Our Lady of Kibeho

Play #21 - Our Lady of Kibeho by Katori Hall

Katori Hall is one of those playwrights who I have meant to read for a long time, but for whatever reason, I haven't gotten around to it until today. And I am definitely looking forward to reading more. Our Lady of Kibeho is a poetic account of the true story of three girls in Rwanda who had visions of the Virgin Mary in 1981 - visions that ultimately foretold of the coming genocide. In this play, the visions start with an orphan outsider, Alphonsine. The other girls find it easy to dismiss until a second girl - Anathalie - also begins to have visions. Father Tuyishime - the head of the school - believes them, but Sister Evangelique does not, and gives the head "mean girl," Marie-Claire, full latitude to pinch and burn the girls in order to prove that they are lying. Still, the visions keep coming, until a climactic moment at the end of the first act when Alphonsine and Anathalie are finally joined by Marie Claire in their visions - their beds fly up into the air and break in half. The second act begins a few months later as a representative from the Vatican (Father Flavia) has arrived to confirm or debunk the girls' claims. He begins by asking the girls questions about catechism, which does trip up Alphonsine, but generally they do fine. Then, when the girls begin having a vision, Father Flavia begins piercing them with a large needle - if their claims were true, they wouldn't feel the pain. And in the moment, they do not. But as we see them covered in bandages in later scenes, the aftermath of the tests is quite painful. Father Flavia remains highly skeptical of the girls' claims, and Father Tuyishime is furious with Flavia's methods, but Bishop Gahamanyi insists that they go along with Flavia, hoping that a verified miracle could turn Kibeho into another Fatima - a hub for pilgrimages. One night, in the dorms, the girls begin to argue, until Anathalie begins to have another vision, and flowers and vines begin to grow up and down the walls. When Father Flavia arrives, Anathalie speaks to him in Italian as the Virgin Mary, and his skepticism is deeply shaken. With the approaching feast of the Assumption, the girls have told the surrounding villages that Mary will appear with an important message, so a huge celebration is planned with people coming from miles around. When Mary arrives, however, the vision is of Mary weeping - she tells them of the impending genocide. In the aftermath, Flavia confirms that the girls' visions are real - even though they are unspeakably dark. Finally, Father Tuyishime tells Alphonsine that he must leave them - as a Tutsi, it is safer for him to flee to Uganda.

The idea that this play is based on a true story is sort of amazing to me. Having been raised Catholic, I am still drawn to fantastic stories like this. All those tales of miracles tend to seem so inaccessible in a church setting. Seeing the real people at the center is exciting and much more moving for me. The weight that these girls carried - and the weight that the country would carry in the coming years - are so vividly portrayed. And Hall's voice as a writer is so cool. I felt like I could hear the rhythm of the speech - even though the people talking would not have been speaking English. And in her stage directions, you get a pretty clear vision of her personal voice - so the difference between the poetry of the dialogue and her own idiosyncratic voice is clear and really fun. I love being told in parentheses that this stern, straight-laced nun is "Totes lying." The beauty and spectacle of the story makes me want to see it, but the tone of the stage directions makes me want to hang out with Katori Hall. 

4000 Miles

Coming in just a wee bit after midnight, but it still counts!

Play #20: 4000 Miles by Amy Herzog

This is another one that goes in the book for sweet and lovely. 4000 Miles starts out when 21-year-old Leo shows up at his grandmother Vera's New York apartment at 3am with no notice, having ridden across the country from Seattle on his bike. Apparently he hasn't even been in touch with his family, which makes the arrival even more shocking, but Vera agrees to let him stay the night. He ends up staying for a few weeks. He is dealing with the death of his best friend Micah - a death that occurred in the middle of their cross-country ride, which is something we don't see. He is also dealing with breaking up with his girlfriend Bec, which is something we do see. Over the weeks that they live together, Leo and Vera come to depend on each other. They get into a rhythm, they keep each other company, they even smoke a little pot together to celebrate the Autumnal Equinox. And then, like people do, they part ways when Leo decides to go home to face his family before heading to Colorado for a job. It's really sort of a heartwarming buddy/roommate story in some ways, but with about 60 years age difference between the two buddies. It's a very charming story of a brief window in these two peoples' lives when they needed each other and were able to be there for each other. Plus, there are some good scenes between Leo and Bec, as well as a scene between Leo and a girl named Amanda who he brought home from a bar, so I'll keep this in my undergrad acting class bag.

Still, I have to say, as much as this is a perfectly lovely play, I'm really having a lot more fun reading the more outlandish scripts as opposed to the sentimental ones. But that's just me... and that's just this week. Who knows what I'll be feeling with twenty or so more plays under my belt!

F***ing Art

Play #19 (Make-up #3) - F***ing Art by Bekah Brunstetter

I don't know why I'm so gun shy about typing out the actual word here on the venerable interwebs. I certainly have no problem saying the word, but speech is so ephemeral. There's no record of it.

Anyway... no need to wax so philosophical about a short, simple, sweet play with a slightly scandalous title. FA is the story of Art, an 18-year-old boy dying of cancer, and Gal, the 18-year-old girl who has come to be "his first and his last." They knew each other when they were much younger, but never well. Still, apparently this pretty, popular girl has decided to offer herself to the dying son of two youth ministers. There is understandable awkwardness as they size each other up. Gal learns that she is not the only girl to have written Art about their possible missed connections. It's such a sad demonstration of the way people can try to make someone else's tragedy all about themselves. But as they talk, Gal is able to open up to Art little by little, expressing her fears and hopes with him in a way that, perhaps, she never could with someone who was likely to be alive a year from now. There is a sweet, sad honesty to this play that I really responded to. A lot of Brunstetters plays can be a little more harsh or even absurd in tone (a trait that I happen to love, by the way), so the straightforward nature of this one was a bit of a surprise, but it really is pretty lovely. They don't end up having sex, but what they do share is probably even more intimate. Another one I'll hang onto for acting classes.

Hir

Play #18 - Hir by Taylor Mac

Now, I know that I had said I was going to read plays by women for my "Play a Day" project, but I'm going to make an exception here. Taylor Mac is a genderqueer playwright (who prefers to use "judy" as a gender pronoun), and I feel totally comfortable including a non-binary viewpoint like Taylor's into my year o' plays. So, let's do this!

At the beginning of Hir, Isaac is coming home from three years in the Middle East where he served in Mortuary Services during the war. It was his job to collect body parts after people died so they could be sent home to their families. He is home because he was dishonorably discharged for some, shall we say, creative drug use. When he arrives home, he finds that the house has changed substantially from when last he saw it. First of all, the place is a mess - to the point that the front door is wedged shut because of the piles and piles of clothes and debris strewn about the house. His father (Arnold) has had a massive stroke and is now at the whim of his mother Paige, who dresses him in frilly nightgowns, feeds him estrogen, and squirts him with a water bottle when he misbehaves. Paige has stopped cleaning and has started a non-profit with which she intends to buy out and raze their neighborhood. And Isaac's little sister Maxine has begun taking testosterone, changed her name to Max, and prefers to be referred to as "ze" or "hir" rather than "he, she, him, her." Isaac's reaction to all this upheaval is predictably off-kilter, particularly in the face of his PTSD, which makes some everyday activities - like using a blender - extremely difficult. In general, his fits of PTSD involve a lot of vomiting. After being bombarded by all the changes that surround him, Isaac insists on staying home with Arnold while Paige and Max go off to the museum for their "Cultural Saturday" excursion. While they are gone, Isaac tries to talk to his father about the man he had been (the man he had been was apparently an abusive drunk who was unable to deal with his own failures, but he was a MAN who was IN CHARGE and Isaac seems to desperately want a return to that). Isaac also begins to clean the house - which Paige strictly forbade him to do. When they return home, Isaac gives Max jobs to continue cleaning the house, but Paige flies into a rage when she sees what Isaac has done. They argue, with Arnold and Max seemingly siding with Paige, until Paige calls them back to her to perform a shadow puppet play about the hairdresser with whom Arnold had had an affair for years. Tempers flare and Isaac explodes, shoving his mother and beating the air conditioner with a bat. Finally, Paige throws him out of the house, describing him as just another extra, cast away, dead body part that will just be picked up by someone. Isaac leaves, devastated, and Max is left with hir mother, though ze desperately wants to get away from it all. In the final moments, Arnold wets himself and, though Paige tells hir to leave it, Max defies Paige and goes to clean up hir father.

There are some fabulous comic moments in this play that are immensely effective at highlighting the darkness that lies at the foundations of this family's existence. Listening to Paige spout off all the modern gender rhetoric that Max has burned into her brain must be a bit like watching a trained animal - she really doesn't have any idea what she is saying, she's just so proud to be saying it. My favorite line: "MAAAAAAAAX COME IN HERE AND EXPLAIN YOUR AMBIGUITY TO YOUR BROTHER." Genius. Taylor Mac has elevated a complex set of identity politics - and not just when it comes to the transgender character. Arnold has lost all the things that he felt made him "a man" - except for his penis, which he fondles regularly throughout the show. Isaac attempted to find an identity and solutions in the army, but all he found was death and other broken people. Paige was defined for so long by the husband who terrorized her, and now she is bursting from the seams, attempting to define herself as pretty much anything that isn't connected to who she was before. Honestly, Max probably has the strongest sense of self of any of the characters, having made a conscious decision about how ze wants to be perceived in the world. Obviously, as a teen, there is still a lot to sort out, but the cisgender people who surround Max are all careening so wildly out of control, I found myself rooting for the day that Max gets to walk out that door and into the future. But ze doesn't just go - hir family is still there and still needs hir. It's really a very sad and self-sacrificing ending, and an insightful and well-told story!

After Ashley

Play #17 - After Ashley by Gina Gionfriddo

After Ashley starts out in 1999 with 35-year-old Ashley and her 14-year-old son Justin watching a self-help guru on TV. Ashley seems agitated. She keeps trying to have conversations with Justin - she considers the sex talk, but he objects, and when it starts anyway, it all sort of devolves into her airing her own frustrations with his father (Alden). Justin entreats her to stop treating him like a girlfriend, to get out, and get a hobby or something. When Alden comes home, he and Ashley argue over his new decision to hire a mentally ill homeless man to do their yard work. Once they finish arguing, the action is overtaken by a voice over of a 911 call: it's Justin, crying out that his mother has been murdered and that he will not leave her side. The action then jumps three years later. Justin and his father are being interviewed for a true crime show hosted by a man named David, whose estranged 17-year-old daughter had been murdered ten years before. Alden has become something of a celebrity in the wake of Ashley's death, having written a book about the experience called After Ashley. Justin is combative and abrasive throughout the interview, clearly frustrated with the dramatic half-truths his father has perpetuated about his mother for his own benefit. After they finish taping, David pulls Alden aside and offers him a spot hosting a new version of the show: it would film in Florida, it would feature reenactments of sex crimes, and it would, of course, share the name After Ashley. Justin is appalled, but acquiesces to his father's desires, as long as he is provided with an allowance, a car, and his own apartment once they move to Florida. Once in Florida, Justin meets a girl named Julie at a bar. She approaches him because she recognizes him as "The 911 Kid," but they end up sleeping together anyway. The next morning, Alden and David come by to tell Justin that they will be opening a luxury battered women's shelter to be named "Ashley's House." Justin objects strenuously, but the money and fame hungry men ignore him. When they leave, Justin reveals to Julie his plans to shut down all of this Ashley business once and for all. He has his mother's journal, which details how she took Justin's advice to go out and get a hobby: she took part in orgies. And in the journal is the phone number of the name who led the orgies... and that man has video footage of them. Justin, it seems, would rather that people know something true and unpleasant about his mother, rather than all the lovely lies he feels they had been sold. Roderick arrives with the video tape, at which point he insists on video taping Justin and Julie having sex as payment. They agree, and get the tape, which they then switch out for the tribute tape at the ribbon cutting ceremony for Ashley's House. Everything is ruined: the show is postponed indefinitely, the home is renamed, etc. Finally, we see Justin and Julie sitting by the water. She chastises him for apparently getting plastered and embarrassing them both in front of her friends. They discuss whether or not they should stay together now that he has done what he set out to do. The ending is left deliberately ambiguous, as Ashley stands behind them, looking with them out at the water.

This is another script that has some good material for college aged students. Julie and Justin have some really lively dialogue. And, I'll be honest, I could probably piece together a pretty great monologue from Ashley's lines in the first scene. The script itself is bit of a heavy-handed discussion of a culture that is so obsessed with spectacle that it is unwilling or unable to process any genuine emotions. Honestly, I'm not exactly sure why the Roderick-driven sex scene is necessary in the dramaturgy of this play, but I suppose it has something to do with genuine human connection being messy. It's sort of a mediocre play about damaged and selfish people, but then again... isn't everyone in at least one of those categories at least some of the time? 

Mud

Play #16: Mud by Maria Irene Fornes

Mud takes place in a sort of amorphous rural past, sometime on the verge of mass production, but still completely removed from it. 20-something Mae lives in a small, ramshackle house with 20-something Lloyd, who was taken in by her father when they were children. They are not siblings, and they are not lovers, but they are also both. Mae has been going to school to try to make herself feel like she is not a hollow waste - Lloyd sees no need for this ridiculous schooling. Mae and Lloyd argue a lot since they are poor, and Lloyd does not seem to have a job. Their only income is probably from Mae's laundry business. Also, Lloyd is very ill, but refuses to go to the doctor. Mae eventually describes his condition to a doctor, and brings him a pamphlet on Prostatitis, but she also has to bring 50-year-old Henry to read it for them, as the language is far too advanced for her. Mae confides to Henry that she loves him because he is intelligent and eloquent and makes her feel like she is worth something. She kisses him and invites him to live with her and Lloyd. Lloyd is, unsurprisingly, unhappy with this arrangement. He even gets kicked out of his bed and has to sleep on the floor. He does eventually go to the doctor and he steals money from Henry to pay for his prescription. In his anger over this theft, Henry falls on the street and injures himself severely, so when he returns to Mae and Lloyd, he is disfigured and possibly paralyzed. Mae is disgusted with him and with Lloyd and plans to leave, but Lloyd chases after her with a shotgun and returns to the house with her dying body in his arms.

This is an ugly play about a woman who has aspirations, but no knowledge or apparatus to make them come true. She is tethered to two men - one who has always dragged her down, and one who she had so badly hoped would elevate her. Instead, he becomes an even heavier weight around her neck. The tone of this play felt very much like Fen by Caryl Churchill - the episodic structure, the faded hopelessness of the world, the heroine who believed in something better, but was never able to experience it. In between each scene, Fornes directs the actors to freeze for eight seconds - like a photo of the final moment of the scene. It ends up feeling like the old photos of tenement life: pictures of desperation that make the viewers feel pity, but also a certain level of distance and relief that we are not the subjects of those photos. From time to time, Mae reads from her schoolbook - she reads about Starfish (yes, I know they're properly called Sea Stars... but I'm just quoting) and Hermit Crabs. These oceanic denizens are representative of the characters who cannot seem to breathe anywhere but where they are. As she lies dying in Lloyd's arms at the end of the play, Mae cries out that she is a Starfish, longing to see just the tiniest sliver of light. You see - it seems that Starfish cannot see, but they can tell the difference between light and dark. Poor Mae cannot accurately discern what lies beyond the darkness she's been living in, but she knows that there is light just out of her reach, and she would give anything to find it.

Ruby Sunrise

Play #15: The Ruby Sunrise by Rinne Groff

The Ruby Sunrise tells two stories. The first part is the story of an Indiana farm girl in 1927 named Ruby. Ruby has a vision: she wants to figure out a way to beam images into people's homes like they do with radio waves. She starts working on her prototype in the barn of her aunt's farm, as she has recently been orphaned. (It is later discovered that though her mother did die a long time ago, her drunken father is still very much alive and looking for her. She had run away after he destroyed her last lab.) Her aunt isn't all that happy to see her, but she eventually lets her stay. While there, Ruby meets her aunt Lois's boarder, a college boy named Henry, who becomes enamored of Lucy and does everything he can to help her in her endeavor to invent the television. Technology ends up moving too fast for her, however, and when she hears about the successes being made in the big city with this technology, she gets frantic and accidentally electrocutes herself - at which point we find out that she is pregnant with Henry's child.

In the second part of the play, we meet Lulu, a script girl working at a TV studio in 1952. Lulu meets the writer Tad Rose and starts to tell him the story of her mother - Ruby - and he ends up turning the story into a teleplay. However, as the studio executive (Martin) gets hold of it, more and more changes start to happen. Lulu finally snaps when the woman who should have been playing Ruby (Elizabeth - played by the same actress who played Ruby) is replaced by some busty chorus girl type because Elizabeth has been blacklisted. The story is spiraling out of control, and she feels that her mother is being lost to history all over again. She shouts at all the actors, Tad, and Martin, and gets herself fired. As the actors progress with their rehearsals (Paul and Ethel, the actors, are played by the same actors who played Lois and Henry), they find that the script is falling apart. Tad is getting frustrated and disillusioned. When he meets Elizabeth, the blacklisted actress, she talks wistfully about how much she regrets losing the role in this beautiful teleplay, and she also reprimands him when she finds out how far short the story has fallen from the ideals present in the first draft. The older actress Ethel convinces Lulu to come back to work, and Tad turns over the rewrites to her, telling her to tell the story the right way, to work with him, and to fight the good fight.

The play has a lot to do with idealism. Ruby wants to invent, Henry wants to get married and live a farm life. Lois had been in love with Ruby's father, but lost her dreams when he ran off with her sister. Lulu is the product of a woman who clung to her ideals, but was ultimately destroyed by them (she never did marry Henry, and she destroyed her lab - she ended up drinking herself to death). Tad sort of discovers his ideals as the play goes along. The characters are lovingly drawn, and the idea of holding making your ideals your priorities regardless of the cost - that's a pretty noble thought. I have to admit, I didn't get all worked up and excited about this play, but it is solid and sweet and has some very good scenes for acting students - it's definitely one I'm going to keep around.