Grand Horizons (Bess Wohl)

Dennis (a friend, you don’t know him) said once that any play is about a question you can’t quite put words to. While I don’t always agree with that observation it is true that the best and the worst plays often have an ambiguous void in the middle of them and you’re left with a feeling of nagging absence or brilliance.

In this ways plays can mean a lot of different things to different people, like the bible, and they take on something which is not quite universality but more chameleonic. If reading the back quotes about Grand Horizons is any indication that is true of this play because people ascribe all sorts of meaning from being about the refusal of the culture to accept women as complete people, to being about the foolishness of trying to support others, to being a comment on comedy itself.

For the record I didn’t get any of those, but is a strong work that is hard to articulate what is compelling about it.

If you want to be so blasé as to worry about something so insignificant as plot, then Grand Horizons is about a family coping with the late-in-the-life divorce of a mother and father. Our first scene is a glorious ballet of a marriage in routine which composes only five words over two lines: “I’d like a divorce.” “Ok.”

So Bill and Nancy are going to get a divorce after fifty years of marriage and with both of them nearing their eighties. They seem fine with it, but their two sons Ben (in tow with his pregnant wife Jess) and Brian (an unattached theater teacher,) lose their minds and spend most of the rest of the play struggling to understand that this decision is going to happen.

We get many lovely scenes of all the characters explaining their views on intimacy and how a partner changes you or doesn’t change you. Ben and Brian complain about the other and try to get through to their parents. Ben’s own marriage is tested by Jess’ frustration at putting her life on hold for this situation and his inability to make simple changes she asks for.

Altogether it is a mediation of love and relationships: who owes whom what and are we best served by building ourselves strong or by thinking of others first. In an unusual direction for this kind of story Grand Horizons seems to make the argument that looking after one’s own needs first, along with clear and early communication, makes for, if not stronger relationships, then less frustration over time.

Fire in Dreamland (Rinne Groff)

When I graduated college I got a job as a technical director at a local high school. A combination of the school’s too-high expectations for a two-person crew and my own inexperience led to the worst year of my life: 14-hour days, six days a week, constant disappointment, and regular emotional breakdowns.

During this time I was saved by a board game.

No matter how hard my day was, I knew I could wake up early and play a game by myself before going to work, and no matter how late I came home I could play a game before going to bed. And for however long it took me to play I could escape into something else for awhile and put my life to the side. I played that game over one-thousand individual times that year.

Rinne Groff’s Fire in Dreamland follows Kate trying to put her life back together after the devastation of Superstorm Sandy and the nothingness her life has become. She meets a charming expat named Jaap, and she gets drawn into his dream about making a film. This film lets her escape herself for a little while, and though her problems come back she’s able to rebuild.

Over six months Kate gets blinded by his passion, ignores his rougher edges, and trudges forward until reality is undeniable. I don’t want to ruin the subtle action of the play, how it ping pongs between the smallest moments that mean everything to the character, and the quiet it finds onstage, but it is a moving portrayal of lives in ruin and what we do to get ourselves through.

The play has a strange device, one that challenges a traditionalist such as myself, but I could see being used to either great, or alienating, effect: frequently scenes are interrupted by a clapper board, like you see on film sets, and the action resets to another time and place; sometimes we look at a small moment we’ve seen before, sometimes we jump a minute or two to get to the meat of an issue, and occasionally we join Kate eight years ago at her father’s deathbed. It is the sort of thing that I think playwrights configure, but that is hard to pull off in reality.

I think the portrayal of Jaap will make or break this play. He could be reduced to nothing more than a simple conman, someone looking to get his no matter how he needs it. But I’d rather see him as a person afraid of the world, a child of sorts who doesn’t understand what he gets into, follows his whims, and leaves messes behind for others to clean-up.

This month I’ve realized how much comedy means to me: as I read plays devoid of laughs, or consisting of very shallow ones, I’ve discovered that I really do need laughs to connect me to a work. But then this comes along which, although not unfunny is certainly not a comedy at its heart, and challenges my notions of what I’m looking for in a work.

Life is a Dream (Pedro Calderón De La Barca, Trans. Nilo Cruz)

Yesterday I admitted to having no stronger a ground in the English classics than the average theater student, so it must not be a surprise that my non-English theatrical knowledge is similarly emaciated. American programs often focus on the few truly classic American authors (such as Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill,) and the acknowledged masters such as Shakespeare, and a person is lucky if he escapes traditional education with even a passing understanding of Moliere.

So I’ve never heard of Pedro Calderón De La Barca, though I’m given to understand that he is rather famous and that this is his most famous work.

I am also a rather mathematical person, especially for theater folk, and I often have difficulty easily drawing meaning from poetic language; it just isn’t my strength, so reading this play, which is translated and poetical, and given to the stylish excesses of classic theatre was always going to be an uphill battle for me to truly respond to it.

What I found was a noble portrait of free will v destiny, reason v passion, and honor v practicality, soaring with deep rhetoric and operatic plots.

Rosaura, a potentially noble woman disguised as a man travels with her servant Clarion for unknown purposes, she comes across a jail in the middle of nowhere and we learn during the first act that the king of Poland (Basilio) saw prophecies that his son (Segismundo) would be a terrible ruler and so has imprisoned him since his birth under the watchful eye of Clatado, who happens to be Rosaura’s father who left her mother.

Also central to plot are the niece and nephew of Basilio, Estrella and Astolfo, who are set to marry each other and inherit the kingdom. Astolfo happens (as we learn later though it’s fairly well telegraphed,) to have been betrothed to Rosaura but left her. Basilio decides to challenge fate and seat Segismundo on the throne to see if he behaves tyrannically.

Segismundo, bereft of any kindness in his life, does act with anger and malice once he’s revealed to be crown prince, and he’s quickly imprisoned again and made to believe that his brief respite from torture was just a dream.

Since royal lines are predicated on heretical rule soon the army demands that Segismundo be freed and a civil war erupts. As he wins Segismundo, who’s trapped in not believing anything is dream or reality anymore, reasons that one must act good, even if one is in a dream, and he spares his father’s life in attempt to rule justly, thus averting (perhaps) the prophecies that everyone feared.

There’s a lot going on, and I was far more interested in Rosuara’s subplot of honor and dignity, but it was interesting to read a pre-enlightenment play which values reason above destiny. If this were a Greek play no doubt Segismundo would have no choice but to become the tyrant foretold and that would be his tragedy, but here the tragedy is that Basilio so believe in portents that he deprived a human of warmth and himself of a relationship with his son, and it is only what few lessons which had been taught to Segismundo which allowed an aversion at all.

The literary value of the play, I think, far outstrips its current theatrical value, but I’m not going to spend more time analyzing it at present.

This is not a play I intend to return to; it’s not what I love in theater, but I’m glad I had the opportunity to read such a good translation and I hope to be able to visit other foreign-language works as time goes on.

The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde)

Since I have a habit of reading plays people frequently assume I have a stronger base in the classics than I actually do. While I am more than ready to leave them that misconception, it does lead to problems if I’m ever put to the test.

Despite it’s ubiquity in classrooms and its enduring legacy as an hysterical play, it wasn’t until today that I had ever actually read The Importance of Being Earnest. Sure, I’d seen parts of it performed in acting classes, read some scenes during various theater classes, even watched part of the film adaptation during one theater history class so long ago, but never gone from start to finish experiencing it the way the author intended (read on a computer screen during breaks from work.)

It was fine. Good, even.

That’s glib of course; it’s a feat to remain known at all, and a double feat to maintain any sense of humor being transported both over time and space, but there was a part of me that hoped for more than I got.

Like A Girl’s Guide to Chaos, Earnest is mostly a vehicle for Wilde’s authorial voice which leaves many of the characters with little distinction: they make similar jokes, in a similar way, and many have similar attitudes on the same subjects. And it’s funny, it is, but Wilde has a bag of tricks that I’ve seen before (I’ve read other things by him, just not this one,) and he employs it frequently: express one thing, then express the opposite; attribute a bad habit to a class/profession of people; defend a vice as if it were a virtue. Many of the jokes would work the same if you kept the sentiment and changed the nouns, moments of genuine brilliance are diminished and diluted when repeated later on: it’s good, I liked it, I’d watch it, but I was hoping for more.

For anyone like me who hasn’t read it, you may trust that cultural osmosis has given you a lot of the plot, either through direct parody or by simply knowing how a story works, but for those who don’t: we’re introduced to Algernon and Jack, two people who throw witty barbs at each other. Jack wants to marry Algy’s cousin, Gwendolyn, but in short order we realize her mother won’t give her permission because of Jack’s uncertain lineage.

Jack, meanwhile, lets Algy know that he has a ward out in the country and a scheme to move about as he wishes by claiming that his younger brother Earnest (who Algy and everyone in the city knows Jack as) is getting up to scampy behavior all over the place.

Naturally Algy gets it in his head to go visit the ward, Cecily, masquerading as Ernest, and it turns out there’s an epidemic of women wanting to marry men named Earnest, so Jack and Algy need to solve their various problems, pose as Earnest, etc. until all the marriages are arranged satisfactorily.

We don’t really go to farces for novel plots, and this one does its job. I can see why it survived, (everyone should see the Boiling Point Productions version of it in Houston February 2023!) but I can’t help feel like Jack in the play: I’m tired of everyone being clever all the time, and this play is a cup of tea with a bit too much sugar for my taste.

June July August (Sinead Daly)

If there are two quintessential childhood experiences I never had it was summer camp and being a girl, thankfully Sinead Daly has given me enough to fake my way through it if ever asked with her play June July August which follows a group of junior counselors at a summer-camp throughout their three months molding young minds.

I would hesitate to call it a children’s play, but it’s definitely well-designed for schools or community theaters due to its large cast (20, which in this day and age is unheard of in professional companies,) light tone, and focus on the sorts of problems that would plague teenage girls.

With such a large cast and lots of time in-between acts most of the changes are based on inference or feeling: while not fully stock characters, we know the types of characters that populate this show: sheltered girl, queen bee, doddy elderly woman, unnerving quiet person, and the play doesn’t do anything to subvert these tropes.

It’s hardly a problem though, as the play whips along quickly and is just funny enough to keep you smiling all the way through. Some tragedy hits at the end of the second act, and the third act deals with that fallout, but like the best of our media that is suitable for young audiences it is populated with enough people for you to find someone to relate to, everyone has something lovable about them even at their worst, and it shows the audience how to grow from even the worst of circumstances.