Playwrights to NameDrop Next Time You’re Wearing a Turtleneck

December 7, 2007 by Sarah  Send to a Friend

DC’s favorite literary column as written by Sarah turns BOTH seasonal AND theatrical this week, for all your turtleneck and pretension wearing needs.

Starting in the 9th grade I attended a performing arts school where I majored in Drama. I spent a lot of my time painting sets while wearing turtlenecks and singing the songbook from HAIR, which was actually cool at my school. The rest of my time was spent talking shit about art with my adolescent friends and flunking out of math. So it was sort of like “Fame” - complete with boys and girls running around the hallways in leotards - except that we never got a spin-off TV show. I can’t say that my years studying drama helped me all that much in my life but what I can tell you is that I’m fully equipped to deal with melodramatic emotional meltdowns, and that cast parties are fun because theater actors are never self-conscious about how poorly they dance. Below is a brief list of some of the plays I read during those years of trust games and improv and seriously awful dancing.

ALFRED JARRY
Ubu Roi

So you’re wearing your best black turtleneck and you’re standing around with a bunch of actors and someone says something about Macbeth. Clever you, you use this moment to mention big daddy Jarry, the man credited as having had a profound effect on the surrealist and dadaist movement. “Jarry, I think, was satarizing Shakespeare, and particularly MacBeth,” you might say. Everyone nods and has another sip of red wine. It’s been a long time since I read it, but as I remember, the play boasts an enormous cast of obese idiots running around swearing, spitting, farting, and murdering each other. I also seem to remember that much of the dialogue was complete tommyrot. It’s sort of the theatrical equivalent to one of those abstract paintings that people always point to and say “My third grader coulda done that,” to which I never reply, “Yes, but could he sell it for a million-two?”

EDWARD ALBEE
The American Dream

You can guess what this one is about: a satire of American values, featuring caustic Mommy, emasculated Daddy, old Grandma, the neighbor Mrs. Barker, and a handsome and successful Young Man. As with all of Albee’s work the writing is vibrant, often funny, verging on the absurd, and thick with meaning.

The only one of the five characters who makes a lick of sense is Grandma: “Well, that’s all that counts. People being sorry. Makes you feel better; gives you a sense of dignity, and that’s all that’s important . . . a sense of dignity. And it doesn’t matter if you don’t care, or not, either. You got to have a sense of dignity, even if you don’t care, `cause, if you don’t have that, civilization’s doomed”

So maybe Grandma is the real American Dream. But she’s dead by now. Let’s all buy iPhones!

TOMPSON HIGHWAY
The Rez Sisters

I performed this play in the ninth grade. It’s about a group of seven sisters who live on an Indian Reserve and who are all determined to get to Toronto to win “The Biggest Bingo in the World.” I don’t think that at the time I understood the commentary Highway was making about Native politics or homosexuality or poverty or desire. I only knew that my character, Marie-Adele, had stolen her sisters husband and had 14 children with him, and that she was dying of cancer, and I knew that the language was powerful because it sounded real, and it was my first encounter with plays whose characters sounded like real people:

“EMILY: Fuckin’ right. Me and the Rez Sisters, okay? Cruisin’ down the coast highway one night. Hum of the engine between my thighs. Rose. That’s Rosabella Baez, leader of the pack. We were real close, me and her. She was always thinkin’ real deep. And talkin’ about bein’ a woman. An Indian woman. And suicide. And alcohol and despair and how fuckin’ hard it is to be an Indian in this country.”

SAM SHEPARD
Fool For Love

Sam Shepard’s written something like one million plays, and the only I can ever remember reading was “Fool For Love.” I also saw it performed once when I was in the tenth grade (the lead actor, Gilbert Garett, wore a wife-beater and it set off something inside me I’m still not over. Gilbert, if you’re not gay, call me.) Fool For Love is set in the Mojave desert and features a couple of crazy fools (in love). There’s at least one bottle of tequila thrown against the wall. Plus there’s incest and an old man in a rocking chair. I sound flip, but it’s actually one of the best plays I’ve ever seen: power struggles, issues of identity, love, sex, gender, and Shepard’s language is beautiful, concise; a true cowboy poet.

PS. If you were actually looking for some names to drop, I got some information from my best friend, a working film actor who happens to care. Here’s what he has to say about Broadway right now: Things We Want directed by Ethan Hawke is supposedly “mamet-esque” and the critics hate it. Rock and Roll by Tom Stoppard (a very good name to drop) is generating big buzz for actor Rufus Sewell for his portrayal of Jan. Apparently “Donnie Darko” is awful (surprise!) and The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney is so hot that nobody even cares who directed it.

NEXT WEEK: HOW TO NAMEDROP MONTREAL POETS (YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF)

 Send to a Friend