As Shyla Ray once told me “In [theater] we can do anything we want, but we so frequently choose arm-distance apart and reenact our everyday life.” Theater has an unhealthy obsession with realism, but when we break away from that we can tell fascinating stories in a way no other medium can.

When I found a play about comic book authors writing a super-hero story, I had to read it if only to see what the author chose to do with this unusual set-up.

Mynx and Savage tells three stories: the first (top-layer) is about comic author Adam Mark Evans, his new relationship with inker Ket Timura, and their work to get issue #100 of Mynx and Savage out on time; the second is about Mynx and Savage themselves, locked in an eternal fight, what their struggle tells us about Adam and his thought process; and the last is about a personal project Adam works on in his spare time, Summer Vacation, about two kids Jill and Kyle on a lake.

We also briefly visit Adam’s earlier, groundbreaking work Stupid Masks, which is important thematically, but to explain its plot relevance would be tedious here.

From the original production. https://www.oneilldesign.net/selected-work

As the Audience
I don’t love saying that the play left me cold: it has a lot of opportunity and O’Neill takes advantage of the setting to give us interesting rises and falls in action and energy, but ultimately the story is something we’ve seen ten thousand times before: a young hotshot comes to shake the old warhorse out of his melancholy, he begins to trust her, there’s a momentary falling out, but in the end they come together; an artist secretly hides his own history and pain in his work, looking for people to decode it; a success owes everything to a dark and troubled past, feels like a fraud and looks for absolution; nothing in this play is surprising, and it is neither funny enough nor painful enough to make up for that inherent lack of spark. Still, everyone has to have a first story like this, and this one is competently put together, and is certainly a nice diversion for a community theater season.

O’Neill, I think, is savvy enough to know that the audience will know that the summer vacation story is Adam’s childhood before she makes it explicit, so she wastes little time and doesn’t treat it like a surprise. Still, the nature of the story is we know something bad will happen to Jill, and when it comes it doesn’t hurt. We (I) was already emotionally distant from her, and her death isn’t seen through the younger Adam’s eyes so we don’t get to see the fresh guilt of a child who has (for the second time) let someone he loves down, which I think is a lost opportunity.

Ultimately the stakes seem low (by the end, will Adam forgive himself and be able to move on,) and the flashy nature of the surrounding action cannot save the show from that.

As a Designer
Finally a play with something interesting to do! There is a magnificent balancing act to do inside the design: the play is not goofy, it has humor, but it isn’t trying to be Starkid’s Batman, and superheroes are inherently ridiculous, especially done live in front of you, so every element of design (but especially costumes) has a hard (and fun!) job of being true to the weirdness of comic books while not robbing the show of the gravitas it does have.

I imagine a lot of intense music with stark lighting, and sets painted to look like splash pages.

As a Writer
This is a tough one: as I said the play lacks critical punch: not funny enough, not dramatic enough, not surprising enough, etc. etc. etc., and I think that’s what my work is currently mired in as well. Would this play be better if Adam was harsher in the beginning (or would it still seem like a shadow of a hundred other works,) would it be better if O’Neill leaned into the humor more (or would that make the Summer Vacation stuff too melodramatic)? If I learned anything from this play it’s the continued reinforcement of twisting your character’s arms, really making them sweat.