Boston Theater Marathon 21 - Themes and First Impressions

It is with vim and vigor that I return from having watched fifty plays in ten hours. You'd think after all that, I'd want to plop on my bed never to reawaken, but seeing that barrage of talent and creativity hour after hour it only pumped me full of adrenaline and I've got to share some of my thoughts before turning to bed.

First, some house keeping. Apparently two years ago they stopped doing the warm up laps so I have nothing to comment on regarding them as they didn't happen. Second, I will not be writing full reviews of all the plays. In fact I currently plan on only reviewing fourteen, split up into seven thematic pairs. This does not necessarily mean that these are my favorites (though I admit to greatly liking all fourteen of them) but it more means that I really want to discuss and examine these fourteen plays in particular. This meant that in some comedies I really enjoyed I will not be reviewing because I don't know if I'd have a much to say but "Good Job! They were funny!" (The Dual by Jack Neary, Hot Love in the Moonlight by Patrick Gabridge, and The Trouble with Maisie by Greg Lam and Walt McGough immediately leap to mind)

I will however be mentioning many of the plays briefly in this blog post because I'd like to discuss overall how I thought the Marathon went this year and the many interesting themes that this year's playwrights tackled.


It was a great festival this year. The standard was quite high. The shows were consistently interesting or entertaining and in general they were all well performed. There were only a couple of instances where it seemed as if the actors had been under-rehearsed. But this was quite quite rare with only three instances I took note of.

Indeed it was overwhelmingly the opposite. There were several plays where it's difficult for me to imagine other actors playing those roles. Kudos all around. They call it a marathon, but frankly the day flew by. I stand by my assertion it's the best theater deal in town.

Moreover, as someone who watched them all it was satisfying to see so many of the same themes arise and how different playwrights tackled the same subject matter differently. Let's look at the trends I identified:

1) Trump

As the elephant in the room, it was only natural that our current  news-maker-in-chief would inspire current writers. However few playwrights took the bait. One play, Gagtime! by Richard Grossman literally revolved around its characters desperately trying NOT to bring up Donald Trump, a sentiment I think most of us can identify with.

Other writers tried to talk around him, as in Fake News by L.H. Finigan which spins a nightmare dystopia straight out of Orwell that no longer seems so far fetched, though never mentions him or his movement by name but instead refers to The New Order.

More direct references could be seen in The Trumpiad by Robert Brustein which spins a rhyming poem about our current political era and The Interview a clever imagining of a Trumpian figure dueling with a prospective ghost writer.

2) #MeToo

Close a full fifth of the plays this year dealt with the #MeToo movement specifically or at least general themes of feminism. The most direct of these was the well observed Meeting with Management by Stephanie Eisemann about employees facing the consequences of a monstrous abuse of trust and power by a superior.

There was also the complicated Whoa Means No by Erik Christian Hanson about the immediate aftermath of misinterpreted sexual consent. That play in I believed was helped from having a female director (Mara Dale) who added some much needed parity that I'm not quite sure was there on the page.

The lengths that some people might over-correct for the MeToo Movement was satirized in Steven Bogart's The Men's Room in which a hopeful father is flummoxed when trying to give a sperm sample at a clinic since now the only magazines on display are Better Home and Garden and Forbes Magazine. (he eventually settles on a picture of Tom Brady from Sport's Illustrated)

The vague unease that comes from some people not knowing what's appropriate or not any more was given the Schrodinger's treatment in You Didn't Say That by Ellen Davis Sullivan in which a husband tells (or didn't) a tasteless (though funny) joke at work. His wife is petrified he'll be fired or that it'll eventually come back to haunt him. Instead of taking a side, the play raises the question and purposefully creates vagueness to what even happened, as if to mirror the uncertainty of just what's expected of us in today's era.

What's not so debatable is domestic violence. Three plays concerned this subject, but only two dealt specifically with women. In The Stand by Caity-Shea Violette, a sharply written jailhouse drama, a woman who has murdered her abusive husband arguably in order to save the life of her child deals with the brutal efficiency of the legal system as she faces an unjust plea deal.

Gender-wise, the roles are reversed in One-On-One by Elaine Brousseau in which a husband suffering from physical abuse at the hands of his wife arrives at his sister for reluctant help. While the beats seem worn, the simple fact of reversing the genders is pretty important and reminds us that #MeToo is not necessarily gendered but speaks to all those who have suffered at the hands of abusers.

It's women themselves wrestling with what it means to take back their own power that is the basis of both Bubble Bubble by Tom Coash and Think like a Man by Marisa Smith. The former is a tale of two witches putting curses on their exes at a Hooters Bar and the other of two moms having a hypothetical debate about the price of their dignity and if by calling it priceless to they under-serve themselves? The former was an increasingly funny send-up and celebration of female power and the later raised some interesting questions in the guise of two wasted moms on Halloween.

The last of the #MeToo plays is in a class all its own, and that's No One Talks About It: A Lactation Play by Cassie M Seinuk. A very smart script about the microaggressions inadvertent-or-not new mothers place upon each other. I am however very confused because I could swear that I've seen this exact play before performed at this festival some years earlier and if I'm not mistaken by the exact same lead actress. What happened here? I thought these plays were supposed to be new!

3)  The Gender Spectrum

Three plays this year dealt with protagonists other than straight or even gay characters. Two directly dealt with trans people. The first in School by Greg Hovanesian deals with the pressure a trans-woman feels when asked to be a spokesperson for a friend's kindergarten class and her ambivalence about being seen as just an example of her "identity".

The other is a rollicking comedy called Locker Room Talk by John J King which finds two high school sports coaches confused when they discover their star quarterback has been a trans-man the entire time and isn't legally allowed to use the boy's locker rooms. What could have been a maudlin after-school special is transformed into a genuinely hysterical and ultimately jubilant affirmation of Gender Non-conformity.

Speaking of nonconformity, the third play in this category, Stiletto Envy by Eliana Pipes is about two childhood friends facing crushes on each other while getting lessons in walking in high high heels. What's particularly refreshing and also interesting about this play is that the character Shaun who identifies as a "Gender Non-Conforming Pan-Sexual" defies categorization and in many respects the play is about what happenes when you don't fit into ANY preconceived category that people automatically want to put you in.

4) School Gun Violence

Gun violence, particularly in schools was a very present theme and watching these plays I realized how much the threat of gun violence has become a pervasive and awful cloud hanging over every schoolchild in this nation. Instead of Nuclear Strike drills, students are forced to enact even more traumatizing active shooter drills. These drills and the trauma and ethical dilemmas they elicit were the direct subject of two plays.

In Closing Doors, a teacher breaks the rules of a shooting drill by opening the titular door and letting one of her students into the classroom who is trapped out in the hallway. This break in rules causes an incredibly sad and passionate debate with her friend and superior. An intensely nuanced play, ultimately it shows two women thrust into impossible situations by a threat that would seem absurd if it wasn't so omnipresent.

The other, Lock Down by Christine Marglin features four students stuck in a closet. The fact that they don't know whether or not the lock down is a drill, a false alarm, or a genuine active shooter mixes with elements of race and questions of how safe People of Color can be in a crisis situation.

Gun violence is given a whimsical super-powered kick with Banana Gun by Mary Beth McNulty in which a mild mannered mother of one discovers she has the power with a swift kick to turn weapons into bananas. Tthe premise is... well, bananas, but it's realized so cleverly and delightfully that it's effortlessly enjoyable. Yet ultimately it too comes to some pretty sobering conclusions.

5) Memory

The fourth major theme I noticed this year was more universal and less topical to the current moment. But that didn't make them any less interesting. Four plays tackled the subject of memor in multifaceted and pretty nuanced ways.

The first, aptly titled, Remember Me by Christopher Lockheardt begins as a sappy story about a wife taking care of her Alzheimer's plagued husband but twists into a story in which memory is used as a weapon for cosmic revenge. The second, Catching Lemons by Michael  Pisaturo explores the meaning and boundaries of  communicating with and having a relationship with someone in the midst of losing their ability to form memories.

The heavy subject of memory loss is handled with a breezy joie de vivre in Susan Kosoff's Just Give Me a Minute, in which two older friends talk in circles as they both lose and are reminded of their trains of thought.  Not exactly the same meditation on memory loss as the other two, but instead a warm hearted love note to two fully realized friends who might need each other now more than ever.

The rewriting of memory is the sad necessity in Pay Day by Chris Flaherty in which three brothers help to rescript their lived experiences of physical abuse at the hands of their father into tales of fun and adventure. It's a pretty story of the resilience of children and sibling bonds.

6) Lack of Experimentation

My only complaint about this years crop of uniformly good plays is that so few of them experimented with dramatic form or conventions. A very large majority of the plays put on this year followed the same general form. Two to four characters in one space hashing out a problem with a strong sense of realism. Now, I don't have any problem with this form, and indeed many of my favorite plays of the day were resolutely in this category, but I did find myself longing for playwrights who would try to push the boundaries of the ten minute form.

Not to say that there weren't any. The very last play of the evening, The Dual by Jack Neary obliterates the fourth wall in which two actors come out on stage very much commenting on how awkward this is, and about being the last play in the festival, and having been commandeered to be on stage by the desperate playwright after his two actual actors got stuck in an uber. All of this is pretense so that these two actors can read from and act two separate scripts simultaneously. Jocelyn Duford reading from a passionate romantic drama and John Manning reading from an innuendo laden service call from a plumber. The result was very clever and very funny.

Similarly, the first play of the day The Door by Peter M. Floyd presented an obtuse tale in which one be-suited traveler recounts to another the creeping horror of finding a door in their house behind which leads stairs and darknesses and mirrors and other existential horrors. Directed by Matthew Woods of the Imaginary Beasts as a concoction of German Expressionism and physical absurdity, it set a base level of weirdness that no other play came close to touching.

Of course style points have to be awarded to Nine Minutes 22 Seconds by Eric Henry Sanders, if not quite points for execution. A multilayered conversation about the craft and legacy of Miles Davis, the well dressed ensemble silhouetted against a blue black drop unfortunately flubbed lines and cues,sabotaging what I suspect would have been a stellar piece of work.

I've already mentioned Banana Gun which utilized to probably the greatest extent of any play elements of mutli-scene story telling to create an epic story of super-hero-dom. But similar techniques were used to profound effect on Patrick Cleary's Closet in which two strangers find themselves occupying the same house.  I'll leave that cryptic description as is, since this is the first play I plan on giving a full review to.

Of course sometimes it's not structural experimentation that I look for, but also how playwrights use actors and who or what they portray. In Hot Love in the Moonlight by Patrick Gabridge we find two young lovers looking for a mate in a meet-cute whirlwind of romance on a moonlit spring night. It's a scene fresh from any romantic comedy if not for the fact that our lovers happen to be spotted salamanders also dealing with the existential threat of climate change. (also smartest costumes of the day. All three characters wore a subtle but coordinated polka-dot motif  which was both stylish and brilliant)

Similarly in Greg Lam and Walt McGough's The Trouble With Maisie, a desperate brother tries to free his delusional brother from the grips of his ventriloquist dummy, this time played with precision comedic physicality by Lizzie Milanovich. When Marc Pierre brought her ought slumped over his shoulder and I realized what was about to happen it produced from me my biggest and most consistent laughter of the night. I am also extremely biased because I happen to be a literal ventriloquist. Up until the end I kept thinking to myself, what would have happened if they'd staged this with me and an actual ventiloquist dummy. Would it still work? But the fun of having her voice that role I think was better and more brilliant than anything an actual wooden doll could have done.

7)  Other Important Mentions

I've briefly recapped many of the plays throughout the festival but there are several that I think also very much worth mentioning that don't fit into any of the above categories.

A Garnet in the Rough by Cliff Odle is a lovingly observed slice of life between a father and daughter as they pick through rocks hunting for gem stones. (I got a little confused about exactly where they were finding these rocks. Can you literally find garnets most anywhere?) It's a loving and surprisingly complicated relationship that nonetheless feels completely real, lived in and generous.

Diagnosis by Charles Bradley is essentially about a man who feels affronted when told by his new therapist she needs to make a diagnosis in order for his insurance to pay for her care, and then gets set straight after being unbearably rude to her. But the secret is in the execution and Bradley gifts both actor with smartly written clever monologues and treats both characters with love flaws and all.

Whiskey Neat by Kevin Cirone is a sweet and beautifully acted window on the aftermath of a not-quite one-night stand by a guy and a comedian who has some major defense issues. A nice character examination of a funny and relatable and relatably funny person who nonetheless has enormous amount of baggage.

You don't have to to be a Harry Potter fan to enjoy Siriusly by Tyler Prendergast, though I imagine it would help. But as someone who doesn't know my Hufflepuff from my Gryffindor, this was still a smartly written and very funny romp. Two women meet for an OKCupid arranged date. They're 98% compatible, have similar tastes and desires and suddenly discover they're both massive Harry Potter fans. But wait, what book is their favorite. It's a well observed and funny satire on how the smallest of disagreements can make the biggest difference.

Aether by William Donnelly is about two new neighbors meeting for the first time and staring out at the stars. By far, it is the play with the least that "actually happens" and yet, god damn was it good. I have much to say about this play but I'll save it for later.

The Campaign by Ken Green is a clever modern morality tale of racism, job-promotion, and thinking smarter than your enemies. An advertisement exec has created an ad campaign a portion of which is deemed to be obviously racist by a fellow veteran and notably black ad exec. When a younger "hipper" assistant is brought in to assess, he falls in line with his white boss. What follows is a cynical but ultimately hopeful tale of karma and the dangers of white obliviousness.

A Departure by Grant MacDermott invests all of its power on a third act pivot but what a pivot. A professor of linguistics prepares to go to a conference as her retired husband reads the paper. She frets and fusses over him getting out of the house and doing something with himself while she's away. Just as she's about to leave we snap into her internal thoughts which reveal secrets which completely recolor everything we thought we've just seen.

Nematodes by Ron Radice seems for much of its run time like it could have been plucked from a James Thurber New Yorker short story. A neurotic wife and her comically apathetic husband enjoy their wooded home away from home. They both speak in the kind of urbane cosmopolitan patois of the 1940s and there's something arch and artificial about the both of them. And then enters the mother in law played with riveting gravity
by Nancy E. Carroll who not only immediately proves herself preternaturally smart but also matter-of-fact about drowning herself. The play is suddenly thrown into surreal black comedy. I'm still not sure what this play was about and it took me a while to get into it, but by the end I was absolutely hooked. 
 
Visions of an Eagle Atop a Cactus Eating a Snake is the lengthy title of a short simple play by Andrew Sianez-De La O. A father and daughter hike through the desert, loaded with backpacks and supplies. He tells her a story. They joke and bond. They leave. But in the play simplicity I found great depth and meaning and I can't wait to write more about it.

8) The Upcoming Reviews

So as you can see, there were a lot of great plays this year and even more that I didn't touch on because it took forever just to write about this lot. However, I really would like to speak about fourteen of these in particular and I'd like to write about two at a time as I think that several can speak even louder in communication with each other.

This year was such a good year for plays and I feel so blessed that I got to watch and partake in this beautiful event. I can't wait for next year and I hope that I'm not performing at some matinee so that I can do this again. In the meantime please watch out for the following reviews which I hope to post in chunks of two in the upcoming week or so:

1st Chunk:

- Closet - by Patrick Cleary
- Visions of an Eagle Atop a Cactus Eating a Snake - by Andrew Sianez-De La O

2nd Chunk:

- Stiletto Envy - by Eliana Pipes
- A Departure - by Grant MacDermott

3rd Chunk:

- A Garnet in the Rough - by Cliff Odle
- Aether - by William Donnelly

4th Chunk:

- One-On-One - by Eliane Brousseau
- The Stand - by Caity-Shea Violette

5th Chunk:

- Locker Room Talk - by John J King
- Banana Gun - by Mary Beth McNulty

6th Chunk:

- Closing Doors - by John Minigan
- Meeting with Management - by Stephanie Eisemann

7th Chunk:

- Just Give Me A Minute - by Susan Kosoff
- Catching Lemons - by Michael  Pisaturo

I would like to note that these choices are not ranked. This is not a best of fourteen list. As I mentioned at the top, there were several plays that I liked just as much if not more so than the fourteen I'm to write more about. I just feel like I have more to say about these fourteen in particular.

The list is not ranked, though I will admit that first two plays are indeed my favorites. But the rest are quite random..

I hope this blog is of interest to at least one person. Even if it's not, I feel like I've grown by not just watching the festival, but putting into words my thoughts about this glut of theatrical riches. If you are a playwright from the festival and would like my private or public feedback, please feel free to drop a comment or contact me directly through my website. Thanks so much for reading.

It's now 4:21 am. I think I'm going to go to bed.