Play a Day: Fairfield

Eric Coble

For Monday I read Fairfield by Eric Coble, and available at New Play Exchange.

Two months reading a new play every day, and this is the first time I have presented the work of Eric Coble which is odd because we are friends. I am friends with playwright Eric Coble. Everyone hear that? Me and Eric Coble. Yes.

We met in college, I was completing my fifth year as an undergrad and he began his MFA in Acting at Ohio University so though I think of him as older we are the same age. He stopped acting in 1996, I was the marketing director at Dobama Theatre when he walked on stage for the very last time in Eric Overmyer's Mi Vida Loca. Coble is an excellent actor and I am sorry no one else has the opportunity to see that.

Because he was committed to becoming a playwright! And he has been most prolific and most successful. I had the great good fortune to perform in The Velocity of Autumn opposite Cleveland legend Dorothy Silver at Beck Center in Lakewood, before it moved to the Arena Stage and then Broadway, a production for which Estelle Parson was nominated for a Tony.

The Velocity of Autumn
(Beck Center, 2012)

I am dropping all the names today.

For ten years Eric and I have been colleagues in the Playwrights' Unit at the Cleveland Play House, where I have been blessed to receive Eric's guidance, advice and good humor as I have made my own journey as a professional writer.

I have also had the fortune to experience several of his works in progress, including Fairfield, as well as seeing the CPH premiere production in 2015. In the spirit of #NewDayNewPlay, however, I did re-read it before writing my recommendation!

Fairfield takes place in an inner-ring suburb somewhere in the United States. Except the only city like this one in the United States in Cleveland Heights, a magical fantasyland where an almost equal number of white people and black people (and a not insignificant number of Jewish people) live side-by-side and get into heated arguments about race and racism and yet never actually set fire to anything and we don't leave because we love it here. Except for all the racism.

Fairfield
(Cleveland Play House, 2015)

Eric was a member of our school board when he wrote this play (we both live in Cleveland Heights, the city of great writers) and after the table read I asked if he wasn't concerned about how it might be received. He just gave that carefree smile of his and told me he wasn't running for reelection, anyway.

Coble has an incomparable way of taking difficult contemporary issues to outrageously hilarious extremes, and Fairfield is a classic example of this. He explodes modern conversations about race, while still presenting engaging and (with one obvious exception) sympathetic, well-meaning, occasionally delusional characters who truly want to do the right thing, even if they only help make everything spin more wildly out of control.

As one of the parents whose children attend Fairfield might say, Eric Coble knows how to "use his words."

This month I have been heartened to read thirty great works by thirty tremendous playwrights. So many of them were recommended to me by other playwrights, dedicated individuals who proudly promote each other's work.

I am taking a short break from writing, however, as I concentrate on an outdoor, summer production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Perhaps I will see you there!

Eric Coble is currently developing his new play, "The Girl Who Swallowed a Cactus" at the New Visions/New Voices Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Play a Day: Big Nose

Stacy Osei-Kuffour

For Sunday I read Big Nose by Stacy Osei-Kuffour, and available at New Play Exchange.

An immigrant, a woman who has come from away, from Africa, she will not leave her NYC apartment until she has had the operation to reduce the size of her ever-growing nose.

This script is close to the heart, but the playwright also has such skill with awkward conversations, misunderstandings and malaprops, physical timing and magical absurdity that reading it I kept bursting out laughing. It is hilarious, and also poignant and sweet.

They used to say that in America you could be anything you want, but what do you want do be? Our ideas of beauty and sex are so troubled and messed up, we spend time and money harming ourselves to please others instead of accepting who we truly are.

Tomorrow is the last day of April, and the final day of #NewDayNewPlay. I think I already know what I am reading. It's been an incredible month.

Play a Day: The Oba Asks for a Mountain (BONUS)

Photo: Steve Wagner

Saturday night we had a special family outing; my mom and my brother joined us for The Oba Asks for a Mountain, produced by Talespinner Children's Theatre (TCT).

Written by Gail Nyoka, and directed by my colleague Chennelle Bryant-Harris, Oba is a Nigerian folk tale about an overbearing king, and the subjects who outwit him through teamwork and friendship. It's a charming story which sends a great message of resistance with grace, joy and kindness.

If you've never been to see a show at TCT you really should, and this is an excellent example of one, with plenty of gentle call-and-response, beautiful costumes, and equal parts story, dance, physical humor and song. The set design is always gorgeous, especially the set painting.

Clocking in a little over forty minutes, I think I still hold the record for shortest TCT mainstage production with Adventures In Slumberland.

The Talespinner Children's Theatre production of "The Oba Asks For a Mountain" at Reinberger Auditorium closes tomorrow, Sunday, April 29, 2018.

Play a Day: Living Creatures

Ashley Rose Wellman

For Saturday I read Living Creatures by Ashley Rose Wellman, and available at New Play Exchange.

Having a relationship means risking part of yourself. Having a child means risking all of yourself.

My daughter has a severe peanut allergy. She is smart and diligent, she's fifteen and can care for herself. Always very careful about checking packaging, she doesn't fool around with that. She won't eat any baked good if she doesn't know where it came from.

And yet, things happen.

When my son was less than one year old her had a fall and fractured his skull. I was on watch. It required surgery. He's fine. Scar on the back of his head, when his hair is long you can't even see it.

It didn't have to happen that way. It could have been worse. A fraction of an inch. It could have been debilitating. It could have been fatal.

And before that, we were expecting a baby. Just the two of us, our first child, and he died before he was born. Like that. Things happen.

Having a child means that every day, every moment, is an opportunity to die. The fact that it becomes less fraught as they grow doesn't mean the terror goes away. You just get used to it. It's right there to destroy you if something goes wrong.

Wellman has composed a chilling fable about the helplessness of parenthood. Part ghost story, part aching lament, she taps into the primal fear of child loss, creating a contemporary mythology, not to explain the afterlife, but rather what happens to the living when someone they have put their heart into is gone.

The anxiety, the misery, the bargaining, and the utter impossibility of acceptance, of "closure." We want to believe that one day everything will be okay, that everything will go back to the way it was. But the only way through is forward.

Play a Day: Barceló On The Rocks

Marco Antonio Rodriguez

For Friday I read Barceló On the Rocks by Marco Antonio Rodriguez, a playwright whose work is available at New Play Exchange.

That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder!
- HAM V.i

The first murder, and in Hamlet's case the recent murder of his father by his uncle. The story of the human race is one of continual and constant betrayal, between family members, friends, and lovers.

The baggage that we carry as Americans, the collective weight of cultures without number, many who flee across the border to escape persecution, but end up bringing their oppression with them.

Rodriguez's tale is a memory play of the Dominican Republic, centering on one man who has betrayed as much as he has been betrayed. Caught between nations, abandoning his home and not yet embracing America, he burdens his sons with his shame, disappointment, and sadness.

His script is rich and layered, a tension of regret and fear from the old country haunting the otherwise everyday setting of an apartment in Washington Heights. The final moments, of honesty, confession and acceptance, are a welcome release and promise hope for the future.

Play a Day: Provenance

Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder

For Thursday I read Provenance by Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder, and available at New Play Exchange.

Earlier this year I attended an audition and the performer chose as her contemporary piece a monologue I hadn't heard before. When I asked about it, she said it was from The Bone Orchard by Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder. She'd found it at New Play Exchange. I will read that someday, today I read this instead.

prov·e·nance (ˈprävənəns) n.
the place of origin or earliest known history of something.
"an orange rug of Iranian provenance"
synonyms: origin, source, place of origin; More
- the beginning of something's existence; something's origin.
"they try to understand the whole universe, its provenance and fate" - a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality.
"the manuscript has a distinguished provenance"

It is also the name of the restaurant in the Cleveland Museum of Art. My wife and I love to dine in museums. We also love books, though it would be difficult for me to suggest I love books more than she. She has worked in several bookstores, in New York and Cleveland. I visited her in early 1995 when she was working for Shakespeare & Company, the one on West 81st Street, now demolished.

During her shift I sat in Cafe Lalo and wrote my first full-length play, The Vampyres.

She often laments never having become a librarian. But she is an English teacher at an all-girls school, and while that's not the same thing it feels to me like a related thing. Because though there remains great gender disparity in who gets published, the care and maintenance of books, like the care and maintenance of most things, falls to women.

The best bookstores in Cleveland, Appletree, Loganberry, and Mac's Backs, are all owned and operated by women.

Books are bizarre artifacts; finite, as memory goes, but expansive. Pages have writing on both sides, and collapse into a neat package that can hold thousands of words or stories. Paper is impermanent, easily damaged by water or heat. Even so, some last thousands of years. I have books from my childhood, from my parents' childhood. This CD of priceless personal photographs I burned ten years ago is already damaged and worthless.

Wilder's play is not entirely about books, though that is its entry point. Two women with cross-purposes meet in a library, and the reluctant search for a rare book is on. Her crackling dialogue is positively Beckettian, expressing frustration and futility with knowing wit and absurdity. It is a magical tale about the things we keep, the tasks left undone, and the fear of making connection with those best-suited to take the journey with us.

This month I have taken the opportunity to read so many outstanding plays, so many stories, from such a diverse selection of talented and enchanting writers. In Provenance, one of Wilder's character observes that, "stories are meant to be shared." Isn't it so?

Play a Day: The Fear Out There

Dr. Jodi Van Der Horn-Gibson

For Wednesday I read The Fear Out There by Jodi Van Der Horn-Gibson, and available at New Play Exchange.

Our month of #NewDayNewPlay is almost through! After today, I have only five more plays to read before the end of April. However, the first day of May also marks the beginning of the International Children's Theatre Festival, which has been rebranded as Family Theater Day at Playhouse Square.

During the week leading up the Family Theater Day (Saturday, May 5) there will be matinees for school groups, and often I have the opportunity to see some of those.

The first year I experienced the festival came at just the perfect time, as I was only just beginning my work writing plays for children. I saw several plays from around the globe and had my eyes opened to just how expansive and the palette of shows for young people could be.

Van Der Horn-Gibson's play put me in mind of those works, as the playwright delves into complicated issues which trouble children and which they may not entirely understand, issues of bullying, illness and the death of a parent.

Two children from a blended family, almost ten years difference in age, come into emotional conflict as their needs are at odds with each other. At the same time, each are coping with the unspoken fears that come with being left on their own due to a family crisis, and the fear that dwells beneath the surface. Children do not understand what is and what is not their fault, or under their own control.

Van Der Horn-Gibson tells this story, however, with playfulness, with color and humor, seeing the world through six year-old Jodi's eyes as she explores her backyard with a troupe of unique and diverse imaginary animal friends.

The best children's plays are those which are smart and open-hearted, appealing to an audience of all ages, and this is one of those.