The Best American Short Plays 2010–2011
Edited with an intoduction by William W. Demastes
Copyright © 2012 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books (an imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation)
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Note: All plays contained in this volume are fully protected under copyright laws of the United States of America, the British Empire, including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the International Copyright Union and the Universal Copyright Convention. Permission to reproduce, wholly or in any part, by any method, must be obtained from the copyright owners or their agents.
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Contents
Introduction: Love, the Strange Attractor
by William W. Demastes
The Subtext of Texting
Lorin Howard
The Request
Vincent Delaney
It’s Only a Minute a Guy
John Franceschini
Thread Count
Lisa Soland
Dissonance
Craig Pospisil
Creatures
Janet Allard
The Coyote Stratagem
G. Flores
Chocolates on the Pillow
Arlene Hutton
And Yet...
Steve Feffer
A Song for Me, or Getting the Oscar
John Bolen
Scar Tissue
Gabriel Rivas Gomez
Snowbound
Brent Englar
Eleanor’s Passing
John Patrick Bray
A Marriage Proposal
Kimberly La Force
Till Death Do Us
Gene Fiskin
A Number on the Roman Calendar
David Johnston
Six Dead Bodies Duct-Taped to a Merry-Go-Round
Lindsay Marianna Walker and Dawson Moore
Starfishes
Michael Ross Albert
St. Matilde’s Malady
Kyle John Schmidt
Lobster Boy
Dan Dietz
You’re Invited!
Darren Canady
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Love, the Strange Attractor
William W. Demastes
Do any of us long for anything more desperately, hungrily, achingly than we long for love? And is there anything that scares us more? Falling in love is heaven, falling out is hell, and the unrequited sort is an unbearable blend of both. We vow time and time again never to fall into a trap that, statistically speaking, more often ends poorly than well. Heartbreak outdistances happily-ever-after no matter how you try to spin the evidence.
Medicine can’t inoculate against it, psychology can’t cure it, science can’t dissect it, and reason can’t fathom it. So sometimes we choose just to ignore it. Tom Stoppard reminds us (in Arcadia) that love is the attraction that Newton left out when he created that orderly world view that we all pretend to live in. But love is in the system and erupts onto the scene often when we’re least prepared for its unexpected arrival. Maybe we should quarantine it as we do malware in our electronics. Being the truly rational creatures that we are, surely we should simply find ways to avoid this most irrational of human attractions as we work to create secure and comfortable lives for ourselves and our “loved” ones. Create a good firewall....
But we don’t. We accept the fact that “the course of true love never did run smooth” (thank you, Mr. Shakespeare) and pursue it against all good reason. We shadow those we love, hoping for any sign of attention, seeing even pity, sometimes even downright contempt, as a sort of sign of love. In perhaps one of the greatest short plays ever written (The Zoo Story), Edward Albee reveals that love and hate sometimes spawn from the same emotions. And, sad to say, “neither kindness nor cruelty, by themselves, independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves.” It is “the two combined, together, at the same time, [that] are the teaching emotion.”
The following short plays, in an incredible variety of ways, demonstrate Albee’s point. These best short plays of the 2010–2011 season were selected from among a large group of very high-quality works (it was a very good year) whose primary nexus involved matters of love in one form or another. What it says about the beginning of the second decade of this no-longer-new century (if anything) is a matter of speculation I leave for the reader. What it says about love is pretty apparent: it’s a subject that occupies a good deal of our time, interest, and energy, often despite our better intentions. These plays show people trying to build firewalls in order to avoid the teaching emotion, only to learn that love can’t be quarantined. They show people learning hard lessons by way of the teaching emotion, coming back to life despite repeated efforts to spare themselves the pain and suffering. They show people lovingly trying to prevent others from suffering through the teaching emotion, only to discover that the lessons are non-transferable: we need to learn them on our own, and meddling invariably causes more problems than it solves.
Love finds a way despite all our efforts to negotiate, reject, or control it. And in the end, even against our better judgment and despite evidence to the contrary, it is pretty hard to argue that life really would be better without love in the picture.
Those early first fumblings in love can be the most painful, poignant, and funny (at least for other people). Lorin Howard’s The Subtext of Texting puts a contemporary spin on these early romantic contacts by reminding us how the advent of new technologies like texting generates a new language of love not quite sorted out. Howard confesses that she is the desperate character in the play, “feverishly obsessing over what is said in a series of cryptic, no-frills texts after precisely seven months of the beginning of a relationship that actually began online.” Text-speak is a whole new language whose subtleties and innuendoes appear to have gender-specific responses. Howard reports that when she asks whether or not this staged relationship will end happily, “inevitably, the girls respond with a resounding ‘yes.’ The boys are less optimistic and think that ‘the end’ is the end of the relationship.” The play is about communication and how it looks in 2011. And Howard confirms, “Yes, this is a love story.”
Poignant describes Vincent Delaney’s The Request, which also revolves around contemporary technology, but in this case technology creates a completely unexpected by-product in the virtual realm of Facebook and Internet: “immortality.” Delaney recalls being inspired by an eerie discovery that a Facebook page had outlived a deceased friend by several years. Says Delaney, “The strangeness of this made me think about the odd permanence we’re all creating online, and how little control we really have over it. I wonder if we should be more careful.” With this experience as inspiration, Delaney plays on the hauntings of past loves and lovers that we all experience in our lives, this time with a uniquely contemporary, sadly modern twist.
John Franceschini’s It’s Only a Minute a Guy takes on t
he anxieties of a recently divorced woman and her reluctant adventure with another recent phenomenon: speed dating. Franceschini says, “It’s difficult to restart your social life after a divorce. Accept the fact you’ll churn through a lot of flotsam before you can connect with a genuine soul mate. The secret is to believe it will happen and keep trying.”
Thread Count is perhaps the most romantic piece in this volume, triggered by an instantaneous spark of inspiration: Lisa Soland summarizes: “I was in the mall shopping. I had just stepped onto the escalator to go down a floor, when I turned and looked back just in time to see a male salesclerk opening up and tossing a bedspread across a display bed. A female customer stood across from him and she was reaching across the bed to catch and help to lower the comforter neatly onto the bed. In that single moment, I had the entire play.” The play is its own Miracle on 34th Street, bringing together an uppity sales clerk and North Dakota widow and generating a not-quite love-at-first-sight encounter that is wacky and romantic at the same time.
Actually, some might consider Craig Pospisil’s Dissonance the most romantic play in this volume. By no means a conventional boy-meets-girl play, it involves a former musician and the daughter of a just-deceased music teacher. These two characters, loosely inspired by actual friends of Pospisil, are joined together in the most unlikely of circumstances, generating a harmony of their own, which, we learn, necessarily involves a certain degree of dissonance to succeed. The first drafting of this play occurred, says Pospisil, while “I was on my honeymoon, of all places.”
Creatures by Janet Allard is an inspired little project generated as a response to the writing prompt “A secret has just been revealed: What happens next?” The comic incongruities that result—a werewolf is a central character—remind us of the compelling and essential nature of secrets even among those we love. Secrets of identity, how we hide who we are, and when we choose, or are forced to reveal, who we are. And what happens when we do. Says Allard, “I find this really compelling.”
The Coyote Stratagem by G. Flores has a title whose reference is to the tactics of Wile E. Coyote in the Warner Bros. Roadrunner cartoons. The play warmly documents a specific instance of immature behavior that—if we really think about it—is manifest in many of even the most healthy relationships. Flores observes about his play that “it isn’t quite a condemnation of the immaturity of a lot of American men (a trait that I suffer from as well), but it certainly is a critique of our childlike reaction to adult problems.”
Arlene Hutton’s Chocolates on the Pillow is another take on the theme of deception in romance, benign and otherwise. This one involves a first-time (last time?) bed-and-breakfast getaway where, as Hutton notes, her two characters “are playing roles in a clichéd land of faux Victorian decor with fluffy towels, fancy soaps, chocolates, and sherry. Do they really want to go antiquing and hiking or are they talking about these things because that’s what they think they should be doing? From the very first lines it’s clear that they are not listening to each other and although we’re rooting for them, we’re not hopeful that this weekend will be everything they want it to be.” Disturbingly, a pet teddy bear takes on something of a life of its own as observer and critic, increasing the characters’ self-awareness that they have taken on roles in this relationship that aren’t necessarily who they really are.
And Yet... by Steve Feffer takes Shakespeare’s famous sonnet on love unvarnished (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”) and utilizes video technology to probe the mysteries of performed behavior in love relations. “Acting” is a central component to all human behavior but seems even more intensified and concentrated when love is involved. Inspired by the sonnet, Feffer reports: “I knew immediately that I wanted the play to speak to how these mediatized images were getting in the way of the main character seeing his love....I like how that struggle comes through in Sam’s effort to communicate both with the audience in his direct address and with Shayna as a TV.” Yes, a television is a character in the play. Hyper self-conscious as we all are today about the mediating influences of technology, Feffer’s play takes a unique approach by literalizing the idea that our lives are like television.
Is honesty always the best policy? If so, then why does love inspire so much deception and such strange behavior? John Bolen, in A Song for Me, or Getting the Oscar, confronts this issue by making the obvious point. At least it’s obvious to those of us who are willing to be honest about the subject: “How could any relationship survive unfiltered when verisimilitude will serve much better, and get us kissed at night?” Bolen adds, “We have to be selective with our truths, for our spouses really do not want to know that those jeans make their asses look fat.” The attendant problem, of course, is determining how much truth is a good thing, because complete mendacity surely can’t be the correct strategy.
Forcing the truth to be known and struggling to live with that truth is the subject of Gabriel Rivas Gomez’s Scar Tissue, a play “about hearts in disrepair, both literally and figuratively.” Gomez explains: “It is dirty. It is ugly. It is vicious. And, at its core, it is a story about love. And loss. It is a story about what damages and eventually repairs the heart. The rest is just a vehicle.” Best intentions gone awry infiltrate lives of good people, leaving regret amid honest confrontations with the complexities that comprise truth.
Regret and honesty also inform Brent Englar’s Snowbound. Englar observes that the play is a “conversation turned to art, philosophy, and eventually God,” which is simultaneously dramatized in a manner that, in the end, defends love and forgiveness as gifts that defeat hatred and urges for vengeance. Eleanor’s Passing by John Patrick Bray has a similar elegiac quality to it. Described by Bray as “a subtle look at three friends who decide to stick together until the end, whenever that may be,” it is a reflection upon life and living by a new-made widower and his aging friends.
Kimberly La Force’s A Marriage Proposal has a negotiated quality to it that doesn’t occur (at least not so directly) in the other plays. Here it involves a single mother and hard-working illegal immigrant, both of whom need something other than love from a relationship. The play unfolds as a frank view on the romantic versus practical nature of marriage. Economic necessity rarely finds its way into discussions where love and romance should dominate, but it is a consideration that does take center stage when people are weighed down by the struggle of day-to-day survival. Necessity can be a powerful force. But even then, many of us still tend to stand by our romantic inclinations.
Taking a far lighter look on matrimonial matters, Till Death Do Us by Gene Fiskin was inspired by the conclusion that men and women view things differently when it comes to weddings. Says Fiskin: “This play was a brief tongue-in-cheek exploration of those differences.”
But if women have more romantic notions about marriage, life after marriage sometimes entails a female conversion to far more pragmatic matters, including keeping the lid on dreamy, idealistic husbands. A Number on the Roman Calendar by David Johnston looks back to an earlier millennial happening (AD 1000) and follows a poor but loving couple through their thoughts and actions on the undoubted eve of the end of the world. Upon reflection, I think that this play, too, could be among the most romantic in this collection.
There are no women available to qualify the thoughts and actions of the two men in Six Dead Bodies Duct-Taped to a Merry-Go-Round by Lindsay Marianna Walker and Dawson Moore. But women in the background do inspire these men to bizarre acts of self-expression. What the play captures is, as Moore observes, “nothing more complicated than a couple of seemingly disparate people finding each other’s humanities.”
Moore’s description also aptly describes Michael Ross Albert’s Starfishes, involving a lonely youth’s encounter with an equally lonely prostitute in a desolate lighthouse along the Nova Scotia coastline. Albert reports, “As I worked on the play and discovered what it really wanted to be, a goofy sex farce turned into a play about loneliness. It is a love story
about two people, both cut off from the rest of the world, finding hope in one another.”
St. Matilde’s Malady by Kyle John Schmidt has its own prostitutes. In fact, it’s set in a “pre-industrial” brothel and, as Schmidt says, “speaks to the ambivalent nature of love,” though his interest involves “not falling in love (which is always easy), but love in a continuum (which is never easy).” Schmidt adds: “This kind of love is like a debilitating, contractible disease: restricting freedom, limiting action, and containing a brutality that verges on criminality. However, this chronic sickness is not only sought after but undertaken with joy and excitement.”
Lobster Boy by Dan Dietz confronts “the inability to feel pain, a profound sense of guilt...and lobsters.” It’s a mesmerizing work that captures much of Albee’s “teaching emotion” gone horribly wrong. How do you teach fear? Is it love or is it hate that inspires someone to give the life-preserving gift of fear to someone who doesn’t come by it naturally?
Ending on a light note, You’re Invited! by Darren Canady is both funny and telling. Love in our culture has become something of a commodity that we tend to think has monetary value. Buying love is recognized by many as prostitution, of course, but it curiously seems that money spent on sons and daughters signals familial balance and order, especially in middle-class suburbia where keeping up with the Joneses has become a money-hemorrhaging marathon that has lost sight of its ultimate goal. Let’s not forget, Canady reminds us, that love preexists in our children and simply needs to be nurtured in the simplest of ways.
Love. What a word.
The Subtext of Texting
Lorin Howard
The Subtext of Texting by Lorin Howard. Copyright © 2011, 2012 by Lorin Howard. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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