MY RECENT JOURNEY THROUGH THE THEATER.

 

This entry is about theater, which is so boring. Feel free to skip it until I write about something cooler, like punk rock or cute boys or something.  

There hasn't been a lot of time for blogging lately. I've been producing a play and writing like mad trying to finish a first draft of The Sluts of Sutton Drive. I finally pounded out a draft and had a reading of it in my living room and then at Youngblood. It was very helpful/painful, and now I finally have a direction to go in.

I have a weird feeling about this play. I feel really protective of it and find it so, so sad (even though it's a comedy, natch.) I think it's kind of my favorite of my plays but maybe will be an audience's least favorite. We'll see. I thought for sure audiences would hate MilkMilKLemonade, and that didn't turn out to be true at all. (I actually found MilkMilkLemonade hurtful and embarrassing to sit through and only watched it with an audience twice.)

I also reviewed Girls in Trouble for nytheatre.com, which really challenged me... and not only because it's a play about abortion by a conservative playwright. Subsequently I had a very pleasurable email exchange with the playwright, Jonathan Reynolds, who seems perfectly lovely. Seeing the play now was also really interesting timing. I'd just had a realization about my work: that I write about children as if they were burdens and curses. Always. 

I have to wonder why this theme appears in The Chalk Boy, MilkMilkLemonade and the Sluts of Sutton Drive. The first play on that list even has a mother telling her pregnant 15-year-old daughter, "Having children is what women do to destroy their lives." I don't think I feel that way, but I suppose I must if I keep writing it over and over again. Is it from growing up poor and seeing lots of teenage mothers? Well, probably. I had a lot of female friends and family who had children when they were much too young only to be trapped in a lifetime of systemic poverty. 

I had a dinner party last night and Mother Theresa came up. It just occurred to me that this woman gave so much to poor people except for one big ticket item they really could have used: some fucking birth control. Also, as a Catholic, Mother Theresa must've believed in abstinence before marriage, right? (And, really, correct me if I'm wrong about this.) See from this light, Mother Theresa was really kind of an asshole.

On a separate note, a friend sent me this write up from the Roundabout:

“Tigers Be Still,” by Kimberly Rosenstock, who is studying under the playwright Paula Vogel at Yale, will be directed by Sam Gold (“Circle Mirror Transformation”) at the black-box theater that is part of the Roundabout’s Underground program, which fosters work by emerging playwrights or directors. The play is about a young art therapist who moves back with her family and takes a job as a substitute art teacher.

Let me preface this by saying I don't know this particular playwright or play, but I'm using this to express two larger points:

1. No more living room plays about privileged white people whose biggest problem is that they have too much education, please. Really, just no more plays about privileged people who are bored/sad because they have too much of anything, in general.*

Again, to be clear, I'm being unfair to this playwright and her play, but the subtext of this blurb reads:

The play is about a highly educated but under employed young woman is humiliated by having to move back into her parent's home and do a job she sees as beneath her.

2. Can we stop pretending that Paul Vogel's playwrights are emerging? I mean, I guess technically they are, but the intonation here suggests these playwrights were found in some warehouse theater some place gritty. Let's call them what they are: America's Next Top Playwrights. "I have two playwrights before me, but I only have one script in my hands. One of you will be one step closer to becoming America's Next Top Playwright and the other will immediately go back to off off to be ignored forever."

Also, when it comes down to it, I'm really just jealous of Rosenstock. Like a fat girl in high school, I hate the cool crowd but also want in desperately. It's such a fucked up relationship. Sue me. (Please don't actually sue me.)

*Unless you want a theater exclusively for rich, white people. If you do, by all means, carry on.

Comments

[RVCBard]

No more living room plays about privileged white people whose biggest problem is that they have too much education, please. Really, just no more plays about privileged people who are bored/sad because they have too much of anything, in general.

That's totally unfair. Well-off White folks have problems too, Josh!

Who else is in the unique position to explore the issues surrounding having more time than you know what to do with and more money than sense?

[Josh]

Of course well-off white folks have problems too, RVCBard, like which polo to wear to the club and which Andy Warhol to hang in the foyer... but its not exactly thrilling theater.

[Nicole]

America's Next Top Playwrights. "I have two playwrights before me, but I only have one script in my hands. One of you will be one step closer to becoming America's Next Top Playwright and the other will immediately go back to off off to be ignored forever."

Hahahahahahaha! I wish that were an actual show about playwrights...and screenwriters, too. Writers often get treated like they are invisible. At least then they could be seen before being sent back to off off.

[RVCBard]

"Of course well-off white folks have problems too, RVCBard, like which polo to wear to the club and which Andy Warhol to hang in the foyer... but its not exactly thrilling theater."

It's not meant to be thrilling. It's meant to be ironic!