Suitcase... (Melissa James Gibson)

The full title of this play is Suitcase Or, Those That Resemble Flies From a Distance, the first part of the title is inscrutable (to me, at least,) and the second a reference whose provenance I don’t know the relevance of. The title, I mean to say, is as resistant to classification as the rest of this work.

On the surface it seems straightforward: there are two women, friends, who live in the same apartment building and are both working on their dissertations, as they have been for a long time. There are two men, acquaintances, who are the partners of these women and are trying to see their girlfriends.

Over the course of the evening we see the women wrestle with their chosen paths (in love and in academia) and the men do the same. The language is sparse, often repetitive, and we are frequently listening to three conversations simultaneously, as all the people involved search for meaning and for purpose and for happiness.

Of all the plays I’ve read this year none but this has made me want to dive back in immediately after leaving. The clear musicality with which the play is written almost demands to be spoken aloud (yes, all plays do this, but rarely does it feel so vital.)

As a Writer
I’ve omitted this section from the last few because there was nothing not glib to say about the writing: Wolworth Farce expounds on the value of confusion, Minotaur perhaps has something to offer about authenticity and simplicity. Suitcase, however, is a clear repudiation of the writing I do. Where my writing is dense, frequently lining up words precisely in order to build an image and then contort it at the last moment for a perfect lay-up laugh, this play is sparse, almost empty, relying on the pain of silence and the strangeness of response to give glimpses of character, and to allow for laughs (for which there are plenty) to drift by like delicate bubbles that are popped if one leans too heavily on them.

It is something I don’t know if I am capable of, which of course makes me want to dive right in and find out.

Minotaur (Anna Ziegler)

I have a problem, or challenge, right now. At the end of the year I want to share with my friends a play I loved this year through a private reading, only I haven’t found it yet. Last year I knew exactly the play I wanted to feature, it was one I read in March and fell in love with instantly. I’ve loved few plays this year, and those I have are not appropriate for one reason or another.

This problem exacerbates a different problem: I read plays too quickly. I read them like I eat: to suck out the nutrients as quick as possible then move on to the next thing. I do this because there is too much: too many plays on my floor, too many things I need to get done, too many things to slowly consider this one play. Because of that, I don’t appreciate them nearly as much as I could, or should.

Knowledge of this isn’t sufficient to keep me from enacting it over and over and over again, and this is similar to the odd crux of issues at play in Anna Ziegler’s The Minotaur, a quasi-modern retelling of the Greek Myth of Theseus, largely told from Ariadne’s point of view.

All six characters (three real, three chorus) are keenly aware of their own problems, and yet many of them choose not to confront them head on, or rather abdicate responsibility, and say there is no way they can stop themselves. That they have no choices in this world.

The play takes the tack of many meta-works before it (The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler being the first play I encountered with this thinking) where the retelling of the story is a kind of comfortable purgatory for the characters within it, and I think the “power of storytelling” has become too apotheosized for my taste.

Apart from that Ziegler has created characters gloriously unmoored from reality leading to winking and nodding references to the capriciousness of youth.

Taken as a whole the play is a little too navel-gazy, a little too recursive, a little too unserious for my impossible to pinpoint desires, but moment after moment of the show is powerful and interesting, and shows why I continue to gravitate towards Ziegler’s work, and her treatment of adolescence in particular .

The Wolworth Farce (Enda Walsh)

Every so often if I am particularly struck by a show I’ll relate it to a local theater, and there are few Houston theaters with as defined an aesthetic and as alienating a tone as Catastrophic Theater. I’d define this aesthetic as odd, brash, and unconcerned with the comfort of the audience. If I dislike Sarah Ruhl because she strays a few degrees from the entirely comprehensible it should perhaps not be surprising that I often find Catastrophic shows not to my taste.

It is with surprise, however, that the main things I thought while reading Irish writer Enda Walsh’s The Wolworth Farce is “This is a Catastrophic show” and “I very much want to see this.”

Strictly speaking this is a realist play: it has characters who exist in our world and behave comprehensibly given their circumstances, what is obscured, however, is that we don’t know those circumstances at the beginning of the play, Walsh is none too interested in giving them to us, and therefore we feel like we’ve been thrown into a world entirely alien to us.

It is impossible to talk about this play without ruining surprises, so the final words I’ll say before launching into spoilers is this: The Wolworth Farce is a companion piece twenty years removed from Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal: the show is about what is real and what isn’t, about the clarity that repetition gives us, about watching and being watched, and the comfort of telling simple (and false) stories. It is a deeply disturbing play that finds humor in the wells of human despair, and if you enjoy being confronted with things you don’t understand, you will like this masterwork of a show.

We begin the play in a run-down apartment, where three men silently go about some tasks. Suddenly, the oldest member of the group starts a recording and everything is off to the races as the three men begin to perform. What they are performing is unclear. Why they are performing it is unclear. Who they are is (for the moment) unclear. The only thing that matters (to them and to us) is that they are performing a show, as the older man plays a single character and the two younger ones play a variety of characters.

Trouble starts when some of the props aren’t what was expected and we learn that Dinny (the man and the character) demands absolute fidelity. We see the abuse he gives the men we learn are his sons. The performance continues, and gets strangers and more farfetched: it’s about a family whose matriarch dies and neighbors conspire to steal the inheritance from Dinny and his brother, Paddy (played by the youngest of the sons.)

Eventually a stranger intrudes, and the troupe has an unwilling and unwanted audience. We learn that this performance, which happens every day, is the only thing keeping these fellows going, and that although there is a promise of an outside life, it is one all three men are afraid of. The show spirals out of control, integrating this new presence, twisting her, and torturing her. Eventually it has to come to an end, even if the storytellers do not want it to.

The ending of the show is one that I will not spoil, it is heartbreaking and it is expected.

This is not a show I’d ever want to do, but it is one that I expect will spark something in a great many artists and I’d love to see what they’d do with it.

Home Sweet Homicide (Ann Reynolds, Craig Rice)

The past eludes often, no matter how familiar something is there is some aspect of culture which cannot be fully understood over decades, only translated to a better or worse degree.

So there’s a question in my head, and that is this: did Craig Rice, an author known for brutal mystery novels, understand the inherent darkness of his premise of Home Sweet Homicide, or did he miss it entirely?

This is a play where a mother tells her two teen daughters “I know it’s been a strain on you two, since the murders. So let’s just put them out of our minds and really celebrate”. It’s a play where a girl deliberately and consistently plants or tampers with evidence so the police won’t solve a murder. A play where a next-door neighbor is killed and the main thought on one of the character’s minds is if she can hook her mom up with the police detective.

In short, it’s a delight, whether intentionally or no.

Three young children of a mystery novelist hear their neighbor get killed. Instantly they each form a different plan: 1. The eldest daughter thinks it’s time her mom got married, and she may as well marry a police officer, they seem dependable. 2. The middle daughter thinks it’d be great publicity for their mom if she solves a mystery, and so they won’t have to worry about sales anymore. 3. The young son mostly doesn’t care and wants to eat and not be left out.

This forms the spine of what those characters do for the rest of the play as they investigate (either the murder or the romantic interests of a few key adults), obfuscate, and deliberate with each other. Despite the rather dark circumstances the play is incredibly light and breezy, with the kids not fully realizing the consequences of their (or anyone’s) actions.

As one might expect it all ends quite happily for all involved (except the man whose wife was murdered, but we don’t hear much from him.)

A modern production can have a lot of fun in a Brady Bunch Movie kind of way, and it seems like the perfect sort of show for a community theater.

The Totalitarians (Peter Sinn Nachtrieb)

Currently Peter Sinn Nachtrieb is my favorite playwright. I am voracious for political satire. I adore wildly premised comedies. Peter Sinn Nachtrieb writing a political satire about how the lieutenant governor’s race in Nebraska will usher in a wave of totalitarianism is the kind of play that seems so absurdly tailored to my interests that it’s practically unfair for it to have not been delivered to my doorstep when he finished the manuscript.

In short, I love it. I was always going to love it. It’d have to have tried to make be not love it.

Still, I don’t love it as much as boom, Bob, or even Hunter Gatherers which was a lot more intimate, so we can scratch around the 2.5% of the play which took it into the murky depths of a 98.5%.

The Totalitarians follows a married couple, Francine and Jeffery, and how they get drawn to opposite ends of the political spectrum by their own weakness. Francine is a campaign manager who has never won a race and has now resigned herself to working for Penelope Easter, a wacky woman who presages your Taylor-Green or your Bobert’s. (It’s important to note that this play premiered in 2014, so Nachtrieb is extrapolating with unsettling accuracy from Palin and Bachman.)

Her husband Jeffrey is a spineless doctor who can’t even tell his patient, Ben, that he’s dying of cancer. Ben, as it happens, is a revolutionary who dedicates himself to ending Penelope Easter’s rise to the top.

Easter’s campaign is going nowhere until Francine writes a magnificently uncomfortable speech which strikes a chord. Even as she doesn’t respect the woman Francine is unable to ignore the pull of success and continue to follow it in a deranged fashion until she’s at the precipice of handing over Nebraska to an absolutely insane person.

Meanwhile, the success widens the gulf between Jeffrey and Francine, and a newly chastised Jeffrey finds solace in the violence and change that Ben promises, and the fear of a rising totalitarian regime if Easter should win.

Really, what more needs to be said about a play that finds emotional triumph in an activist proudly saying that he knew he was meant to be activist when he incited a mob to kill his brother?

It’s top to bottom funny and disturbing, and really only fails in being a political satire without a lot to say, except maybe that extremism is no virtue. Nachtrieb excels at writing compelling characters with essentially no redeeming traits, especially weak-willed men, and he uses that to great aplomb here.