Sugar in Our Wounds (Donja R. Love)
One of the most disappointing things in theater, or any story-based medium, is to get to the end of a work and realize that the author was telling a different story than the one you thought. By way of example, Abigail Washbourne’s Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play is a play I clicked with immediately, a group of survivors from a national nuclear meltdown gather around a campfire and struggle to remember the plot of a Simpson’s episode, but I was supremely let down by the ending, one hundred years in the future we see that Simpson’s episode play out operatically with a century of embellishment.
It wasn’t Washbourne’s fault that she wanted to tell a story about the role of stories (and religion) and I thought I was watching a story about how survivors bond together through shared fiction, she cared more about the plot, I the characters, and neither got what we wanted out of it.
I feel the same regarding Donja R. Love’s Sugar in Our Wounds, which with all its folklore and fablestic elements is at its core an anodyne love story that thinks it’s more profound than I do.
Notably this play takes place on a southern plantation in the middle of the Civil War. I don’t know of many stories set in that particular place and time where all the pain and tragedy is amplified because you know that a small amount of comfort is just around the corner if they could just hang on (which of course, they can’t.)
I’m calling this a fable, though if it were a little more modern we might say it’s magical realism: there’s a tree that stretches to the heavens and whispers to one of our main characters, there’s a man with skin as dark as the midnight sky, and a woman with skin so yellow to make the sun jealous: there’s magic at the core of this story.
But the main drivers of this work are the twin prejudices of racism and homophobia. We’re on a plantation, and young James is a bright individual who is sensitive and thinks. He’s captured the attention of Isabelle, the daughter of the plantation owner, who teaches James as practice for when she goes off to teach “normal people.” She’s our personification of racism.
James is guided, as are the other slaves on the plantation, by Auntie Mama, an old woman with no children of her own who has likely seen much more and would like to forget most of it if she had the chance. Also on the plantation is Mattie, the presumed daughter of the master of the house who was put into the fields after he forced himself on her, and then the lady of the house treated Mattie to terrible facial scars.
It’s a testament to the play that it never shies away from any of the abhorrent aspects of life as a slave: the disregard Mattie has towards being almost-raped by her father, the casual hatred of Isabelle, the fact that the tree is so big because “every male slave who’s ever worked here has been hung on it”. These things are presented simply and without a lot pomp, because that’s just the way life is. And it’s during these moments that the play really comes alive.
The status quo of life on this plantation is disrupted by the arrival of Henry, a former runaway now sold to this plot of land. He is headstrong, unrepentant, but unable to put his thoughts eloquently. Both Mattie and Isabelle take a liking to him quickly, and both think little of taking him sexually as they see fit, which he is largely stoic about. In short order he creates a friendship, then a romantic relationship with James, as James teaches him how to read, and Henry tries to teach him how to be strong.
Where the play whimpers to me is right at the end: after repelling Isabelle’s advances Henry knows he has to escape, so he has a quick conversation with James before running away, presumably forever. He returns a few months later, having been unable to find peace or his former family, only to find that James has been hung, and everyone is sad, but has taken it on the chin, that’s how life is.
I’m disappointed we don’t see James after Henry runs away. How did he change? Can we see what provoked the hanging? I’m disappointed that James mentions that Mattie treats him differently after learning that Henry prefers James to her, but that we never see it. If the play is about “queer black love,” as the author says, can’t we see more of the prejudices of the time? I’m disappointed too that Mattie just accepts Henry’s sexuality at the end of the play after we’ve been told throughout the last quarter that she’s being outright hostile to James because of it. Maybe months change a person, but I would have wanted to see that.
What began as a magical story about squandered potential due to society’s prejudices ends with a bromide about accepting people as they are. But that’s no one’s fault that I wanted that and Love wanted to give me something else.
As a Producer
I think it goes without saying that this isn’t a Pronoia show: not comedic, doesn’t hit on themes I think are particularly in our wheelhouse, and doesn’t have roles for our usual cohorts.
Would Pronoia ever do a show that centers race? I really don’t know. Lobby Hero feels like our kind of show in some ways, and the background of much of that story is racial.
If Pronoia creates satire it is Horatian not Juvenalian, and most playwrights dealing in race these days want to go straight for the Juvenal.
As a Designer
The magical aspects of this play lend themselves to all manner of exciting design choices. One particular sequence, in which the tree whispers to James the names of all the men hung on it, is a centerpiece which would be thrilling to bring the life. The tree branches are described as growing and moving, I can imagine the soft focused light, and the quiet, considered music.
For costuming you not only have the period clothes, but also the facial scarring on Mattie and trappings of old age on Auntie Mama.
All in all, this show provides ample opportunity for design.
As a Writer
I don’t know that I learned anything as a writer for reading this. It’s good writing, though not easily applicable to what I do.
How to Defend Yourself (Lilana Padilla)
What do we want? How do we want it? How do we communicate that? Those are the questions at the heart of this new play. Written with confidence and skill the play is brimming with evocative and realistic language that exposes the characters in interesting ways. Nothing is didactic and the play moves along at a brisk pace. It sparkles with anger and with humor. And I don’t respond to it, but I don’t know why.
At one point my friend Dennis said that plays are essentially indescribable because if the point of them could be made explicit they wouldn’t be plays. They’d be another medium, or perhaps they wouldn’t be art at all. I don’t entirely agree with that, but I have a feeling that author Lilana Padilla may.
The play takes place in the aftermath of a campus attack on a sorority sister. A senior trained in karate takes it upon herself to start a defense class for the women on campus and we follow the class as they learn and share.
The first flare-ups of conflict happen on the second day when the leader Brandi brings two boys in the classroom space (without knowledge of the students) and when other senior Kara’s inability to verbalize what she wants (and intense desire for rough sex) makes Brandi nervous. We learn that both of the boys (Andy and Eggo) are game to help, but that Eggo is frustrated with uncertain norms about what he should do with sex; feeling like what women want and what they say they want is different and incompatible.
Over the a swift two hours we see the contradictions at play in modern collegiate dating life, we see people lie to preserve themselves, and sadly we see the techniques meant to make these women stronger aren’t panaceas that work automatically: at the end of the play one of the young participants gets attacked and there’s a gulf between what she thinks she knows and what she’s able to accomplish which results in her lashing out at Brandi.
But why am I not filled with this play? It picks at a lot of threads but doesn’t resolve them satisfactorily. In the penultimate scenes Padilla is still pulling out new ideas and conflicts, things which can’t be resolved. Early in the show this habit is exciting, it prompts plenty of interesting questions, but as the play nears its end that excitement turns to anxiety: surely we’re almost at the end, how will these questions be answered?
They’re not. We’re left, like Brandi, confused and disappointed, with little closure. Perhaps that is what it is meant to convey, but for me it is not a satisfactory experience and I want to know what happens between Mojdeh and Diana, do Brandi and Kara work things out, does Nikki return? I’ll never know.
There’s one final bit of transcendence which I wouldn’t talk about except that maybe it holds the key to understanding the play somewhere in the folds of its strangeness. I swear some writing teacher out there is telling playwrights that there needs to be an out-of-body experience in every play, something which sets it apart from cinema, something which can only be done in the intimacy and unreality of the stage; and I’m sick of it.
Whether it’s an opera at the end of Mr. Burns, or Pip turning into a bird in How to Transcend an Unhappy Marriage, or a fever dream of an 1800s pirate ship in the otherwise modern and normal India Pale Ale we are treated to more and more sequences out of step with the story that’s come before existing to give the audience spectacle under the guise of imparting character information. It’s the modern equivalent of a dream ballet, but a dream ballet rarely pretends to be anything else.
In the final moments of How to Defend Yourself as Brandi stammers excuses as to why people show press on despite Nikki’s failure to do what the title suggests we are whisked backwards in time to parties: high school parties, middle school parties, and finally a six year-old’s party where the woman whose attack started the whole show, whom we haven’t seen until now, is a child blowing out her birthday candles.
How does this teach us about communication? Or what we want? Or treat on the difficulty of finding a balance in consent and sex where some partners like the surprise or the feel of danger? What does it treat on at all? I honestly don’t know and am not prepared to think about it any longer.
As a Producer
Despite what I’ve said above this might make a good Pronoia show. It’d likely fit better into the Rec Room’s oeuvre, but the humor, the outlook, and the fun of the show (as difficult as it is) do tick the invisible boxes of what I’m looking for. The show likely wouldn’t get chosen because it requires a skill set our main company doesn’t possess (fight training,) but I’d like to think I could write something like this one day.
Buzzer (Tracey Scott Wilson)
I’m probably not going to give this play as much thought as I should. Just up front.
Buzzer is not about gentrification, it looks like is, it halfway suggests it is, but it’s not. It’s about how you see yourself and how you protect yourself. It’s about telling lies: to yourself and to others, and it’s about allowing those lies to become reality. It’s also not about race, though race is inextricably tied up in its workings.
Jackson is a young black lawyer who has bought an apartment in his old neighborhood. He thinks it is on the verge of gentrification and he wants to be a part of it, but he also wants to see some of his old self in it. He, on some level, misses being part of it, and perhaps of feeling above it all.
His white girlfriend Suzy is a schoolteacher who is unsure of moving to this place, but is willing to give it a shot. Throughout the play she endures harassment by the inhabitants on the block and grows concerned for her own safety and comfort.
The matchstick on the periphery is Don, a white upper class addict that Jackson met in boarding school who briefly lived with Jackson after his dad kicked him out. Over the last decade Don has burned through favors and chances, but convinces Jackson to let him stay, but if he ever uses again he’ll be kicked out.
Danger comes from the inside as Jackson’s late nights mean that Don is the only witness to an ever-frustrated Suzy’s harassment. Over the tense one-act play they grow closer until they reignite a brief affair the two had, leading Don to feel guilty. At the end of it all Don’s covering accidentally provokes Jackson into a fight with the men on the street, Don gets kicked out, and Suzy’s trust in the neighborhood is irrevocably destroyed.
It’s a tight, tense, thoughtful show. One that underlines the power of my preferred style of personal-stakes storytelling.
So much of the experience of the play comes down to who do you believe: Jackson and Don have different perceptions of their time spent in the neighborhood, and Jackson’s reflexive insistence that Don couldn’t possibly know what anything was like, or treating it as a kind of dangerous vacation, leads him to be (to me) the less trustworthy narrator.
I may have missed something about the show, so much of it being under the surface, but whether that would deepen my esteem for it or lessen it, is not something I’m prepared to answer.
As a Producer
This isn’t a Pronoia show- too grim. In terms of Houston theater it feels like a 4th Wall show, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they do it in the next few years.
Pop Quiz!: Dennis v Trivia
Due to a big rock getting rolled away Dennis and Aaron are momentarily reflecting on the last season's episodes and checking in to see how much Dennis retained.
Did Ulysses Grant's horse get any electoral vote? Who wanted a third term? And who was Orval Fauvus? All these questions and little else are answered on this edition of Presidential Death Match!
Send retractions to contact@pronoiatheater.com
support the show at paypal.me/pronoiatheater or venmo: @pronoia
The History Boys (Alan Bennett)
Yesterday we visited Senior British girls now we look into Senior British boys!
(actually I’m quite disappointed that the coincidence was just that and not nearly as intentional as it could have been.)
The History Boys is a play I know about, but I don’t really know why, I couldn’t have told you anything about it before today except that it was referenced in Episodes and is presumably a coming-of-age story, both of which continue to be true.
What I found was a reminiscence, which I suppose all coming-of-age stories are, it being generally unheard of to write movingly about your transition while you’re in the middle of it, of young men pushed to be better than anyone thinks they can be, and succeeding at it, despite their best efforts.
It is, too, about the value of education: is it for its own sake, is it to endow you with facts, or is it there to arm you with the skills to get what you want (regardless of how you use it)? The play looks at eight boys and their three teachers in the waning days of their carefree time in mid-town England.
(I’m translating most of the plot into American terms, I’m not entirely certain if they’re correct)
This private school just boasted the best standardized tests of their tenure and in order to make a push for some of them to clutch at the brass ring of Oxford or Cambridge their headmaster wants to supplement the fanciful and directionless teaching of their beloved Hector with the results-oriented approach of Irwin, a man who seemingly has no shame.
Such as is the way with these things the plot is just a series of episodes of getting to know the boys, their outlook, their prospects, and seeing how they interact with their teachers, and letting us feel this moment in their lives.
As someone who is not quite where he wants to be in life, and had an unusual schooling history as far as America is concerned I was more than a little wistful, a little caught up in the trappings of the story. I found myself wishing to tell my younger self that what unconventional Irwin said was correct “you should hate [upper class private school types]. They’ve been bred to win this race far better than you.” It was moving, and it made me think of my classmates and teachers, most of whom have no need for me in their lives anymore.
The subject is one that I’m more than a little affected by.
That’s to say nothing of what actually occurs, which is the subjects on most men’s minds of that age, and fierce debates as to how to position oneself in society.
And it’s funny. It’s honest-to-god funny with jokes, and situations that spring from the characterizations, and harsh collisions of views and beliefs and weaknesses. It’s deserving of the accolades it received, and I hope I can see a production (or the original cast film) one day.
As a Producer
Here we have a story more closely attuned to Pronoia: funny, bitter, and it has a part for Steven Saltsman. It has a bit of the seriousness that we shy away from right now, but might embrace in the fullness of time and the wizening of years (if we get that far.)
As a Designer
Nothing particular jumps out at me, the blankness of the scenes and the remoteness of the boarding school give a kind of desire to paint certain moments in interesting ways (where do you place the nothing-conversations, where the harsh truths?)
As a Writer
Bennett wrote a play I can’t forget easily: Kafka’s Dick, about Franz Kafka being mysteriously transported to 80’s England, along with his friend Max Bron, and his well-endowed (and demeaning) father. All three men are forced to confront their legacies with literary lovers and ditzy maids alike. It’s a play that melds humor, characterization, and an odd premise, and I love it. But I recognize that it can’t be for everyone.
History Boys has all the humor, all the fun, and all the difficulty of Kafka’s Dick, but mixed with a universality and a stable world that allows it to be invited into more people’s heads. I think I’m in my Kafka’s Dick phase, and I hope to get to my History Boys phase someday.