The first Marlowe I read was Edward II, and it fundamentally influenced the way I saw him. I completely bought into the idea that he was a dramatist who could have outshone Shakespeare, and may have been the truly brilliant mind of his generation. I've read Edward II many times since, and my opinion of that play has never wavered ... but then there's Faustus.

This is Marlowe at his most maddening. Clunky "low" scenes (that may not actually be his work), wooden blank verse, and theatrical forms that seem like they are centuries before Shakespeare's best, instead of decades. The introduction is quick and dirty, then we plow through episode after episode where Faustus uses his powers to mock the powerful and satiate his own gluttony. There's no development of character, plot, or theme until perhaps the last monologues as Faustus must confront his fate.

But then there are these pieces of magic, of pure rock-and-roll that stick out from the text like a blaring beacon. Here is a playwright boldly exposing himself on stage far before it was accepted.

FAUST. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?

MEPH. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it:

Think'st thou that I, that saw the face of God,

And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,

In being depriv'd of everlasting bliss?

---

FAUST. Tell me, where is the place that men call hell?

MEPH. Under the Heavens.

FAUST. Aye, so are all things else, but wherabouts?

MEPH. Within the bowels of these elements,

Where we are tortur'd and remain for ever:

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd

In one self place; but where we are is hell,

And where hell is, there must we ever be

And, to be short, when all the world dissolves,

And every creature shall be purified,

All places shall be hell that is not heaven.

It's electrifying and alarming and exciting. I don't know how you stage the rest of the play to match that cold modernity.

.... As a side not, as thinking about this, I came up with the following: let's compare Elizabethan playwrights to classic rock. So ... Shakespeare's the Beatles, right? Then Marlowe is Jim Morrison. I need to figure out John Webster and Ben Johnson.

Perhaps I have said this before ... but what a difference a week makes. Seven days ago, I lamented Mamet's misogynistic Boston Marriage. Here's another three-woman play by a modern (male) master, but the results could not be further from that extended strawwoman argument.

Edward Albee's Three Tall Women is a beautiful work, diving deeply into the life of one woman as she nears her end. There's a clever conceit as the individual characters from the first act are transformed into aspects of the woman at different stages of her life in the second ... but gimmickry is not the aim, deep investigation is. In the preface to the Plume edition, he makes it clear the old woman is based on his adoptive mother:

Is the woman I wrote in Three Tall Women more human than its source? Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last twenty years of her life could abide her, while many people who have seen my play find her fascinating. Heavens, what have I done?

"Fascinating" does not mean "likable", and that's where this play succeeds so well. Though firmly in Albee's constant milieu of East Coast Elite, the old woman is both a a product of her time and also a rough-edged individual that speaks plainly about the scope of her life. I'm almost at a loss to describe why this play is so effective: I expect brain from Albee, but this is pure heart, an outpouring of humanity on par with Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?. I wasn't expect heart from a play where the three women are named "A", "B" and "C".

DIANE. Come now, Mitchell -- you're just having another one of your little adventures.
MITCHELL. I don't have adventures.
DIANE. Please. You're like Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn on a raft made out of rent boy.

Ahhhh ... that's better. A quick-witted comedy that hits some true relationship notes, and kept me guessing about where it was going and how it would end: that's what the doctor ordered. Specifically, the doctor ordered The Little Dog Laughed by Douglas Carter Beane.

On the surface it's a Hollywood satire like The Player or Tropic Thunder, but the satire drops away pretty quickly as the quirky love story at the heart of the play quickly takes center stage.

Beane does an interesting juggling act, where three out of the four characters all appear to be the protagonist at one point or another. Our initial POV character seems to be Diane, the sharp and driven Hollywood agent. The play quickly leaves her behind to foreground the story of Mitchell, the almost-big star "who suffers from a slight ... recurring case of homosexuality" ... and when he starts to fall in love, I instantly though I knew where we were headed, into a coming-out comedy that would end up being like a Pride Day Special Episode of Entourage.

It's only as the story grows more complex, dealing with all kinds of pressures in all kinds of lives do we learn the play is untimately the story of Alex, Mitchell's rentboy paramour. He's a street hustler, and Beane flirts with all the stereotypes this prince/pauper pairing could entail, but doesn't give an ending that I anticipated at all. Almost out of nowhere, Alex makes a decision I didn't expect ... but for all my surprise, it seemed perfectly natural and in-character once I thought about it. It's the kind of moment you get at the optometrist office: one flip of a lens and it all suddenly comes into focus.

Pictured to the left is what my puppy did to Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband.

.... Which is what I've wanted to do to it more than a few times over the past few weeks. This is the first play I've been late on, the first play I've had to put aside and start over again, the first play I've dreaded in this project. This is the first time that reading felt like a chore, like homework.

It's not an awful play by any means ... I've certainly read worse. Part of my reaction was simple fatigue, as Macbeth caught up with me and work went through a rough patch.

But much of what I was feeling was simply that the play is so bloody Wilde.

This is a fascinating experiment, a melding of the Shaw/Ibsen/Strindberg well-made play with the frippery that will come to define Wilde when he writes The Importance Of Being Earnest a few years later. It's an uneasy balance, but at times reaches a fascinating depth where the "triviality" of society is stripped away to the ugly core that lies just under the surface. The stumbling block for me was getting to the seedy underbelly, as the play is frontloaded by a party scene full of bon mots and witticisms daintily pronounces by a multitude of people whom we don't care about and will never see again.

I'll be thinking about this play a bit more, and my foot-dragging reaction to it does not mean it didn't end up captivating me. It's a strange, strange play ... but that strangeness is exactly what pulls me in.

I participated in a staged reading event this past week, and one of the questions that came up in the discussion was the use of language to reveal character. So it's entirely possible it's just plastered to the front of my cerebellum as I think about Take Me Out by Richard Greenberg. But I don't think so: I think precise language that carefully defines character is the shining feature of this play.

The most shocking thing about the writing here is the crafting of the central figure of Darren Lemming, star center fielder for a very thinly veiled Yankees team ... who also publicly comes out of the closet. (I had to double check: this play predates A-Rod joining the Yankees by a couple of years.)

As I read it, I kept thinking what a carefully defined role this is, and how difficult it'd be to cast. Beyond the specific physical attributes, the language describes a character is floats in a zone between many extremes: his language is a mixture of grace and slang, intelligence and jock-speak, hubris and self-questioning. It's a tough mix, and a type we haven't seen on stage. Just because he is gay and has some ability with language doesn't mean he isn't also a professional athlete, with all that often entails. That grey zone is much of what the play's about, and it's all there in the language, as he never settles into any defined role: instead he breaks them.

And then there's the language of those beautiful showpiece arias that won Denis O'Hare his Tony. I'm not the biggest baseball fan in the world, and I tend to reject cloying paeans of the George Will/Bob Costas variety. But these are simply stunning speeches that speak to the power and beauty of sport.

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.

As much as I have enjoyed Jacobean playwrights, it's still hard to read anything from this period without reflexively overlaying Shakespeare, without continually comparing phrasing and content. I find myself always surprised that it isn't Shakespeare, that his individual authorial voice does not completely define a generation.

And what a generation it was. For my money, this is without doubt the high-water mark of the theatre. It's a time when live theater met linguistic explosion, where high art met true popular culture, where the theatre was a breathing, vital part of the collective experience. Modern comparisons can be so glib, but Elizabethan and particularly Jacobean theater was the HBO or FX of the day, producing content that electrified as much as Big Love or Breaking Bad or The Sopranos does today. And it did it in the same way: mixing intelligent insight with crowd-pleasing sex and violence.

It's hard not to instinctively think of Richard and Iago when reading DeFlores, to not see a young Lady Macbeth in Beatrice. But The Changeling by Middleton and Rowley (etext here) is a different beast than Shakespeare. It's much more frank, for a start. There's a bed-switch here, a la Measure For Measure, but crueler and discussed in very plain terms. This is not a play safe for outdoor festivals and their tourist base. The other comparison, of course, is the verse ... which simply is a halting beast compared to Shakespeare. Perhaps it's familiarity, but it's Shakespeare and Marlowe that read easily for me and as much as I enjoy other Jacobeans, I admit their verse doesn't hit the ark of beautiful simplicity quite as often. And, of course, there's the violence that's the hallmark of the period. Shakespeare only really approached it in Titus Andronicus, but even that pales to some of what the Jacobeans inflict on their characters and audience.

I was actually somewhat disappointed as I raced to the climax of The Changeling. As the dominoes were put in place and the tension was slowly racheted up, I was expecting a true explosion of blood and chaos. This Grand Guignol fireworks is what Jacobean theater does best, so this quiet offstage climax is completely unsettling ... like a summer blockbuster where nothing explodes. It's very intentional: this tragedy is quiet, dark, and mean. This is not operatic, but petty and ugly.

---

The scenes between DeFlores and Beatrice are stunning in their focus and power, and deserving of attention. It's often hard to find good verse work for classes that lies outside the well-trod 37-or-so, but there's a treasure trove of scene and monologue work here ... especially for women. There's no reason that a "Shakespeare" monologue or scene needs to be from Shakespeare, and this is a really good play I need to keep in mind in the future.

With every post, I like to have an image. Just over there to the left. It's a nice layout for a blog post, I find. A book cover is always easy enough or at times I'll use a poster image, but I do sometimes try to find a production photograph. I specifically did some googling for the original production of Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1997, as I'm completely enthralled by the idea of John Slattery and Bradley Whitford sharing a stage before they were stars. But try to google this play, and you will see this its curious fate: Star Vehicle. It's all about Julia Roberts' Broadway debut, or James McAvoy's triumphant return to the London stage.

Why? Why would this seemingly dense play about architecture and genius and the weight of family history become fodder for film stars showing off their stage chops?

It actually makes a lot of sense it McAvoy's case, as the central role of Walker/Ned is a powerhouse that contains a lot of theatrical pyrotechnics. From madly expressive chaos to stuttering repression, it's a showcase piece for the actor that can pull it off. Roberts' decision to work on the project is more confusing, as her role doesn't contain near the splash ... but perhaps that's the point. Trading on her likability, Three Days of Rain would make an excellent way for her to establish her stage bona fides in a piece laden with the trappings of intelligentsia ... but without actually having to shoulder too much weight.

... And the play is funny. Actual, honest-to-god, laugh-out-loud funny. In a tradition spaning from Wilde to Coward to Aaron Sorkin and Joss Whedon, Greenberg is writing smart, witty people who say smart, witty things, and it really works. What could easily become a maudlin work crackles with snap and fun and joy in the playing, and that was completely surprising to me. I imagine it plays like a house on fire, and I'm looking forward to seeing it in August.

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?

"2002 Pulitzer Prize Winner" It blares out from the bright orange cover of Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/underdog: "This play is important. This play is historic. This play is recognized."

Makes it hard to judge honestly, doesn't it? It sets the tone for the discussion, it becomes the bar by which the play is considered: it is award-worthy, or it isn't. I can either confirm that it is deserving of the recognition, or take it to task. It's hard to come at the play neutrally and see through the golden haze of the award.

There's a whole lot of theme here, a heavy load of concepts and leitmotifs and woven plot threads. Starting from the initial images of three-card monte and a black man who plays Abraham Lincoln in whiteface, two brothers fight over their meager existence, while a criminal past haunts and teases them. Lincoln left the con before he ended up dead, but the cards seduce him back, with the inevitable result. (Did I mention that Lincoln's brother is named Booth? Need any more literary foreshadowing?) In a thrilling end, it hits the something like the same note as The Usual Suspects: the whole thing's a con. Theme and plot come together, and it's electric. There's a heady mix of identity and family and the weight of the past and the greater weight of the present. There's no doubt it's a dense and thorny literary piece, deserving of recognition as such.

But is it a good piece of theater? Do the characters change? Is there any journey? The characters certainly act: there is a crescendo of action, and the status quo is irrevocably altered. But the seeds of that climax don't grow organically out of the events on the stage. It is largely external, unseen actions that impel the bloody conclusion instead of change driven by the action we do see. There's a feeling of inexorable inevitability about it all, like Greek tragedy ... but we're robbed of seeing it trigger onstage. It's almost as if it could have been 90 minutes shorter, because the characters we meet at the beginning are simmering with the same resentments that drive the ending, only missing the spark of the offstage events to set them aflame.

Sometimes it's pedantic and old-fashioned to insist on traditional dramaturgy, but it's a simple fact of the theatre: we've given our time and attention and shouldn't be shortchanged by an experience that tells us that very time and attention was worth nothing because what really matters is unseen. It's a limitation of a two-character, one-set piece: The influence of the outside world (and make no mistake, societal forces drive this play) becomes limited to reportage. I imagine it's a play that you could "act the shit out of" (to use a highly technical term), and wish I had seen the People Productions run in 2007. But literary themes and great acting material aren't all there is to a great play. It's a "good" play - perhaps a "very good" one - but the amount of narrative action means it can't be a "great" one. I realize I'm criticizing a play that I otherwise might have appreciated, sans Pulitzer ... but there you are. It makes me look harder when someone tells me what I should think.

The play's a theatrical three card monte: watch all you want and be dazzled by the flash ... but you will never see what's really going on.

Part of this year's play reading is recovering from my theatrical Rip Van Winkle act. 9/11 was a part of those years, so when I started thinking about "The State We're In", I wanted to find a play about that September day. I honestly don't know how theatre reacted. A quick Google search for "9/11 play" pointed me to Anne Nelson's The Guys.

I'd like to look at these plays in a critical vacuum, I really would. It's a lot easier said than done, though. My initial response was so strong, I itched to see what the critical reaction had been, and found universal praise. It was enough to make me pause: Am I just that far off?

I'm sure a great deal of the initial acclaim had to do with the immediacy of the production: premiering at The Flea Theater (only a short distance away from Ground Zero) a mere three months after the attacks, this was an important healing event for New Yorkers. Like Waiting For Lefty, this play can't be disassociated from time and place. It must have been an electric experience, the kind of therapy theatre can create when it allows a community to come together in a time of crisis.

However, I'm reading this play in 2009 Utah: far removed in time and geography.

This simple one-act is based on real events, with the character of Joan a thinly veiled version of the author. The play opens with a monologue where Joan talks about leaving Oklahoma behind to live in the dreamland of New York: a rent controlled apartment "filled with music and books. A husband who liked opera more than football. Two charming children in a good private school." Then, the horrors of 9/11 hit. Through friends, she is introduced to Nick, a fire captain who lost most of his men that day. He needs to give eight eulogies in the coming weeks, and is utterly overwhelmed. She agrees to spend a weekend afternoon using her writing skills to help Nick compose the speeches.

The bulk of the play is a by-the-numbers discussion of Nick's men who died, as Joan teases out specific details and crafts pieces out of them. I really wonder how fictionalized these men are. I've done some research, and can't get further than "inspired by". They certainly don't feel real or closely observed: we have "the average Joe", "the rookie", "the family guy", "the scalawag" in that order. For all the avowed intent to memorialize the individuals that stand behind the numbers, the firefighters never have the shock of the real. A feeling that this was a true memorial (like Mary Dickson's EXPOSED) would really have tempered my feelings towards the play, but they remain ciphers - a pretext for the central theme of the play.

It is obviously a heartfelt reaction by a talented writer. So why does The Guys infuriate me? Because it is ultimately not about the guys that died that day, or their leader who survived. Naturalistic scenes continually break out into direct address monologues that reveal the writer's own anguish and pain. Even within the scenes, she is emotionally shattered and Nick constantly apologizes for ruining her weekend. The only emotional arc is Joan's, as if when thinking about all the people who lost their lives on that day, what should truly concern us is the shattering pain felt by the liberal intelligentsia who had to endure the horrors of writing about it.

I'd like to react to The Guys in a purely technical sense, but I can't get past my own distaste for the play's narcissism. When we talk about The Culture Wars, here is Example A in The People vs. The Smug Self-Centered Lefties. The spine of the play (and of its reception) seems to be this: How are we, as rich, artistic left-leaning New York intellectuals ... how are we affected by 9/11.

Perhaps I'm not all that far from the critical reaction after all. As I was finishing this post up, I stumbled across an otherwise glowing review from the Village Voice:

As time passes, The Guys may come to seem shallow, even clichéd, not because it doesn't deal in authentic emotions, but because it offers little critical distance on them.

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(One thing The Guys certainly has going for it is some great monologues for adult women. Those can be hard to find, so it's well worth a note just for that. I'll be keeping track through the year of plays that have good scenes or monologues though Labels.)

Next Week: Black Watch by Gregory Burke