Play a Day: Falstaff Riseth

Rachael Carnes

For Friday I read Falstaff Riseth, by Rachael Carnes, and available at New Play Exchange.

My daughter a high school freshman, is currently in rehearsal for a performance of Michael Frayn's backstage farce, Noises Off. It opens next weekend, I am anticipating a good time, though I am understandably anxious to witness my first-living-born child in her first full-length play, one of great physical mayhem, English wit, and above all ...

Uh, timing.

Carnes's tale is one of epic absurdity, a relentless and raucous send-up of Elizabethan and high school drama, and above all a tribute to the thankless theater parent, without whom the show would not go on (but don't tell the senior lead that.)

The pop culture references come at you fast and furious, hip-deep with turns of phrase both classic and current, as a troupe of teens unintentionally strive to produce several productions at once. It's smart, silly, and even subversive, as the playwright has created a Shakespearean showcase where the Bard himself is entirely absent and someone else has written his plays.

Hmn. Perhaps I might recommend another work which poses the Authorship Question, The Great Globe Itself ..?

Play a Day: People of the Book

Yussef El Guindi

For Thursday I read People of the Book, by Yussef El Guindi, and available at New Play Exchange.

"Can we all agree going into this war made us less safe?"

That is a question one of the characters ask in this People of the Book, and though you may assume they are referring to the Iraq War of 2003, they could easily be referring to the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

Following the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the power-imbalance led to leaders like Saddam Hussein to press their advantage in a way which would have been more difficult in previous years.

President George H.W. Bush pressed his advantage as well. The West had not seen a wide-scale war in some time. Saddam's invasion of Kuwait was tailor-made for international outrage and for one shining moment, the United States was able to convince most of the world to join in or at the very least stay out of the way.

The war lasted thirty-three days, or has never ended, depending on how you look at it.

Taken literally, El Guindi's play is about deception, professional and personal jealousy, and the effect of American wars in the Middle East. It's a great read, with playful and cutting dialogue, and it is also a metaphor for how American has played itself, chaining our fate to the region. Each of the four central characters reflect a different point of view, about art and writing, about the war and its worth, and what responsibility the United States has yet to take for its actions.

Yesterday the President announced his plans regarding the conflict in Syria. "I want to get out," said President Trump. That's what he said. "I want to get out."

Play a Day: I Go Somewhere Else

Inda Craig-Galván

For Wednesday I read I Go Somewhere Else, by Inda Craig-Galván, and available at New Play Exchange.

As a man in a play once said, "This play is memory." This play includes several nods and allusions to past classic plays and movies about American families and their intimate intricacies, like tiny knots that must be unpicked to be understood. These references serve to place this unique, specific tale in its rightful place as part of that larger tapestry.

I Go Somewhere Else is told from the point of one women at three stages of her life, yearning to understand her mother, for it is she, the mother, who is truly at the center of this tale. Reda, the mother, is possessive, abusive, and controlling of her daughter (first Lanny, then Langree and finally Tabitha.)

On one day, the younger self asks -- though there is an implicit request or plea involved -- "Aren't we supposed to love everybody? No matter what they've done to hurt us in the past?" For when someone we love hurts us, we assume it is something we have done to deserve it, even a blameless child thinks this.

The playwright creates a mother who is at turns proud and irrational and mean-spirited and sad, yet deftly lays out the story of Reda's life and relationships which leaves it squarely at our feet to understand her and to forgive her, as we strive to understand and forgive our own mothers. The way we hope our children may one day understand and forgive us.

Play a Day: The Tallest Building In The World

Matt Schatz

For Tuesday I read The Tallest Building In The World, by Matt Schatz, and available at New Play Exchange. On of these days I will read his An Untitled New Play By Justin Timberlake but everybody has been reading that and loving it so I thought it could wait.

You know, my wife wrote a play and that play was being produced at the New York International Fringe Festival in downtown Manhattan. We had a company of young people and during our off-hours we'd go everywhere and see everything.

One of our members really wanted to see the World Trade Center, and a small group broke off to check it out. Big, ugly buildings, or so they said. I was hungry or something and wanted to get lunch, so I passed. Maybe some other time. This was in August, 2001.

You knew I was going to conclude my little story with something like that, a fact like that, there was an obvious dread in the entire anecdote. Here it comes. And so it is with any tale bout the Twin Towers. Like the Titanic, an enormous human undertaking through which no story can be told without a foreknowledge of its horrible demise.

Schatz's play is not about the end of the WTC but its beginning, a debate between those who would determine its fate, who would collaborate and argue to create what was at one tie, for a short time, the tallest building or buildings in the world.

There was a time when we reached for the future, instead of cringing from it. Schatz tells an expansive story with great economy, utilizing a small number of interesting characters who debate and kvetch with wit and passion to build a dream for the future. The tragedy as they see it is the predetermined ephemera of architecture. Superlatives like "tallest" are fleeting, and as the playwright points out, "architecture might be the only art form where the art is destroyed as a means of progress."

The audience is all too aware of the flaws in the logic of their design, and how the techniques employed to make the thing possible are also elements which will contribute to its eventual destruction.

Play a Day: Monsters Are Made

Hannah C. Langley

For Monday I read Monsters Are Made, a new work in development by Hannah C. Langley, and available at New Play Exchange.

The playwright has chosen to post a new script which is in development, which is a brave and unique move. It would be one thing to read this 82-page script and believe it is complete, but I can see where there is room for development.

I keep these blog entries to reflect upon the work, not to critique, just to record my reading, but properly workshopped it would be fascinating to see the struggle play out between these two well-defined characters, not just mentally but physically. It is quite violent.

The #MeToo moment has emboldened women (and men) to come forward and accuse their assailants, and they have done so in overwhelming numbers and we know it is only the tip of an iceberg. We are hearing their stories, full-throated and without apology, and we who listen are learning a new language for their survival, strength and determination.

This play asks the question, though, to what extent must we understand the assailant, the rapist? What do you do with a perpetrator who demands his own punishment, when doing so is merely another form of control, dominance, and presence? One character states plainly, "you know you're a rapist but you don't even know what rape means." We now better understand what it means to be the victim, but those in positions of power do not yet understand what it means to be the assailant.

By the way, Langley's bio was written by her mentor which is a boss and creative idea.

Play a Day: Before Evening Comes

Philana Omorotionmwan

Last April I decided to read a play a day from those posted at New Play Exchange, a program of the National New Play Network. The result was joining a community of new writers across America, learning a great deal about where the work is being created, and how good so much of it is. It was an inspiring experience, and I look forward to experiencing (at least) thirty great new plays in this brief period of time.

Whether I can actually manage the time necessary to read a play a day, and comment upon it, in addition to all other responsibilities is another matter.

For Easter Sunday I read Before Evening Comes by Philana Imade Omorotionmwan, an impending graduate of Ohio University's MFA in Playwriting Program. (Bobcats, represent.)

A Dystopian parable, set in a near-future where all African-American men are legal bound to make a very specific sacrifice to maintain their own survival. In days past, those enslaved told of people who could fly (and escape their captors) and that story is wound up in this, a moving and lyric tale of the men who are complicit in the system and the women who sacrifice everything to save their children from it.

This year I have been reflecting on my own life, as I turn fifty in July. As the morning paper reminds me, in three days it will be the fiftieth anniversary of the murder of Dr. King. The world has moved forward in the past half-century, and yet today it feels as though it is spinning backward, or that it's never moved.

Jesus Christ Superstar (musical)

John Legend (2018)

The summer 1979 production of Jesus Christ Superstar at Huntington Playhouse in Bay Village may have been the greatest theatrical event of the 20th century. I couldn’t say for sure. I was ten, going on eleven. But as far as I was concerned, it was beyond compare.

We had albums for musicals in our house. My father really liked Godspell. That one’s a poppy, upbeat revue of parables and lessons without any real narrative structure except for some reason one of them gets murdered.

Superstar tells the story of Holy Week with a few loud guitars which has led some to call it a “rock opera” and it is, in the way Rent is a “rock musical,” which is to say it’s really not.

We had a copy of the original, pre-production concept album version, which we did not get as much play in our house as the Godspell record, and for good reason. Every track sounds like a first take, and for rock music they chose a lot of guys who aren’t very good at hitting the high notes.

I mean, Murray Head can’t sing. Am I the first person to notice that? The guys from ABBA figured this out when they gave him “One Night In Bangkok” from Chess and had him rap. I mean, Murray Head can’t rap, either. I digress.

In performance, it’s really Judas’s play. If there were another character in musical history who could be compared it’s Burr in Hamilton. He’s the narrator, we get to hear his version of events, he feels entirely justified in his actions, and he makes a terrible mistake that he immediately regrets.

In addition to making Judas into an anti-hero, Superstar pisses off some of the devout because it ends with Jesus’s burial (spoilers alert) and no resurrection. Judas is the one who gets to come from the dead for a reprise with newfound cosmic awareness of future events, to ridicule and snark. Good ol’ Judas.

I have rediscovered my turntable.

My brother was about to start his sophomore year in high school, and he was in the pit band situated in the wings of our community theater; a grand, old, moldy barn located right across the street from the lake. He was playing vibes, and I had literally nothing to do those summer evening’s but play or watch TV. It was summer!

He’d shown me how to sneak into the loft next next to the tech booth. There were couches and pillows and you could lounge and view, high above and just behind the audience. Must have been a make-out paradise, but I could not tell you.

So I went up there to watch. And I was compelled. I had been raised protestant, I was familiar with the gospels the way most Americans are -- vaguely. I knew the characters and the plot. And this way the late 70s, so sympathizing with a hip, charismatic Jesus with complexities and even hypocrisces was not a stretch, not even for the pre-adolescent mind.

I cannot remember who played Jesus, however. No one ever does. Judas, however, was performed by the late Tom Castro, a beloved educator from Lakewood. I already knew him from when he played Ogg the Leprechaun in Finian’s Rainbow, the same show in which my brother played Sunny, the mute sharecropper’s child … and we should leave it right there.

Unlike the recording with which I was marginally familiar, Castro was an indelible presence as Judas, a powerful singer, occasionally followed by a shadow, a female dancer dressed from toe to crown in a black leotard (SATAN?) I can see him now, and I will never forget him. I wanted to be him.

A couple of nights I watched the how from the loft. Then I asked my brother if I could sit backstage to watch the show. Just sit next to him, in the “pit” band in the wings (there was no actual pit.) It was a community theater production, there was no one around to say, no, that’s dangerous. Or no, that’s foolhardy. Or just plain, no.

So, I sat in a chair by the band one night, and for the first time, I saw how it was all done.

I saw the characters become actors once they crossed into the wings. I saw the tasty-looking food on trays and in baskets were fake. I saw the stage hands and I saw them moving the set around. I saw actors slipping into and out of costume pieces -- nothing risque, but it was suggestive enough that I thought I was seeing something I should not have been.

These things I also remember; the band was tight. High school students and adults, and they were good. One thing I love about the score of Superstar is how creepy it is, not just haunting but spooky. Atmospheric with lurking evil. It’s thrilling!

NBC's version of the last supper (2018)

By my second night backstage I was on my feet. Walking around, staying out of the way, I understood the traffic pattern. I would hide in the wings, getting as close to the action as possible. I was a kid, but not much younger than some of the other players. I could do this. I wanted someone to invite me onstage. I had a fantasy of some company member saying, here! Put this on and join us!

This did not happen, of course. My mom and dad came for closing night, and got me a ticket. We sat in the third row. I had not yet sat in a seat in the audience. It wasn’t as good.

Sunday night, NBC will present Jesus Christ Superstar as one of their live musical events. I don’t understand the appeal of these productions, most likely because I’m not really that much into either musicals or broadcast television. The thrill is in seeing them pull off a stunt like a multi-set, large cast musical production, on the night with millions of people watching.

I have heard such terrible things about them, too. They must make for tremendous ratings, because the abuse on social media is astronomical.

However, when they announced this one, I got excited. Because I do love Superstar. And I don’t like anything else Andrew Lloyd Weber has ever written. Nothing. Hate Dreamcoat, hate Phantom, despise Cats. And yet I have never been inspired to see a production again because my memories of that first are so indelible. Besides, most professional touring companies feature desiccated prog rock stars who are well-more than twice the age of Christ when he died.

The thing is, unlike A Christmas Story Live, or Hairspray Live or Grease Live, there’s no book to ruin in Superstar, there’s no acting. It is a sung through piece (inviting the comparison to opera, sure) and unless they find some way to pad it out interminably, all they need to do is to sing, but sing very, very well.

They announced the cast one at a time over the course of weeks. Alice Cooper as Herod is a stunt, they always get someone like him for that one scene, that one song. But then they said John Legend is playing Jesus! Not some fly-by-night pop star, they got John Legend! Well, okay!

Brandon Victor Dixon (2016)

And Sara Bareilles! I’ve heard of her!

But who was going to play Judas? That’s the role, right? Surely they’d get someone famous from one of NBC’s past sit-coms or procedural dramas. Someone with character, but no chops. Because that's what they do for these modern, televised musicals.

No. They got Aaron Burr.

They tapped Brandon Victor Dixon, who assumed that role in Hamilton after Leslie Odom Jr. stepped down. A name as-yet unfamiliar to the ear (he’s not even mentioned in the promos) yet with high credentials in playing another of the greatest, knowing, conflicted anti-heroes ever conceived for the musical stage.

He also lectured the Vice President, you remember that, right?

I’ll be watching. Have a good Friday.

NBC presents "Jesus Christ Superstar" Live In Concert, Sunday April 1 at 8:00 PM