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Cleveland Public Theatre has thrown its hat into the ring of the 10-Minute Play Festival trend that has been, for many years, sweeping the theatre world. And tonight, well, I went to check it out.

There were 8 plays in 120 minutes. Perhaps someone else can do the math on this; or maybe I’m a poor sport for being so literal? The whole experience was playful and well-orchestrated. Narrators and “guides” came on to introduce the play and the whole Gordon Square theatre space was utilized for the production. Each piece was executed in a different space throughout the whole of GS and so the audience had to be spritely mobile throughout. I dragged my chair around the space for two hours and then, impolitely, forgot to put it back’as the rest of the audience was responsible enough to put their chairs away: well, most of them. I started next to a black curtain at the back of the house that separated the theatre space from the concessions and box office, and ended up a the front of the house looking back’and up’over the area from which I had originated.

My Date with a Zombie

Written by Steve Strangio, Directed by Christopher Johnston

This play begins with an homage to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The two “main” characters of the piece come dancing in to the aforementioned anthem of the 80s. Jen, the dead woman (Saidah Mitchell) is a wily zombie looking for love and a fresh bit of meat from Bob (Tom Kondilas) who also is looking for love and willing to take a chance on a zombie. The short piece begins with the unlikely pair meeting at a restaurant in Zoho (the zombified counterpart to Soho, of course’and is possibly a critique of it, a la Scorsese’s After Hours) and utilizes an abundance of puns and short quips that one might expect’such as that mentioned above (Jen is looking for some ‘fresh meat’), as well as the possibility that the loving couple would get to eat a young man named Jose, leading Jen to state that she loves “eating Mexican.” It also takes shots at modern political correctness with Bob’s insensitive zombie references being corrected by Jen to “Undead Americans.” Other puns include, when the appetizers arrive, ‘finger food’ as well as several misunderstandings between Bob and the zombie’ eh um ‘Undead American waiter’ Joe Milan. Adding a strange dimension to the whole piece is the repetition of certain words by a coterie of off-stage “zombies.” For instance, when Jen says, “try some of the fingers” or whatever, the coterie behind the black curtain would call out in shrill whispers “fingers!” Soon, the main course arrives, a newly captured quadriplegic’Tom (Ryan Smith)’who, though still alive, is perfectly willing to be the menu’s main entre. The whole thing is too much for Bob, who decides that Jen is not worth the dinner or the hassle’after all, he tired one finger and couldn’t stomach it. Bob, who runs away, returns moments later as a zombie, reporting that he had been attacked by a mob of zombies. Bob and Jen are finally able to be together “eternally,” not until “death do they part,” but literally, until they “fall apart.” The highlight of this piece for me is when Jen begins to eat the first appetizer, a finger with a ring on it, and asks Bob if he’s got something planned and is trying to “tell her something.” This was a good little piece, well directed and well acted, and everyone, including the audience had fun with it.

Antarctica (purity)

Written by Anton Dudley and directed by Fred Gloor

Tells the tale of what I believe is a married couple long on the outs who, by the end, have found a way to renew their love. At the outset, they are sitting in separate chairs in a large sand-filled box with a filtered spot on the wall behind them very much resembling a burning hot sun. The wife (Teresa McDonough) complains of the unbearable heat and the husband (Derek Coger) counters by explaining that some people would kill for the heat they take for granted. Each continually wipes sweat from his/her forehead and bemoan their boredom. The shallow conversation that they continually turn to regarding the temperatures that surround and overpower them and the dreadful ennui that they endure is interrupted by the arrival of a postal employee (Shawn Galligan) who also bemoans his fate’of endlessly having to “give” away letters and packages while never receiving anything himself. While he bemoans this fate, he tells, in passing, the story of how 5 goose-necked swans appeared to him and then merged together to form one glorious man with blue-veined wings for arms. How when he touched the glorious incarnation of this man he forgot all that he had previously known and dreaded and knew, finally, love and wanted nothing more than to depart with the goose-man. Instead, he was overpowered by threats from his boss to get back to work delivering things, and sadly he listened. Finally, bored with his story, the couple asks if he has something to deliver. Indeed, he does, and the postman gives the woman a plain box wrapped in brown paper and string. The couple argue over the package’who it’s for, who it’s from’and turn their backs on the postman who, per his bemoaned fate, is no longer of interest to the couple. The couple note that the package is from Antarctica and try to figure out who they know from that place. They tear the package open only to find a strange chunk of clear solid material that looks like a diamond’but is sweating. There is much to do over the piece of ice: lots of poking and prodding and the man, who touches it, describes how he has been burned. In the end, the couple watches the ice melt, an event that catalyzes the woman into a terrifying emotional revelation: she begins weeping and says of the ice “it hates us,” and then “I hate us.” She says, “I’m vanishing. I’m shrinking…who sent me here.” The whole terrible display prods the, to this point, dull husband into action and he comforts, pleads with, and consoles his wife’presumably being the first time that they have made both physical and emotional contact in a very long time. This contact and demonstration of feeling leads the woman to say, at the end, “It stopped,” referring to the unbearable heat. And we are given to believe that now all will be well. There is much that is strange and delightful about this piece and I think it may be influenced by Sartre’s No Exit, as that is what I was very much reminded of, aside from the fact that Dudley clearly has a more optimistic view of human nature and what is possible’as the couple did find an exit from their existential disaster.

Make Yourself Plain

Written by Mike Geither and directed by Jaime Bouvier

Make it Plain tells the story of two co-workers, Sandra (Felicita Sanchez) and Randy (Shawn Galligan) who each have a strange fascination with photocopying their bodies and carrying the copies around in neat little folders. They perform this photocopying surreptitiously, occasionally leaving behind a body part or two for the other to pick up. There are several funny and partially meditative scenes in which the co-workers, independently, sing and perform various movements akin to yoga and then contort their faces and photocopy them. Sandra tells of her overworking, her insomnia, and how she managed to photocopy her entire self onto 75 pages and then 15 by duplexing and reduction. All this while providing a litany of technical information about the specific copier model that her office uses. Randy talks about going to the Natural History Museum with his son (while he strips to his skivvies next to the photocopy machine) and how overcome he was by the dioramas of the cavemen and cavewomen who hunted, breast fed, and pursued their daily lives which were filled with purpose and meaning: how they knew what was important. Randy contrasts this with the lives he sees around him: men and women staring endlessly at lighted screens and talking on phones and masturbating in offices and, of course, photocopying themselves. How strange a life it is when compared to the other’and what will the future members of our race think of us when looking back. Sandra and Randy break from this scene to one in which they eat lunch together. Randy stumbles through an attempt to get a more meaningful relationship with Sandra’including asking her to lunch despite the fact that they are eating already. Sandra confesses that her dog died, and then her dad had a heart attack and the surgeon working on her father died and the surgeon after that died and the priest at the cemetery died, and so on, providing a list of terrible death associations that she carries along with her no matter where she goes. Randy reveals that he found Sandra’s folder next to the copier, and after Sandra runs off explosively details how he envisions himself all dressed in white as a gallant highwayman wearing a red sash and riding a white horse. He mixes this desultory tale with that about a game of Texas hold’em with his father-in-law. And later, finally, Randy confronts Sandra and reveals his love for her and her beauty and couches it all in various mythic motifs mixed heavily with sundry advertisements from television; “I am the Phoenix, I rise…support your public television stations by calling this number now…” and so on. The play ends soon after Randy’s admittance, when he provides Sandra a copy of his own folder, from which she selects four copies and tapes onto the side of the copier for all to see: a face with puckered lips, a right and left hand, and a chest with the hairy nipple of Randy at center’which I, from a distance, mistook for a heart. All-in-all a very engaging piece and one which my mind will no doubt flip and turn around for many days to come. Such is how I always find myself when confronted by Mike’s highly interesting and confounding work.

In the Cool, Cool, Cool

Written by Peter Papadopoulos and directed by Fred Gloor

In the cool, cool, cool is a piece of crap, crap, crap. I hate to be so blunt and don’t mean to be nasty, but there were so many things to not like about this piece that I haven’t got much that’s nice to say. The premise is a surgery being performed on a man who will die by the end of the play and the gossipy atmosphere and intertwined lives of those surgeons and nurses in the room around him. Each character gets a chance to tell his/her tale, but I have to admit that as things moved on I was not particularly interested in them: a lecherous surgeon who’s cheating on his wife with the nurse (cliché) who’s a single mom, another nurse who narrates (horrors of blunt narration), and a patient on the table who’s condition is not stable and who repents his life and lies as he dies. Per the last half of that last sentence, for some reason the playwright chose to present the majority of this play in a succession of dimwitted rhymes, such as “he knew he was in trouble when he was seeing double” and…blah blah blah There is little in this play for the audience to get its head around, as the play is pretty much told to you: the nurse did this, then a monologue; the surgeon did this, then a monologue; the patient did this, you guess it, monologue’and so on, ad infinitum. This one did nothing for me.

As I mentioned in my recent posts, I was given a gracious opportunity by Jonah Knight to speak on his program Theatrically Speaking–for which I am grateful. The topic I discussed was playwriting process and I looked over the breadth of my experience, which has moved from a formal pursuit of the “well-made” play; into the fearful vagaries of just letting images and ideas swell up from the unconscious and surround a set of characters or actions or spaces. In doing the podcast I found that I was hedging against a diatribe and I still feel somewhat that I should avoid doing so outright. However, the more I think about the subject of playwriting process and the more I look at what others say about it, the more I’m convinced that I have moved onto a solid path: one that will guide my future steps. I have just picked up the book [amazon_link id=”1585103403″ target=”_blank” ]Playwriting in Process: Thinking and Working Theatrically[/amazon_link], and I have a feeling that I will very much enjoy it. The author, [amazon_link id=”1585103403″ target=”_blank” ]Michael Wright[/amazon_link] promises a litany of exercises to explore the various aspects of playwriting, and, as I’m always anxious to explore, I will take them up and later comment on them: including which I have found effective, not so much, and, of course, what they did for my awareness and experience of process. Wright’s introduction is very encouraging to my mind. He begins by stating that,

“…this book does not follow any kind of formulaic approach to the making of a play. It’s my belief that formulas impose an inhibitive sense of style and limited theatrical thinking on a writer.”

This is far better articulated than what I managed in my podcast, where I resorted to strange metaphors and comments to the effect that making plays is not like making cakes: that is, there’s no recipe that you can follow: a dash of tension here, and teaspoon of spectacle there: here 3 cups of exposition. Now, I don’t want to imply that just anyone can make a cake either…there is art to most everything that is done conscientiously, tirelessly over time, and well. In my podcast I say that this approach to writing,

“tended to produce plays or create plays that often seemed to be very similar to one another, not necessarily in their content, but in the way that they moved and in their rhythm and in the way that they felt…”

And I think Wright’s diagnosis of the problem is accurate: namely, that there is “an inhibitive sense of style and limited theatrical thinking…” and, perhaps, I was inhibited and limited in the same way all the time, so that my plays were constricted and lacking always in the same way…thus giving them the same feeling or quality that I describe above.

Wright later states that, “Playwriting is an art even though we refer to it as a craft; the latter implies that playwrights simply become apprenticed and five years later have achieved playwright status.” Despite the truth of his comment, I have to state that I would love to be apprenticed to a master playwright and spend five years in such a manner as, say, a printmaker would have in 1778, or a shipwright or whatever. I think there is great value in such an arrangement and I wholly believe that the knowledge of the tools and the forms and constructions, etc., would be invaluable. This is not to say, as Wright justly points out, that having done this one would achieve ‘playwright status.’ But, one would go a long way toward it. I believe, still, with growing certainty, that dropping inhibitions and exploring the different components in a free form of writing would be necessary to making that jump to the status of a successful playwright–and I don’t mean commercially, but personally and artistically: that is, satisfying yourself, exploring yourself, and at the same time creating meanings that truly connect with others and add value to their understanding of both themselves and the world we all live in–limited as my Western perspective on that would be.

Wright writes (I have to say that again and again) that,

“Watching master playwrights struggle with their latest plays would be a great training ground. We could learn by watching how they make decisions about plot, which structure to place the plot in, how late to get into the action of the play, and how much needs to be known about their characters.”

Interestingly enough, I have a book entitled “From Ibsen’s Workshop” which takes the approach of gathering up all known copies of his notes and drafts and then assimilating them and then comparing them with the final versions of the play–so that you can see, for instance, how Nora changes in earlier versions to the final version of [amazon_link id=”0486270629″ target=”_blank” ]A Doll’s House[/amazon_link]. (It also provides the interesting note that in Germany whoever staged the play forced Ibsen to change the ending so that Nora didn’t leave, saying, instead, something to the effect, “Oh, I could never leave my children.” and then collapsing at the door to their room. I think whatever that line is would make a great title for a play for any of adamant feminist writers out there who want to poke fun at this pathetic alteration of Ibsen’s play in Germany.) But, I digress.

I think one of Wright’s excellent insights is when he comments that,

“Human nature is to copy what we don’t know how to do, and so a student ends up putting together a Xerox of what the sample looks like. But were does the student go from there?”

[amazon_link id=”1585103403″ target=”_blank” ] Wright[/amazon_link] says this in the context of introducing his exercises and how he uses them. However, for those playwrights out there who have self-taught themselves from books (as I started) and found themselves mimicking the structures and designs of other playwrights, I think there will be general agreement that this leads directly to a very difficult period of adjustment when one must learn to think for oneself–as one eventually must if one is to truly be an artist. That is, there is a sense of dependency that is fostered and one must refer to other plays as guides or reference books–like learning php or css. “How did he do that again? Hmmm. Let me look.” Instead of just taking the proverbial bull by the horns and saying “damn it all, I’ll figure it out myself.” That step took me a while and I think that relying on a manner of creating plays that focuses on structure and building and proper arrangement of pieces for an effect leads to a manner of play creation that fosters this approach to writing. [amazon_link id=”1585103403″ target=”_blank” ]Wright[/amazon_link] goes on to say that “there is no longer any meaningful single definition of play that applies across the spectrum of what’s being created around the world, beyond saying that a play is a (largely) live event that takes place in a space that all involved have agreed is a “stage.” And that further,

“there is little reason to believe that theatre will retreat to the well-made play or to some rigid Aristotelian framework. Theatre is far more likely to continue its expansive form, subject matter, language, use of space, and so on. In fact, it will continue to embrace its eclectic heritage from the experiments of the twentieth century.”

By both accident and guidance from my professor/mentor Mike Geither I have found my way to this path, this “eclectic heritage.” And for that I am glad and hopeful for the more deeply meaningful and personal playwriting that it has engendered in me.