Play a Day: Sour Mash

Benjamin Gonzales

For Saturday, I read Sour Mash by Benjamin Gonzales and posted at New Play Exchange.

My brother's first off-campus housing, he lived in the upstairs room of a professor of English who would answer the telephone by shouting, "WHO'S THAT?"

Gonzales's play is a classic drawing room comedy of manners with additional contemporary relevance. I laughed out loud many times, the wordplay in this farce about class, race, and whiskey is truly delightful.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Trust

Sarah Schulman

When my wife and I visited London in the late 90s, she found Silver Moon, a feminist book store in Charing Cross. She bought a sweatshirt that listed in alphabetical order many famous women writers, e.g., Wharton, Wollstonecraft, Woolf.

I was not familiar with the name Sarah Schulman, and in fact did not notice her name there, between Dorothy L. Sayers and Anne Sexton, until after my wife has completed her MFA at Goddard College, where Schulman was one of her favorite professors.

For Thursday I read Trust by Sarah Schulman, and available from New Play Exchange.

Like one of those caper films in which an ordinary, white seemingly blameless white guy gets sucked down into the dark seedy underworld, only to emerge by the final reel safe and sound, a bit wiser but confident in his place of privilege, Trust is a seriously dark comedy in which our protagonist (Steve, the whitest name) is hardly blameless, and his passage through the underworld unearned and undeserved. You know how we all know the drug war unfairly punishes people of color? This is a damning, hilarious and fast-paced illustration of that.

This morning, before dawn, it was in the mid-sixties. I sat out on the deck and read in the dark.

Play a Day: Elephant

Ivan Faute

For Tuesday I read Elephant: A Comedy by Ivan Faute, and available on New Play Exchange. This is another script that was workshopped at Last Frontier last summer, another that I missed. I first had the opportunity to chat with Ivan on the puddle jumper from Valdez to Anchorage on our way out of town, which is often how these things happen.

Elephant is an outrageous condemnation of moneyed East Coast liberals, depicting a world in which it is difficult to discern exactly who is complicit in the destruction of the planet, until you realize it's pretty much everyone, including the (literal) elephant in the room.

White people are insane and they are ruining everything. Not sure there is any argument against that at the moment.

When Elephant was read, I was in the next room over, enjoying a delightful, period piece for children. Uproarious laughter could be clearly heard through the thin, conference center walls, and I had that familiar feeling I have at parties where I am having an intense one-on-one conversation with a good friend who is telling me a personal story that is extremely important to them, and over in the corner the cool kids are laughing their asses off about something and I try really hard to concentrate on my friend but I can't help but wish I were over there with the cool kids.