Her new play?
Actually, her next play is called Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? and is in preview at the Royal Court, the theatre that first staged most of her plays. The word is that it involves a particular British leader’s obsequious affection for aparticular transatlantic leader, but the playhouse insists that it is far less specific and limited than that.
Hmm. The softporn version of Stuff Happens? Or, knowing Churchill, hardcore.
Playgoer, I just have to say that I am delighted I found you. What a detailed and insightful blog, a glimmer in this dark nasty www vacuum we surf in.
ReplyDeleteI saw Drunk Enough To Say I Love You this past weekend. Dreadful. Tedious. Would have walked out except I hate quitting.
ReplyDeleteChurchill's swan song?
Oh, please. It's an inventive and exciting play. No one else on earth could have written it.
ReplyDeletea comment from the dramaturg's list:
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if everyone is being exactly fair to Geralyn. What I read was
her frustration at the relative lack of representation of white female
playwrights of a certain generation, and I cannot say that she's entirely
incorrect. If you look at, just for one example, survey text books, which
is something I do fairly regularly, you see great pains being taken to
include female playwrights of color in contemporary/modern surveys and
rightfully so-- it's the unusual survey text that doesn't have Raisin and
either a Shange or an SLP or both; often a Fornes as well. You see an
abundance of men of various ethnicities and sexualities-- Kushner, O'Neill,
Shepard, Williams, Hwang, Valdez, Wilson, Mamet, Albee, etc-- you all know
who they are. For white women you generally see a Churchill or a Vogel and
maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe a Howe or a Norman. The text that's being used for one
of my classes has this breakdown in the contemporary section: 11 white men,
4 men of color, 4 women of color, 3 white women. I don't find this division
to be out of the ordinary for texts.
I don't think anyone is saying we have enough of any one particular group.
What I think Geralyn is saying-- and what I think is the most interesting
thing anyone has said on this topic all day-- is where are the white women
playwrights? Why are they proportionally underrepresented?
I don't believe it takes anything away from SLP or anyone else to ask that
very valid question.
Melissa Hillman
Artistic Director
Impact Theatre