New Downtown Now: An Anthology Of New Theater From Downtown New York

416 Pages·2006·2.38 MB·English

by  Mac Wellman

NEW DOWNTOWN NOW
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NEW DOWNTOWN NOW
AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW THEATER FROM DOWNTOWN NEW YORK
Mac Wellman and Young Jean Lee, Editors
Introduction by Jeffrey M. Jones
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce the
illustrations in this book. If any proper acknowledgment has not
been made,we encourage copyright holders to notify us.
Lines of poetry in The Appeal are excerpted from “Canto XVI”by
Ezra Pound,from The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Copyright 1934,1937,
1940,1948,1956,1959,1962,1963,1966,and 1968 by Ezra Pound.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Copyright 2006 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
New downtown now : an anthology of new theater from downtown
NewYork/ Mac Wellman and Young Jean Lee,editors ;
introduction by Jeffrey M. Jones.
p. cm.
isbn-13: 978-0-8166-4730-9 (alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8166-4730-5 (alk. paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-8166-4731-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8166-4731-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. American drama—21st century. 2.American drama—20th
century. 3.Experimental drama—New York (State)—New York.
I.Wellman,Mac. II.Lee,Young Jean.
PS634.2.N49 2006
812'.608—dc22
2006007345
Book design by Lisa Diercks
The text is set in Celeste.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator
and employer.
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Preface vii
MAC WELLMAN AND YOUNG JEAN LEE
Introduction: How to Read a Curious Play ix
JEFFREY M. JONES
Interim 1
BARBARA CASSIDY
Tragedy: a tragedy 49
WILL ENO
Nine Come 73
ELANA GREENFIELD
Sachiko 105
MADELYN KENT
Enoshima Island 125
MADELYN KENT
The Appeal 155
YOUNG JEAN LEE
The Vomit Talk of Ghosts 187
KEVIN OAKES
Ajax (por nobody) 245
ALICE TUAN
Apparition: An Uneasy Play of the Underknown 313
ANNE WASHBURN
Demon Baby 355
ERIN COURTNEY
Contributors 399
PREFACE
I
Yes,theater is a game,and yes,that game is rigged,and yes,everyone knows it. The three
(unacknowledged) rules of the American theater of our time: aim low,shit floats,and the
squeaking wheel gets the grease. All this everyone knows,yet none knows well to shun the
heaven that leads us to this hell.
However.
American theater always manages (how I do not know) to reinvent itself at the very deepest
bottom of the worst of all possible times. Thus,lately in downtown New York the best of our
new theater practitioners have begun to imagine a set of goals and procedures,to imagine a
best of all possible worlds in which perception requires no other justification than that to
which its beauty entitles it. In this dramatic universe,acuity of perception and theatrical high
jinks are their own reward; and so it is with the very new plays one is beginning to en-
counter in New York these days.
Like I say,how this is I do not know,cannot fathom. But it may well be that just as the con-
ventional realisms of the second half of the twentieth century seem to have run their course
and devolved into meretricious self-parody (Miller,Mamet,the Wilsons,and their imitators),
a new and altogether remarkable kind—indeed,all kinds of theater writing have begun to
appear in these States. I am talking about plays that are based on a meticulous craft of clearly
realist origins but that do not rest with conventional and tired realist homilies,and that do
not attempt to reassure that what is taken for granted (by the previous realists) is all there is.
These are plays in which recognizable American types speak our language as though it were
as foreign to them as it is to most of those who live far from these shores. Here is the the-
atrical practice of a group of young writers whose art is almost that of the paranormal,nay,
the normal paranormal. I would make the argument that there is more new,truly original
work in this vein,what I am tempted to call the theater of the normal parareal and hyper-
normal,than ever before in our history. Furthermore,they all are (in the editors’view) ac-
complishments of the highest order. One must perforce call these works experimental,al-
though they refer back,in most cases,no more to the native American experimental theaters
(from Stein to Foreman) than they do to the tradition of the familiar and mainstream.
These are made-up worlds,but made up out of the junk of the real. Many of these plays betray
the American delight in the tinkerer’s habit and the outsider’s delight in the beauty of the
random arrangement,the accidental,and the discarded. But what makes them so powerful is
their obsession with truth of perception and precision of expression—no otherworldly sym-
bolists here! Hence the wonderful humor to be found in so many of these plays: ironic twists
of familiar moralism and cynicism that segue into a new continent of strange new joys,lilts,
terrors,and absurdities. Welcome to the dizzying world of new downtown theater now!
—M. W.
vii Preface
II
About four years ago,I decided to drop out of my English Ph.D. program and move to New
York to become a playwright. I had no theater experience and no idea what was going on in
contemporary theater,so I started by going to the bookstore and looking at recently pub-
lished plays.
I was shocked by what I read. Most of the new plays that were being produced on and off
Broadway read like pretentious,boring television scripts. Having studied Shakespeare and the
modernists in school, I was used to a level of linguistic playfulness and innovation that I
wasn’t finding anywhere in the smug,pseudointellectual drama that was winning awards in
mainstream theater. I read through script after script until,finally,I found playwrights such
as Jeffrey Jones and Mac Wellman who were doing interesting,original work. Not long after-
ward,I enrolled in Mac’s playwriting program at Brooklyn College and moved to New York.
In the city,I found a theater community that I hadn’t known existed—a community where
theater tickets didn’t cost much more than movie tickets and people were doing challenging
new work that could be realized only in a live theatrical context. This type of theater was fre-
quently called “downtown”or “experimental,”although a lot of it happened in Brooklyn and
nobody seemed to know what “experimental”meant. For the next year,I went to see shows,
knocked on doors, interned, worked backstage, and asked questions until I had learned
enough to start making shows of my own. The more I learned,the clearer it became that the
most interesting,most theatrical work was being done “downtown.”
This anthology is not meant to be a cross section of all the different kinds of new downtown
theater,much of which does not rely on a single playwright and employs collaged texts that
couldn’t really be called “plays”in the traditional sense. Moreover,the playwrights in this an-
thology do not represent a single school or style of experimental playwriting. What we do
share,I think,is a sense of play: we are all playing with theatrical conventions,structure,and
language in ways that excite us,without consideration of the demands of mainstream com-
mercial theater or of the imperatives of some outdated notion of the avant-garde. We are
doing what we want to do,which results in something completely different for each of us.
I am very excited about the publication of this anthology and proud to be included in it. This
is exactly the kind of book I was looking for on all those early trips to the bookstore,and I
hope that at least some of the people who read it will be motivated to seek out interesting
new theater and see it for themselves.
—Y. J. L.
viii Preface
INTRODUCTION How to Read a Curious Play
Jeffrey M. Jones
CURIOUS: inquisitive; skillfully, elaborately, or beautifully wrought; peculiar.
Boredom
If we expect reading to be simple and straightforward,it’s because we’ve been told so since
grade school,where it was likened to a kind of listening. But reading a play involves not only
“listening”to the various voices of the characters but trying to “watch”an imagined perform-
ance. In theater,it turns out,reading is more like watching—and in the case of Curious Plays,
which set out to challenge theatrical conventions,reading and watching can prove equally
challenging.
After all,watching any play is hard work. One not only has to pay attention,but figure out
what’s going on—in real time—without the ability to put the play down or look away when
one chooses. Hence boredom comes easily in the theater—boredom being the name we give
to the feeling that watching has become work (boredom surely because we’re acutely aware
of not wanting to pay attention,although it’s when we really can’t figure out what’s going
on—as when reading or watching a Curious Play—that we’re likeliest to feel bored).
And it is precisely to minimize this risk of boredom—of our being overwhelmed by the dif-
ficulty of watching a play—that theater has become uniquely convention-bound and resist-
ant to innovation. It is convention-bound because it relies on familiar and well-understood
forms, structures, and dramaturgical principles in order to make it as easy as possible to
figure out what’s going on,pay attention,and not feel bored. Conventional theater,in other
words,makes reading plays as easy as possible by making all plays more or less the same.
Whereas the Curious Play aspires to be something new—hence necessarily different.
Modeling
Perhaps the most basic way to read a play (or,more strictly,the performance of a play) is as
a model of how things happen in the world (or,more strictly,of our experience of the world).
All the dramatic machinery of the play,in such a reading,serves but to open a window on a
representation of “the world,” where things happen more or less as they do in our “real”
world.
So strong is our representational bias that we hold fast to such a reading even when the
world of the play cannot possibly be mistaken for reality—as when the language turns
overtly poetical,or the events are clearly metaphorical. Indeed,when the language and events
ix Introduction