Play a Day: Glass

Azure Osborne-Lee

Fourteen plays in fourteen days! Two weeks of new work.

For Friday I read Glass by Azure Osborne-Lee and available from New Play Exchange, which put me in mind of Yoruba folk tales and the works of Sam Shepard, filled with animal characters in human form slouching in an existential, American tableau.

Ancient magic abounds as Life and Death engage in a barroom brawl with Anansi playing bartender.

So what have we accomplished, reading new, unpublished plays for two weeks? Has this been motivational, you might ask. I have written bits and pieces here and there, and thought that emerging myself into the works of others might be an inspiration, and I am glad to say that it has.

It also takes up a great deal of time, that time I normally reserve for the writing itself. But as long as I am not writing, why not engage in something different?

Having said that, last night I was sitting in XYZ, waiting to see The Tongue That Tells Me So next door, and I started sketching a game plan for a story I'd like to tell, and how I might like to tell it. Not much, a few notes, but there were more ideas there than before. Reading diverse work from others reminds me of how much freedom I have, to do anything, but also to be myself.

I am discovering, though, that what is in myself is more expansive and interesting than I previously allowed myself to imagine.

Play a Day: The Tongue That Tells Me So (BONUS)

Tonight I saw the premiere workshop performance of The Tongue That Tell Me So, written by Mariah Sage and Bruce Seymour, part of Cleveland Public Theatre's new Test Flight series of new works.

The Test Flight stage of their new works program is like the former "Big Box" program (2003-2016) in which a company receives a modest budget, a free hand, and the keys to the Levin Theatre for four technical rehearsal days and three performance nights.

It is an intense piece, and brief. Mariah also performs, in the character of Anne, a woman who is motivated and driven by her "mentor" - my word - another woman named Simone (Linda Manning). The story takes several significant shifts and my perception of what their relationship truly is changed and changed again. Even after the final curtain, it changed again.

Mariah and I worked together as actor-teachers for the Great Lakes Theater school residency program, my partnership with her in that program was a model for what I believe our work there is supposed to be. She left Cleveland after our year together, and though we have stayed in touch fifteen years is a long time, and I am glad we had time today to have lunch and I am so proud of her in this work. Go see it!

Cleveland Public Theatre presents The Tongue That Tells Me So through Saturday, April 15.

Play a Day: Salvage

George Brant

This morning I read Salvage by George Brant, whose work is available on New Play Exchange.

A full-length play but a swift read, an artful three-hander for women. There is an ethical dilemma involved, as writers all we see and hear and experience form the basis for our work, but how much of what defines us doesn't belong to us alone?

Or at what point do we say, you know what? Fuck it, I'm a writer. I'm writing this.

Anyway, there are consequences to absolutely everything, aren't there. So, you know. Fuck it.

Salvage will be produced at None Too Fragile in Akron next month and so I asked George if I could read the script. The piece was originally commissioned by Theater 4 in New Haven, a company co-founded by my friend Mariah Sage, and she and her husband Bruce Seymour have co-penned a new work, The Tongue That Tells Me So, which receives a workshop production this weekend at Cleveland Public Theatre.

Tonight I will be attending The Tongue That Tells Me So. Perhaps I will run into George there.