Play a Day: The Way I Danced With You (The George Michael Play)

Sarah Blubaugh &
Cody Fitzpatrick Steele

This is closing weekend of the premiere of my play The Way I Danced With You at Ensemble Theatre in Cleveland Heights. You have two more opportunities to catch it, today at 2:00 PM and tomorrow at 7:00 PM.

Presented as part of the 2019 Colombi New Plays Festival, we have had a marvelous run following an extended development process.

Last weekend my new children’s play About a Ghoul closed at Talespinner Children’s Theatre. I wrote that piece in about eight weeks, last November and December. I recently found notes from late 2013, which were my exploratory writing for this play. I’d had it on a list of “plays I would like to write” for longer than that. It was just said “George Michael” but I knew what it meant.

In the past five years we've read it in a bar downtown, in Valdez, Alaska, and in the Waterloo Arts District. It's been produced on the West Side and the East Side. Dani and Charles have gotten around.

Sarah Blubaugh

People love this piece, and I am so glad they do. It has moved audience members to tears, I didn’t know I could do that. It has been a joy watching Sarah Blubaugh and Cody Fitzpatrick Steele grow in these roles -- especially Sarah, who had what I felt was a very challenging task, adapting her idea of Dani, a character she had already grown very attached to at the Blank Canvas production last year, to a different actor’s idea of who Charles should be.

It’s an intimate, two-person work that keeps the audience guessing until almost the end. A real psychological mystery. Each development process the script has changed, even here; at the suggestion of director Tyler JC Whidden we removed a few words, just a few, and in doing so extended the mystery even further so that the reveal was all the more satisfying.

Theater is all about collaboration, even or especially the writing.

Read "The Way I Danced With You" at New Play Exchange.

Play a Day: The Coward

Kati Schwartz

For Saturday I read The Coward by Kati Schwartz, and available at New Play Exchange.

I have teenagers in my house. I have listened to and documented teenagers talking to each other in a coffee shop. It is very difficult to write for teenagers or young adults, everyone has such strong opinions about how it’s done.

One out of one hundred people have told me that the dialogue for The Way I Danced With You is too mature for eighteen year-olds. I do not listen to them. I wrote it the way I thought it should sound for a particular type of young adult person, and that’s that.

Schwartz does masterful work capturing the essence of young adults speaking in conversation. It is at once affectless, and entirely earnest. Here she presents attendees at a college-age, summer drama camp, with a compact collection of interesting characters who each have their own way of navigating the backstage (off-off stage, in the dorm room) need to be noticed and accepted.

The brittle conflict between Christopher and Jill, two young homosexuals who feel threatened by each other, is so handily represented through turns of control and manipulation, the words we use to intimidate and also to gain sympathy. It’s a rewarding tale of bullying which would be well used by any college program or (mature) high school drama company.

I have my own experiences at the insecure one, the brunt of those seeking a beta male to dominate. I found an awful lot to relate to in this script.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Once Upon a (Korean) Time

Daniel K. Isaac

For Friday I read One Upon a (Korean) Time by Daniel K. Isaac and available from New Play Exchange.

Isaac stirringly traces a century of Korean history with characters who recount ancient folks tales to console, explain, or simply draw attention away from the grief and hardship which has affected the Korean peninsula and its people. His storytelling is magical, candid, and very funny.

Adapting international folk tales for the stage, I have discovered that the same plots and characters have presented themselves across the years and across the globe. One story of a virtuous girl who receives a calabash which is (surprisingly) full of good things, prompts her sister to demand a calabash which is (not surprisingly) full of bad things is pretty much the same basic outline as Red Onion, White Garlic.

But Isaac stops to ask, what is the lesson? What are we teaching our children? Be passive and good things will come to you? Strive for achievement and you deserve punishment? Never do the same thing twice?

There’s also the lesson that good only defeats evil at a price, and that is hard to argue with.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: E2

Bob Bartlett

For Thursday I read E2 by Bob Bartlett and available from New Play Exchange.

Christopher Marlowe's Edward II is a play script that I enjoy very much and have wanted to someday direct. The only time I have ever seen it performed was a solo adaptation back in the 90s about which I would just as soon not comment.

Bartlett's E2 is a "contemporary reimagining" which will premiere this fall. Revisiting the tragic reign of the son of Edward I ("Longshanks") in a modern setting, one is reminded of the eighth British monarch to take the name Edward. He also put personal affection higher than service, though Edward VIII's association with Hitler has somewhat tarnished his reputation, even among those who supported his unsuccessful attempt to buck tradition.

The root of these stories, like those we see on The Crown, is that these people, these monarchs, just want to be normal people, to have the freedom to love and be loved by whomever they choose. But then that would make them just that, normal. So why the fuck are they elevated to a position above all others? Especially on the public's dime.

Transposed into the modern era, when people are free to marry whom they like and homosexuality is greatly (though by no means entirely) accepted, Bartlett's play reminds us that we still hold our monarchs to different standards. And it's complicated, because the King's lover is not only of the same gender, he is low-born, and perhaps worst of all, foreign.

"For you the words foreigner and fear are the same," one says, and so it is all across the globe.

The ancient conflict remains; this king abdicates his responsibilities so he may have private time with one whom he must love secretly, for which he is harshly judged. But if he could openly have the kind of relationship heteronormative people enjoy every day, would he not be able to concentrate more successful on the matters of state which require his attention?

This is a witty play, and very smart.Cunning in its ability to take historic events and make them believable in a modern setting. I would love to see the premiere at Maryland's Rep Stage this November.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Hottentotted

Charly Evon Simpson

For Wednesday I read Hottentotted by Charly Evon Simpson and available at New Play Exchange.

At the end of Lysistrata, the men of Greece use a woman as a map to divide territory and determine the terms of peace. It's played for comedy, but as critic Amy Bracken Sparks pointed out in her review of the Bad Epitaph production in 2000, "the image is as old as strife."

"War is essentially fought on a woman's body, be she the earth, the country, or the women left behind to tend to things such as holding the country together." 

I was reminded of this metaphor, of woman's body as terrain, as I read Hottentotted, a bold and beautiful examination of the black female body, and how it is seen. Seen by the other, seen by itself. How they are watched, judged, fetishized, exalted, scorned and controlled. Led by the famous “Hottentot Venus” Saartjie or Sarah Bartman, six performers explore a life and a history of being looked at.

It is a haunting piece, exploring the dichotomy between that which is perceived as beautiful and unsightly, self-denial and self-awareness. Of wanting to be something else, and the struggle towards empowerment, safety, and self-love.

In performance Hottentotted should be a very physical piece, the stage directions are both graceful and haunting. And in the final moments the audience (and this reading audience) is reminded that the watchers watch, also.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Source: "Rowdy Romps" by Amy Bracken Sparks, The Free Times (5/24/2000)

Play a Day: Run Kingsbury Run

Tyler JC Whidden

For Tuesday I read Run Kingsbury Run by Tyler JC Whidden, and available at New Play Exchange.

First disclaimer: I know Tyler, he directed my play The Way I Danced With You at Ensemble Theatre, which you should see because his direction is fucking amazing and it is playing through this Sunday, April 7.

Second disclaimer: I know far too much about the history of the so-called "Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run" and I am fucking tired of people trying to turn this hideous, sordid moment in Cleveland history into some kind of epic sequel to The Untouchables just because Eliot Ness is involved.

Okay. We got that out of the way.

Kingsbury is not about Ness, it's about the officers who do the work of trying to solve a grisly set of murders, and the psychological toll that can take. The unseen Eliot Ness is where he should be, off in the distance. An administrator, not a cop, and one whose own ambition rises above his need to protect the public.

But the main thrust of the narrative involves the pressure, the damage, and the wide-raging effect a public panic can have on the greater community. The "mad butcher" is the catalyst as three officers at a crime scene engage in intense psychological gamesmanship about reputation, responsibility, and the ghosts of our fathers.

Forensic science recently determined the most-likely suspect in the Whitechapel Murders of 1888, and the identity of "Jack the Ripper," and it only took one hundred and thirty years. Perhaps there is hope we may settle this saga once and for all.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: The Story of Walter

Audrey Cefaly

Two years ago I chose the month of April to read one new play, each day, from the selection available at New Play Exchange, and comment upon it here in my blog.

Last year the folks at NPX were inspired to make a competition out of it, to see how many plays could be read in one month! I came in second of all those reading full length plays. They sent me a pin!

This year I am on my own again, but determined to read thirty plays in these thirty days. You know why? Because I am not good at concentrating on my reading, or on anything at all. Having a goal, competing with myself is a great way for me to get things done.

Also, there is a world of writers out there, all across America, and I very much want to know what work they are producing. All of them.

And so, for Monday I read The Story of Walter by Audrey Cefaly and available at New Play Exchange.

Here’s the thing, I have two living kids. The eldest is a daughter, and there was a point, probably during second grade, where she began holding me at arm’s length. I don’t mean we were emotionally estranged or anything like that, it’s just that was the moment she stopped running up to me to hug me, and if I put my arms out for a hug like I used to she would give me that face like, no, dad. That’s okay.

I could deal. I knew this was temporary. She was growing closer to her mom and that was fine, I would be patient. And sometime, about a year or so ago, it all changed back. Now that she was in high school, she would greet me with a hug, maybe out of nowhere. Maybe while I am making dinner.

In this play, Cefaly describes a much more challenging experience, and it is a heart-hurting tale of grief. Not the grief you feel when someone has died, but when someone has decided that you are dead, and leaves. Walter’s story is lyrically told by a narrator, cut with dialogue between the main character and his young daughter as he navigates a new life without his partner.

I can relate to this father, his feelings of utter helplessness and inability to do anything right for his child, the constant sense of self-judgement. It is a particular kind of self-pity … is it a feeling unique to fathers? Regardless, Story of Walter is a touching sketch book of emotional recovery.

What should I read tomorrow?