The week before school starts every semester involves heavy research. I read as many plays as I can, as many articles as I can find. It's like I'm cramming for a test, as I tell my students not to do. I like to use new and little-known plays for class, mostly because the chances of my students finding online summaries or essays on them is so low. I've discovered quite a few ones I adore thanks to New Play Exchange. Sometimes you have to go through several before finding one that works.
"Works" means I feel an inner resonance, like a bell rung, at the end. It means I love the play. Admittedly it's easier to feel that when reading published and produced plays. Such works have generally already gone through several layers of workshopping and refinement. I remember feeling it the first time I read Gidion's Knot by Johnna Addams, Skeleton Crew and Pipeline by Dominique Morisseau, The Ghosts of Lote Bravo by Hilary Bettis, Cambodian Rock Band by Lauren Yee, and most recently Primary Trust by Eboni Booth. (What a lovely gem of a play Primary Trust is!)
But I feel especially proud when I find a ringer script in NPX. Often it's a play that's long, so long I wonder if I want to read it at all. But then it turns into Marianas Trench by Scott Sickles or Even Flowers Bloom in Hell, Sometimes by Franky D. Gonzales or Crying on Television by R. Eric Thomas or House of Joy by Madhuri Shekar. These become some of my favorite plays, at least for a time. And I put them into my course and see how they fly.
For any number of reasons, some scripts that I really enjoy just fall flat with students. I continue loving them but take them out of rotation for use with undergrads. I love The Nether by Jennifer Haley, for example, but her Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom--which I also love--just poses fewer mental roadblocks for students. Others prove pretty durable. Students never tire of Diana Son's Stop Kiss, and 'night,Mother by Marsha Norman--for all its iffy representation of epilepsy--keeps their attention.
Some scripts I have to take out of rotation because students (or at least a few students) like them so much they propose them for our season. This happened with Jen Silverman's The Moors as well as Gullem Clua's Marburg--and now with Haley's Neighborhood 3. I hate to lose these (at least for a four- or five-year stretch), but I'm also pleased that they sparked someone's interest.
And then there are plays I keep in rotation even if they aren't the students' favorite. I use Eugene Scribe's The Glass of Water every semester (I took this cue from Shelly Orr) because (1) I like it, and (2) it so neatly encapsulates the well-made play format so many of the other scripts I choose alter or reject. Few students enjoy that one, exactly, but many come at least to appreciate it. Susan Glaspell's Trifles is ubiquitous and dated but rock-solid as a starter script for the semester (I put that alongside Alice Gersternberg's Overtones and Alice Childress's one-act Florence). Jackie Sibblies Drury's Really doesn't enjoy the popularity of her better-known (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) works, and it confounds students. But the way she plays with time and ambiguity is so rewarding.
Some plays I put in precisely because they'll confound students, usually by refusing to resolve ambiguities or explain themselves. Caryl Churchill's Far Away is a favorite of mine (just about any Churchill would work). A little-known play called D Deb Debbie Deborah by Jerry Lieblich is so, so delightfully complicated.
Not every script I use is one that resonates with me immediately. My perspective as a white cis US guy (a minority with outsized power) is limited, my bell (like everyone's) is tuned better to certain frequencies than to others. I try to remember that most plays aren't made for me, in other words. I wasn't immediately bell-rung with Jaja's African Hair Braiding by Jocelyn Bioh, for example, but I appreciated Bioh's craft and noted how the script checked several of my preferred boxes at once (interesting structure, centers African diasporic voices, centers women, recently popular). I put it in last semester. And as students engaged it, it grew on me. It'll likely be in my rotation for a while.
I write this having just read another one tonight that rang a bell: Juan Ramirez, Jr.'s Calling Puerto Rico. An agoraphobic man uses ham radio to reach out to both a friend on the International Space Station and his estranged grandfather on Puerto Rico just as Hurricane Maria hits. I'll need to give it a night or two to reality check myself, making sure I'm not just reacting out of personal resonance. My father was a ham radio operator, learning that hobby while serving in the air force on a base in Puerto Rico. I've been through a number of bad hurricanes here in the South myself. I'll need to do some thinking to see if this script is just one I liked or one I liked that would also be useful in class.
More tomorrow.
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