Heartland THE END for now

Attending the Iowa New Plays Fest wasn’t all just watching shows, strolling under the redbuds along the river and marching into town for coffee, just so you know. After every production and reading, the Festival guests met with the playwrights and their collaborators to talk about whichever play we’d just seen. And since most of the writers also met privately with the guests….that’s a lot of meetings.

And why not, right? The beauty of the system is that the guests are far, far from home and they’re in Iowa with the sole mission of responding to the work they’re seeing. No distractions. Or, well. Morgan, John and Wendy had their Crackberries to plug back into whenever a meeting ended, but they certainly gave of themselves generously in the meetings, be they group or personal.

A case in point is Seven Dreams of Her, a remarkable play by graduating playwright Sarah Sander. Taking place entirely within the dreaming mind of the main character, the story concerns the rise and demise of a triangulated relationship between two women and a man. And it tells it story by looping around the same Gordian knot again and again, as in a musical fugue, while the dreamer tries to sort out what happened and to begin healing from it.

As directed by Sarah Ballema, the set was an austerely gorgeous dreamscape with a bright red tree for a focal point, extending from the stage floor up into the fly space, out of sight. Late in the play, when one of the characters starts uprooting this tree, it’s a shocking moment – will the tree float away now? The play is replete with moments like that.

Because of its complexity, Seven Dreams of Her could have been very hard to speak to individually – in each case, the respondents would have been coming from an idiosyncratic POV. But because we respond to each others’ thoughts as well as to our own, this wound up being a great discussion. In particular I recall we discussed a graph that’s seen briefly on a chalkboard during the play (the protagonist is a mathematician) in which a length of a curve function is missing. And that a quote preceding the play, in the script version, mentions that standard procedure in solving an equation is to isolate one variable from the others. We tease out this idea, and Sarah agrees that while the idea was central to her writing the script, it has turned out to be nascent in actual production. And so on to re-writes. I felt she left the discussion know the respondents were unanimous in their excitement about her script, and that she now knew how to privilege the parts of her play she most wanted in the foreground.

As always, Art was there to direct and redirect the discussion, and Dare Clubb framed the conversation for us. I looked at all the playwrights assembled there, Sarah and her colleagues, and wondered if they had any inkling of how rare discussions of that depth are, once you’re out of school. Decades after my own graduation, I still miss them.

Heartland part two

According to Art Borreca, who runs the Playwrights Workshop and is my colleague of old from the New Haven Canning Factory, the group of Festival respondents is one of the best they’ve had in a long time. Sure, he may say that to every group every year, but personally I’m very fond of us. There’s the legendary Morgan Jenness, the only person ever to win an Obie for her dramaturgical contributions; there’s John Eisner of the Lark, tall and lanky and looking to my mind like a French revolutionary (sans culottes, of course). Wendy Goldberg has somehow managed to be away from the O’Neill long enough to be here, and the downright glamorous Regina Taylor has a perspective all her own to offer. I’m loving hanging out with them here in Ioway.

And Festival madness has continued non-stop. Wednesday's production was Greg Machlin’s A History of Bad Ideas (pictured above), directed by Joe Luis Cedillo. It took place in yet another theater space in the School – this one with a steeply raked seating area that gave me the impression of looking down into a well. That was perfect for Greg’s play, which takes place entirely in the cramped living quarters of a struggling writer and his charming but damaged girlfriend, who duke it out for the upper hand. Sweetly sad and affecting, the play was clearly a fave with the audience.

Thursday we returned to the studio space to a reading of Sheela Kangal’s smart, edgy play about a family divided against itself, for which religion is the family business. The House of Grateful shows that Sheela has a wicked ear for the sort of relations where people have learned how to twist the knife in as few words as possible from years of practice. On each other. I’m looking very forward to the next draft of this work in progress.

Yesterday (Friday) we were treated to Joshua Casteel’s drama about another religious family and its destructive secrets, Mourning Aletheia. As though tapping into the national playwriting zeitgeist, Joshua’s writing……dares to be realistic! There, I’ve said it! Realistic! Though Joshua says this play actually isn’t representative of most of his writing, it did remind me that there’s a remarkable shift going on nowadays – plays being written again in a style reminiscent of Tennessee Williams, for instance (who did time here at the University long, long ago), or even Inge. But with a difference, of course, since writers have been upping the ante for decades now…..

Friday evening we were treated to a taut, eerie, austere new play by Mary Hamilton, We Three (deftly directed again by John Kaufmann). Because the play has two startling reversals I won’t spoil the plot for you – since I am sure theaters will be producing this play – I’ll just say that this script is just a few refinements shy of readiness for main stage performances.

Today we heard a reading of Joe Luis Cedillo’s play, Painted Skin, an extremely ambitious and metaphor-rich piece that was a finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival last year. And the Festival came to climax this evening with a wild piece of Americana by Morgan Sheehan-Bubla entitled Dust Town. Directed by Anthony Nelson, the play uses a storytelling motif to present a pair of contrasting fables: in the first, a women succumbs to temptation and is destroyed by it, whereas in the second a strong female character throws off her shackles (literal and figurative) to triumph over despair.

Thunder and rain serve as aural integument in the play, and tonight, conveniently enough, we finally finally got the rain I’ve been missing since my arrival seven days ago. Talk about web-footed Oregonian -- I have to laugh at how I exulted tonight, walking to the theater alongside the Iowa River, which was glassy and speckled from all the raindrops pouring down on it.

It’s still pouring, Which nakes me miss Oregon something TURRible, as they might have said in tonight’s play. Or as one of my childhood crushes, Wednesday Addams, used to say: “It’s so nice and gloomy.”

Greetings from the Heartland, Part One

Go Hawkeyes and whatnot! I’m here at the annual New Plays Festival produced by the School of Theater at the U of I in Iowa City, where I’ve been since last Sunday, so it’s high time I told you what I’m seeing here.

This is the third time the School has honored me by inviting me to this fabulous festival of work by the MFA theater students. Playwrights are the focus, but director, dramaturgs, designers and many others are also contributing to the event, and their enthusiasm for this week is better than a triple shot of Foglifter Espresso.

The Festival a heady mix of aesthetic styles and philosophies, and I’ve always found it’s a prescient time; these writers are the next wave of plays moving into the American repertoire, after all, and historically these writers have been a great source of future collaborator for me. David Adjmi, Allison Moore and Kirsten Greenidge are all writers I met here for the first time, to name only a few.

So imagine my anticipation. And I’m glad to say we got off to a good start with a reading of Tony Meneses’ remarkable new play Bajo Agua. Tony also directed, assisted nimbly by dramaturg Kate Stopa. Reminiscent of some of Anouilh’s frothier plays, Act 1 is a lighter-than-air dream state in which a trouserless groom-to-be (played Rick Garcia, he of the movie star good looks) wakes up in a room next to a fiancée he doesn’t remember. Act 2 ventures into deeper waters, figuratively and literally, as we learn about the fiancée’s own fugue states and also why the groom was so deep asleep in the first place.

All this took place in a large lab space – a narrow yet cavernous space tank well-suited to the play’s sense of spiritual submergence. For that evening’s offering, we moved to a full production in a largish theater space with a three-quarter thrust config. The Toymaker’s War, written by Canadian playwright Jennifer Fawcett and directed by Bruce Brandon, is clearly a work in progress, but one with great promise. In scenes that shift between present-day Montreal and the Bosnia of 1995, the script is a taut examination of journalistic integrity at the breaking point. Ms. Fawcett can write, and I expect we'll be seeing much more from her.


The next day we were treated to a theatrical epiphany entitled Why LOVE Doesn’t Recognize Its Name, written by Lisa Leaverton and directed by John Kaufmann. (Above is a rehearsal photo; John is in the foreground, Lisa’s at the far right.) The action revolves around a shop called Lee’s Expressive, where Lee and his staff (the “Mechanics of Expression”) strive to help clients whose speech patterns are clogged with words that are too ornate, or have the wrong shade of meaning, or just plain don’t communicate. Since the Mechanics sometimes get stuck themselves, they occasionally have recourse to Deep Mystery – the audience – whom they consult to get the perfect spare part, meaning a word or phrase that will be strikingly apt.

Part scripted play and part free-form event, it was deliriously fun for the audience of about 50 to be cast as Deep Mystery, especially when feeding words to a Mechanic so drunk on language and its potential that we fall in love with her. The message she ultimately synthesizes from Deep Mystery’s mutterings was surprisingly moving to me. William Burroughs and Laurie Anderson used to say that language is a virus; this play brings us to the realization that as powerful as human speech is, it functions best when it transcends itself.

Stayed tuned for more about the Festival.