I love smart play scripts about modern teenagers so much. I love them even more when they feature drop dead, whip-smart dialogue while also communicating deeply felt character and emotion.
Rosenberg’s story of a Gen Z cohort who engage in outrageous dares, faking injuries for social media, is thrilling, moving, and very, very real. There is an almost complete absence of adults, highlighting the extent to which these kids have been made to be self-reliant, but also the chilling degree to which they are on their own to manage their many emotional challenges.
Last night I had a dream that I was in a public library, trying to produce my half-hour radio program for broadcast on the local station. And I was trying to sit at a crowded table, full of nerds. That's how I thought of them, in my dream.
There was one guy in particular who was railing against the system in a voice we once would have refered to as "adenoidal" and I had just had it and was trying to extract my bookbag from my chair which next to his chair, because he had an entire lack of spatial awareness and I wasn't able to sit at the table in the first place, regardless.
As I stalked away, with my bag, heading over to the recording equipment I thought to myself , "Ugh! Nerds!"
I mean, I was a nerd, myself, which in those days was different than it is today. I think. I played RPGs, had a passing interest in the occult, noodled with computers (back when only nerds would own one) and listened to Genesis. And yet, I didn't go all in, I tried to pass as straight, and yes, I would disown one of my colleagues if I there was social pressure to do so.
I was on the fringes of one circle of dorks, guys who perhaps I had spent one twenty-four hour period playing a single, unending game of "Risk" with. One of our members shot himself when we were juniors. I mourned in shame, because we were friends/not-friends. We had spent good times togther. I had mocked him behind his back.
My daughter was just making new friends as a freshman when one of them she sat with at lunch also died by suicide. As a parent, the terror, worrying that your child might be removing themselves from reality, losing hope for their own future, it's real. It is unspoken. Until it must be spoken.
Playwright Jackie Martin has crafted an unsettling fable of a teenage girl who has come to believe in a reality everyone knows to be false. Her parents are sympathetic, they are real. There are no simple answers, there is no ah-ha moment when some dark secret is made evident, we are left in the dark to wonder, as they do, what has happened to Abigail?
It is a metaphor for being adolescent, to literally evolve into a new beign, with the same thoughts and memories of the child whose form is being shed. And also for what it is like, as a parent, to feel helpless in the face of inevitable change.
Last weekend my new play The Witches was to have received a workshop production at Cleveland Public Theatre. As I was trying to create a modern take on the historic events of the Salem Witch Panic of 1692, I was worried that I might be influenced by this piece which has been getting a lot of attention.
I need not have worried. If anything, Belflower's play script has inspired me to return to my own text and push it further. Because her play is startlingly biting and beautiful and just what we need right now. I hope it gets produced all over the place.
And it is in reading such pieces that I feel challenged to create more and better work.
I love the title, that's first. And I was stunned and delighted that the holding company for Arthur Miller's written works granted permission for text from The Crucible to be quoted in this play. We could compare and contrast how those gatekeeping works by dead white men such as Samuel Beckett or Edward Albee have (mis)managed their estates, in this case I was gratified to know the keepers of Miller's work appreciate that criticism does not mean erasure.
Taylor Atwara, Anna Nicolosi Academy for the Performing Arts, 2023 Photo: Daren Stahl
John Proctor Is the Villain is a high school drama which excellently describes the familiar manner in which woman is still pitted against woman in American society, a society still haunted by its Puritanical roots, for the continued domination by men. The cracks are beginning to show, though the light shining through them remains dim. It's a hopeful story, but also realistic. There's so much work left to be done.
This script is tense, taut, humorous, dramatic, powerful, poetic, and devastating, and high schools everywhere should be producing this.
In the past two days, I have read plays about transgressive relationships between teacher and student, this one and Meet Me In The Bathroom. One of the iconic taboos, as it is not only a violation of our communal understanding that it is criminal for adults to engage in sexual activity with children, but also represents a violation in the bond of trust between student and mentor.
It is a power play; one uses their position of power to satisfy their own desires, with little or no regard for the damage that might cause the disempowered.
Broadway Premiere Starring Sadie Sink The Booth Theatre (2025)
As a child, or pre-adolescent, I was exposed to the Kubrick film version of Lolita, and also the popular song which name checks the author of the novel from which it was adapted, "Don't Stand So Close to Me." At that time, in these cases, such titillating fare made an impression on me because I thought of myself as the child, receiving forbidden knowledge, and not as the adult, and I was caught up in the romantic danger of it, instead of paying attention to the very apparent abuse.
This was further complicated as I entered high school and as a freshman was complicit in turning a blind eye to an actual teacher-student relationship. "Tell my parents I'm with you," is a lie teenagers have been pressed into telling on their friend's behalf since before the invention of the telephone.
Whether it be Nabokov or Sting, we used to learn about these stories from the predators point of view, one who positions himself (usually himself) as the hero. Increasingly, as with these two scripts, we see it from the student's. And that is a powerful thing.
Seinuk creates a modern Greek tragedy, complete with chorus of voices, debate and off-stage violence, and the Unities followed in spirit if not the letter.
The question, for several of these teen protagonists, is when does betrayal actually happen? When an act of tragsression is committed, when the act is proposed, suggested, or as yet unspoken, living on in the mind of the perpetrator?
An intense tale for the #metoo era, flashing with on-point modern lingua (it helps that I have teenagers in my house) old wrongs fuel present actions and the conclusion is tragic for everyone involved.
A musical! An honest-to-God musical! This past week members of my Facebook cohort have been sharing this list of musical favorites and hatreds. I don't generally like to use the word "hate" if I can help it, but for this I made an exception.
MUSICAL I HATE: Bye Bye Birdie
MUSICAL I THINK IS OVERRATED: The Book of Mormon
MUSICAL I THINK IS UNDERRATED: Chess
MUSICAL I LOVE: Company
MUSICAL I CHERISH: Hedwig & the Angry Inch
MUSICAL I COULD LISTEN TO ON REPEAT: Hamilton
MUSICAL I STILL WANT TO DO: Urinetown
MUSICAL THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH MUSICALS: A Chorus Line
MUSICAL THAT CHANGED MY LIFE: Jesus Christ Superstar
GUILTY PLEASURE: Doonesbury
MUSICAL I SHOULD HAVE SEEN BY NOW BUT HAVEN'T: Spring Awakening
So now you know. I'm not really a musical guy, anyway. But it was a pleasure to read the book to this new musical -- even better, to listen to the demo recordings on Soundcloud, music and lyrics by Joe Stevens and Keaton Wooden.
Billed as a "new high school musical" Paper or Plastic chronicles the doubts and hopes of a very modern clique of high school seniors in "flyover country." These intertwining tales are a healthy reminder that any adult who tells you that high school is the best time of your life is a very unhappy person.
I have teenagers, and these worries and dreams are quite close to surface for me now, which Jade & Brown describe in realistic detail; the fear of missing out, fretting over applications and aspirations, the helplessness one feels acting as the adult for parents whose own marriages and lives are falling apart. Stevens & Wooden have created some lovely pop ballads for their characters, I'd love to hear them performed by actual teen performers.
These kids are trying to figure out the same things we all have, but today its different. Liberated from binary choices brings freedom, and danger, yes, but freedom has never been synonymous with ease.
Yesterday I was casting about for what to read today, and my friend Mimi suggested this play. Swimming was also profiled yesterday in HowlRound. The play received its world premiere last February at Milagro in Portland, OR.
This play is a lovely, lyric dance of dialogue between two teens in a shelter for LGBT youth. Angelo seeks connection, and Mila's every response is a wall that Angelo must climb over, dig under or break through, but the very fact that Mila responds invites that struggle. Otherwise, he wouldn't respond at all.
Mimi interviewed Rodriguez for HowlRound when Swimming was in development, and his comments about receiving audience and company feedback in shaping the work are insightful. Sometimes hearers tell you what is strong about a scene, which by omission can clue you into what may be weak, or unnecessary. It is not always the easiest thing to intuit if you are merely searching for validation.
Rodriquez says, "playwriting feels like the perfect blend of theatre, poetry, and creating art with a purpose." His belief in the power and importance of playwriting is evident in Swimming, which employs performance poetry to move the story forward, not merely as commentary on the action, but to take emotional leaps forward in the relationship between these two young men.
For the record, Donkey Coffee opened ten years ago, and has justifiably received every popular merchants' award, not least of which a Best Coffeeshop in Ohio nod from Ohio Magazine. It is spacious (two big floors featuring rooms large and small) clean, the coffee is very good, the baristas are mostly polite (those who speak) and bestest of all, the place is quiet.
Well, not always quiet. My wife and are holed up in town for a week, she working on a manuscript, myself pushing through the first draft of a children's play. Our in-laws generously look after the kids while we head Uptown to write, write, write (and Facebook. Sigh.) The day before Christmas we checked out the upstairs of Donkey for the first time ever and found a cozy table for two next to two, short, empty couches.
After about an hour, a half dozen TEENAGERS slouched in, each carrying a Red Cup (wtf?) spilling themselves into the couches, and proceeding to talk disaffected nonsense for three-quarters of an hour.
Verbatim:
(on the sound system: soundtrack to The Hours by Philip Glass) Sal: Are you saying I don’t like Pink Floyd or that I don’t like don’t like Pink Floyd? Austin: I don’t like old music. June: I don’t like your face. (pause) June: I’m just kidding. I love you. Sal: I don’t like that Megan is here so I can’t kiss Austin. Austin: I don’t like 'Zelda'. Megan: Gaping asshole. Austin (whispered): Goatse... (long pause) Sal: I hate your mom. June: (giggles) That was the most serious face ever. Sal:Is it bad that I am almost starting to dig this song? Megan: What song? Sal: I’ll show you. Megan: No don’t. Sal: You’re saying don’t like you want to. June: That was the best thing ever. Sal: (about the music) This makes me feel so good. (They whisper inaudibly.) June: That’s exactly what you were wearing on Friday. I mean the shirt and the hat. Sal: Austin, The transformation is coming. June: Do they come off, ever? (Austin leans across and kisses June. To sit back, he tries to pull he over to him, but she does not want to go.) Megan: I saw these things on TV and I want them. Zach: You have so many shirts with such tiny buttons. Megan: They’re like fake. June: Every single pair of pants, none of them had front pockets! Zach: Girls don’t need front pockets. Jenn: I do! I think guys just want to see guys put things by their butt. June: This is as big as my pocket gets. Jenn: Look where I put my cellphone. June: This phone’s too big. Sal: I wish cats had voices. June: I love Amy. Austin: I love Amy, too. Don’t be jealous. June: Shut up.
They weren't actually loud. In fact, they were making a concerted effort to
whisper, and occasionally hush each other. But they were astonishingly insipid. Eventually one broke out a guitar (where the hell did that come from?) and began to tunelessly, pointless plunk at it, all the while disdaining assholes who can't actually play the guitar.
And then they all left, together, all at once. POOF. They're gone.
Today was even quieter and more successful, except the fact that I score a nasty sinus headache, which led to a walk in the rain to the CVS to buy drugs and a snack. Surprisingly, within moments of taking ibuprofen and pseudoephedrine, the pressure and pain went away.
In the past two work days I have put down nineteen pages of the new play. This, following several months of rolling it all around in my head. Following auditions for Talespinner's 2013 season and attending a performance of Magic Flute, I solidified not only how many actors would be available to me, and who they are, but exactly how far I could push Ali & Co. in making this comic strip come alive. This holiday season has also given me some highfalutin idears about what I want to see in a Christmas pageant.
