Madrigal in Black and White

Play #60 - Madrigal in Black and White by Patricia Montley

This short play shows a quick, seemingly simple exchange between Liz (who is white) and Cleo (who is black). Liz is outside mowing her lawn when she notices an unfamiliar, seemingly empty car in front of her neighbor's driveway. As she approaches, she notices that the car is not actually empty - Cleo is sitting inside. They begin to talk about the niceties of finding an unattended vehicle with its lights on, they introduce themselves, they discover that they are both teachers - Liz teaches choral music and Cleo teaches Shakespeare, and they even consider collaborating on some Shakespearean songs for Liz's choral students. It's really a pretty boring, normal conversation that could happen in any suburb in America. However, both Liz and Cleo are accompanied by their shadows who speak their inner thoughts as the conversation progresses. Liz's Shadow lets fly with white guilt and mistrust of unknown minorities and general bizarre stereotypes. Cleo's Shadow just knows she is suspect, knows her education is unexpected, knows there are bizarre stereotypes flying left and right. The Shadows beg their conscious selves not to engage in this weird partnership with these women they just met. They berate their conscious selves for their naivete, their political correctness, their internal insecurities. It's a sort of fun, sort of painful little look at the messy social subconscious that we all carry with us whether we like it or not.

Stick Fly

Play #59 - Stick Fly by Lydia R. Diamond

At the beginning of Stick Fly, we meet brothers Flip and Kent who are bringing their girlfriend and fiancee to their family home in the vineyard to meet their parents. The LeVay family is a very well-to-do African American family - a family that has had every possible advantage in life. The patriarch of the family, Joseph, is a neurosurgeon, Flip is a plastic surgeon. We don't know what Mrs. LeVay does for a living, but she comes from a long line of money. Kent brings home his fiancee Taylor whose biological father was a prominent scholar of the same economic class as the LeVays, but she had no relationship with him after he left her and her mother. This makes her uncomfortable with the affluence of the LeVays. Flip is bringing home his girlfriend Kimber, who studies inner-city dynamics and the achievement gap. Though he is concerned that his mother won't like her, because Kimber is white. Also in the mix is Cheryl, the daughter of the family's long time maid Ms. Ellie, who has recently taken ill. Mrs. LeVay never shows up, however, and Joseph dodges and dodges the reason for her absence. In the meanwhile, the dynamics ebb and flow with a believable feel as family and personal issues bubble to the surface. We learn that Taylor and Flip actually had a one night stand six years ago. We see right away that Joseph is disappointed in the fact that Kent hasn't yet found himself a stable career (he is particularly disapproving of his latest endeavor as a writer - though his first book is about to be published). We see Taylor's discomfort with Kimber, who tends to speak all too knowingly about the difficulties that face African-American youth in education. In the end, it turns out that Ms. Ellie didn't show up because Mrs. LeVay had threatened to fire her when she discovered recently that Cheryl is actually Joseph's daughter - something that Ms. Ellie chose to tell Cheryl over the phone this weekend.

One of the things that I think is particularly difficult about writing a family drama is creating a world in which the people who are related seem related without all sounding the same, and the people who are not related feel just outside enough from the family unit. This is something that I think Diamond does very well. Relationships are very clear in her writing. The way she builds the minor conflicts is effective in diverting the audience's attention, while planting just enough seeds about the Cheryl/Joseph relationship. It doesn't feel full of histrionics, but genuinely familial. And, as they point out about Kent's novel, it is the specificity and detail of a personal story that can achieve a universally accessible feeling. There are also some decent monologues in here, so that's always a bonus!

Oh - and my favorite line. It's one of Taylor's insights on relationships: "Also...black men are almost never serial killers, they dress well, and usually can dance."

Waffles

Play #58 - Waffles by Martha Garvey

Today was a surprisingly busy day. So I decided to go for another short play. Waffles is a sweet, compelling scene about a young-ish married couple - Betsy and Joe - ordering dinner at a diner. Joe is having a bit of a hard time remembering some salient details, however, because he has a brain tumor. He keeps notes on cards and even on his skin to try to keep track of things, but it never quite seems to be enough. They try to stay positive and supportive for each other, but that never quite seems to be enough either. Betsy, it seems, was told by their Slavic oncologist that brain cancer is like syrup on a waffle - you can turn the waffle on its side and scrape off all the syrup, but the syrup has already seeped into the waffle and changed it forever. And it is this change that they are having to deal with - regardless of the outcome of the illness. Can they do it together? Can they deal with the way it has fundamentally changed them?

Foreign Policy

Play #57 - Foreign Policy by J.J. Hunt

This is a fun little piece about mothers and daughters. Edna and her daughter Marilyn are visiting a tenement apartment that Edna has decided to move into now that her husband has passed. Marilyn is appalled at this decision, not only because of the dubious quality of the neighborhood and the apartment, but also because she and her husband have outfitted a beautiful, up-to-date mother-in-law apartment for her at their house. Edna is hell bent on maintaining her independence though. They argue and argue and argue while the landlady, Mrs. Park, alternately ignores them, pressures them, or lectures them. In the end, Mrs. Park ends up shooing them out, yelling that Edna does not deserve this apartment. The people who are coming next to look at it have lost everything due to war and other circumstances, and here Edna is throwing away a perfectly beautiful apartment because of pride.

There's a nice energy to this piece that feels very authentic to the mother/grown daughter experience as they navigate a shared loss in very different ways. Edna feels like she is just on her way to death, which is something that must be done alone - and she has never spent time alone. Marilyn, on the other hand, having just lost her father, is not ready to let go of her mother either. As Mrs. Park astutely points out, Marilyn needs her mother in a way that neither of them seems to recognize. It's a great portrait of two women with similarities that run too deep for them to be able to see them. And sometimes it takes an outsider to see us as we really are.

Child of the Movement

Play #56 (Make-up #14) - Child of the Movement by Cheryl Davis

Well... this play was disturbing in a whole different way from the last one. Although this, too, was based on a true story.

The scene is a living room in Montgomery, AL in 1955. A 56-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl are having a meeting because this 16-year-old girl was recently arrested and beaten for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. She is a polite, well-spoken, passionate, tough young woman, and the NAACP has seen her case as just the match they need to light the fire for the fight for civil rights. In this meeting, however, the girl confesses to the man that she has become pregnant. At this point, the whole tenor of the conversation changes. He no longer sees her as a good girl, a wronged child, a face of the upstanding African American. Now he sees a harlot, a ruined woman. He sees someone who can do nothing for the cause. She argues that she knows her rights, she believes in her rights, and she is still the same strong, smart person she was when they began the conversation, but he pushes her aside, sends her home, and assures her that history will forget her completely. Then, he gets on the phone to Rosa Parks.

The name of the girl to whom this situation actually happened was Claudette Colvin. What's particularly awful about this story is that the NAACP wasn't necessarily wrong in their estimation. If they had put a pregnant teenager up there instead of soft spoken, upstanding Rosa Parks, white naysayers would certainly have ignored anything she had to say, patting themselves on the back for being right about those loose morals. So this poor girl gets tossed aside because of a bad decision. This young girl was impregnated by an older man, and the man sitting in front of her accuses her of leading him away from his wife. After all, he tells her, "It's the woman's job to say no to the man." And if she doesn't, then she's filthy and wrong. The man remains above reproach - largely because he will bear no physical consequences from the encounter. No one can look at a man and no that he has participated in a pregnancy. But when a woman is pregnant, it's pretty much all you can see. What's even more awful, is that this is a stigma that women and girls still face today. The way society judges a woman who has sex outside of marriage is wildly disproportionately negative in comparison to the way it judges a man. This girl had something to say that was worth hearing, but she was silenced by the very people who had called her to speak, because she wasn't the "right kind" of woman. The hypocrisy is practically viscous. And unequivocally vicious.

Yeah... this is another play that people should see... and that should cause some people no small amount of shame.

What Mommy Told Me

Play #55 (Make-up #13) - What Mommy Told Me by Paula J. Caplan.

Well... this was a horrifying little play. I'm definitely going to need to read another one to wash this out of my brain. It's well written, don't get me wrong, just horrifying.

This play is about a mother whose young daughter was being sexually abused by her ex-husband - who also happens to be a police officer in their town. When the moment came in the trial for the girl to tell the judge what happened, she told him that she was just telling him what her mommy told her to tell him, which the judge interpreted to mean that the mother had fabricated the abuse in order to humiliate the father. What the little girl meant, of course, was that her mommy had told her to tell the truth. But the judge protected this officer who he knew so well against another one of these vindictive women, awarding full custody to the father, with only minimal visitation for the mother. When the little girl showed up to dance class with bruises, she reported more physical and sexual abuse, and when the social worker told the mother not to return the girl to the father, they were accosted by numerous police officers, and the girl was dragged screaming from her mother's arms. The judge harshly questions the social worker who fills in detail after detail, including the fact that the father's lawyer had been the one to issue the report that the mother had threatened the girl if she didn't tell the judge about the abuse. But again, the judge knows this lawyer, they are friends, and he backs him up, taking away all visitation rights from the mother and placing her under a gag order - she cannot even speak to anyone about the situation. The play ends with her crouching behind shelves in a Wal-Mart, where she had gone to get a box in which to send the daughter's favorite toy to her. You see, the girl and her step mother turned out to be there, and she could be held in contempt for being in the same place as her daughter.

And this play is based on a true story.

I seriously want to cry just typing the summary. It is a powerful story, and all too believable, based on some of the stories I have heard about friends' custody battles. When people in power only want to help each other, and not the people who their power is intended to protect... what then? As the mother says, "the truth is only the truth when the hearer wants to believe it."

Ugh. My heart hurts. People should see this play. And people who let things like this happen should be ashamed of themselves.

Dead Soap

Play #54 - Dead Soap by Bekah Brunstetter

Full disclosure - I started two other plays today, and I just couldn't get into them. Perhaps I will come back to them another day, perhaps they will remain dead to me, but if I can't get into your world some time in the first scene... I'm probably going to have to put it down and back away. Sad, but true.

Nonetheless...

Today's play is a short play in which we first see Coop and MacKenzie in what is clearly a sort of overdramatic love scene in which there are lots of references to other traumas involving missing parents, THE ACCIDENT...all that good stuff. An important part of their story is that he loves her even though he is hunky and she is a bit overweight. But, she confesses breathlessly, she has just had gastric bypass surgery... after which, he will love her even more! Then, there's a big "CUT!" and we discover that the two people we've just been watching are actually Ryan and Caitlin, two actors in a soap opera. It's Ryan's first day, and he's more than a little bit jazzed. Caitlin is more matter of fact, rushing off to use her break time to deal with her... physical needs. So, our eager beaver heads over to the make-up area, where he meets the long-time leading man Farley, who advises Ryan/Coop not to get too caught up in all the glitz and glamour. It's a great gig, after all, but it can all go away in an instant. He also lets Ryan in on a bit of gossip: the gastric bypass is not a plot device, it was an ultimatum to Caitlin: get skinny, or lose your job. As the original pair regroups, Ryan finds out that Farley has just been written off the show over a contract dispute. And as they take their places for the next shot, Caitlin asks the previously starstruck Ryan out... only to discover that, in real life, he is just not attracted to her.

This is really a play all about ideals and illusions. Farley seems to be the only one who is entirely past the power of the illusions - now that he is older, and on the other side of having his ideals crushed a wee bit. Coop and MacKenzie are complete illusions, full of excitement and non-socially-conformist love. But even Ryan's starry-eyed excitement can't get him past the fact that Caitlin is a little too heavy to date. Illusions are everywhere, but they don't remain in place for long. Just a 10-minute break proves to be enough.