Play a Day: Inappropriate Relationship

Marcy Lovitch

For Sunday I read Inappropriate Relationship by Marcy Lovitch, and available at New Play Exchange.

The Police single "Don't Stand So Close To Me" was released in 1980. At the time it was a bit risqué, an affair between a teacher and a student. It's not graphic, it's suggestive, much like the novel that gets pretensionally named-checked by Sting ... a former high school teacher.

The scene of the crime is a car. So it is in Lovitch's play, a teenage girl waiting outside the school in the cold after dark, and "his car is warm and dry."

#NewDayNewPlay

Interesting, the rule at the high school in question is that a teacher cannot give a student a ride without express permission from the parent. We work with students, and our code of conduct expressly forbids providing transportation for any student under any circumstance. There are also all of the new regulations involving social media. The best policy is just "no." No friending, no following, no contact outside the classroom under any circumstance.

The high school in Inappropriate Relationship, Seaview High continues to struggle with these rules, certainly the teachers are. There's an old saw, that even an animal doesn't shit where it eats. The men who teach at Seaview need to learn a thing or two about gossip in the break room (and believe me, I have heard these conversations) but they are not alone, it seems every character from the administration on down has an opportunity to make a bad situation worse. The playwright has created a gripping test-case in how not to handle an allegation.

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.