In this issue of NuMuse we include Mac Wellman, a supreme poet of American theatre, a relentless, inventive, linguistic exorcist who exposes the cliched madness of our times. By excavating the language Americans spew, banal words that are a veneer of superficial morality masking immoral behavior, language that misinforms and conceals and revels in the rapture of speech, Mac Wellman continues to infuriate the critics and delight those of us who appreciate work that defies easy categorization, experiments in forms that subvert narrative structure, questions notion of character, and uses evocative language as a tool to discover the mysteries of those who are speaking.
Wellman was a playwright-in-residence at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco from December, 1994-1996, and Visiting Professor in Playwriting at Brown in the spring of 1997. A current recipient of the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest grant, Wellman is continuing to write poetic theatre that, in his own words, "is not about correcting other people's bad thoughts...about the life which flows through all of us which we barely understand. This life embodies an ethic which may not always understand...but without which we are only so much raw material for those who would redescribe us for their own ends."
A reprint of Mac Wellman's Theatre of Good Intentions seems particularly appropriate for this issue since the plays presented here are certainly the opposite of what Wellman declaims as "the poetics of gentility."
Similarly, a reprint of Marguerite Duras' short essay, "The Theatre," in which she espoused her belief that "theatre should be read, not acted," begged to be printed in NuMuse, a journal whose aim is to encourage the reading and readability of plays.
The year 1997 marks the end of China's lease of Hong Kong to Britain, and Alice Tuan charts three seminal points in Asian history in her allegorical play, Some Asians. Tuan is a master of oblique language as she employs sexual banter that reverberates with political resonances between the poetess Honey Kong and the ultra-civilized British officer who comes to lie with her for 99 years. We also get insight into the divided selves of East and West and all their contradictions through a discourse on the shape of the noodle as we travel backward to the thirteenth century and encounter Marco Polo
and his noodle carrier. Finally, ending at the beginning, we reach the long-lost Bong Dynasty, Emperor Mui Po (spell it backwards), and the entire opium-sodden court as Honey Kong is about to be had in all forms: sold, lent, raided, borrowed, escrowed, merged, yoked and leased for 99 years.
Alice Tuan is a playwright who eschews the marginalized tribal writing space limited merely by ethnicity or articulations of gender constructions. Tuan unites both form and content into an organic ethnic interiority that looks into the face of the past, sifts out the illusions of our present, and expresses the clash and merge of past and present, East and West.
Claire Chafee's Even Among These Rocks is a cinematic, poetic, haunting portrait of contemporary 33 year-olds in San Francisco dealing with the search for love and the loss of loved ones.
Daniel Alexander Jones describes his Blood: Shock: Boogie as a "theatrical jam session: Generation X superhero creation story: looking like hip-hop: sounding like: jazz between black and white, man and woman, straight and gay, young and old soul. Funny with explosive edges and an eye toward motion, Blood: Shock: Boogie is the story of a boy who is the moon." Jones' pen is full of fire and declaration as he leaps over the interstices writing from the spaces where seemingly opposites are housed capturing... bringing together... bringing out voices... identities... musics...the... joyfulness of being.
Jake Ann Jones' Eclipse In Bottomsville takes place in the year 2015, but was inspired by Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities, a study on the frightening state of the public school system in disenfranchised communities, and the Rodney King verdict. Jones portrays the chaos, mayhem, and spiritual hardiness that exist in such areas.
The aesthetics of Mac Wellman have consistently been a beacon of light for Brown's playwriting program, and from the pen of that "damnable scribbler" NuMuse publishes for the first time Fnu Lnu, a political meditation that includes voodoo, zombies, Sicilian thugs, Bolita men, Baron Samedi, Anarchists, and Socialists in Ybor city, Florida.
Only In America is a wildly farcical and wickedly satirical romp on race, sex and gender and politics in latter 20th century America.
And like a breath of spring romance and reminiscent of the old blues lyric "I once married a woman when her back was turned," is Keith Waldrop's mirthful The Birth of Theatre from the Spirit of Bigamy.
In this fourth issue of NuMuse we continue our expanded policy of presenting the finest of Brown University's emerging playwrights in combination with those playwrights who are internationally known.