Rest Assured (Donald Payton)

The first escape room I went to was unparalleled: magical, fascinating, and fun in a way I’d never had before. After doing more than thirty of them not every room can stand up to that first experience, but even more so: that experience can’t measure up to itself. I know now that if I went back to that same room it’d not be as wonderful as what I’d experienced before.

As we experience more of a category its novelty wears off and more and more of them muddle together in an undistinguished soup. I wrote last year how reading plays as quickly as I did (and try to no longer do,) meant that none of them was living with me as long as they ought, but the more I read the more they also start to resemble each other, and it’s often not to their credit.

Donald Payton’s Rest Assured is a perfectly fine comedy, arguably a hidden gem despite running a little long, belaboring its point a bit, and disappointing roles for women overall. Despite having what should be an exciting premise: two ghost dads fight to either push or pull their children from each other, that never really gets off the ground in the face of what is, in the end, a Christmas Carol plot, of one person learning a lesson about what really matters.

Unfortunately I can’t find much else to say about this: it will still work as an engaging school or community piece, something to give the performers and designers a large cast and something to work with, but offers little for a modern audience to challenge or surprise themselves with.

Water by the Spoonful (Quiara Alegría Hudes)

I don’t know why I instinctively rebel against reading new plays by Quiara Alegría Hudes. Almost certainly it’s a combination of my thinking that the first (and until today, only) thing I read from her I thought was exceptionally weak (the book of In the Heights) or because she’s a bit over-exposed in my area of the country so she’s standing in as the kind of “important” work that crowds out the work I prefer (and think would draw more audiences in.)

Regardless, I’ve had Water by the Spoonful for six months (not that long considering the stack of plays on my floor,) and resisted reading it because its synopsis and pulitzer prize pushed me to thinking it’d be a slog.

What I found instead was a touching, difficult story of the type I’ve been asking for: human-stakes comedies.

Photo from Austin Chronicle

Water by the Spoonful follows two storylines of grief, addiction, and loneliness which braid together at the end of the first act and drive to a crushing conclusion:

In 2009 Elliot Ortiz is a struggling actor and veteran who spends his time with his cousin Yazmin, an accomplished woman who is not where she wants to be in life. Early in the play Elliot learns his mother has died (who is the matriarch of the family) and the rest of the play deals with him and Yazmin making arrangements and honoring her memory, while plotting their course for the future.

Meanwhile their relative, Odessa Ortiz, runs an online community for people struggling with drug addiction (that’s what’s pictured above,) how they support each other, lie to each other, need each other. We learn over the course of the play that Odessa has committed some egregious wrongs against Elliot which she cannot or will not apologize for, even as it’s clear that Elliot has the seeds of addiction inside him and hates both himself, Odessa, and the chat room for their perceived weakness.

To say more would risk giving too many surprises away, suffice to say thought the ending is not an easy one, it is one that shows all of our characters, in weakness and in strength, choosing to reach out for connection in a world that is difficult and gives nothing but struggle.

Often moving, frequently funny, the play tiptoes to the line of melodrama a few times and I hope all directors and actors have the fortitude to not trip past it, but otherwise Water by the Spoonful is a thoughtful, entertaining show about challenging subject matter.

The Indoor Sport (Jack Perry)

In his Scriptnotes podcast writer John August said (paraphrased) “I’ve gotten used to the idea that I’ll be working on some version of Big Fish until the day I die,” referencing rewrites he did to the musical in advance of its London premiere. Theater writers, as opposed to screenwriters or radio writers, have a rare, continuing opportunity: their works are always reinterpreted, so they are given many chances to rewrite them to changing times.

And honestly, even more than the script of The Indoor Sport (which is fine, better than fine even,) that is what intrigues me about this play. It was originally written in 1953, revised in 1968, and revised again in 1976 (which is the version I read.) The play is about marriage, and its about men and women and anyone who knows anything about history knows that between 1953 and 1976 the role of women, and the attitudes of society changed prodigiously.

The version I read has a lot of the sixties and seventies in it, the conclusions we reach and the attitudes of the characters hinge on the social ideas of the time, and I’d really love to see what the original version was like, because I can’t imagine it was the same.

Anyhow, we should probably talk about the play, at some point:

Jack Perry is a currently famous fighter, so I can’t find any production photos from the play. Enjoy this creation of Ideogram and your upcoming local thespments

The Indoor Sport is a comedy about an important 24-hours in the lives of a married couple- Gary and Sheila. Gary is a cargo pilot who is gone for weeks at a time, and in fact has been gone seven months when the play begins. Sheila is fed up with him and has been seeing Jeff, a high school friend who used to go out with her sister Ellen. The core comedy revolves around Gary, very much in love with his wife, reacting to this news and trying to reverse its course, while Sheila acts aghast that Gary would have any problem with what’s going on, and Jeff being a real stand up guy.

Additional characters include Ellen, Sheila’s older sister, a Madison avenue copywriter and career gal with no marriage of her own; and Chip, a drunk bachelor reporter that Gary gives rides to.

Strictly speaking this is a standard, well-built wordplay comedy: the situations and jokes hold up, the action is clean, and if you like shows like Lend Me a Tenor, Boeing Boeing, or Black Comedy you’ll find a lot to like here.

It even has a pretty nifty surprise, all things considered: the beta couple in this show is Chip and Ellen, two people who profess to not need relationships and are inextricably drawn to each other, until Ellen leaves Chip at the last moment in a big, funny moment of weakness and extreme commitment to character flaws, I dug it.

The play has two major problems, one, an unforced error, the other a big ol’ Taming of the Shrew-esque knot born out of trying to merge 70’s reality with a 50’s plot or the author’s own sexism (or both! Why limit ourselves)?

Before we talk about either let’s recap the plots, the stakes, and the potential outcomes:

At the top of the show Gary hasn’t been home for seven months and that is the core rift in his and Shelia’s relationship: she wants him to stay home, he needs to be in the sky. We learn early on that in addition to running cargo Gary takes extra flying jobs for fun and cash, in fact we are told that the last extra job Gary took was filming the coastline for a movie, and it is said in no uncertain terms that he did it cause he thought it’d be a gas to be in a movie, and that if he didn’t he would “have got home months ago” (emphasis mine.)

It’s not hard to see what a conventional story would do with this setup: the happy ending is Gary and Sheila getting back together after Gary learns that part of taking care of his family is thinking about them, and that he and Sheila will find a new balance in their lives.

Instead, when Sheila and Chip (the only other character fully on Gary’s side) are alone he guilt-trips her by pointing out that many of the extra jobs Gary does are humanitarian: flying medicine where it’s needed, rescuing people from fires/floods, etc. and Sheila realizes that Gary’s job really is that important and that she should be more forgiving of his absence. In 2024 we see this as a bit of a regressive, if not an outright sexist, ending, but at least it could have been softened if the mission we hear about at the top comports with the ones Chip tells Sheila about at the end! It’s a shockingly poor bit of craftsmanship.

The end of the play has all of these unfortunate holes: the set-piece scene towards the end of act II is a painful conversation about what men and women expect from each other, and while the characters are definitely sexist, the conclusion of the show does little to disavow the notion that it is what the author believes too: in a play with three career women, none of whom could be called meek, all of them end the show basically admitting that all they really want to do is take care of a man.

Ellen, who has made no secret of being a little disappointed she isn’t married through the play, but also is quick-witted, sardonic, and not shown to be sad about her career success, has a long monologue about how her life is empty and that she made the wrong choice, and what she wants to do is give up on the world of advertising and take care of a man.

This would be disappointing, but was almost saved with Sheila briefly looking like, out of Gary and Jeff she was going to choose “none-of-the-above” and they’d basically do a swap, but she also submits to Gary in the end. It’s a shocking turn for a play that up to that moment seemed egalitarian and fair.

And if ALL THAT wasn’t enough, it’s probably about three hours long, so sadly The Indoor Sport fumbles at the end of the game, and unless Conchord Theatricals lets me rewrite it, it will remain benched until it goes out of copyright sometime around 2989.

Mynx & Savage (Rebecca Gorman O'Neill)

As Shyla Ray once told me “In [theater] we can do anything we want, but we so frequently choose arm-distance apart and reenact our everyday life.” Theater has an unhealthy obsession with realism, but when we break away from that we can tell fascinating stories in a way no other medium can.

When I found a play about comic book authors writing a super-hero story, I had to read it if only to see what the author chose to do with this unusual set-up.

Mynx and Savage tells three stories: the first (top-layer) is about comic author Adam Mark Evans, his new relationship with inker Ket Timura, and their work to get issue #100 of Mynx and Savage out on time; the second is about Mynx and Savage themselves, locked in an eternal fight, what their struggle tells us about Adam and his thought process; and the last is about a personal project Adam works on in his spare time, Summer Vacation, about two kids Jill and Kyle on a lake.

We also briefly visit Adam’s earlier, groundbreaking work Stupid Masks, which is important thematically, but to explain its plot relevance would be tedious here.

From the original production. https://www.oneilldesign.net/selected-work

As the Audience
I don’t love saying that the play left me cold: it has a lot of opportunity and O’Neill takes advantage of the setting to give us interesting rises and falls in action and energy, but ultimately the story is something we’ve seen ten thousand times before: a young hotshot comes to shake the old warhorse out of his melancholy, he begins to trust her, there’s a momentary falling out, but in the end they come together; an artist secretly hides his own history and pain in his work, looking for people to decode it; a success owes everything to a dark and troubled past, feels like a fraud and looks for absolution; nothing in this play is surprising, and it is neither funny enough nor painful enough to make up for that inherent lack of spark. Still, everyone has to have a first story like this, and this one is competently put together, and is certainly a nice diversion for a community theater season.

O’Neill, I think, is savvy enough to know that the audience will know that the summer vacation story is Adam’s childhood before she makes it explicit, so she wastes little time and doesn’t treat it like a surprise. Still, the nature of the story is we know something bad will happen to Jill, and when it comes it doesn’t hurt. We (I) was already emotionally distant from her, and her death isn’t seen through the younger Adam’s eyes so we don’t get to see the fresh guilt of a child who has (for the second time) let someone he loves down, which I think is a lost opportunity.

Ultimately the stakes seem low (by the end, will Adam forgive himself and be able to move on,) and the flashy nature of the surrounding action cannot save the show from that.

As a Designer
Finally a play with something interesting to do! There is a magnificent balancing act to do inside the design: the play is not goofy, it has humor, but it isn’t trying to be Starkid’s Batman, and superheroes are inherently ridiculous, especially done live in front of you, so every element of design (but especially costumes) has a hard (and fun!) job of being true to the weirdness of comic books while not robbing the show of the gravitas it does have.

I imagine a lot of intense music with stark lighting, and sets painted to look like splash pages.

As a Writer
This is a tough one: as I said the play lacks critical punch: not funny enough, not dramatic enough, not surprising enough, etc. etc. etc., and I think that’s what my work is currently mired in as well. Would this play be better if Adam was harsher in the beginning (or would it still seem like a shadow of a hundred other works,) would it be better if O’Neill leaned into the humor more (or would that make the Summer Vacation stuff too melodramatic)? If I learned anything from this play it’s the continued reinforcement of twisting your character’s arms, really making them sweat.

Plunder (F. Perlman)

Last year I had the pleasure to read How Not to Read a Play by Walter Kerr and in it he argued that part of the turn the populace did from theater to movies was that theater started serving up moralizing lessons instead of entertainment. In particular he spoke first about the Propaganda Play which was softened into a Thesis Play and further softened into the Problem Play.

While I have read plenty Thesis and Problem plays until now I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever read a propaganda play (unless one counts the play-long screed against witches Macbeth), until I read Plunder a soap operatic, decades-spanning attack on Western Imperialism, trade, and potentially pacifism and work broadly.

I want to get something out of the way first: the dialogue is hamfisted, the manner of presentation suggested by the script cumbersome, and the play as a whole overly long. I can find no production history online to suggest that Plunder has ever been performed live, and its publishers are not dramatic houses, but socialist/anarchic presses (depending on the printing). As such this seems to be a work of closet drama, and the play is more interesting as a work of literature than as a breathing document from whence to entertain (or indoctrinate) an audience, so I’m not going to spend time on how I would design this show (painted backdrops, weird masks,) or what I can learn from it as a writer (don’t do this, it relies too heavily on narration, is inelegeant with its themes, and the dialogue is poor,) and instead I will look at it as the audience, as a person who read it.

First things first we’re at a play within a play, and the nested play is written for the benefit of the author’s family who is watching in the audience and reacting to the goings on onstage. The Stark family has gathered to watch a play written by (what I assume is) the youngest son, Bruno. As far as I’m aware, this relation is never actually made clear in the text of the play, the fact that Bruno Stark is a child and brother of the family interrupting the performance is only spelled out on the character page of the document.

Regardless, Darius Stark made his fortune importing ceramics into India after WWI, and the family business grew to many factories, mines, and other concerns throughout what we would later call the third-world of Africa and Asia (South America is not mentioned in the play.) Darius, his three sons (who are both embedded in government and corporations), and his son’s light-skinned Indian wife Pretoria are all in attendance.

Usually I wouldn’t grouse too much about unrealistic reactions from the peanut gallery, but the way the author’s family reacts strains any amount of credulity. The Starks will occasionally start complaining only to stop mid-thought so that the action in the nested play is heard properly before picking up as though nothing has happened.

The play we’re watching onstage we eventually learn is all for the benefit of Pretoria, the Indian wife of one of the Stark brothers: as the action unfolds we see how Krishna Moksa who starts as a young potter in India and ends as a lunatic beggar in Indonesia is affected, buffeted, and indirectly injured by the Stark’s wanton business interests in the region, while we also learn that Krishna is Pretoria’s father, and she grows angrier and sadder as the full knowledge of the Stark’s greed and carelessness comes to life.

Otherwise the play is episodic and, I assume, is historically based. We begin in India where Darius Stark is looking for partners in an importing business, move onto South Africa where there is oppression at a mine owned by the Starks, go back to India where the ground is fallow and the factories kill Pretoria’s mother, are moved to begging in Indonesia (where Krishna dies), and finally Pretoria’s elder brother goes to fight in the Congo while her younger brother agitates for peace (and ultimately shows up onstage, and presumably told all this to the author Bruno Stark.)

Throughout the play Krishna is depicted as a well-meaning but ineffective man, that engaging with the West will destroy his soul and so he lets his body wither through the atrocities which are committed to him: he doesn’t want to help Darius Stark trade in India because his pots are not a means to an end (money) but an expression of himself; he doesn’t engage violently at the mine because doing so will injure his righteousness; when we arrive to Indonesia the crazed and elderly Krishna, starving, finally accepts help from the west (food sent by Pretoria,) but it is too much for him and he dies.

His eldest son, with the not at all heavy-handed name Indio, is painted in a more sympathetic, but still not agreeable light, as he wants to fight: fight in Africa, fight in Asia, and ultimately fight for freedom for the Congolese. He is not shown to be effective, and dies in Africa after his mistrust drives him to foolish decisions.

If the play suggests a remedy (and it doesn’t, really) it is in the youngest son of Vasiya, who is not as inert as his father and not as reactive as his brother, and instead stands for separatism, a kind of severing of east from west where they shall not interact and kind will stay with kind (the play has the effect of driving Pretoria away from the Starks to returning to the east with Vasiya.

The play contains a useful through-line of how thoughtless pursuit of industry coupled with dehumanization leads to horrifying consequences, the more effective outbursts from the Starks are when the business leaders talk about the cost of this or that when speaking of riots and deaths, but its pro-segregationist attitude and its drawing of a moral equivalency between commerce and violence ultimately led me to rolling my eyes more than in thinking hard about the (non)arguments it presents.