Play a Day: What Was Lost

Steven Carl McCasland

For Wednesday, I read What Was Lost by Steven Carl McCasland and posted at New Play Exchange.

I have put the dead white male playwrights on a shelf for a while (except for, you know, that one) but I still hold a certain regard for those frustrating American navel-gazers of the mid-twentieth century, Miller and Williams. Miller fancied himself a poet but he only ever wrote a weird kind of prose. It is Williams whose work truly sings with beautiful melody.

The one thing they most had in common was the chosen subject matter of all of their plays; themselves.

McCasland has created a creation myth, about the original production of The Glass Menagerie. But he does not center the playwright but the ageing star, Laurette Taylor, who originated the role of Amanda Wingfield. It is a story of recovery, poetic in its own fashion, as Taylor presents at AA meetings, her stories of personal struggle rival that of Tom, the narrator of the play she is starring in.

Williams plays his part as well, an alcoholic philosopher who inspired his mother figure into sobriety, for her own sake, but really for his, you know?

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Aliquippa

Lydia Valentine

For Thursday, I read Aliquippa by Lydia Valentine and available at New Play Exchange.

Lately I have been made aware of the use of board games to illustrate to young people (and not young people) the concept of instutitional racism.

One example, in brief: Four people play Monolpoly. Actually, two play, and two watch. The two people playing move around the board, accumulting property and wealth.

After maybe a half hour to forty-five minutes, the other two are invited to join the game. Two people have all of the wealth and property, and the other two have nothing but are free to move about the board, scraping together cash and paying rent for everything. Got it? That's America.

With her play Aliquippa, Valentine has composed a painful and joyful family drama of tragedy and hope. Four generations of Lockwoods aspire to difficult dreams in a nation where the rules remain set against African Americans. The playwright neatly weaves issues of economics, chemical dependence, and raising non-heteronormative children, providing each of her characters the opportunity to have a voice, doing so with a great deal of warmth and familial humor.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Sources: 
Using Monopoly to Introduce Concepts of Race and Ethnic Relations by Warren Warren, The Journal of Effective Teaching (2011)
The Disturbing History of the Suburbs, Adam Ruins Everything (2017)

Play a Day: Riot and Dishonor

Luke Brett

For Saturday, I read Riot and Dishonor: A Tale of Teenage Falstaff by Luke Brett and available at New Play Exchange.

Everyone makes Shakespeare references. Just last week Bob Dylan released a fifteen minute song abou the Kennedy assassination called Murder Most Foul, a line from Hamlet and I should know, I said it.

Then there are the many plays divined from the works of Shakespeare, prequels and sequels and stories retold from the point of view of other characters, completely abusrd or deadly serious. Some of them are even okay.

Lisa Ortenzi, Kelly Elliott,
Leah Smith, Tyler Collins
Reading at Nighttown (February 2018)

Writing in the voice of Shakspeare is a trick and challenge. You are, after all, setting yourself up for a harsh comparison. On the other hand, take it too lightly what have you done? Set your standards lower than you might otherwise? What self-respecting writer would choose to do that?

Well, Luke Brett would. Riot and Dishonor is an origin story for Sir John Falstaff. We meet young Jack as a kid, with his trusty sidekick Bardolph, and follow him as he becomes the cowardly, alcoholic rake Harold Bloom called "the greatest personality in all of Shakespeare."

Brett joyfully mangles English, creating absurd metaphor, and laugh out loud abusive language. This Pythonesque insanity set to imabic pentameter put me in mind of the works of Kirk Wood Bromley, whose delirious forays into verse were nearly psychedelic.

I had the pleasure to hear a reading of this play a few years ago, and it was a non-stop riot, indeed, from beginning to end.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Joker

Yilong liu

For Thursday, I read Joker by Yilong Liu and available at New Play Exchange.

The recent passing of Terrence McNally took me back to the mid 1990s. I am not proud to say this, but the only McNally play I have ever seen was A Perfect Ganesh at Dobama Theatre. Not one of his better-known works, it tells the story of two older women from Connecticut who travel to India as much for adventure as to escape from the reality of the deaths of their sons.

I learned about the trials of being homosexual and coping with the trauma that comes from living in a society which condemns homosexuality from such plays. Even then, people I knew who were and are gay were not out or were only then in the process of coming out.

And Dobama produced a variety of plays in that time, about that experience, including Ganesh, The Food Chain by Nicky Silver, My Night With Reg by Kevin Elyot, and of course, they were the first Cleveland theater to produced Angels in America. All in the course of just a couple years.

Non-hetero relationships have become mainstreamed in such a short period of time. Eleanor's bisexuality in The Good Place wasn't even a thing, and that was a hit network sit-com. We've come a long way from Ellen.

But not far enough. With Joker Liu chronicles a moment in the recent past, the breakthrough of marriage equality in the United States, in this case in the state of Hawaii, and also the continuing struggle for equal rights in the Philippines. As recently as last January the Philippine Supreme Court struck down another case for marriage equality this time "with finality." Or so they say.

An intimate family drama set against the backdrop of momentous events, Joker is a keen mystery, as we try to understand and sympathize with Joe, a closeted man whose efforts to do right by the man he loves is misinterpreted by all those around him. The playwright does a masterful job creating tension and an inscrutibly frustrating emotional puzzle which when unlocked reveals the many layers to a character who has kept so much pain hidden for so long.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Source:
"Philippines Supreme Court rules against marriage equality 'with finality'" by Juwan J. Holmes, LGBTQNation (1/7/2020)

Play a Day: My Uncle Javy

Carlos E. Rojas

Twenty-one plays in twenty-one days!

For Saturday I read My Uncle Javy by Carlos E. Rojas, and available at New Play Exchange.

"Do you think it's possible for people to change, if they want to?" asks a thirteen year-old girl in this play. She regrets saying it, in that self-conscious way people do when they suddenly think what they've said sounds "stupid," because the answer should be obvious.

You want to change? Change! But it's not that simple.

Rojas has composed a troubling family drama about the cycle of quiet abuse that happens when we abandon our dreams and reach for what is closest to us, and create a shameful, furtive reality.

I remember, just before we split, my ex-wife proposed running off the New Orleans for New Year's Eve. It seemed preposterous, we hadn't been civil for weeks, I was deep into a new relationship, but she made a suggestion so grand, I'm sure it was meant to be exciting, wild, liberating. But it also seemed silly, and pointless.

There are lines you cross and you can never go back. Sometimes that is good. In the case of the title character of this play it is not, and it nearly destroys the life of a teenage girl. The playwright creates a absorbing, uncomfortable scenario, posing difficult questions. In the end those who transgress are not punished, but we are left with the hope that Rosie, the girl, will be able to control her own destiny when everyone responsible for her has failed.