing and interpreting laws. Above all, they need to have ethics and integrity. As a nation, we no longer understand nor appreciate that.

Corthron's play is taut and tense, with colorful and flawed characters, all essentially decent, their intentions clear and understood. It's a legal thriller without any of your cigar-twiddling villains. What's at stake is very real and urgent, and the conclusion uncertain up to the final moment.

Play a Day: To the Orchard

Les Hunter

Twenty-eight plays in twenty-eight days! Four weeks of new work. And April is almost complete.

For Friday morning, I read To the Orchard by Les Hunter, and available at New Play Exchange. Dr. Hunter is a professor at Baldwin Wallace, one of our great Cleveland playwrights, and a total boss.

To the Orchard premiered at Playwrights Local last fall, and received the Foundation for Jewish Culture New Play Award. Like Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, from which the play's title is derived, this piece focuses on the relationship between parents and adult children, and the ghosts of things unspoken. Or not yet spoken.

You know that thing they told us recently, about how if the spiders worked together they could devour humanity with hours? The same could be said of trees. Those things are everywhere. The pervasive realty of trees. They play a major role here, the Tree of Knowledge and/or Life. Trees that might reach out and grab you and pull you into the earth (or as was the case in Poltergeist, eat you.)

I am charmed by this story because it touches on elements of my life which I feel are absent, so they interest me greatly. The intense relationship between parents and children, the importance of mentors and lovers, and lovers who are mentors. I never stayed in touch with my mentors, to my continual disappointment. My wife is my mentor, and perhaps that is why I will never leave her.

In spite of my somewhat casual relationship with my parents, at least I am confident that my father knew I loved him, and there is a spiritual comfort in that.

Two more plays in two more days. Then what is the plan? The reading has effectively put the writing on hold. Why? Because I write in the morning, that is when I can think clearly, so that is when it happens. Can I return to a regular process of writing every morning at five.

Mornings at Five. If I give it a name, will that make it real?

Selections from Weimar, a new play by Les Hunter, will be read at Dobama Theatre on Monday, May 1 at 7:00 PM.

Play a Day: Trust

Sarah Schulman

When my wife and I visited London in the late 90s, she found Silver Moon, a feminist book store in Charing Cross. She bought a sweatshirt that listed in alphabetical order many famous women writers, e.g., Wharton, Wollstonecraft, Woolf.

I was not familiar with the name Sarah Schulman, and in fact did not notice her name there, between Dorothy L. Sayers and Anne Sexton, until after my wife has completed her MFA at Goddard College, where Schulman was one of her favorite professors.

For Thursday I read Trust by Sarah Schulman, and available from New Play Exchange.

Like one of those caper films in which an ordinary, white seemingly blameless white guy gets sucked down into the dark seedy underworld, only to emerge by the final reel safe and sound, a bit wiser but confident in his place of privilege, Trust is a seriously dark comedy in which our protagonist (Steve, the whitest name) is hardly blameless, and his passage through the underworld unearned and undeserved. You know how we all know the drug war unfairly punishes people of color? This is a damning, hilarious and fast-paced illustration of that.

This morning, before dawn, it was in the mid-sixties. I sat out on the deck and read in the dark.

Play a Day: The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin

Jessica Huang

Reading a play a day for a month has been exciting, exhilarating, inspiring, all the good things. It also means getting up early most days, even weekends, to read the play, ruminate and then blog about it. It's kind of messing with my sleep schedule. Also, exercise.

Now that I have gotten in the good habit of reading so many plays by so many different people, I hope to continue, maybe on a weekly basis, if not more often. We are in the homestretch now, after today there only four more days/plays in April.

For Wednesday I read The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin by Jessica Huang, and available for download from New Play Exchange.

The only child of a Chinese immigrant father and American mother struggles to cope with his needs following her mother's death. The plot gets more involved than that, mysterious and magical, and yes, there is a mystery to be solved. But the premise, coping with the ghosts (literal, imagined) of the country left behind, are universal, and have a particular resonance in this country.

Once we speculated if it would be more challenging had mother passed before father. My brothers and I never discussed it, until that time when he had passed and we agreed that would have been much more challenging. The men need the women, it does not go the other way.

Which reminds me, I need to call my mom.

Harry Chin would prefer to leave his past behind, his daughter Sheila insists upon knowing her heritage. Only recently I learned a little about my own father's past. He was adopted, but chose never to search for his birth mother. He claimed he did not want to know. But I wanted to know. I did not even know his ethnicity. Caucasian, sure. But from where?

Luxembourg. Huh. Really? That's weird.

The parent wants to abandon their culture, the younger to embrace that which has been abandoned. Who get to choose?

Play a Day: Swimming While Drowning

Emilio Rodriguez

For Tuesday I read Swimming While Drowning by Emilio Rodriguez, a playwright whose work is available at New Play Exchange.

Yesterday I was casting about for what to read today, and my friend Mimi suggested this play. Swimming was also profiled yesterday in HowlRound. The play received its world premiere last February at Milagro in Portland, OR.

This play is a lovely, lyric dance of dialogue between two teens in a shelter for LGBT youth. Angelo seeks connection, and Mila's every response is a wall that Angelo must climb over, dig under or break through, but the very fact that Mila responds invites that struggle. Otherwise, he wouldn't respond at all.

Mimi interviewed Rodriguez for HowlRound when Swimming was in development, and his comments about receiving audience and company feedback in shaping the work are insightful. Sometimes hearers tell you what is strong about a scene, which by omission can clue you into what may be weak, or unnecessary. It is not always the easiest thing to intuit if you are merely searching for validation.

Rodriquez says, "playwriting feels like the perfect blend of theatre, poetry, and creating art with a purpose." His belief in the power and importance of playwriting is evident in Swimming, which employs performance poetry to move the story forward, not merely as commentary on the action, but to take emotional leaps forward in the relationship between these two young men.


Good morning.

Play a Day: Rain and Zoe Save the World

Crystal Skillman

For Monday, I read Rain and Zoe Save the World by Crystal Skillman and available for download from New Play Exchange.

Yes! We begin the week with an Ultimate Millennial Road Trip Play! -- or as Zoe puts it, "a life changing journey of awesome." Awesome has been my go-to descriptor for all things that are awesome since the early 1980s and am thrilled it is still in use by those who are awesome.

There is much that is contemporary and urgent in this work, reflecting our modern anxiety and the urge, perhaps for the first time in our lives, to take action against everything that has gone wrong that allowed Donald J. Trump to become President of the United States, and all that that means.

This past weekend the boy and I participated in the March for Science, my wife and the girl attended the Women's March in January. When I was a younger man I thought like the character Rain, who believes that those who choose public protest "thinks they can change things by getting together and yelling."

But maybe they can. Depends on how many people are yelling and what they are yelling. The night the Iraq War started, two months after my now fourteen year-old daughter was born, I joined a protest at the Coventry Peace Park out of a sense of duty, my wife stayed home with the girl but I was there to represent. There were maybe a dozen of us. It was raining. I didn't hang around long.

Organizers believe around 10,000 attended the march in Cleveland alone last Saturday.

There is a moment in Skillman's play where our protagonists face off against those in the opposition, no doubt Trump voters, who choose fiercely to believe lies the that have been told them that uphold a worldview that no longer exists, never in fact truly existed.

But in spite of the fact that those who have fed and perpetuated these lies currently occupy all three branches of government, the facts clearly state that they have lost. They cannot win. Their way of life is unsustainable. But they cannot accept this. Who could? And so they live in complete and utter denial.

The Millennials are dismissed, as all people in the twenties are summarily dismissed, but I do believe that Rains and Zoes are going to save the world. We have to believe that, actually, I don't see that we have much choice.

Let the Wild Rumpus start.