I have a confession to make. I don't know anything about classical music. I sang in choir for almost a decade. My illustrious career even includes a performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall (true facts!) but I really don't know anything about the genre. The following is everything I knew about Mozart before I read Amadeus: 1. He wrote Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when he was five. He also wrote Sonata in C, which I used to know how to play on the piano but I don't anymore. He wrote a lot of other things too, I'm sure. 2. He wrote the opera Le Nozze di Figaro which I once saw at The Met and I absolutely LOVED it. It is the only opera I have ever enjoyed. #sorrynotsorry. 3. From Nozze we received the GIFT of an aria "Non so piu cosa son faccio" which was masterfully reinterpreted 225 years later in the video below. Please watch it now. Music has always been one of my cultural knowledge gaps that I'm pretty embarrassed about (see also: I have never seen Star Wars or a single movie from the Marvel franchise). I love music. There are certain artists who I know their full discography. I used to love to sing and play piano, even though I never excelled at either art form. But I can't talk about music the way I talk about theatre. I can talk about musical theatre the way I talk about theatre but that gets us to a very deeply obsessive place that is not the point of this blog. So reading Amadeus taught me lots of things that may or may not be true about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his, for lack of a better word, frenemie, Antonio Salieri, whose name has been lost to history outside of this play and it's film adaptation. One of the things I learned is that Mozart LOVED to curse and had a very immature sense of humor, which I find delightful. The edition of the script I read was based on the 1999 Broadway revival (which has since been returned to the library so this whole blog post is just from my brain), which I didn't choose for a specific reason, it was just the copy I found. This edition had lots of notes from important people that I didn't read, but I did learn that Margaret Thatcher (who you may vaguely remember from AP Euro and more strongly remember from her negative portrayal in the musical Billy Elliot) absolutely hated Amadeus when it was originally produced at the National Theatre. She told Peter Hall (acclaimed British director/director of Amadeus/artistic director of the National Theatre) that there was no way someone like Mozart was so crude and immature. He told her that his portrayal was based on actual letters that he wrote, and sent her copies of Peter Shaffer's (the playwright) source materials. She still refused to believe him and never went back to the National Theatre during Hall's tenure there. Hmm. A politician being presented with factual evidence by an expert and refusing to believe it because it doesn't suit their view of the world. Glad nothing like that happens before! All in all, I would say I enjoyed the play (especially the ridiculousness that is Mozart, who I can only imagine was brought to life brilliantly by Tim Curry in the OBC), but this does fall into the category of, "I really wish I could SEE it instead of read it." Alas, plays are meant to be seen! If I was feeling ambitious today (AKA if I hadn't procrastinated on reading this play until the day it was due back at the library), I would have followed along with the sound cues in the back of the script and played the appropriate music along with their moments in the script. But that would have taken a level of effort I was not prepared for today! I think listening to the music along with the play would have really helped me understand it more. That being said, it was so hard for me to put myself in the shoes of Salieri, the narrator and complicated protagonist/antagonist/antihero? of the play. Salieri was a man who devoted his life to music, even becoming the Court Composer for the Hapsburg Empire (which you may be vaguely remember from AP Euro but more strongly remember from that episode of 30 Rock where Jenna tries to marry the last living Hapsburg prince), but when confronted with the genius of Mozart was simultaneously forced to confront his own mediocrity. Can you imagine hearing Mozart for the first time? Not like for the first time in your life because you probably can't remember that but for the first time EVER. I'm trying to think if I've ever had an experience where I saw something or heard something and was like, "This is gonna change EVERYTHING." Two examples come to mind but neither of them are probably on par with Mozart. 1. When I was 14, I saw In the Heights at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles during their first national tour. Of course at this point they had already won the Tony Award for Best Musical but I didn't really know much about the show aside from that. To this day, it is still the only show I've ever seen that got a standing ovation at intermission. After the show we met Lin-Manuel Miranda at the stage door and actually had a conversation with him because no one in Los Angeles knows anything about stage door-ing and my dad got to connect with him about living in Washington Heights and after we walked away my dad was like, "He is going to be the Rodgers and Hammerstein of your generation," to which I was like, "okay Dad, whatever." 2. When Beyonce dropped her surprise self-titled album and the accompanying visual album. Everyone remembers where they were the moment this music-industry-altering event occurred. I was sitting on my aunt's couch procrastinating writing an essay for my freshman English class that I'm still mad I had to take (I had plenty of AP credit! [I have now referenced the fact that I took AP classes three times in this blog post {did I peak in high school?}]). See also: this map of twitter mentions of Beyonce the night of the release. All this is to say, I could not imagine being in the room where it happened (lol) when Lin played "Champagne" for the first time or literally any room that Beyonce has ever graced with her presence. But that must have been how Salieri felt all the time. That being said, I do firmly believe I am friends with people who will be really famous some day. Are they geniuses? Yet to be seen, but probably not (sorry to all my friends reading this, I love and value you as people and artists!). However, Salieri was a total dick about it. The play is literally his guilt stricken confession that he sabotaged Mozart's career and inadvertently his entire life. Normally I don't like a lot of narration and direct address in a play because it is a #cheap narrative devise but I thought it worked in this play because Salieri is in a conversation with the audience. He addresses them as Ghosts of the Future and invites them to hear his story, mimicking the invocation at the beginning of an opera. It reminded me of the closing monologue in The Tempest, in which Prospero implores the audience to clap and set him free. By the way, you might be hearing about The Tempest a lot in the coming months because I'm now a teaching artist with The Public Theater and I'm working on a production of The Tempest with a bunch of awesome 4th-6th graders at the Hunts Point Alliance for Children. Yay theatre and social outreach and me having a career! Back to the play. So Salieri is about to die and feels like an asshole so he asks the audience if he can show them everything that transpired between Mozart and himself. The rest of the play is Salieri destroying this poor guy's life, which includes financial and artistic sabotage as well as sexually harassing his wife. There are actually multiple scenes in this play where women are treated horribly and there are no female characters that aren't objects of desire for either Mozart, Salieri, or both. Only one female character even speaks in the whole play, and that's Mozart's wife, Constanze, who is pretty dumb and also is the victim of Salieri's sexual harassment and a lot of really manipulative behavior from Mozart. I did not enjoy the female representation in the play. Not one bit. I did like the narrator, Mozart's silliness and dirty humor, and the general concept. It's a play that asks a lot of big questions about art and genius and why some people work so hard their whole life for something that comes naturally to another. I also generally like Peter Shaffer plays (#Equus #DanielRadcliffe) so I'm not really surprised! I was talking to my roommates recently about how if for whatever reason I became important enough that someone wanted to portray me fictionally, it would probably really freak me out. Well, Mozart's dead so he's probably not freaking out about it. Also, he was a narcissist, so he'd probably be fine with it anyway. This has been another wild, all over the place, blog post about a play I should have read a long time ago. Thanks for making it to the end. Next up: Torch Song Trilogy by Harvey Fierstein!! Yay!!! Currently playing on Broadway but I have not seen or read it so it counts!
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DISCLAIMER: I, Stephanie Kane, am an able-bodied, neurotypical, adult human. In this post I will be talking a lot about the representation of individuals who are physically disabled and/or neuroatypical in the arts. Although I have spent a great deal of my professional and personal life in neurodiverse communities, these are my opinions only and I do not speak for or in anyway replace the voices of people who have the actual experience of living with a disability. NOW PLEASE WATCH THIS TED TALK BEFORE WE MOVE ON: The Elephant Man by Bernard Pomerance is loosely based on the true story of John Merrick, a man who lived in late 19th century England who was born with significant physical deformities, earning him the nickname, The Elephant Man. For the purposes of this post, I have chosen not to do research on the real John Merrick, including looking at pictures of him in real life or from any productions. I don't want to talk about the reality of this story because I know nothing about it, I only wish to discuss his theatrical portrayal, as published in 1979 and first produced on Broadway that same year. In the text, Merrick is described in great detail by Dr. Treves, his primary caretaker for most of the play, as follows: "The most striking feature about him was his enormous head. Its circumference was about that of a man's waist. From the brow there projected a huge bony mass like a loaf, while from the back of his head hung a bag of spongy fungus-looking skin, the surface of which was comparable to brown cauliflower. [. . .]The deformities rendered the face utterly incapable of expression of any emotion whatsoever. [. . .] The right arm was of enormous size and shapeless. [. . .] As a limb it was useless. The other arm was remarkable by contrast. It was not only normal, but was moreover a delicately shaped limb covered with a fine skin and provided with a beautiful hand which any woman might have envied. [. . .] To add a further burden to his trouble, the wretched man when a boy developed hip disease which left him permanently lame, so that he could only walk with a stick." He goes on to elaborate that his condition is a disorder, not a disease, and although they are unsure of the cause, they are positive his is not contagious, although he still struggles to find people willing to spend time with him. Due to his physical condition, it is difficult for him to communicate verbally in a way others can easily understand. Those who do keep him company and learn to understand him, such as Bishop Walsham How and an actress named Mrs. Kendal, seem to be surprised by his intellectual capabilities and ultimately inspired by his resilience in some way. In one scene towards the middle of the play, all the characters who encounter him briefly address how they see themselves in Merrick and more or less how he teaches them to be better people. If you haven't watched the Ted Talk I embedded at the beginning of the post, please do so now. This scene made me very frustrated with this play, because it seemed to be a turning point where it was no longer actually about Merrick and his internal life, which we see through out the play to be very rich and thoughtful, but about how his life affects others. Like in so many works of fiction, a character with a disability serves less as a character and more as a tool so other, able-bodied characters can grow and learn. Merrick was a real person, and regardless of whether the story is true or not, plays that choose to portray characters with physical or mental disabilities should treat them like characters, not symbols. In my opinion, Merrick is not even a fully formed character for he has no real character flaws. His faith is boundless- another classic trope, of course a person who has been let down by nature has such total faith in God- and he is a brilliant artist, painstakingly using his good hand to sketch and construct a scale model of St. Phillip's Church through out the play. He doesn't complain or lament his fate. He never expresses being disappointed that his mother abandoned him and actually keeps a picture of her with him. His only sadness is that he has never experienced love, or, more specifically, that he has never even seen a naked woman. Which honestly he has every right to be upset about! Women are awesome. He shares this with Mrs. Kendal, who is my favorite character in the play and I think is the only one that really embraces Merrick's humanity. Treves highers Mrs. Kendal, an actress, to spend time with him after failing to find a female nurse who could stand the sight of him. Early in the play he interviews a nurse who is sure she can handle it, and she says: "Let me put your mind to rest. Care for lepers in the East, and you have cared, Mr. Treves. In Africa, I have seen dreadful scourges quite unknown to our more civilized climes. What at home could be worse than a miserable and afflicted rotting black?" Ugh. I really hope this was commentary on England's past racism but honestly did it need to be included? Anyway, that nurse runs from Merrick screaming and never comes back. The dialogue when Treves explains the situation to Mrs. Kendal is much better: TREVES: [. . .] I must warn you, women are not quite real to him- more creatures of his imagination. MRS. KENDAL: Then he is already like other men, Mr. Treves. TREVES: So I thought an actress could help. I mean, unlike most women, you won't give in, you are trained to hide your true feelings and assume others. MRS. KENDAL: You mean unlike most women I am famous for it, that is really all. Mrs. Kendal always tells it like it is. So anyway the arrangement is made and Mrs. Kendal successfully makes Merrick's acquaintance and they begin spending time with each other regularly, working on his model, reading scenes from Romeo and Juliet, etc. Eventually, Merrick confides in her his wish to see a woman's body, and in what in my opinion is the most moving and impactful scene of the play, she obliges and undresses for him. Merrick tells her, "It is the most beautiful sight I have seen. Ever." Just as Kendal is swearing him to secrecy, Treves walks in, shames Kendal for revealing her body, and that is all we see of her for the remainder of the play. What I like about this scene is that in a way Merrick and Kendal are the only individuals that see each other clearly. Kendal sees Merrick as more than his body and Kendal bares her body to him willingly, not as an actress, but as herself. They both are used to being objectified by audiences (before Merrick finds himself in the care of Dr. Treves he travelled through freak shows) both professionally and as a result of their bodies. In that time, even more so than today, people with physical disabilities and women were discriminated against simply for being born in the bodies they were born with. This is your friendly reminder that if your feminism isn't intersectional, you're doing it wrong! The play continues and we find out that as Merrick's life is improving his condition is worsening and Treves is fairly certain he's going to die soon, and he does, shortly after finishing his model. Mr. Gomm, the hospital administrator, reads his obituary, and the play ends with Treves trying to add one final touch before Gomm tells him it's too late, it has already run to print. Sad. Now we're gonna stop talking about the play as a text and address the play as a produced play, which is something I usually avoid on this blog because I haven't actually seen any of them. But this is my blog and I can do what I want and this feels important. It is super fucked up that this play has been on Broadway three times, most recently in 2014, and Merrick has never been played by an actor with a disability. All three of the actors who have portrayed him (Phillip Anglim in 1979, Billy Crudup in 2002, and Bradley Cooper in 2015) have been nominated for the Best Leading Actor in a Play Tony Award. I know times have changed recently due to an increase in activism and growing intersectionality between communities that experience oppression, but black face started to go out of style in the late 1930s. Could you imagine if an actor played a character in black face in 2015 and was nominated for a Tony Award? There would be riots, because it is offensive. It is already so difficult for actors in differently abled bodies to get work. Shouldn't they be allowed to tell their own stories? Even when they do, they are often met with criticism. In 2017 The Glass Menagerie was revived on Broadway for the FIFTH time and for the FIRST time Laura was played by an actress with a physical disability, Madison Ferris. She was Broadway's first lead actress in a wheelchair. The first actress in a wheelchair to appear on Broadway in ANY capacity was Ali Stroker, who played Anna in the 2015 Deaf West revival of Spring Awakening, which to this day I am SO sad I didn't get a chance to see. Hopefully we will have more ASL inclusive options coming to our stages soon. Which reminds me, is I Am Most Alive With You still playing at Playwright's Horizons? No. It closed four days ago. Shit. Anyway, I did not personally see Madison Ferris' portrayal of Laura, but the way she was talked about was absolutely disgusting. The show opened with Amanda, played by Sally Field, helping Ferris pull herself onto the stage from the house with her arms. People called it exploitative to watch her struggle. What is exploitative about watching a woman live her truth in imaginary circumstances? If that is exploitative so is literally all acting. Neil Genzlinger observed in his NYTimes piece, "As for the charge of exploitation, I read that as, 'It was unpleasant to see Ms. Ferris pull herself along the floor by her arms; I prefer that people with disabilities remain invisible, as they so often are.'" Let's contrast this with how Bradley Cooper played Merrick. When the production trasnferred to London in 2015, Susannah Clapp described his performance in the Guardian: "He begins (no deterrent to spectators) semi-naked, as a bare-chested, bare-legged, upright figure. He lets one hip drop down so that he is lopsided. His mouth twists, slipping diagonally across his face. A shoulder hunches so that his body is bent, his head sticking forward." This is offensive. Bradley Cooper is an incredibly gifted actor, and I can't wait to see him in A Star is Born as soon as humanly possible even though we all know there will never be a better version than the 1954 version starring Judy Garland (who was ROBBED of an Academy Award for. ROBBED). But why is Bradley Cooper brave and impressive for portraying someone with a disability without any prosthetics and makeup while Madison Ferris is exploitative? Why is it that so many actors as talented as she is who live in similar bodies don't even get a chance to be seen? This is the part where I get off my high horse and tell you I'm not perfect. Like the other characters in The Elephant Man I thought about myself a lot while reading this play. Before I moved to New York I was told that I would know I've been here a while when I start to recognize members of our community who are homeless and beg on the streets or on the train. I've come to recognize many of these people and unfortunately there's a common theme. There's a man outside my local grocery store who doesn't have legs. I could rattle off plenty of other examples but there's one that always hits me the hardest. I don't see him a lot, but sometimes when I'm on the NQRW line, usually going in or out of Brooklyn, I see a man who is impossible to forget. He is a veteran and he sustains serious chemical burns. His body is probably unrecognizable from what it once was. He is very, very hard for me to look at. I find it difficult to meet his gaze. But he is a person just like me and I shouldn't feel that way. Also, our country should spend way more money helping our homeless and often mentally ill veterans and less on deploying more of them into wars that aren't ours to fight but this post is already SUPER political and I need to stop. To wrap up, I'm gonna leave you with two more Ted Talks. The first is by an actress and stand-up comic named Maysoon Zayid. She's a woman of color and she has cerebral palsy. She is also a total badass. And even though I began this post with a woman sharing her experience being objectified as "inspo-porn," we all still love to be inspired sometimes. This is my favorite Ted Talk for when I need a little encouragement. I've watched it who knows how many times and it always makes me cry. Thanks for making it to the end of this longer than usual and more emotionally charged post. I have more thoughts on this, and also about the theatrical portrayal of neuroatypical folks and people of size. While those deal with similar themes, it felt like biting off more than I could chew for one blog post.
If you want to read some plays that deal with similar themes to The Elephant Man but approach the topic in what is in my opinion a more nuanced and inclusive voice, I highly recommend Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks and and Cost of Living by Martyna Majok. Both of them feature characters with physical disabilities in settings with more agency, both are written by badass, Pulitzer Prize winning women, and neither plays have been produced on Broadway. What a surprise. THANKS FOR READING LOVE YOU ALL SEE YOU NEXT TIME!!! Next I'm reading Amadeus by Peter Shaffer. This video is all I know about that play. DISCLAIMER: I've sat down to write this so many times. It's barely edited. So just know that. When I started college I was simultaneously embarrassed and proud that I had never read or seen Hamlet. Of course, I got the gist. I've seen The Lion King (the movie, the Broadway show, and the Jewish summer camp Hebrew version) and I can still recite the "What a piece of work is man" monologue because of it's inclusion in the musical Hair. But as of August 2013, I had never seen or read the source material. I was proud because this was entirely due to my high school English teacher Mrs. Frank, the best teacher and person my life has ever crossed paths with. In my high school curriculum, students were expected to read approximately one Shakespeare play every year. For me, that meant freshman year was Romeo and Juliet, sophomore year was Macbeth, and we didn't read one junior year because the AP English theme was American lit, hence no Shakespeare. Senior year everyone was supposed to read Hamlet. All the other English teachers taught Hamlet, but Mrs. Frank was bored of teaching Hamlet, so we read King Lear instead. Mrs. Frank being bored is also why I have never read a single novel by Mark Twain and why we weren't allowed to write essays about The Great Gatsby. QUICK DEPARTURE FROM THE POINT- have you SEEN the trailer for the Amazon Prime King Lear?? WILD, right? It dropped a few weeks ago and I haven't watched it yet because I'm scared of the eye-gouging out scene (not a spoiler, it's literally in the trailer and the play is hundreds of years old) but I love this play and Emma Thompson so I'll have to give it a go sometime soon. BACK TO THE REGULARLY SCHEDULED BLOGGING: So I get to college and as mentioned in my last point I read Hamlet three times in one year and watched the David Tenant version. I get the hype, it's a pretty good play. For those of you even more out of the loop than I am, before we discuss Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the actual play this post is supposed to be about, I am going to summarize Hamlet in five sentences or less, without pulling out my copy or googling it, mostly just to see if I still can. After writing it I will go back in and add corrections in red, just for the sake of full transparency. Our main man Hamlet comes home from faraway law school (This is in a place called Wittenberg, apparently) because his father, the King of Denmark has died and his uncle Claudius has usurped his rightful spot on the Danish throne by marrying the Queen, Hamlet's mother, Gertrude. There's also an important bit where Hamlet's father appears to him as a ghost and straight up tells him that Claudius killed him. Hamlet senses something is not right about this and Claudius senses that Hamlet senses that and so he tries to make Hamlet think he's going crazy (This is not right, Hamlet decides to make Claudius think he is going crazy) and then Hamlet hires these actors to perform a play within a play that is supposed to expose Claudius's crimes. Also Hamlet kills his lady friend Ophelia (Ophelia kills herself, but for the record I pretty consistently confuse Ophelia and Desdemona for no good reason at all, and Othello DOES kill Desdemona) and his best friend Polonius (Hamlet's friend is Horatio, Polonius is the chief counselor to the King, but Hamlet DOES kill Polonius cause he thinks he's Claudius) and himself (also wrong, Laertes kills Hamlet). Other Act V deaths include Laertes, Claudius, Gertrude, and definitely not Horatio. And Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but we'll get to that later! Okay, so my summary wasn't that bad. It was kind of bad. But let's talk about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They did not make a huge impression on me in my three freshman year reads of Hamlet, they barely made it into my haphazard summary of the play. However, they play a larger role in the plot than I remembered. This brings us to the play this post is actually about. I have another embarrassing confession. When I was looking for a copy of the play I spent an unfortunate amount of time very confused as to why the New York Library of the Performing Arts (arguably my favorite place in the world) did not have ANY plays by Tom Stoppard... before realizing I was in the American playwrights section and Tom Stoppard is definitely British. This was the first play I've read for this series where I really truly wished I had seen it first instead of read it first. This is my first departure from traditional form, and as it happens it was sometimes difficult to read on the page. Tom Stoppard begins the story of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with a Godot-esque scene in which our two protagonists are betting on a coin toss and Rosencrantz repeatedly bets on heads and wins over and over again- every. single. time. I call this Godot-esque not because I've seen or read Waiting for Godot, because I think it's important that you know that I haven't, but because it says so on the back of the copy of my play. Also, everyone knows what Waiting for Godot is all about. They continue in this fashion until the famed tragedians arrive on the scene and we get our first moment of metatheacricality in which actors playing actors comment on acting. It's exhausting and overdone, but probably wasn't in 1966 when the play premiered to rave reviews and sky-rocketed Tom Stoppard to capital G Great Playwright status. After this we get some real scenes from Hamlet which was kind of fun and unexpected. Also, while I'm on the track of confessing my theatrical knowledge gaps, I did have to check that the scenes were in fact, form Hamlet and not Tom Stoppared just being really good at fake Shakespeare and iambic pentameter (something I am very much not good at). Then there's the play within the play and lots of other stuff happens and honestly, I don't really want to summarize the play anymore so we're gonna skip to the ending, which is my favorite part, probably because I forgot how Hamlet ended like the dramaturgical disaster that I am In Act III we find our two heroes and Hamlet on a boat to England. Claudius has given Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a letter to deliver to the King of England upon their arrival explaining the madness and urging them to take Hamlet in. They decide to open the letter only to find out that Claudius has actually ordered the King to KILL HAMLET. That night, Hamlet switches the letter with one he has written telling the King to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern instead. This shouldn't be shocking considering (a) the title of the play and (b) this also happens in Hamlet, but Hamlet is a real dick. In the next scene, Hamlet is no where to be found, suddenly all the tragedians appear on the boat, and then pirates attack. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern lament their fate, the Leading Player explains that all paths lead to death- and this is where things get straight up WILD. Something in Guildenstern, a character I didn't really read as being capable of violence, snaps and he stabs the Leading Player with his own dagger! The scenes plays out as follows: "And he pushes the blade in up to the hilt. The PLAYER stands with huge, terrible eyes, clutches at the wound as the blade withdraws: he makes weeping sounds and falls to his knees, and then right down. [. . .] The TRAGEDIANS watch the PLAYER die: they watch with interest. The PLAYER finally lies still. A short moment of silence. Then the TRAGEDIANS start to applaud with genuine admiration. The PLAYER stands up, brushing himself down." The remaining players act out the famous Act V deaths of Hamlet for... what? Their own amusement? To further irk Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? To further drive home the point that everyone dies? As they play out the scenes we know all to well, they include the inevitable deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the following scene is the final lines of Hamlet, where the Ambassador from England confirms their deaths to Horatio, to whom Hamlet has left the Kingdom of Denmark. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a great play, especially if you're at all into absurdist comedy and/or questioning your own mortality and/or the significance of art and theatre. I enjoyed reading it, but I would definitely prefer to see it. I'm so curious about how some of these these absolutely bizarre scenes are interpreted by directors, actors, and designers. I want to see the 2D play become the 3D play. I don't have as much to say as I probably should, mostly because I read the play two weeks ago and procrastinated hardcore on writing this all down. I guess my 23rd birthday is as good as any other day to write about a play and meditate on death. Next up I'm planning to read The Elephant Man by Bernard Pomerance. Does this mean we'll be talking about ableism? You betchya. I don't know why I'm being so chipper about it, it sucks, but I like talking about it. I should stop writing now. Barefoot in the Park, Boy Meets World, Jewish Media, and other seemingly unrelated thoughts9/17/2018
So, remember the culture wars of the 1990s?
I, personally, was not old enough to know that they were happening, but I was a (very) young consumer of media in the late 1990s, and I was cognizant enough to be aware of some of the results. One side effect of the culture wars was that children's television became very overtly moral. Take, for example, "Teacher's Bet," season one, episode of eight, of the 1990s/2000s hit, family-friendly sitcom Boy Meets World. In this particular episode, Corey, Sean, and Topanga are reading The Diary of a Young Girl in Mr. Feeny's class and learning all of the lessons I am sure you are aware come naturally with learning about Anne Frank. Meanwhile, Sean's older brother Eric is dating an Asian-American. At no point in the episode is her race discussed or pointed out or was it made to seem weird that Eric was dating a girl with a different racial background, and we actually see multiple mixed race couples through out the seven seasons of the show, which is pretty cool. Anyway, in the episode, Sean comes home from school to find Eric comforting his girlfriend who has just been made fun of for her race. They don't go into details about what was said, but the point is made- it is never okay to make fun of someone because of their race, religion, ethnicity, etc. The kids learn about it at school via Anne Frank's diary, and they learn about it at home when it becomes clear that the world, unfortunately, hasn't moved past prejudice. This motif of the lessons being learned in Mr. Feeny's classroom being unusually applicable in real life continues through out the series, and basically never happens in real life. All this is to say that this is 100% not how I felt reading Barefoot in the Park. Okay. Maybe 100% is too strong. But at least 97%. It's not because Barefoot in the Park is unrealistic. It actually struck me as more plausible than many of Neil Simon's wild farces. It's just become such a period piece, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I love when contemporary plays become period pieces over the natural course of time. Reading them is how I imagine architects or archaeologists feel when they discover rare cultural artifacts that are really just bowls. Sometimes when I'm at the Met or the Natural History Museum and I see all the bowls or mortars and pestles or what have you I think about the woman (or man, but let's be honest and just give the credit for early man's survival largely to our female ancestors) who made it purely for functionality. If only we could tell her that the bowl she fed her baby mashed up berries from is in one of the most important cultural institutions in the world. She would probably laugh. Anyway, Neil Simon's multiple Tony-nominated, long running Barefoot in the Park is not quaint in the way a handmade bowl is. It's just an image of a different time. The play takes place over the course of five days in the lives of newlywed couple Paul and Corie Brattner, who live on the sixth floor of a Brownstone on East 48th Street. Let's unpack this, shall we? First of all, Paul and Corie are delightful characters. Some people think Neil Simon doesn't write great roles for women, and while I agree that some of his female characters are definitely dated, I think Corie is the best part of this play. Before her first entrance, the stage directions describing the apartment read: "For all the room's drabness and coldness, there is great promise here. Someone with taste, imagination, and personality can make this that perfect love nest we all dream about. That person is now putting the key in the door." What a gift those stage directions are to any actor tackling this role (she writes, as a pretty firm Not Performer). Even though we continue to learn about Corie and all the wonderful quirks of her personality for the next three acts, these three sentences are arguably more than enough. Her husband, Paul, she describes as a "rising young attorney" and he is, naturally, her foil. Where Corie is spontaneous, silly, and not always thoughtful, Paul is very much rigid, careful, and stable. And charming, of course. The match doesn't make no sense at all. What DOES make no sense at all to me, a reader of the 21st century, is that Corie and Paul are 26-year-old newlyweds who live in an apartment below 125th Street and only pay $125 dollars a month in rent. I could cry. I do know plenty of people that live sixth-floor walkups, though I can state with confidence they are paying more than $125 a month. Other than that their relationship reminds me of some of the ones I witness in my daily life. I'm starting to reach that really fun phase of adulthood where I increasingly find myself to be the only single person in a group (which reminds me- if you aren't following progress on the female lead revival of Company I don't know what musical theatre-less rock you live under) and many of my friends are going through similar early struggles as Paul and Corie. Basically, even 55 years after Barefoot in the Park premiered on Broadway, it is still hard to be young and in love, and the famous fight of Act II, Scene II is probably still being butchered in high school acting classes across the English speaking world. Like many of Neil Simon's best plays, Barefoot in the Park was inspired by his own life, which is probably what helps make the relationships and quarrels still seem so real to a contemporary audience. The New York Times has a beautiful series called "The Last Word" where they interview obituary-worthy individuals and only release the video after their death. Will I ever be unconcerned enough with my mortality (or famous enough) to record a video like that? Probably not, on either account. Anyway, it's a really lovely video and it's wonderful to hear Neil Simon talk about the early days of his marriage to his first wife Joan, the inspiration for Corie and the love of his life.
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While we're on the topic of The New York Times and Neil Simon, I also love this article by Amanda Peet about her experience starring alongside my good friend and collaborator Patrick Wilson in the 2006 Broadway revival (and flop) of Barefoot in the Park. It's a fun read. I could go on, but I feel like in recent weeks everything worth saying has been said about Neil Simon. I know that reading his work today he came seem, as I said earlier, quaint, or even unoriginal, but that's only because he laid the groundwork for so much of the work we are now inundated with. He perfected the New York City living room comedy. Without the critical and commercial popularity of his plays we wouldn't really have living room comedies at all, or the sitcoms they inspired, like Seinfeld or Friends. We also wouldn't have literary managers banging their heads on their desks across the country at every living room comedy that comes across their desk. Neil Simon, along with Woody Allen, brought Jewish neuroticism to the stage and to mainstream media, but with much more light-heartedness (and without the child sexual abuse) than his bespectacled counterpart. Maybe it's the High Holidays or living on the Upper West Side or having spent another summer at a Jewish sleepaway camp, but I've been consuming a lot of Jewish culture recently. I'm ten pages from finishing Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, on Saturday I went to The Jewish Museum for the first time, I spent all day Sunday at the JCC, and I went to three different congregations for Rosh Hashanah last week. I'm going to two more for Yom Kippur. I'm basically a semi-professional Jewish person at this point. I think this post has gone on long enough and I'm rambling, but I think I'm going for a casual vibe with this site anyway. Is it working for you, whoever you are? My decidedly non-academic approach to talking about plays I didn't encounter in academia. Let me know, if you're feeling friendly. And if you want to read along, next up I am tackling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard. I know. I read Hamlet in three different courses but never encountered Stoppard's take on what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were up to while Hamlet was freaking out. This should be fun. Hello faithful readers. It has been much too long. Before we jump into our semi-regularly scheduled programming, allow me to offer an explanation for my long absence. I don't know if anyone has ever told you this, but the first year post-grad is hard. Really, really hard. Don't get me wrong, I am super grateful for my education and my life in New York City and so many of the wonderful people and opportunities here, but there's no sugar coating it. It was really hard. My promise to read a play a week and blog about it shouldn't have been hard to keep. I read and write very quickly and I truly love reading plays. However, for the majority of last year, I held down three jobs, worked seven days a week, and at least four days a week was getting up at 5:00 in the morning to make it all work. I was perpetually exhausted, not intellectually fulfilled, and my self-esteem was lower than it had been in years. I was applying for jobs in my field and working my connections pretty consistently, but nothing was changing. I have never quit anything in my life (well, I quit ballet when I was five, but I wasn't even a real person yet and I regret that decision to this day) and I knew that unless something drastic happened, I was going to continue on this pretty miserable path for the foreseeable future. Enter my dear friend Isabel. We were having coffee one freezing January morning when we got to talking about summer plans. I was applying primarily for work based in New York, but Isa's search was broader. She mentioned that she was auditioning for Santa Cruz Shakespeare, where she as an acting intern a few years back. She told me I would like it a lot and that they have a really amazing dramaturgy program. Because I trust Isabel and I had nothing to lose, I applied. Fast forward to a few months later and while I'm waiting for the kid I nanny to get home from school I receive a phone call with a Santa Cruz area code. The artistic director of SCS called me personally to offer me an internship on their production of Love's Labour's Lost. I was frankly shocked, not only that I was offered the internship, but that it was the artistic director himself who made the call. I said I needed some time to think about it, and after communicating over the next few weeks with him, the managing director, and other SCS alumni and friends in the industry, I decided it was an opportunity I simply could not pass up. I knew the first day I arrived in Santa Cruz that I made the right decision. At the company luncheon I was moved to tears by the way the SCS staff and the directors spoke about their vision. Looking around the room I was in a space that obviously celebrated diversity, education, and the art of theatre. After months in New York, surrounded by people that seem to be in the business for all the wrong reasons and having spent all that time banging down their doors to get in, it felt incredibly moving and validating to be with like-minded individuals. These were people who love theatre and Shakespeare and care about advancing the art form, not for personal gain, but because art still means something in this world. Showing mixed race couples on stage, in classic Shakespearean roles, no less, means something. Having women play roles written for men means something. Having people of color play royalty and aristocracy means something. Once the rehearsal process began, I was very creatively fulfilled and had loads of fun. The director and the whole team made me feel so included. After months in New York being treated very much like an intern without a creative bone in my body it felt so good to be in a setting where I was more than a talking head who could use a computer. I was valued as a person with dramaturgical knowledge and skill. I laughed every single day in that rehearsal room, and very often laughed until I cried. It could not have been a better show to work on this summer and make me fall in love with theatre all over again. Then there's the play itself. Oh, Love's Labour's Lost, what an odd and intriguing piece of work you are. In all honesty before I was offered this job not only had I not read the play, but I had literally no idea what it was about. I had heard Biron's call-to-arms monologue from Act IV, Scene III, "Have at you, then, affection's men at arms," etc etc, famous for being incredibly long and in blank verse, some say the comedic counterpart to Henry V's St. Crispin's Day speech. St. Valentine's day speech, if you will! So one day last spring I plopped down on the Great Lawn in Central Park right before a massive rain storm and got reading. Unfortunately, I left my annotated script at my parent's house in California and don't have my first impression notes at hand but it was definitely a fun first read! I was a little bit nervous that I would forget how to read Shakespeare, but it's like riding a bike. Essentially, what you need to know about Love's Labour's is this: Ferdinand, King of Navarre, and his three friends make a vow to study for three years and in that time swear off worldly pleasure, most importantly, women. However, when the Princess of France and her three lady friends arrive on diplomatic business, hilarity and chaos ensues in typical Shakespeare fashion. Throw in some common folk for extra comedic effect and you've got yourself a good time! It was so fun to read the play because it clearly sets the stage for Shakespeare's later (more produced, more successful) comedies. There's a clever masquerade mix up scene, as we will see later in Much Ado About Nothing, a band of misfits who put on a play like in Midsummer, love letter confusion like in Twelfth Night, and so much more. It's almost like Shakespeare was trying out all these plot devices and stretching his use of language to the fullest so he could refine all of it in his later works. One of my favorite things about this play in particular though is that all of the female characters have so much agency. Unlike Much Ado, Midsummer, and Twelfth Night, the women in the play all act almost entirely independently, or at least without the guidance of men. The Princess has been sent on a diplomatic mission by her father, the dying King of France, with the prideful but lovable Boyet as a chaperone. Although written as a male character, our production had Boyet played by and as a woman, so we never see the Princess or her three companions take advice or instruction from a man. The women hold the upper hand through out the entire show really, as the men are so quick to abandon their vows and fall for each and every one of them. After an act filled with hijinks, mixed up love letters, disguises, and foolishness, the merriment comes to and end when a messenger arrives to let the Princess know her father has died. She is now the Queen of France and decides she needs to head home to mourn immediately. SO of course the King of Navarre and his friends decide now would be a great time to earnestly confess their love for the women who have just found out their king has died. The Princess and her friends are quick to make it clear that they are not won over that easily: PRINCESS We have received your letters full of love; Your favours, the ambassadors of love; And, in our maiden council, rated them At courtship, pleasant jest and courtesy, [. . .] DUMAIN Our letters, madam, show'd much more than jest. LONGAVILLE So did our looks. ROSALINE We did not quote them so. FERDINAND Now, at the latest minute of the hour, Grant us your loves. PRINCESS A time, methinks, too short To make a world-without-end bargain in. The scene goes on and each couple, following the lead of the Queen, agrees to call upon their respective suitor in a year's time, when the traditional mourning period comes to an end. If at that time their love still stands, they will marry. EVERY SINGLE WOMAN REJECTS A MARRIAGE PROPOSAL BY THEIR LOVE INTEREST. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. The play takes place over the course of a couple of days! They've just found out about a personal and national tragedy! They're all beautiful, aristocratic, educated women! They're not gonna marry someone just because they wrote them love letters and bought them jewelry! Ugh. I love this play. So good! I miss watching it every night. Anyway, as the men and women are about to part ways, we get this GEM of dialogue from our favorite meta-theatrical playwright: BIRON Our wooing doth not end like an old play; Jack hath not Jill: these ladies' courtesy Might well have made our sport a comedy. KING Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day, And then 'twill end. BIRON That's too long for a play. While Look Homeward, Angel is an incredibly successful play from a critical standpoint in that it won the Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for Tony Awards, I do not believe it has withstood the test of time. The original Broadway production ran for 564 performances, which is really not bad for a play, but it has never been revived on Broadway, and as far as I know has not had a major New York City revival at all. In 1978 it was adapted into a musical called Angel (which I have frankly never heard of until just now when I looked it up) by songwriting duo Peter Udell and Gary Held (who literally do not even have Wikipedia pages) and it ran for a whopping five performances. So, why did I pick this play as the second play to cover in my blog? I kicked things off with Death of a Salesman, arguably one of the most famous plays in the American canon, and followed up with Look Homeward, Angel. I have a confession to make, dear readers. I picked this play because it was predominantly featured in the internationally acclaimed 2010 documentary, Thespians. Please enjoy the trailer for this incredible film: If you were anything like me in high school (which, let's face it, you probably were if you're reading this right now) than you were involved in drama club (or, if you were really like me, you were the vice president of drama club, but that's beside the point). Many high school drama clubs are recognized as part of the International Thespian Society, as mine was, and can compete at regional, state, national, and international levels as a troupe. Back in the day when I was an active member of Troupe 1814 I competed at many a thespian festival, and this documentary took me back. It features an INCREDIBLE scene from Danny in the Deep Blue Sea (a play which should probably be featured on this blog at some point) and awkward nerdy guys singing songs from Altar Boyz, and most importantly, a very intense high school production of Look Homeward, Angel.
So I picked this play because I was intrigued by a documentary. I'm not going to apologize, but I also am probably not going to focus so heavily on plot as I did in my Death of a Salesman post. I would like to share a few key observations instead. Key Observation 1: In a shocking turn of events, a play written by a woman actually has not only significant female characters (shout out to everyone's favorite characters in Death of a Salesman, Linda and The Woman) but has many different types of female characters! You have our protagonist, Eliza Gant, the matriarch of the Gant family and the leader of the family business, the Dixieland Boarding House in Altamont, North Carolina. You have her daughter Helen, various female boarders of different ages and types, and Laura James, the classic new character who is "just passing through" that comes in and messes everything up as the love interest of Eliza's youngest son, Eugene. Speaking of female characters, old plays have SO many characters in them. Imagine a young playwright trying to write a three act play with 19 characters in it. I once worked on a staged reading of a musical with 17 characters in it and it was horrible. It was like herding cats, except instead of cats it was actors and pages of sheet music. Cats may have actually been easier to herd. Back to the play. Eliza Gant is a pretty fantastic character. It is revealed fairly early on that her husband, Ben Gant, is an alcoholic, (which seems to be another theme in old plays- was alcoholism rampant in the 50s?) and Eliza runs Dixieland and raised a family almost entirely on her own. Of course, she's also a little bit messed up and kind of treats her kids like shit, but not at a Willy Loman level. Key Observation 2: The romantic plot in this play was SO weird. Essentially Eliza's youngest son, Eugene, falls in love with a boarder named Laura James. When they first meet they lie to each other about their ages, Eugene claims to be 19 and Laura claims to be 21, when in reality they are 17 and 23. They eventually find out the truth but it doesn't really matter cause Eugene is an old soul (read: pretentious) and Laura is honestly kind of immature so they fall in love, blah blah blah, Eugene proposes to her and decides not to go to college even though his mom has been saving up and literally sold property so he could go to UNC Chapel Hill and then Laura tells Eliza that she is actually ENGAGED and just was panicking and is going back to her fiancé. Also this play takes place over the course of two weeks. Did this actually happen in 1916? I ask this because I recently read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , which takes place at the same time, and this exact plot line happens, more or less, to Francie Nolan with the guy she falls in love with. Did men and women just pretend to not be engaged, fall in love, and then go back to their fiancé all the time? Did people fall in love in two weeks? Were you not allowed to go to college if you were married? Eugene essentially has no marketable skills except for retaining a lot of information, so how did he expect to support his wife without a college degree? Whatever. She leaves him and he goes to college so it all works out in the end, I guess. Except his brother dies of pneumonia. Key Observation 3: I'm still not quite sure what the deal with the title is. First of all, I find titles with commas in them really annoying. Really any punctuation, but commas especially because I keep forgetting where it goes. I know it's Look Homeward, Angel because I'm literally staring at the script right now but in my brain it is Look, Homeward Angel like 75% of the time. Anyway so the titular angel is Mr. Gant's prized statue. Mr. Gant's vocation is carving marble statues for cemeteries, and his magnum opus is this angel statue that he refuses to sell even though people want to buy it and it's probably worth a lot of money but no, he won't give it up because he is literally saving it for his own deathbed, which is kind of messed up if you ask me. Carving your own tombstone is maybe one step above actually digging your own grave. It's very morbid. I thought that when his son died he would give the angel to his grave because that would make dramatic and poetic sense but nope. He's just saving it for himself. Maybe if I did a more in depth reading I would figure it out. But when you don't say the title of your play in the play you really can't expect me to know what you want me to get out of it. Just kidding, Kind of. No really, I'm joking. Maybe. Anyway, I think that's about all I have to say about this play for now. If any of you have read it or seen a production I would love to hear your thoughts, because to be honest I'm not quite sure what to make of it right now. Join me next time as we (finally) read a comedy: Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon. I love a good farce. First, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge to all of my readers (because I know you exist), that I am incredibly bad with self-imposed deadlines. I am also bad with deadlines imposed by others, but not quite as bad and I also have a college degree and a handful of accomplishments to prove that procrastinating never got me into a mess I couldn't get out of.
That being said, now that the show I was working on has closed and I am forced to seek theatrical fulfillment on my now semi-regularly scheduled free time, I anticipate being more dedicated to this project. Now on with my thoughts on Arthur Miller's seminal classic: Death of a Salesman. Going into my read of this play I had a few preconceived notions, and I am pleasantly surprised that I was actually right about a couple of them. Notion 1: The titular salesman would die, likely by suicide. Notion 2: The play would be about a "perfect American family" but actually be about the failures of the American dream/capitalism/patriotism/other quintessentially American things. Notion 3: The salesman's son, Happy, is gay. Is now a bad time to mention that this post will contain spoilers for Death of a Salesman? Because obviously it will. Anyway, I was right about 2/3 of my notions. I was wrong about Notion 3. I'm not sure why I thought Happy would be gay, like in a weird mid-20th century euphemism-y sort of way? Maybe I conflated Death of a Salesman with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, another Pulitzer Prize winning, capital G Great American Play? I've actually read that one though... So anyway, Happy's not gay. He is actually described in Miller's stage directions as, "powerfully male" and Miller goes on to say, "Sexuality is like a visible color on him, or a scent that many women have discovered" (Miller, 19).* One of my favorite things about reading old plays is their stage directions. Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, and all the great playwrights of that generation just have this lovely novelistic way of depicting scenery and writing character descriptions that just isn't really in style anymore. Now playwrights say "maybe" and "might" a lot (i.e. "he might sigh here, maybe a song starts to play"). At my school they called that "invitations to collaboration." Then you have Arthur Miller who is like: "[Willy] opens the refrigerator, searches in there, and takes out a bottle of milk. The apartment houses are fading out, and the entire house and surroundings become covered with leaves. Music insinuates itself as the leaves appear" (Miller, 27). Music INSINUATES itself. That's freakin' poetic. OKAY BACK TO THE PLAY STEPHANIE. FOCUS. So obviously my first two notions were correct, because this is an Arthur Miller play so the aging and tragically yet beautifully flawed male protagonist is either going to kill himself after some horrible realization at the hands of their pride-and-joy son (looking at you Joe Keller) or be lead to their death knowingly and with moral resolve (hi John Proctor!) leaving behind a mourning yet stalwart wife (Kate and Elizabeth, my homegirls) as a testament that their life meant something. And Death of a Salesman would be no exception to this rule! I will say Willy Loman's death was less shocking than either of the previously mentioned plays, although The Crucible probably shouldn't be surprising since it's (loosely) based on a true story. That scene at the end of the second act when Elizabeth is called in to bear witness and they ask her if John is a lecher and she denies it and as he's being dragged away to his cell and ultimately his death he yells, "Elizabeth, I have confessed it!" (Miller, 91) always gets me. God, I LOVE dramatic irony. Wow I am really getting tangential tonight. Anyway, as opposed to John Proctor's death, Willy Loman's felt more inevitable. We find out early in the play that he's been attempting to kill himself, or at least contemplating suicide, fairly regularly. It's also literally the title of the play, so, you know. The salesman's gotta die. I believe it was Ibsen that once said "if you put a gun onstage in the first act, it has to go off in the third." And as everyone who has ever met me once said, "Stephanie, you are a pretentious asshole." So onto the third notion. Miller describes the setting of the play as follows: "The action takes place in Willy Loman's house and yard and in various places he visits in the New York and Boston of today" (Miller, 10). One could take this to mean the play takes place in 1949, the year of the play's initial publication and Broadway run. But I read Miller as a little more ballsy than that. And I am going to take a second to acknowledge that ballsy is a gendered term for acceptably male over-confidence but other people call me that sometimes so I'm going to use it freely. What I mean to say is I think Miller is asserting that his play is timeless and universally relevant. And while in some aspects the play is notably dated, such as the scene where Howard Wagner, the young head of the company Willy works for, is showing off his tape recorder, the themes are still obviously resonant. I could imagine a baby-boomer seeing Biff as a whiny and misguided millennial. I don't think that's a very intelligent read on the play, but I can imagine someone making a case for it. Willy and Biff are both products of a broken system (*cough* capitalism *cough*) who were promised certain outcomes from hard work and determination. In Death of a Salesman they are confronted with their realties. Their dreams aren't going to come true, they aren't going to amount to what they thought they could be- what they were expressly told they could be. The American dream, like the salesman, is dead. And on that note I think I'm gonna close out this reflection. Thanks for making it to the end of this post. Next up I will be reading a Tony-nominated, Pulitzer Prize-winning, ~LADY WRITTEN~ play, Look Homeward, Angel by Ketti Frings. *Do people use MLA citations in blogs? I used to joke that certain plays would stalk me.
Four years ago around this time I was beginning the biggest journey of my life thus far- my college education. I was pursuing a degree in drama and for the first time something that was once an after-school hobby was my day-in and day-out somehow all at once fueling and draining institutionally validated obsession. During my first week of classes I received my syllabi and began to gather my books. In one class we were assigned to read The Crucible (which was the first show of my conservatory's main stage season) Arthur Miller's 1953 allegorical play about the Salem Witch Trials. Funnily enough, I had also been assigned to read The Crucible in my 11th grade AP Lit class and subsequently performed the role of Rebecca Nurse in my senior year of high school. By the end of my first semester of college, I had approached The Crucible as an English student, an actor, a drama student, and an audience member. Flash forward four years: I have now received my prestigious drama degree and I just moved to New York fresh off a summer break from my beloved theatre. I chose to spend the summer working at a vocational program for young adults with special needs. One of the participants in my program, Zoey, loves musicals, so they were often a conversation topic between the two of us. One day we had a conversation that went something like this: Zoey: Stephanie, have you seen Wicked? Me: Yes. Zoey: Stephanie, have you seen Cinderella? Me: Yes. Zoey: Stephanie, have you seen Annie? Me: Yes. Zoey quickly grew frustrated with this game so she switched gears and decided to make a simple request. Zoey: I want you to make me a list of every play you've ever seen in alphabetical order! I quickly explained to Zoey that I wasn't going to do that, because I've lost track. I have a document on my laptop that was last updated in October of 2015 that has a list of every play or musical I've read, seen, or worked on and it has 194 titles. Last summer when I interned in the literary department of a regional theatre I kept a running tally in the back of my planner every time I read a play and by the end of 10 weeks I had over 60 tally marks. I'm incredibly lucky to have access to all of this, and even luckier to be so passionate about the work that I do. However, Zoey's request got me thinking- the only list longer than the list of plays I've seen or read is the infinitely expanding list of plays I haven't. While I could allow that idea to fill me with existential dread (and at times it does, such as any time I enter the Drama Bookshop), instead I decided to make a project out of it, which brings us here. With remarkably little effort I was able to throw together a list of 52 Tony or Pulitzer Prize winning plays that I, an individual with a prestigious drama degree and a life long obsession with theatre, have never seen or read. Before we move on, two quick disclaimers: Disclaimer #1: This is by no means a jab at my education. I received a first class education and was exposed to so, so, so many plays in my time at school. There are simply too many plays to fit into a four-year curriculum! Disclaimer #2: This blog is about to be very, very white man centric, which is not something I usually condone. However, that is an unfortunate reality of the award-winning plays of the Western theatrical canon AND during my amazing education I took entire, semester-long courses on African-American drama and plays by living women writers, so I've hit a lot of the major players in those two categories. My list does include a sizable handful of women and writers of colors, so don't worry too much! So, each week for the next year I will write a blog post about a play that I probably should have read by now. You can read along with me, if you feel so inclined. Next week I revisit my old friend Arty Mills, this time with his 1949, Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning classic, Death of a Salesman. |
Stephanie KaneI like reading plays, drinking lots of coffee, and holding other people's Tony Awards. Archives
August 2018
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