Saturday, January 31, 2015

Ayravana Flies or A Pretty Dish

Since I did not start this endeavor until January 29, I have 28 days to make up if I want to read a play a day for every day of 2015. So, I added a short play to today's reading:

Play #4 (Makeup #1) Ayravana Flies or A Pretty Dish by Sheila Callaghan

I am writing part of dissertation about some of Sheila Callaghan's plays, so I have a lot to say about her. But this little play is different from the plays I'm exploring in my dissertation. This is a sweet little two-hander featuring monologues by a chef named Olivia and one of her customers - an Elephant. Olivia has been known for her exciting, experimental dishes, and today she decides to make a vegetable stew flavored with Cumin. She is beside herself with excitement. And when she describes the dish to the Elephant, he is whisked back to his Indian birthplace, and he enthusiastically orders the dish. An airport employee, the Elephant ponders the myth of Ayravana the flying elephant, whose wings were taken from him after he broke a branch he had landed on, and landed on a vagrant instead. The Elephant wants to be able to fly again, but he is afraid. And he feels that this fear is letting down all the people back home. But when chokes on the stew... and when Olivia accidentally manages to save him... he experiences an epiphany of sorts, allowing him to take on an adventure. So he and Olivia decide to travel the world (by air) together. It's really quite adorable in many ways... until the very end, when the culinarily adventurous Olivia, while pondering all of the exciting flavors she will experience in her travels, turns her thoughts to the possibilities of recipes centered around elephant. Even in the face of their shared awakening and adventure, her desires for the exotic may well overcome the connection they felt. It's a little wicked turn that is only expressed in the stage directions and, therefore, in the performance. Olivia's ulterior ideas are never spoken in the script, so it would be interesting to see how they might be perceived by an audience.

The plays of Callaghan's that I am currently working on are generally much more violent or grotesque or unsettling than this poetic, imaginative, mythic little piece about dreams and who they're for. The Elephant, for example, had promised the people back in India that he would find a way to fly again - he lives up to that promise to them and to himself. Olivia, on the other hand, seems to be chasing more selfish fulfillment.

It's a cool little play, based in a neat little piece of legend that was unfamiliar to me. I really dug it!


Play #3 is Rabbit by Nina Raine, which actually surprised me a little bit.

It's by far the most realistic of the plays I've read so far, taking place in a bar during a small gathering celebrating the 29th birthday of the central character, Bella. I sort of expected it to be a whiny, raunchy, 20-something gab fest. But as she drinks with two friends and two ex-lovers, the specter of her father's impending death of a brain tumor hovers in the periphery. As they argue over gender relations and sex, Bella floats in and out of the bar into conversations with her ailing father - sometimes in his healthier years, sometimes when he has decided not to seek treatment. Production wise, it's a fairly uncomplicated play, but the emotions that come with having to watch a parent slip away are anything but uncomplicated. A central metaphor ends up being a little set of chimes with angels that spin around when heated by a candle. A gift from one of her ex-lovers, the angel chimes remind her of her childhood - a time that she desperately wishes she could reclaim (don't we all?). But also, as everyone else looks at it, they can never decide whether it's moving clockwise or counterclockwise... perspectives on the world and life and love and death and sex are always sort of like that, aren't they?

The conversations feel truthful and real, and the subtext that haunts Bella is appropriately raw and personal. I feel like there is good material for undergraduate scenes and monologues in here. The moments and objectives are clear and relatable, the characters are young. Aside from Bella and her friend Emily (who is a doctor... and is the only one who knows about Bella's father's illness), they all lack the ability to reflect on the inevitability and pain of this kind of loss. They are absolutely devoted to the trivial concerns of their egos and jobs and sex lives, and they can't seem to see beyond the tips of their own noses.

Losing a parent makes a person an adult in a way that nothing else can. And the final scene of the play - a recovered moment between Bella as a child and her father - is a poignant illustration of the safety of childhood that we all, at one time or another, long for.

Oh... and here's a great line:
"Everyone starts by pretending. If you can't do it you can't do it. But you have to start by pretending that you can. With everything. Then you find out if you're right."

Friday, January 30, 2015


Today was Play 2: Creature, by Heidi Schreck.

It's a strange little play - one that I can't say filled me with a desire to see it, but it was interesting. The setting is a sort of collision between the 15th century and present day in the small town of Lynn where the mayor's daughter and her husband have just had their first child. Margery, the mother, believes that she has been visited by Jesus, and that she is being tormented by the devil, so she begins visiting a local grayfriar who reads to her from a book of revelations written by another woman - Juliana - who is said to have had visions. As she studies, she gets more and more committed to becoming a saint. She fasts, she refuses the company of her husband and her baby son, she weeps and prays and preaches and wears white... all things that are not looked upon kindly by the 15th century people around her. 

The real story, of course, has much less to do with whether these visions are real or what the true nature of divinity might be, and much more to do with a new mother who is completely overwhelmed with all the responsibilities that come with that. She not only runs the house, but she also seems to run their successful brewery as well, as her husband has no head for business. And on top of all of this, she has to be sexually available to her husband as well. She runs from all of these responsibilities into the confusing arms of religion, where men want nothing more than to adore her (in the case of the church tenor) or read to hear (in the case of the friar). Unfortunately, most people don't see things their way, and the townspeople start getting a little burned-at-the-stake happy, so Margery has to make a pilgrimage to Juliana to be officially declared not a heretic. When she returns home, the city is in flames, but she returns to her family and holds her baby for the first time, and allows herself to be held by her husband too. 

Honestly, this play didn't inspire me to see it realized the way yesterday's did. I feel like the danger of this piece is that Margery comes across as pretty outlandish. It's easier to relate to a bunch of avatars than it is to a woman dubbing herself an aspiring saint and wailing on her back in religious ecstasy. I couldn't really relate to any of the characters, frankly. I sort of judged them a bit too harshly throughout. Her husband didn't try to understand her, and just seemed angry he wasn't getting laid. But when he tells the friar that he's been raising their son because his mother won't, I saw a glimpse of a different side of him. I would have liked to see more depth like that in the characters. As it stands, I mostly see a lot of people talking at each other, and no one hearing either each other or themselves all that well. I think it would be a frustrating play to watch.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom

I have set myself a challenge. Starting today, I want to read one play every day for the rest of the year. If I really get going, I may try to make up for the 28 days of January that I haven't done this, so that I can have an actual 365 play year. I have so many scripts (current spreadsheet count is 1788), and I have so many that I haven't read, so here's my attempt at making a dent.  And, to help me keep all of my thoughts straight on the hundreds of plays I will hopefully be reading, I am going to blog about them. So... without further ado, my stream of consciousness reactions begin with:

Play 1: Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom by Jennifer Haley
2 Men, 2 Women (flexible casting for more actors possible)

I want to see this play. I already feel like I'm missing a lot about it, since I don't really know much about video games, knowledge that Haley says in her production notes is fairly crucial. Still, I find myself immensely creeped out by this script. I can't help but wonder how I would go about doing an action analysis of this play, since there are almost no characters that we see more than once. It seems too literary to argue that the major conflict is reality vs. the video game world. The characters are deliberately intended not to be too distinct from one another - they are avatars in that sense. The Mother Type, Father Type, Son Type, and Daughter Type. There are only so many options programmed into this game, just like in a suburban neighborhood, everything just sort of looks the same. Was the neighborhood built to be part of this game? Did the game merely capitalize on the cookie-cutter-ness of the neighborhood? It's a sci-fi horror story that, in some ways, feels just a little too plausible. All the teenagers in the neighborhood are addicted to the same multi-player game - a game that maps their neighborhood. So they are running around among their own houses killing zombies, trying to get to the Last Chapter (during which you can no longer resurrect), and into the Final House... which turns out to be a little something different for each of them. The play itself plays wildly with the bounds of reality, and I can't tell you what really "happened" in a traditional sense. But I think the play is much more than a cautionary tale about the desensitizing effects of video games.

The play itself is built like a video game - the conversations are choppy and clipped - coming as they might in an in-game text box. And they are always between two people - as the player might encounters someone in the world of the game. But there is no central traveler for us to follow. Instead, the audience just sort of picks the avatar with whom they most identify, and follows their journey. Haley does say that the casting can be expanded to have different actors playing each role, but I fear that would remove the mass-produced, pre-programmed angle of the experience. The neighborhood is just a bunch of repeated images and shapes - so are the characters. The build of the action is great, keeping the audience and the characters off-kilter. I never knew what was coming next - it really feels a lot like a Silent Hill type video game, with the sounds happening around you, but never really knowing exactly what is coming your way.

The other day, Brian and I were talking about the fact that World of Warcraft is now ten years old - that there are people who play that game who have no idea what a world without this game would look like. There are people for whom this online interaction with people they may or may not ever know in the real world is their primary means of socializing. So who's to say that what they do in that online realm isn't "real?" Is it any more or less real than going bowling? Or going dancing? Or going to the shooting range? These are all things that people might do socially in the real world, but they are no more connected to those "real" things like families and jobs. We want to think they're different, but I wonder if they really are?

This  play actually reminded me a bit of Dark Play or Stories for Boys by Charles Murillo. There is a similar vein of not knowing who to trust and where safety lies in an increasingly virtual world.

A few years ago, I started wondering about this shift toward virtual space. People meet their spouses online, people relax with each other online. If theatre is an art form that derives its power from an experience shared by people in the same space and time, and if more and more people are having the experience of sharing space and time in a virtual world... can theatre come with them? Should it?

I'm getting a bit off track now. Suffice it to say, this play asks a lot of interesting questions about reality and virtual reality, and the world that we live in where, increasingly, the virtual is feeling more real than the real. Or is the real becoming more virtual? Or are we all just caught in a wormhole?