Play a Day: Last Ship to Proxima Centauri

Greg Lam

For Friday, I read Last Ship to Proxima Centauri by Greg Lam and posted at New Play Exchange.

So-called “cancel culture” is the phrase used by those who feel threatened by the idea of one being held accountable for one’s own actions. Tearing down a Confederate statue is not erasing history, it is no longer accepting the adulation of bad history. The history remains, but we will no longer allow it to be held up as an example of good behavior.

How will future generations judge us? Four, five mass shootings in the span of one week? And we remain indoors, we aren’t in the streets, we have not called for the resignation of every elected official for their refusal to act? What does that say about us? Are we not all responsible?

Lam’s play Last Ship to Proxima Centauri is fucking hilarious, and deeply troubling. And fucking hilarious. What if the Americans were the last to arrive at a planet already resettled by all those other survivors of our dying planet, none of whom are of European ancestry? Why on Earth (or Yeni Dünya, the “New World”) would they not be less than happy to see us?

“They all had guns. And they shot all the blacks all the time.” That is our history, as it is remembered. Any argument to the contrary begins, “Whatabout ?”

What keeps this play charging along are those gut punches Lam includes, without additional commentary, suggesting that the 100,000 Americans held in stasis for the 2,000 journey include some “very fine people” or when the one BIPOC American who is received during the ship’s crash landing defends the reputation of white Americans by stating that “most of my friends are white.”

It’s devastating, devastatingly funny, and now I need to write my Senators.

Who should I read tomorrow?

See also: Last Ship to Proxima Centauri (revisited)

Play a Day: La Sirena

Eteya Trinidad

For Monday, I read La Sirena by Eteya Trinidad and posted at New Play Exchange.

I heard a joke recently. Three sirens sit together on a rock, singing. Some sailors sail past and say, “Hey, let’s have sex with them,” and jump in the ocean and die. The sirens don’t notice because, really. They’re just three women, minding their own business, singing together.

That’s it. That’s the joke. Get it?

Trinidad’s play revolves around the close friendship of Thelxi and Chim, and the diner where they work. The place is lorded over by two white men, the owner, Tanner, and the busboy/waiter Wyatt. It is also about art, and sexual assault, about workplace harrassment, and the uses of a sincere apology.

Who should I read tomorrow?

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: The First Time

Tracey Conyer Lee

This morning I read The First Time by Tracey Conyer Lee. This is my first exposure to her work. Last night I was casting about on New Play Exchange and I found her solo performance Standing Up; Bathroom Talk & Other Stuff We Learn From Dad which she performed a few years ago at the New York Fringe.

I may come back to that, I guess I decided I wasn't in the mood for a solo piece? Reading all these plays is inspiring, which is the point, but I am also trying to get something down on paper myself and reading others' dialogue is helping with that mindset. What do we talk about when we talk?

One thing that struck me about this play, which focuses mainly on five individuals, it how each of them are incredibly forward, it was bracing. I remember first experiencing Death of a Salesman and while I know this is kind of the point, it was irritating, so irritating, that no one said anything they were actually thinking, or that no one was listening to each other. Each of these characters are unafraid to express what they are thinking, at that moment, and there is great energy in that.

There's a moment in this work, in a place at a time, which brought me right back to my own childhood. It made me question so much. That's where we are now. It occurred to me this morning that I knew everything when I was twenty, and how much less I know today. Soon I won't know anything at all. It is making me a better writer.