Welcome to NuMuse.
For a long time now, it has been apparent to me that the academy has the potential of being the last sanctuary, the only remaining haven for theatrical innovation. The continuing appalling economic state of theatre serves as a mandate for theatrical spaces in academia to imitate the coffee houses, lofts, and basements of the alternative theatre movements of the 1960's. Facing the 21st century, American universities have the opportunity to become alternative spaces that provide a new impetus for a new theatre, create a new audience and produce a golden age of theatre and dramatic literature.
The enormous diversity of contemporary American playwriting is not reflected on the stage and commercial publishers will sooner publish bad plays by novelists and entertainers rather than good plays by new playwrights. NuMuse is a journal of alternative information. Its editors want to spread the good news of what is going on in American playwriting. The main objective of NuMuse is to be a highly visible advocate of new play development. We know that our subscribers will be the non-commercial theatres, educational institutions and those interested in reading, studying, performing and producing new work; places where it has been proven plays can have a full life without ever entering the commercial arena; places that have proven that a play has a double life and that its life on the page can indeed survive independently from its stage existence.
New Plays. What does that phrase mean? A new play is as fragile and tough as a new human being. Only the hardy ones survive and its birth on the page is an important part of its growth process. A new play on the page is a blueprint, a galley proof, a hologram of the play in a crucial point of its development. NuMuse believes that new plays should be published not only to be read and studied but to be workshopped, developed and produced. There is no guarantee that every published play will be worth reading in twenty years or even three years but then how many flops are there on Broadway in one season?
Plays for this issue were not chosen in terms of a theme. The one unifying factor is that all the plays have been produce in Brown University's New Play Festival. Therefore the writing is innovative, provocative and widely diverse. I have always looked upon eclecticism as a virtue and simply selected well written plays which pleased me because of their strong dramatic imagination no matter their subject or mode of construction. The plays are topical, ones in which the psychic and the social fuse and the private and public merge; they are experimental, avant garde, and hyperreal; there are plays of circular action and those of linear development; drama that depends on images more than story as well as plays of character and plot and denouement. The feast of plays you are about to savor are products of sensibilities, approaches, and various cultures that are a wonderful cross-section of our coloful heterogeneous American society.
Aurorae Khoo's hyperreal, sardonic comedy Yellow Jell Baby is a womb-eye-view of three generations of Chinese-Americans in California that are afraid of change. The third generation, still in utero, refuses to be born, preferring to remain in the womb to enjoy his powers of communicating with the living, unborn and dead and to avoid being discriminated against because of his bi-racial ancestry. Old Wang, the grandfather, is lost in the past, while Edmund, his son, romanticizes it. Molly is afraid to have the baby because she fears motherhood. The discovery of a demon among them who plans to steal their future if they do not face change provides the impetus for this family to face the inevitable. In a flux of images, metaphors and allusions Khoo takes us on a careening, hilarious journey where old world tradition collides with new world modernity.
In Donna DiNovelli's Crushed Tomatoes, it is an Italian family that escapes examining their lives by sticking their heads in the sands of religiosity and familial tradition. Their kitchen overlooks a busy shipyard making submarines for the next war. Only fourteen year old Cassandra, a religious visionary, takes the threat of nuclear war seriously, to the rest of her family's amusement. Mama Mia, the matriarch, supports and depends on her son's ("Lover Boy" alias "Torpedo") sexist and violent behavior. His characteristic behavior towards his girlfriend rids his xenophobic family of an outsider who is slow in learning their ways. The last image of this play is a picture of the family huddling together as Cassandra draws a circle around them proclaiming "too quick too soon. Without adequate preparation. The world as we know it, ends." DiNovelli's imagistic writing, especially her adept use of food and religious symbols, icons of the culture, cinematic freezes, elimination of the fourth wall and leaps backwards and forwards in time give this deceptive "kitchen drama" a surreal quality.
Rob Handel's short poetic dramas The Secret Plays (which include Why the Sea is Boiling Hot and Parallel Lines) contain kaleidoscopic images that catapult his audience between fantasy and remembered text, familiar and unknown symbols permutating in a disturbing relationship between man and little girl, author and character. Tales interpreted for us in childhood return from the shadows in adulthood to linger and haunt with self-suppressed, hidden, and half-remembered meanings.
Thalia Field's "Theatrics of Indeterminacy" is crafted text seeping between improvisational dialogue, free-falling time playing havoc with stage time, character, plot, and narrative interacting with a language that woos mind, tongue, and ear in a magical hypnosis that occurs between audience and actors. In Hey-Stop-That there are no barriers, no outsiders; the text is amorphous, absorbable and inclusive. I've witnessed the excitement that rippled through audiences watching Hey-Stop-That. The weave of text and actors, improvisations and audience reaction is entertaining, intellectual, risky, humorous, bombastic, and totally celebratory of human beings interacting with one another. Innovative and bold, Thalia writes bewteen the words, capturing nuances and articulation of an expanded language. Thalia writes in untrod territory, bursting the limits of theatre.
Tabitha and her younger brother Jackson battle for Black Power Barbie as they relive the vivid and frightening memories of their childhood in therapy sessions in Shay Youngblood's Hotel De Dream. As adults, Tabitha remains psychologically wounded, living in the past while Jackson faces the reality of living with AIDS. Written in terse, snapshot-like scenes that juxtapose imaginative inner lives with harsh realities, this haunting contemporary tale of loss resonates long after the final curtain.
Using words as tools of imagery in motion, John Russell captures the cultural environment of teenagers trapped in an American suburban wasteland. In Stupid Kids, his rhythmic construction of language makes his characters burn with "anarchy, poetry, velocity and fire." On the battleground of Joe McCarthy High School, Kimberly and Neechee, two gay and lesbian outsiders, bond with each other and battle the "insiders" for the love of two straight kids, Jim and Judy. Russell's characters are mythic, speaking to everything at once, especially the emotions. Full of ritual and passion, they don't follow any predictable formula, making Stupid Kids a beguiling composite of various mysteries.
Rick Rankin has written a mortality tale set in a federal penitentiary. In Book of Babe, in an atmosphere of physical violence and human degradation, the author has drawn a vivid portrait of trapped souls with conflicting notions of spiritual salvation. Because of the subtle yet powerful writing there is a gradual dawning, an illuminating moment in this drama when prison becomes a landscape of the soul; a moment when one realizes that the thief, forger, murderer and male prostitute that people this drama are merely everyman.
Clara and Mateo, young, poor and powerless in an adult world, confront life with intelligence, passion and eloquence in a lyrical portrayal by Nilo Cruz in Night Train to Bolina. Skillfully using dramatic metaphor to create eddies of meaning in a multi-layered drama, Cruz ascends to poetic theatrical heights. Night Train to Bolina is a haunting tale of the dispossessed of the earth in which two poor Cuban children's spirits soar like kites as they run away to an invented place called Bolina.
A tale of a seeker of asylum, restaurant chatter, a parody on patriotism, a satire on the War Room and the Boy Scouts, snatches of lovers' conversations, and bar talk among the guys are interdependent, counterchanged and transposed in Gale Nelson's Alien Nation. Within this flux and reflux dramatic tension builds, characters emerge as conversations, characters, and scenes submerge, interplay, transpose and alternate in Nelson's "Theatre of Permutations."
In this premiere issue of NuMuse we offer you nine talented new American playwrights. Their individuality and distinctness can make a fine picture of American theatre; their talents can breathe life into a theatre where economically inspired necromancy is the prevailing practice, a theatre where the old dominates and the new cannot be born. On NuMuse's pages lie a hopeful possibility of the future of American theatre.