Just The FAQs: Slop-Culture

(NOTE: Many years ago I was a playwright. Improbably a few of my short plays ended up getting published. This is the third and final 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.)

SLOP-CULTURE


What Was The Inspiration?

Here's the short and slightly less boring version of where this play came from:

In 1999 the Actors Theater of Louisville held their annual 10-minute play contest, and that year they had decided they wanted to stage a handful of 10-minute pieces organized around a central theme at the festival. That theme was "Life Under 30." They wanted plays by writers, directors and actors all under 30 years old. And while they'd liked the play I'd originally submitted for the contest, (Guys), they called and asked if I had any other 10-minute pieces that might fit their theme a little more snugly.

"Why of course I do," I told them enthusiastically. "Why, I've got the perfect play for that! I shall send it to you forthwith!"

And then I hung up the phone and started writing it.

Seriously? Same Day?

I know. It sounds glib, but it's 100% true.

It was written and in the mail the same day. (We sent things through the mail back then. "Mail" was a kind of text message that people printed out and hand delivered to each other.) Start to finish, including rewrites, probably three hours of work all in. And you can kind of tell, if I'm being honest.

Fortunately, I had already been noodling over the idea of my own cultural identity and what it meant to be part of Generation X. (Yes, I'm aware that I am, in fact, old.) I'd been considering maybe doing something full-length, but hadn't zeroed in on any kind of story, structure or characters yet. The call was exactly the kind of kick in the pants I needed to pull the trigger.

So, What's It About?

What had been nagging at me, what I was itching to explore, was the fact that I didn't really have much of a cultural identity of my own to speak of. At least not how I understood the term. I didn't have any strong family or ethnic traditions. When it came to music or art or religion or food or ... well, anything really ... there just wasn't much there that tied me to any "tribe."

So a lot of the history and point of view I give Danielle came straight out of me. I, too, was half Italian, but had no connection to Italy beyond knowing how to microwave a bowl of Beefaroni. I was raised on pop culture. Nothing but bad TV and fast food.

At first this was a pretty depressing thought, but as I worked through the play I realized that everybody has a cultural identity. You just might have to widen your gaze enough to actually recognize all of the components of it. It's not just about ethnicity or religion or family. It's all the specific influences -- the books, movies, TV, pop music, whatever -- that make you specifically and particularly you.

And nobody gets to pick theirs. That alchemy is quite beyond our control. The forces and influences that make us who we are just kind of happen.

And that, it seemed to me, was the real choice. Once you recognize the forces that make you who you are ... do you embrace them?

It's a little corny, but that was kind of a big personal realization for me.

A couple hours later I had a cultural identity and the play was in the mail.

What Does The Title Mean?

It's a play on "pop culture," of course. When you have an entire generation raised on bad TV, that bubbling stew of references and touchstones can get pretty muddled and, well, sloppy.

Today, in the age of social media and the Internet, none of this seems like an especially big deal, since we are now all composed of roiling pastiches of memes, dog videos and snapshots of celebrities' food. But back then things weren't nearly as decentralized and fragmented. Deciphering your own identity and finding your tribe was a lot harder.

The Characters, What Are Their Deals?

As I said earlier, much of the existential crisis that Danielle is going through was straight from my own point of view at the time. There was a longing there, a feeling that I was lost. I was missing this deep connection to something larger. I didn't know what it was, but I knew I didn't have it. It wasn't until I eventually I realized that I was already part of something that I felt the pieces click together. I just needed to embrace it. Yes, Danielle is a product of pop culture, and once she accepts that, her place in the world starts to make sense to her.

Cindy is essentially Danielle on the other side of that realization. She's already made peace with that question and is stronger for it. She's got her shit together.

As for Brian and Dylan ... every group of friends has the equivalent of those guys. The lovable dumbasses who seem to float through through life without getting any of it on their shoes. These guys never had the crisis that Danielle having because they've always accepted who they are and where they fit since day one. They don't just accept their slop culture roots, they revel in them.

Hang On, Isn't All This Blather WAY Too Ponderous And Navel-Gazy For What Is Essentially A Fluffy Little Sit-Com?

Yes. Yes, it is.


Do You Have Any Performance Advice?

Okay, nobody ever asks me this, but I'm going to answer it anyway.

Over lo these many years I have found that the "louder, faster, wackier" school of comedy tends not to work at all with my material. I find if you underplay the material, it tends to work better. Mugging and shouting and falling down won't add energy to your show, it just adds frenzy, which isn't the same thing and isn't funny. (To me, anyway.) When in doubt, deadpan. I have found that just tightening up the dialogue pacing and then playing the pauses is a much surer map to laughs.

Just my two cents.

(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 ...

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 ...