Her Requiem (Greg Pierce)
My reading lately has not been focused on plays (and also not the sort of plays that I’d write about here,) and there are far worse ones to return to than Greg Pierce’s Her Requiem. While I did not know him before reading this, I will certainly keep my eye out for other pieces.
In Her Requiem we follow Dean and Allison, the comfortable Vermont parents of Caitlin, a 17-year old delaying her senior year of high school so she can write a requiem. Dean is overjoyed at the novelness and excitement, whereas Allison is worried about whether they’re making too much room for this flight of fancy, as well as the influence her music teacher Thomas is having on Caitlin.
What starts as light fun evolves into something far more serious as relationships are tested and old wounds return to the surface.
As an Audience Member
One of the most wonderful things about this play is that it makes room for your own interpretation while challenging that act. As more and more (unseen) people flock to the Vermont homestead for a chance to be close to something newsworthy we directly and indirectly hear many interpretations of what Caitlin is trying to do, none of them from Caitlin herself (who appears very little.)
In a way it doesn’t matter what Caitlin means when she’s writing this, the audience will take what they need to, and that’s a mode of artistic criticism that I’m more comfortable with than in the past.
The play seems to suggest the dangers of living vicariously through someone else. Allison is constantly derided for her focus on the pragmatic and “moderate” even while it is made clear that she is the one who keeps the household moving forward. If Dean were responsible for keeping the family alive both he and the family would be much less happy. (Though Dean still does step up when he is called on to do it later in the play.
Pierce does a wonderful job of growing a pit in the reader’s stomach as we learn more and more about the history surrounding Caitlin’s project, and the lies various characters tell others.
Never fully tragic, never fully comedic, it tows a perfectly fine tonal line and fits within the mode of the type of plays I love the most: personal stakes stories that reveal character if not universal truths.
As a Designer
Pierce is a touch too dictatorial in his writing about what we should see, feel, or seek to make the audience experience for my taste, but what he writes sparks imagination.
While the vast majority of the play takes place in the living room and kitchen of the home, we do briefly see inside Caitlin’s room which made me excited about how to realize that on stage: build out a wall to the house then remove it to reveal what’s been there the whole time? Always see Caitlin working? How much of the growing commune do we get to see outside? I was excited by the scenic possibilities.
Since it is a play about a particular type of music the sound design is paramount, though ironically (given my employment at a classic music school) I’m not as familiar with requiems so I did not immediately alight with ideas for that.
As a Writer
As I said above this play fits within the sorts of plays I gravitate to when reading, though not necessarily when writing, but I think that’s an area of growth (not always going for cartoonish levels of comedy and unreality.)
Pierce often made the subtext overbearing when I thought it wasn’t necessary, but he has a wonderful hand with introducing just enough backstory to make things meaningful without making them outstay their welcome.
If I am unhappy with my writing style, and in some ways I am, I may start being a little less Nachtrieb and a little more Pierce over time.
