Signs of Life by Deborah Brevoort. NY: Samuel French. 1990, 2007.
Hello, there, and I’m sorry this is up late. This has been a busy week. I’d planned to get ahead last weekend, but that didn’t happen.
Also, I changed my mind on the play about which I would write. The first one I read, I didn’t finish. Plays are short, so it’s rare not to finish. But the author broke one of the cardinal rules — he dictated the jobs of the director and designers, and designated every breath and gesture and inflection for the actors.
That’s an insulting thing to do to the creative team. Theatre is collaborative. Unless you are the director (and even if you are), the rest of the team has to have a say or there’s no point in working in this format.
So I put the play down and picked up this one.
I read a lot of plays, but the point of the Reader Expansion Challenge is to read authors you haven’t previously read, and Deborah Brevoort fit the bill. It won a contest, was workshopped in Banff, and had a couple of productions before it was published.
One of the reasons I love to read plays is because it allows me to engage my imagination in a different way than a novel does. A novel uses more description (in most cases) and chooses where to guide my eye. While a play has specifics and a more limited scope, because the protocol is to leave description and inflection to the rest of the creative team, and hint at it by specific placement and word choice, it allows my imagination more room to soar.
Only two characters, a couple determined to leave their life in a New Jersey trailer part and follow the omens sent by the stars (the ones in the sky, not those on the screen) to California. Odd and funny and poignant, it was a good read, and made me want to see it on stage. It was written to be deceptively simple, with plenty of subtext and room for actors and the director and designers to play. It was a lot of fun.
Reading a good play reminds me how much I love the theatre, and how happy I am that I had such a fulfilling career in it for decades.
Next month, the challenge is poetry. The date is Tuesday, July 16 — which just happens to be the full moon. I’m going to see if I can find a poet whose work is new to me, who writes about the moon!
What play did you read this month? How did it affect you?
A Biblio Paradise 