Just the FAQs: Guys

(NOTE: Many years ago I was a playwright. Improbably a few of my short plays ended up getting published. This is the second installment of a three-part series of posts intended to provide a bit of background and answer some potential questions you may have regarding these plays should you be from one of the handful of the college, high school or community theater troupes from across the country who stage these plays each year.)

(To those who are reading these posts without having read the plays, my apologies. These posts will make little sense. Please feel free to ignore them with my compliments.)

GUYS

So ... here's the thing ... sometimes positions we stake out early in life don't age super well.

It turns out, in order to become "woke," you have to first have been asleep.

This, in a nutshell, is my relationship to my short play Guys . Turns out what I wanted to say in my mid-20s isn't at all what I'd like to say in my mid-40s.

Every piece of art is a time capsule of the moment of its creation. A bubble that preserves the creator's thought or emotion at its inception. Sometimes those bubbles help you float off toward enlightenment. And sometimes ... well, sometimes they're more like a fart in a crowded elevator.

This play, for me, is the second one. Kinda.

Are there a few clever jokes in this play? I guess? Is it super aggressive and didactic in making its point? No, it's frivolous and silly. But the whole thing is in service to normalizing something that today I find kind of gross.

At the time, 20-something me wanted to declaim that all guys objectified women and that it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. "It's just the way guys are hard-wired," I reasoned back then. "There's nothing inherently sinister about it. It's Nature."

"MOST of us are harmless," I argued.


Sure, okay.

Looking back on this play as an adult, however, particularly in the wake of the stomach-churning revelations about the likes of Harvey Weinstein, or Louis CK, or our commander-in-chief, for that matter, today I find this play to be a little chunk of regrettable retrograde apologia.


Now you might read the play and find it totally harmless. Goofy fun. But chances are, if you do, you're probably a dude. If you're a woman, you're likely to read Guys and sigh heavily with recognition.

The play is essentially ten minutes of two hapless dudes gawking at a woman in the park who's just trying to eat her damn Chicken McNuggets in peace -- while they pontificate and navel-gaze about why dudes seem compelled to gawk at women in parks who are just trying to eat their damn Chicken McNuggets in peace.

Without realizing it, I'd pretty neatly encapsulated the concept of the "male gaze" then immediately tried to charmingly dismiss its effect on those upon whom it fell.

"These two guys are totally harmless," I argued. "So it's fine! They're not going to DO anything! Relax!"

It's telling that I specified in the stage directions that the woman not actually appear in the play. Instead, she exists off stage where the two male characters can see her but the audience cannot. At the time, I thought this was clever and theatrical. But looking at it through more mature eyes, that detail somehow makes it worse. Not only did I not give her the agency to respond, I didn't even grant her the dignity of existing at all.

Am I over-reacting? Entirely possible. I am prone to such behavior. I was drawn to the theater for a reason, after all.

Ultimately, there may not be much reason to flagellate myself over this perceived injustice done unto the Universe. In the end, the play may very well be silly and ignorable. But it does bother me that I once thought this way. It's embarrassing. A moral pebble in the shoe. (But then, I am a writer at heart so if a thing is worth thinking about, it's definitely worth over-thinking about.)

Point is, your mileage, as they say, may vary.


Um ... Were There Any Questions On This FAQ List?

Oh, right.

As for Frequently Asked Questions ... on this play, I don't really get many of those. Not enough happens over its ten minutes of run time for anyone to get confused. It's not exactly the building of the barricade in Les Mis. It's two guys sitting at a table, eating french fries and talking about boobs.

(FYI: Just as a reminder, if you're interested in performing any of these plays, please check the Samuel French/Concord Theatricals website. I've helpfully linked to them in most of the places the play titles appear on this blog. Otherwise, start here:
https://www.concordtheatricals.com/a/5552/robb-badlam)



Till next we meet ...