{"id":20079,"date":"2019-07-02T14:51:19","date_gmt":"2019-07-02T19:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20079"},"modified":"2019-07-02T14:51:19","modified_gmt":"2019-07-02T19:51:19","slug":"my-half-year-in-playscripts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2019\/07\/02\/my-half-year-in-playscripts\/","title":{"rendered":"My half-year in playscripts"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Christopher was kind enough encourage me to write about the plays I\u2019ve read this year, so here goes:\r\n<p><ul><li><cite>The Party<\/cite>, by Trevor Griffiths: Most of what I had heard about this play was the big speech\u2014the sort of special guest at the local communist club gives a speech about the proletariat and the intellectual class that\u2019s something like fifteen minutes long. Laurence Olivier in the premiere production. Must have been a thing. Anyway, it\u2019s an interesting play formally, but the big focus of the play is about the politics of the Left, and it\u2019s just not really very interesting anymore. If it ever was. And it\u2019s one of those plays that thinks it isn\u2019t misogynist but is very much painfully so. In the long run, I think my main memory of the play will be the stage direction <i>The fuck is bad<\/i>.<\/li>\r\n<li><cite>Pipeline<\/cite>, by Dominique Morisseau: I have very little recollection of this one. If I remember correctly, it\u2019s a realist\/naturalist play that deals with young people in school and their families, and it was just depressing without being particularly insightful. The language was good, though.<\/li>\r\n<li><cite>Stupid Fucking Bird<\/cite>, by Aaron Posner: This is an adaptation of <i>The Seagull<\/i>, and it\u2019s incredibly formally avant-garde in a late-seventies Robert Patrick sort of way, I think. At the opening curtain, an actor says to the audience that the play will start when someone says \u201cstart the fucking play.\u201d Then everyone waits until someone in the audience demands that they start the fucking play. That sort of thing, you know? I think it would be in some ways fun to act in, but I wouldn\u2019t buy a ticket to it.<\/li>\r\n<li><cite>Merrily We Roll Along<\/cite>, by Kaufman and Hart: I had never read the play that the musical is based on. Now I have! It\u2019s\u2026 um\u2026 theater people sure do love theater about theater people, hunh?<\/li>\r\n<li><cite>The Bacchae of Euripides<\/cite>, by Wole Soyinka: I don\u2019t really know why I picked this up. It was interesting, but seemed to me to be a diminishment of the original play, rather than an expansion. I didn\u2019t itch to read it aloud, as I often do for plays. I think there is much in <i>The Bacchae<\/i> that can speak to our current (American\/Western) cultural moment but Wole Soyinka isn\u2019t speaking to that, so it missed me. Well, and it wasn\u2019t really aiming at me, anyway.<\/li>\r\n<li><cite>A Doll\u2019s House Part 2<\/cite>, by Lucas Hnath: I had heard such good things about this, and the audacity of writing a sequel to <cite>A Doll\u2019s House<\/cite> in our contemporary theatrical idiom really appealed to me. Unfortunately, the actual playscript didn\u2019t appeal to me at all. The naturalist language isn\u2019t intriguing, and the questions of what happened to these individuals also weren\u2019t answered in any intriguing way. They are fairly interesting people, I guess, and it\u2019s all very plausible, but I felt myself so-what-ing the whole thing.<\/li><\/ul>\r\n<p>So, yeah, I didn\u2019t really like any of the plays I\u2019ve read so far this year. I\u2019m also partway through <cite>Peer Gynt<\/cite> and <cite>The Recruiting Officer<\/cite>, both of which I\u2019m ambivalent about\u2014each have some great moments but a lot of dull bits around them. And I\u2019m definitely taking recommendations for playscripts to read in the second half of 2019.\r\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I><br>-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger is quite cranky, innit?","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194,209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20080,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20079\/revisions\/20080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}