July 6, 2020

Y’s lovely program in Raleigh, Sips ‘n’ Scripts, presented the first scene of Ben and Angela as part of a Zoom reading of six North Carolina playwrights. The acting (reading) was good down the line, and I was especially happy with my two young people. Two of the plays were decent-- the last two (mine was second-to-last)– while the rest ranged from gawdawful to not-there-yet. Mine was the only one hitting NEAR the prescribed ten minutes (the discussion of most of the rest had to be stopped because the plays had gone so far overtime). During my “discussion,” the actors were rightfully praised, but not a word said about the work, except that someone wanted to see the whole thing. I took this as a compliment, actually, that the excerpt could be listened to as an achieved opus rather than as something to repair and cobble. Three offerings were monologues, or essentially monologues. People want to be playwrights without the bother of actually writing dialog. It was the 3rd or 4th time I’d seen J’s play about the rock star. She brought it to class, and later solicited my personal analysis because she wasn’t interested in the amateur observations of her classmates. She dismissed my (rather thorough) analysis because the play was as she wanted it and she resented suggestions of how to change it. The play is an interesting example of something that is a complete failure without one’s (this one, anyway) being able to say exactly why. The issue is subtler than ineptitude. In some ways, she has done everything “right,” and has cause to be irked when people observe it has not, somehow, nevertheless, come out right. The first scene is solid exposition, to give the audience what J thinks is necessary backstory, and to set the characters in mind with clever little mannerisms and joshing references to droll moments in times gone by. All the characters are preposterous, perhaps because so much energy went into “character-building” and character biography outside the action of the play. It has been workshopped to death, with that smoothed off and sweated-over aura of the too-much-workshopped. J does not accept that when difficult concepts or passages need to be explained, that writing is at fault. She takes time out of the discussion to explain what she meant, without, in the piece itself, ever saying what she seems to have meant. She declared at the outset that she was, this time through, primarily interested in the character development of the Mexican maid. The character development was essentially a sign saying “Mexican Maid” hung around the actress’ neck. Besides, to be focused on that is like fussing about what brand of brandy is being served in the Titanic lounge. Well, maybe I CAN say why it fails, after all. Maybe my personal living purgatory is to encounter J’s rock star play every few months for the rest of my life.