Play a Day: Hold Steady

Tira Palmquist

For Saturday I read Hold Steady by Tira Palmquist and available at New Play Exchange.

“How did our parents do it?”

“They didn’t think about it, probably.”

The Big Chill is an iconic film about white privilege, about a cohort of Baby Boomer age people in their mid-thirties, folks who attended university in the late 1960s with all of the historic baggage that brought with it, monied liberals who, at the dawn of the 1980s were troubled by their own success, how they had traded their ideals for a very comfortable lifestyle.

Unfortunately, many Boomer aged audiences took this film as validation for their own having sold out, and found it not ironic at all to purchase the soundtrack, a greatest hits of the Motown era, to make it a number one album and even spawn a second soundtrack of songs by African American R&B artists from the “Big Chill era” (as it was marketed) when there is not one single person of color in the entire movie.

Palmquist’s play, Hold Steady, concerns a Millennial friend group, a modern, diverse collection of sympathetic characters … well, except for Quinn. What is it with people whose names begin with Q?

As our heroes gather for a ten year high school reunion, they share their worries and concerns about relationship and career goals, but as with so many of us it all revolves around money. What you can do, what you can’t do, what you hope to do, what you can reasonably settle to do.

I mean, there is a literal fight over fifty bucks. That scene is amazing.

Many of my friends and colleagues are Millennials, and believe me, they don’t spend their all time eating avocado toast and none of them attended the Fyre Festival. And Palmquist has created a fascinating and vivid weekend gathering, ripe with real world dialogue and situations reminiscent of the people I know.

Who should I read tomorrow?

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.