Minotaur (Anna Ziegler)

I have a problem, or challenge, right now. At the end of the year I want to share with my friends a play I loved this year through a private reading, only I haven’t found it yet. Last year I knew exactly the play I wanted to feature, it was one I read in March and fell in love with instantly. I’ve loved few plays this year, and those I have are not appropriate for one reason or another.

This problem exacerbates a different problem: I read plays too quickly. I read them like I eat: to suck out the nutrients as quick as possible then move on to the next thing. I do this because there is too much: too many plays on my floor, too many things I need to get done, too many things to slowly consider this one play. Because of that, I don’t appreciate them nearly as much as I could, or should.

Knowledge of this isn’t sufficient to keep me from enacting it over and over and over again, and this is similar to the odd crux of issues at play in Anna Ziegler’s The Minotaur, a quasi-modern retelling of the Greek Myth of Theseus, largely told from Ariadne’s point of view.

All six characters (three real, three chorus) are keenly aware of their own problems, and yet many of them choose not to confront them head on, or rather abdicate responsibility, and say there is no way they can stop themselves. That they have no choices in this world.

The play takes the tack of many meta-works before it (The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler being the first play I encountered with this thinking) where the retelling of the story is a kind of comfortable purgatory for the characters within it, and I think the “power of storytelling” has become too apotheosized for my taste.

Apart from that Ziegler has created characters gloriously unmoored from reality leading to winking and nodding references to the capriciousness of youth.

Taken as a whole the play is a little too navel-gazy, a little too recursive, a little too unserious for my impossible to pinpoint desires, but moment after moment of the show is powerful and interesting, and shows why I continue to gravitate towards Ziegler’s work, and her treatment of adolescence in particular .

The Wolworth Farce (Enda Walsh)

Every so often if I am particularly struck by a show I’ll relate it to a local theater, and there are few Houston theaters with as defined an aesthetic and as alienating a tone as Catastrophic Theater. I’d define this aesthetic as odd, brash, and unconcerned with the comfort of the audience. If I dislike Sarah Ruhl because she strays a few degrees from the entirely comprehensible it should perhaps not be surprising that I often find Catastrophic shows not to my taste.

It is with surprise, however, that the main things I thought while reading Irish writer Enda Walsh’s The Wolworth Farce is “This is a Catastrophic show” and “I very much want to see this.”

Strictly speaking this is a realist play: it has characters who exist in our world and behave comprehensibly given their circumstances, what is obscured, however, is that we don’t know those circumstances at the beginning of the play, Walsh is none too interested in giving them to us, and therefore we feel like we’ve been thrown into a world entirely alien to us.

It is impossible to talk about this play without ruining surprises, so the final words I’ll say before launching into spoilers is this: The Wolworth Farce is a companion piece twenty years removed from Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal: the show is about what is real and what isn’t, about the clarity that repetition gives us, about watching and being watched, and the comfort of telling simple (and false) stories. It is a deeply disturbing play that finds humor in the wells of human despair, and if you enjoy being confronted with things you don’t understand, you will like this masterwork of a show.

We begin the play in a run-down apartment, where three men silently go about some tasks. Suddenly, the oldest member of the group starts a recording and everything is off to the races as the three men begin to perform. What they are performing is unclear. Why they are performing it is unclear. Who they are is (for the moment) unclear. The only thing that matters (to them and to us) is that they are performing a show, as the older man plays a single character and the two younger ones play a variety of characters.

Trouble starts when some of the props aren’t what was expected and we learn that Dinny (the man and the character) demands absolute fidelity. We see the abuse he gives the men we learn are his sons. The performance continues, and gets strangers and more farfetched: it’s about a family whose matriarch dies and neighbors conspire to steal the inheritance from Dinny and his brother, Paddy (played by the youngest of the sons.)

Eventually a stranger intrudes, and the troupe has an unwilling and unwanted audience. We learn that this performance, which happens every day, is the only thing keeping these fellows going, and that although there is a promise of an outside life, it is one all three men are afraid of. The show spirals out of control, integrating this new presence, twisting her, and torturing her. Eventually it has to come to an end, even if the storytellers do not want it to.

The ending of the show is one that I will not spoil, it is heartbreaking and it is expected.

This is not a show I’d ever want to do, but it is one that I expect will spark something in a great many artists and I’d love to see what they’d do with it.

Home Sweet Homicide (Ann Reynolds, Craig Rice)

The past eludes often, no matter how familiar something is there is some aspect of culture which cannot be fully understood over decades, only translated to a better or worse degree.

So there’s a question in my head, and that is this: did Craig Rice, an author known for brutal mystery novels, understand the inherent darkness of his premise of Home Sweet Homicide, or did he miss it entirely?

This is a play where a mother tells her two teen daughters “I know it’s been a strain on you two, since the murders. So let’s just put them out of our minds and really celebrate”. It’s a play where a girl deliberately and consistently plants or tampers with evidence so the police won’t solve a murder. A play where a next-door neighbor is killed and the main thought on one of the character’s minds is if she can hook her mom up with the police detective.

In short, it’s a delight, whether intentionally or no.

Three young children of a mystery novelist hear their neighbor get killed. Instantly they each form a different plan: 1. The eldest daughter thinks it’s time her mom got married, and she may as well marry a police officer, they seem dependable. 2. The middle daughter thinks it’d be great publicity for their mom if she solves a mystery, and so they won’t have to worry about sales anymore. 3. The young son mostly doesn’t care and wants to eat and not be left out.

This forms the spine of what those characters do for the rest of the play as they investigate (either the murder or the romantic interests of a few key adults), obfuscate, and deliberate with each other. Despite the rather dark circumstances the play is incredibly light and breezy, with the kids not fully realizing the consequences of their (or anyone’s) actions.

As one might expect it all ends quite happily for all involved (except the man whose wife was murdered, but we don’t hear much from him.)

A modern production can have a lot of fun in a Brady Bunch Movie kind of way, and it seems like the perfect sort of show for a community theater.

The Totalitarians (Peter Sinn Nachtrieb)

Currently Peter Sinn Nachtrieb is my favorite playwright. I am voracious for political satire. I adore wildly premised comedies. Peter Sinn Nachtrieb writing a political satire about how the lieutenant governor’s race in Nebraska will usher in a wave of totalitarianism is the kind of play that seems so absurdly tailored to my interests that it’s practically unfair for it to have not been delivered to my doorstep when he finished the manuscript.

In short, I love it. I was always going to love it. It’d have to have tried to make be not love it.

Still, I don’t love it as much as boom, Bob, or even Hunter Gatherers which was a lot more intimate, so we can scratch around the 2.5% of the play which took it into the murky depths of a 98.5%.

The Totalitarians follows a married couple, Francine and Jeffery, and how they get drawn to opposite ends of the political spectrum by their own weakness. Francine is a campaign manager who has never won a race and has now resigned herself to working for Penelope Easter, a wacky woman who presages your Taylor-Green or your Bobert’s. (It’s important to note that this play premiered in 2014, so Nachtrieb is extrapolating with unsettling accuracy from Palin and Bachman.)

Her husband Jeffrey is a spineless doctor who can’t even tell his patient, Ben, that he’s dying of cancer. Ben, as it happens, is a revolutionary who dedicates himself to ending Penelope Easter’s rise to the top.

Easter’s campaign is going nowhere until Francine writes a magnificently uncomfortable speech which strikes a chord. Even as she doesn’t respect the woman Francine is unable to ignore the pull of success and continue to follow it in a deranged fashion until she’s at the precipice of handing over Nebraska to an absolutely insane person.

Meanwhile, the success widens the gulf between Jeffrey and Francine, and a newly chastised Jeffrey finds solace in the violence and change that Ben promises, and the fear of a rising totalitarian regime if Easter should win.

Really, what more needs to be said about a play that finds emotional triumph in an activist proudly saying that he knew he was meant to be activist when he incited a mob to kill his brother?

It’s top to bottom funny and disturbing, and really only fails in being a political satire without a lot to say, except maybe that extremism is no virtue. Nachtrieb excels at writing compelling characters with essentially no redeeming traits, especially weak-willed men, and he uses that to great aplomb here.

Melancholy Play (Sarah Ruhl)

I’m sorry to say it like this, but as a rule I don’t like Sarah Ruhl. I am far too traditional to wholeheartedly follow her notion of poetic truth. Historically the plays of hers that I like are the ones where the abstract nature that typifies her writing is cordoned off from the main action of the show (Clean House, The Oldest Boy) but still has enough there to show what it is she does.

So when I was contacted to do a lighting design for one of her shows I hadn’t yet read in full (and not at all since the revisions) I thought I knew what to expect: a show I wouldn’t like, but could have fun with, that had interesting characters that go off the rails for little rational reason.

It took me awhile to realize I was wrong.

As the Audience
My first read gave me what I expected: weirdness homogeneously spread throughout in a way I didn’t connect with. Tilly, a bank teller, is overcome by Melancholy, which makes her irresistible to those around her. We see her deny or indulge in various love affairs, and how she affects the people we meet, until she becomes happy.

This happiness begins to eat at her mystique, repelling many of the people who once adored her, and sending them into their own fits of melancholy. Eventually as Ruhl digs herself into her Ruhl pit, characters go so deep into melancholy that they become almonds, but eventually they’re almonds together and they end happily isolated with each other.

My first read, I got what I expected, a show with a few laughs, a few ideas, but didn’t inspire much of anything in me. When I saw what the directors (Ruth McCleskey and Katherine Rinaldi) and cast did to bring it to life though, I saw it in a whole new light.

Suddenly it was a hysterical soap-opera style comedy with lots of deep sighing out of windows and goofy tableaus. Everyone leaned hard into the melodrama present in the script and came out the other side into a silly, abstract, and thoroughly non-realistic show.

As a Designer
Unlike yesterday’s breakdown at how to manufacture thousands of props, this design section is a joy to imagine people reading: because while it is a design that I’ve already done, it is one that was interesting to play with.

What I wouldn’t give for some texture like this.

The space in which I did the lighting design is limited, there is only so much I can make the stock do, primarily very shallow color mixing on LEDs.

Even so I had a lot of fun, this is the second lighting design I’ve done that is explicitly non-realistic: whereas for most jobs I start with how things might usually look in real life then bend that to make things look as good as possible. This design was more like approaching dance: the show has big emotions that the characters flit among and the lighting design follows those emotions.

Big emotions mean lots of saturation; melancholy is cyan; depression is dim; happiness is white, bright, and flat. When characters talk about the ocean the lights start to come in and out like the tide. As characters mix and mingle their key colors mix too. I thank the directors for letting me make a lot of odd choices, and I hope it enhances what they were going for.

As a Writer
As I said, I have a complicated relationship with Sarah Ruhl. The more I read of hers the more I find things to respect, if not necessarily like, and that’s what I continue to walk away from the script of Melancholy Play with: respect for the boldness to abandon realism, even as it makes my own writerly senses fray.

Her characters here are unabashedly extreme, and have no problem announcing themselves to whomever is around which pushes the play along and begets similarly extreme reactions from the other characters.

I don’t know that I’m ready to find the beauty and the value in a Sarah Ruhl world, but I am getting closer with each play.