How have I missed this play? Even avoided it? I think I had assumed it to be a hoary old melodrama. But The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman is a wonderful script, with that polished-diamond craft of the Golden Age of Broadway. At the same time, though, there's heart and subtlety. When contrasted with the ham-handed sermonizing of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, there's some reality here. This could still happen today, and the play wisely focuses more on the small tragedies the a witch hunt can bring. Or even the small tragedies of unrequited love.

It's fun reading a play like this cold. I'm sure I should know what the received wisdom is on this play. I should know if what I read in that ending is what everyone else reads. Perhaps I'll try and find out at some point ... or perhaps I'll gladly keep my Children's Hour in my head.

(This wonderful photo is from a production at Southeast Missouri State University. Just a brilliant publicity image.)

Running late, I know. Extenuating circumstances, not the least of which being the imminent end of the project. I have one play left to read, and while I'm looking forward to wrapping up I am also procrastinating in order to stretch it all out.

Anyways, the nigh-penultimate play of the marathon is Sophie Treadwell's Machinal, an expressionist masterpiece that was largely neglected until a 1993 revival at the Royal National Theatre. Since then, it's made the rounds in reinvention after reinvention.

I just can't figure out why it was neglected. What an amazing script, one that flies off the page with rhythm and energy and excitement. Reading, I could feel the pulse of it all, an electric sense of the pace and beat of the the play. It's almost a musical, infused with jazz. (Speaking of which, has no-one done a musical adaptation? It seems like a natural.)

Part of it is, I suppose, waiting for modern theatre to catch up with this 1928 script. It must have seemed like an alien artifact dropped in amongst the landscape of the day. Now the open set, highly doubled casting, and epic storytelling style are part of our vocabulary and seem effortlessly modern. It is cold and beautiful and classic.

It's a completely obscene, indecent, dirty, smutty, rude, improper, coarse, bawdy, vulgar, lewd, raw, off-color, ribald, risqué, explicit, blue play.

Oh ... and it's utterly sacrilegious, blasphemous, profane, and heretical, as well.

I think that about covers it.

It's also one of the most sublime works I've read about the religious experience and "Coming to God". It certainly makes for a tricky balance: the audience that can tolerate this raunchy story of a rodeo clown and his overweight paramour is likely resistant to the message, and the audience that would appreciate a sincere story about the redemptive power of belief would surely never make it past the first description of .... well, they wouldn't make it very far. They wouldn't make it past the opening monologue, in fact.

I posted these words a few months ago about Riding The Bull, but they apply almost equally as well to The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis. Is there some sort of SoHo Great Awakening going on that no one told me about? In a mixture of comedy and beauty and hip-hop and history, this play tells the story of a trial for Judas' soul. The video above may give you some taste of the style of the piece, but it's the content that blew me away.

Just because I don't accept the divinity of Jesus, doesn't mean I don't find it a fascinating and powerful story. The Passion shouldn't be restricted to faith any more than King Lear should be restricted to British people.It's one of the truly great stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. And central in that story is the problem of Judas Iscariot, the problem of his betrayal and his damnation. I chew on it endlessly, like a dog with a theological bone. Why is Judas damned for all time? Why would "it had been good for that man if he had not been born"? Isn't he just playing his part in the original Passion Play? How else was it supposed to go down?

I don't want to spoil the ending, because for me it was a complete surprise. But there is a climactic, wonderful scene that does answer those questions in a theologically sound way. James Martin, a Jesuit priest, describes his experiences working with the original production as a "theological adviser" in A Jesuit Off-Broadway, and it's something I have at the top of my reading list. When I was a young man thinking seriously about joining Father Martin's order, I wonder how this play and it's view of Hell might have changed my life ...

---

When I say Somebody Do This Play, I am fully aware that "somebody" probably can't be a company in Salt Lake. Not only is an 11-actor show that requires an urban, multicultural cast a tall order, but trying to walk that fine religious line is more difficult here than many other places. A point of view that lies between "Conservative Faith" and "Religion Is A Fraud" is a bloody small market here in the Beehive State.

"Laughing wild amidst severest woe" is, of course, from a different play entirely. And we often don't think of Beckett as a distinctly Irish playwright, somehow placing his nationality squarely in Absurdistan or something (where he lives next to Ionesco, I suppose).

But that simple quote says as much about Irish theatre as any, and it finds a full expression in Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa. It's one of my favorite plays, and one I've read often. And every time I read it, I'm always carried away by the richly bittersweet emotion that runs through the script. The joyful dance of the sisters is always undercut by the tragedies of their past and their future.

But it's not a puerile pessimism, a negation of life's temporary joys by its eventual tragedies. The fact that death and sadness haunt these sisters never diminishes their laughter: it enriches it. Lughnasa's memory play keeps both future and past in view, brilliantly balancing the two. And that's why it hits me so strongly each time, that constant tension between the fullness of emotion on both ends of the spectrum.

Why should "Somebody Do This Play"? Well, I'm speaking specifically to the local area here on this one, as I know it's not exactly an under-produced play. But in a local talent pool brimming with talented women, there's no excuse to be constantly doing plays that have seven men and two women while leaving aside a wonderful ensemble piece that showcases this talent pool's strength.

It's been a heck of a week - closing, getting the keys and moving in really eats up seven days of playreading. But this one should be easy. Heck, I could write this in three words:

Hillman.
Was.
Right.

To those that know her, this comes as no surprise, I am sure. But what specifically was she right about this week?

Sheila is one of the most gifted American playwrights alive-- no lie.

Loosely inspired by Jame Joyce's Ulysses, Sheila Callaghan's Dead City is a powerhouse play, bursting with energy and ideas and character and fun. It might just be the Patti Smith references talking, but there's more than a bit of Sam Shepard in Sheila Callaghan. It's hard to recognize now, but there was a time when Shepard was rock 'n' roll theater: cutting edge and young and deeply in tune with the musical scene. Callaghan feels the same - it's a breath of fresh air in the stale theater, the kind of play Vampire Weekend might write, the kind of theater TV On The Radio could create.

I'm going to go ahead and slap the "Somebody Do This Play" tag on Dead City, knowing full well that some of the stage directions will crush any mortal theater:

(GABRIEL approaches SAMANTHA, still sleeping. Hey lays each one of his arms tenderly on her head, her shoulders, her breasts, her face, her womb, her thighs.)


"But then, blue wildflowers sprout from his head."


(Blue wildflowers begin sprouting from GABRIEL's head. He panics.)

But it's a gender-swapped, time-shifted, location-changed Ulysses that features great women's roles and a wonderful ensemble experience in a script that effortlessly flows from social satire to dreamscape ... you're going to let a few blue wildflowers get in your way?

Do this play.

Maybe it's just the joy of discovery, but this was the most delightful read I've had so far. I don't know who John Kolvenbach is and have never heard of the show. I simply stumbled across it at the Dramatists Play Service website trying to fill this theme month. It's certainly not a Great Play, and I doubt there's $7500 coming Kolvenbach's way (although it did get nominated for the Olivier Award). But is it a Very Good Play, free of the weight of pretension and full of life and energy.

It's an exciting read, in large part because of how Kolvenbach writes the dialog. I will endeavor to save a thousand words by using this picture:

Bracketed words, italicized words, capitalized words, italicized capitalized words ... and that's not even capturing any of the footnotes scattered throughout the text that give a little more color to the line. It's all a bit much at first, and I initially felt like it might be too restricting to the actors. But it eventually fades away, and becomes like a musical score: Once I learned how to read the notation, I could hear the electric crackle of the speech, feel its pace and vibrancy, see the briskness of the movement. It's a fascinating attempt to communicate the play Kolvenbach obviously saw in his head.

As you might expect from the title, Love Song is about love, as a lonely maladjust finally finds someone to be with. It's a very simple play, and I probably shouldn't have been caught off guard by the simple twist. But it's not overly concerned with plot: it's about character and emotion and delicious, delicious language.

Do this play.

(In fact, if anyone from SLAC is reading this: really do this play. At least read it. It's very castable with local actors, the play is in keeping with your style, and Keven Myhre would brilliantly solve a pretty bloody tricky set design.)

Next Week: Betrayal by Harold Pinter