A Man's World

Play #14: A Man's World by Rachel Crothers

Okay, theatre history folks, Rachel Crothers is definitely one of those folks you should know, but probably don't. I first met her in my MA program when I read He and She. Writing at the beginning of the 20th century, Crothers was one of the most successful women playwrights of her day. She was regularly produced, she acted a little, she even directed many of her own productions and sometimes designed sets. And her plays have a tendency to deal explicitly with the unfair differences in circumstances between men and women. I think it's pretty obvious that a play with this title would do so, eh? A Man's World is the story of a woman named Frank Ware, who has gained great acclaim as a writer. In particular, she writes about the plight of women in the tenements of New York. She also runs a sort of halfway house in the area designed to help young women find their way out of poverty. The public assumes she must have a lover who does her writing for her - it's too good to be written by a man. She lives in an apartment with Kiddie, the boy she adopted. Of course, as a single woman raising a child on her own in 1909, there is plenty of gossip surrounding these circumstances. And, of course, she must be lying about the child's origins - he must be her illegitimate son. Most convinced in this is Leone, a singer who lives downstairs. She is convinced that Kiddie bears a striking resemblance to Malcolm Gaskell - a newspaper man who everyone thinks is in love with Frank. She assumes that they really knew each other back in Paris despite their story of only meeting here, that the child is theirs, and that they are hiding this knowledge from the world. Leone finally confronts Frank with this idea after she has finally admitted to Gaskell that she loves him - despite her convictions to remain a strong, single woman. It seems she has a hard time trusting men because she is so appalled by the actions of the man who impregnated and abandoned Kiddie's mother - a young woman who came to Frank in Paris looking for help, and eventually died during childbirth. But she has finally given in to love when Leone proposes her theory - and Frank realizes that she's not entirely wrong. Kiddie does look like Gaskell! She confronts him and he admits that he had known the girl, and together they confirm that he is Kiddie's father. This proves to be more than a little problematic for Frank, who has spent the last six years hating the nameless, faceless man who had destroyed that young woman. Gaskell argues that she ought to forget that old nonsense. Frank begs him to admit that what he did was wrong, but he says that, as a man, he is subject to different rules than women and refuses to admit any wrongdoing, so Frank ends up sending him away - choosing her ideals that men and women should be held to the same standards over love.

I found this play interesting, because in He and She, the woman ends up choosing her duties as a mother over her ambitions and talents as an artist, so to see her heroine choose her ideals over being a wife was kind of nice. I wonder how this play would come across today, because it really is pretty relevant when you think about how much scrutiny women celebrities are under as opposed to their male counterparts. This is really a very well-mannered critique of the slut-shaming rape culture that holds women solely responsible for an activity that really does require two people to do it. Hmm...

Juniper; Jubilee

Play #13 (Make-up #2): Juniper; Jubilee by Janine Nabers

This is a short play about the pain of coming of age. Juniper is a young teenage girl whose adopted parents - an Afrikaaner doctor (Carl) and his American wife (Deena) - have just moved them to America from their home in South Africa. Juniper is uncomfortable in the gray world of the American suburbs until she meets a neighbor boy - Matt. The two of them become friends and even begin to date, but her mother objects. Every time Juniper begins to feel something for Matt, she hears the sound of African drums and feels pain in her pelvis. As things progress between the two of them the pain gets worse until she is surrounded by a vision of three women in African garb who surround her and cut her. Juniper's mother explains that, before they adopted her, her birth mother performed the traditional rite of female genital mutilation on her child, which was why Juniper found herself feeling pain at the hint of arousal. Her adopted mother assures her that her birth mother loved her, and did only what she believed to be right, and she tells her that some day they will find a way to heal her body so that she can feel peace and warmth when she is touched by a man. The play ends with Deena cradling Juniper and singing her an old African song.

As I mentioned, this is a short play, but it's good enough that I found myself wishing there were more of the play. I cared about Juniper so quickly that I wished I could spend more time with her - particularly in her moments of being haunted by the chorus of African women - one of whom is her birth mother. The simultaneous longing and violation she feels toward her African home is sweet and sad and so very human. And, of course, aside from being a girl who is traumatized by such an extreme event, she is also just a teenage girl who is trying to grow up, and the relatability of that familiar journey is only compounded by her more extreme circumstances. And the magic images of the women from her home town in the Sudan lend themselves to some really beautiful moments of theatricality. 

The Long Christmas Ride Home

Play #12: The Long Christmas Ride Home by Paula Vogel

I love these plays that are so beautifully theatrical! I'm not saying that there aren't marvelous "realistic" plays out there - of course there are - but it's these plays that invest so heavily in magic that only belongs to theatre (as opposed to film), that inspire me and scare me and just plain make me happy. The Long Christmas Ride Home follows a family of a mother, father, two daughters and a son who head to church and then their grandparents' house on Christmas. However, the children are played for most of the performance by Bunraku puppets. If you're unfamiliar with this Japanese puppetry style, here's a picture:

From Britannica Kids

For the first part of the play, lines are only spoken by two narrators - a man and a woman. They are the parents, but they also provide all the narration and inner life of the children. The children fight and play and get carsick and whine... just like any kids. The father daydreams about the woman with whom he is having an affair. The mother daydreams about how she could regain her husband's interest - maybe another child? They sit through the Christmas service in which the Unitarian Universalist minister talks about Japanese art and philosophy as a way to understand their role in the world. Then the family heads to their maternal grandparents' house where they receive gifts, and the evening devolves into fighting until their grandfather kicks them out and they get back in the car to head home. On the way home, the father raises his hand to hit his wife... and the action splinters. The puppeteer behind the eldest daughter splits off and enacts the same night 25 years in the future when her boyfriend finds out she is pregnant with another man's child. She is left out on the street in the cold and almost decides to sleep on a snow drift - which would certainly have killed her at that temperature, but a wind blows and wakes her, and she runs to find her car. The action returns again to the slap, and then the youngest daughter splinters off to enact the same night 24 years in the future when she stands outside having followed her lover Naomi to the apartment of her new lover. She is about to shoot herself when a wind blows and she decides to live. Finally, the brother splinters off from the car to enact a night 20 years in the future when, after his boyfriend has kicked him out and taken up with a new, younger man, he goes to a club and hooks up with a stranger who gives him AIDS. He reflects on that moment, on his death, and on the ability that he has to return to earth on this night each year to check on his sisters. In the end, the puppet children are all back in the car as it skids to the edge of a pond in the moments after their father hit their mother. They join together in their fear - the children literally linking arms - and the father manages to get the car out of danger, and they head home.

Like Baltimore Waltz, there is a clear reference to Vogel's own beloved brother who died of AIDS in the character of Stephen, but so much more than a story of personal loss for her, it is a story of family connections that are so inextricably part of our lives. In both of the girls' future scenes, they mention the loss of Stephen - they feel his absence. But even in death he is there for them at their darkest moments, protecting them. The description of death in this play might be one of my favorites I have ever read - the idea that our loved ones return regularly to watch over us, that we subconsciously feel their presence. It's poetic and comforting and so beautifully realized in this piece. The use of all the puppets (from the children to the man in the bar with Stephen to the "two naked lesbian law student puppets," etc.) is extremely intimidating to me as a director - finding the ways to interact with the puppet world vs. the world of the humans, finding the rules of a world that works this way and then communicating those rules effectively to an audience that would be so unfamiliar with the mode. But what an exciting challenge it would be to have the opportunity to stage this! This is definitely one I'm going to have to put on my bucket list - partly because it scares me. But so far, some of the most rewarding experiences I have had as a director have been working on plays that I was afraid of. and I really do believe that theatre needs to cultivate its own theatricality more... and man, is Vogel just one of the absolute grand-dames of theatricality!

Matt & Ben

Play #11 - Matt & Ben by Mindy Kaling & Brenda Withers

This play is just plain fun... but also, I imagine, a little tough to separate from its creator. It sort of made me think of Parallel Lives: The Kathy and Mo Show in that way. Both plays are hilarious, and could certainly be hilarious with any number of skilled performers, but there is something about them that really belongs to the people who wrote and originally performed them.

At any rate, the idea behind Matt & Ben is that two women are playing Matt Damon and Ben Affleck who are two dudes from Boston in the middle of trying to write a screenplay adaptation of Catcher in the Rye. It's not going terribly well. Then, lo and behold, a parcel falls from the ceiling. In this parcel is the completed screenplay for Good Will Hunting - with these two guys' names on the cover sheet. For the rest of the play, then, they attempt to decide what to do. Can they pass this off as their own? It does say it's theirs, after all. Who would play the lead? Who has always overshadowed/been jealous of whom? They explore their current and past frustrations through a series of hilarious memory-type scenes in which they sometimes play other characters from their past. Finally, once they have reunited after their big fight, they discover that the pages are now blank, and the lights go down on them attempting to recreate the screenplay from their memory. It's a bizarre and delightful "what if" for the origin story of two dudes from Boston who managed to win an Oscar for a screenplay.

I will admit, I have been developing a bit of a crush on Mindy Kaling of late, having just started watching The Mindy Project. She has a really fun, dynamic, up-beat wit that just invites a very positive and pleasant kind of laughter. I get a sense of enjoyment from her work - and that definitely comes through in this send up of the buddy comedy/Cinderella story/origin story. However, reading this on the heels of the Super Bowl and her very funny ad for Nationwide (which I cannot, for some reason, find in its full version anywhere online... wtf, internets!), I can't help but wonder what's up with her and Matt Damon? Personally, I hope they're awesome friends.

This is the kind of play that I would like to perform with a really close and trusted friend - I think that's the kind of vibe that wrote it, and the vibe it's about - so it really seems to demand it.

Aria da Capo

Play #10 - Aria da Capo by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Aria da Capo is a short little metatheatrical piece that seems to delight itself in its sending up of theatrical conventions. The book it's in actually lists the play as a morality play, but I think that's a drastic oversimplification. It starts out with a fairly simple commedia type scene between Pierrot and Columbine - two classic stock types of Commedia dell'arte. They flirt and make jokes and eat and drink for a while, until they are interrupted by a character named Cothurnus, who is wearing a tragedy mask. They argue for a moment that his play isn't to start until later, but he protests that he will play it now, so the comic actors leave. Cothurnus then summons the two tragic actors, Corydon and Thyrsis, who are both fairly put out by having been summoned to the stage so long before they were supposed to perform. But perform they eventually do. Their play is the morality play about two shepherds whose mutual jealousy leads them to escalating animosity that begins with building a wall down the middle of their field, and ends in them murdering each other. Once they are dead, Cothurnus shoves their bodies under the table that the comic actors used and just leaves. The comic actors return to play their scene and are concerned to find the dead bodies there. But when they complain, Cothurnus tells them to just cover them up - the audience will forget they are there. Pierrot and Columbine agree, and begin their initial scene again as the curtain falls.

Tragedy, it seems, can interrupt comedy with impunity in the theatre. Moralizing can be derailed by mechanics (unprepared as they are, the shepherds keep having to ask for their lines, for example). And the horrors of death and betrayal can be quickly swept under the rug (or tablecloth, as the case may be).

It's a poetic little piece that feels more like an inside joke than something truly intended for a larger audience, but, as someone who loves a good inside joke, I found it quite pleasant!

Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue

Play #9: Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue by Quiara Alegria Hudes

Well, I was right. I definitely wish I had read this one first. I got such a sense of the importance of Ginny to Elliot in this play, and since Ginny never actually appears in Water by the Spoonful, the connection was something I just had to sort of believe second hand rather than actually knowing about it. Elliot is the story of Elliot's return from his first tour in Iraq. He was wounded, but even so, he returns for a second tour. The construction of the play is less linear than Spoonful, built like a musical fugue. A fugue, according to the good ol' OED, is "a polyphonic composition constructed on one or more short subjects or themes, which are harmonized according to the laws of counterpoint, and introduced from time to time with various contrapuntal devices." This play behaves very much like this. Constructed out of the memories of Elliot, his father (Pop), his grandfather (Grandpop), and Ginny, as well as some local interviews Elliot participates in during his week on leave, the characters almost never actually speak to each other. They speak to the audience, they speak via letters written from the front lines of Vietnam and Korea. It is an intricate tapestry of three generations of a family of veterans, and the experiences they share - though they have never actually spoken about them. The trauma that each of them carries (Ginny was a wartime nurse in Vietnam, so she shares the experiences as well) weighs on them, but it also connects them, whether they know it or not. Like Spoonful, Hudes asks for nonrealistic staging elements, seeking the poetic and theatrical rather than the literal. The penultimate scene, when Ginny takes Elliot into the garden to help heal his wound soars as she wraps him in ivy (just like he was wrapped in barbed wire in Iraq), and helps him to find happiness and healing within. And this healing is compounded when she hands him his father's letters that he had written home from Vietnam. It related experiences that Elliot understood first hand, but had never been able to get his father to talk about. The final moment of the play sees each of the men as the young man he is/was when he goes/went off to war. This might be one of the more beautiful portrayals I've seen in recent years of the soldier experience. It's a hard and scary and unsettling life that involves injury and having to kill other human beings, but there is also camaraderie and love and music and honor.

I am going to have to get my hands on part three of this series... Hudes really is a lovely writer.

Water by the Spoonful

Play #8: Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Alegria Hudes

This one won a Pulitzer Prize, so I figured I should probably get it read. And now, I'm wishing I had thought to read the first in the trilogy... you know... first. I suppose I'll just hit up Elliot, A Solider's Fugue tomorrow. At any rate, this is a gorgeous play. The story centers follows Elliot, who returned from serving in Iraq a few years ago. His aunt Ginny who raised him is on the verge of dying of cancer, and his birth mother Odessa who abandoned him as a child is a recovering drug addict with six years of sobriety behind her. Elliot and his cousin Yazmin spend most of the play dealing with the implications of Ginny's death. Odessa, on the other hand, spends most of the play online, talking to other addicts in an online support group that she moderates. Elliot's anger with his birth mother grows and grows as we learn that they have more in common than we might have thought. And the participants in the online forum are very interesting - deep relationships with people who know their deepest, darkest secrets... but they don't even know their real names. They address each other as Orangutan or Chutes&Ladders or Fountainhead. But as time goes on for them, the online world isn't enough, and they require something more as well. It's a meditation on loss and family and support and weakness and personal failings and the knowledge that personal failings are simply the cost of being human.

The title comes from a horrifying story from Elliot's childhood when he and his two-year-old sister had the flu and were unable to keep anything down, so Odessa was instructed to feed them a spoonful of water every five minutes to keep them hydrated. Unfortunately, addict that she was, she was unable to keep up this arrangement to dire consequences. It was after this that Elliot was sent to his aunt Ginny, whom he refers to as his mother. It's a positively shattering metaphor for the tiny gestures and decisions that add up to a life. The tiny steps that can mean love and survival and success, or destruction and loss and failure.

Hudes gives an interesting set of directions in suggesting how to stage this play, calling for many different chairs to represent the "real" places, and open space to represent the online interactions. I would love to see this piece staged - I would love to see which of those worlds ends up feeling more real at which moments in the performance.

I really can't wait to read the other two pieces that frame this play in Hudes's trilogy.