Gwydion Suilebhan |
For 2021, I conclude with a short play, not a full-length play. And I do so for several reasons. First of all, I am tired. It has been a long month. I have final projects to complete, polish and turn in before the end of the semester.
But I do not choose a short play out of resignation, far from it. I do so because this is my project, and so I celebrate the completion of another month of plays with a lagniappe. Yes, that should more appropriately come tomorrow, the “something extra”, but as I said, this is my project, and if that bothers you, you can suck it.
Speaking of which, this short play is about the egg. Not any particular egg, but the egg in general. The incredible, edible egg. And it was written by a good egg, Gwydion Suilebhan, Project Director for New Play Exchange, without whom I would not have had the opportunity to read all of these plays. And by that I don’t mean 30 plays, I mean those 149 full-length plays I have read since the beginning of April, 2017. And this one, short play.
In this short play, this six page monologue, Suilebhan presents a lyric and gentle rumination on the nature of existence, bundled into a small, delicate spheroid. A provocative, promised “demonstration” takes the shape of a sermon, through which the egg represents all things, and no thing. It’s a gorgeous piece of surprising depth.
And with that, I have read thirty plays in thirty days. The imagined thoughts of real people, reimagined classic plays and fables, the shockwaves of historic events, traveled across the nation and the cosmos, troubled and troublesome relationships. All written for our as yet still empty stages.