Graceland (Ellen Byron)
I love old plays, both the artistic product of a script, but also the physical object. When you grasp it you hold an old tool that someone used to craft something, only dissimilar from a saw making a table in its permanence.
Graceland is an old play in an old, used volume, my copy has lots of notes, circles words, question marks, blocking diagrams, and it’s made more powerful because I saw the production the script, and the craftsperson who used it, that was made out of it. And it helped me remember it, and it transported me back over a decade ago to a memory I haven’t revisited in full for a long time.
Graceland is a one-act play about cruelty, devotion, and kindness. About looking for meaning in hollow activities and holding onto hope. About letting your own dreams go for a stranger in need.
It does a lot in twenty minutes.
Two women show up outside Graceland three days before it’s to be opened to the public for the first time. Both of them are jockeying to be the first in line. For one, it’s a point of pride, for the other, it’s her only chance to make sense of a world that’s done her wrong.
Even if we can see the ending coming, even if we know that the one woman must soften and yield for the person who needs it more, the journey there is lovely and painful.
As they argue back and forth they begin to show a little bit of themselves. The older woman (40’s) is in a stable marriage full of commitment, but low on love, and she spends her time being fanatical about Elvis Presley. The younger woman (22) loves Elvis because her dead brother loved him, and since he died in the war things have gotten worse for her, as a cruel wannabe big man in a small town marries her and dominates her.
The play takes a slow route to get us to the end, and the two become friends and even, as one ending suggests, protectors of each other.
As a Producer
This play fits much nicer within our purview than Eric Bentley’s of the past few days, notably because it shares a few qualities with my own writing: comedic, difficult to love characters, and personal optimism in a difficult world. This is easily the sort of show we could do, if we decided we wanted to put on a night of one-acts written by someone else.
As much as I appreciate the script though, and I do, I don’t love it. It feels like an old friend who I miss occasionally, but don’t need to stay close to.
As a Designer
More than anything this is a props and costumes play. There’s a lot of opportunity, and responsibility, to paint these characters as specific as they are on the page.
As a Writer
The script shows a deftness of character and a carefulness of dialogue that I hope to be able to match one day. Byron’s pace is excellent, never hurried, and showing just enough newness to move you from one moment to the next without revealing its hand too soon. I don’t know how to get there, but I want to.
