4/22/2025 From the Bookshelf: DPS Broadway Book Club Collection # 11
NOT ENOUGH SCRIPTS IS THE VILLAIN
So, for the first time, the DPS Book Club has included a script currently seeing life on Broadway! In fact, the playwright of John Proctor is the Villain, Kimberly Belflower, curates this quarter’s collection, which includes some familiar titles, some new (to me) titles, and even a classic Pulitzer-Prize Winner. So, let’s get on with it!
(To repeat the same words I copy/paste every time I thumbnail these collections, for those late to the party, script publisher Dramatists Play Service runs a book club, where, once a quarter, they will deliver to your doorstep a box of scripts, curated by an established playwright, brimming with talent and creative life force. I look forward to every shipment as, to put it bluntly, I love reading scripts, even those for plays I know not and may never see brought to life on stage.)
JOHN PROCTOR IS THE VILLAIN
By Kimberly Belflower
Originally Produced Studio Theatre, Washington DC May 2022
Premiered April 14,2025 at the Booth Theatre, New York City
Not only was this my favorite play of this package, it’s the best script I’ve read in a long time (and I’ve read a boat-load of REALLY EXCELLENT scripts, especially since my move to Florida). Filled with sharply drawn characters and compellingly readable dialogue, it is a vivid portrait of young women in the #MeToo era, an ode to the healing power of friendship and music and dance. And it is also a trenchant criticism of The Crucible, a calling-out of Arthur Miller’s fifties-blinders misogyny, and a convincing argument that the elevation of John Proctor as “tragic hero” is an argument built on sand.
The play centers on a group of small-town Georgia high schoolers, some of whom have been seduced by a charismatic teacher. They can’t help but side with Abigail Williams, who was also an abused teenager seduced by her much older employer. And Miller (and Proctor) call HER a whore? Filled with equal parts joy and anger and intelligence, it builds to a climax in which two of the students imagine a scene between Abigail and Elizabeth Proctor that is nothing short of a cathartic primal scream, that builds to an unbridled group dance (to Lorde’s “Green Light”). That it echoes the dance at the start of The Crucible is totally intentional.
With performances scheduled only through June, I can only hope it gets extended into July, when my next NYC sojourn will (hopefully) happen. Atlanta venues should jump on this one as soon as rights become available. Perhaps in repertory with The Crucible itself – I will NEVER be able to see (or even read) Miller’s classic again without Belflower-tinted glasses.
DEEP BLUE SOUND
By Abe Koogler
Developed and Produced by Clubbed Thumb Summerworks 2023 New York City
Revived Off-Broadway at the Public Theatre February 25 2025
Here’s another you could have caught in NYC if I had been a little quicker with my thumbnails (it just closed April 5). This is a charming piece, a “bastard child” (if you’ll forgive me) of Our Town and Almost Maine. The cast comes on stage to announce the roles they will play, and, throughout, drop into (and out of) character as the residents of an isolated island an uncomfortable ferry ride from Seattle. The play is about the community, their trials and concerns, especially their panic over the disappearance of a pod of whales whose annual return was the high point of the year. These are very specific characters (who maintain their uniqueness even as anonymous “Villagers”), and each has a story to tell, stories that intersect and collide like small town bumper cars, stories of life and imminent death and quirky choices and larger-than-life eccentricities. And, yes, there is a character who is a whale (with lines!). This was a real pleasure to read, and I look forward to eventually seeing it live – if a production doesn’t prove as elusive as those whales.
WHERE WE BELONG
By Madeline Sayet
Developed and Premiered by Wooly Mammoth Theatre Co, Washington DC June 2021
Achokayis is a theatre maker of indigenous heritage, a specific heritage that must be revised and rewritten to align with the heritage of the actor/actress playing the role. The role is written as Mohegan and much of the script delves into issues with Mohegan history and heritage and, especially language. The play is, indeed about language, about how indigenous languages were systematically erased, about the efforts to keep them alive, and, initially, about the haven of Shakespeare to underscore the beauty and deep-seatedness of language. But it is also about colonialism, about subjugation, and, about looking at Shakespeare through an indigenous lens – is Caliban REALLY a metaphor for colonial subjugation? I’m convinced!
Ms. Sayet is indeed a Shakespeare scholar and teacher and performer, and her script (a monologue which she also performed in the original production) is a wide-ranging but oddly cohesive portrait of a people and an individual’s efforts to (literally) fly above it. This monologue is filled with observation and thoughts and wit and digressions that ring true and breathe with desperately literary life.
For the record, James Fenimore Cooper has a lot to answer for – Uncas was NOT the “Last” of the Mohegans – not by a long shot. To any theatre company who takes the easy road of “land use acknowledgements” in their programs and curtain speeches, may I STRONGLY suggest hiring an artist of a local culture to perform this – CELEBRATE the original inhabitants, instead of simply acknowledging them. This one stayed in my head for a long time after I finished reading it.
TEA
By Velina Hasu Houston
World Premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, October 1987
During the post-war American occupation of Japan, over 100,000 Japanese women married American servicemen. I actually did not know this and I’m thankful that Ms. Houston’s play made me aware. But I’m even more thankful for her giving us this compelling script, a look at a group of “war brides” relocated to America’s heartland (Kansas) as they gather to pay honor to another who has committed suicide. Each has a “slice” of the American Pie – one is married to an Hispanic American, one to black American, one is even married to a Japanese American (who never bothered to learn her language). This play is structured using tropes from Japanese Theatre – Himiko’s ghost is as close to a “main character” as there is in this very ensemble-centric piece – and Japanese culture – the wives gathered together for a monthly tea ceremony that included its fair share of American gossip. And it climaxes with each woman assuming the role of her husband in a tapestry of rage and love and loss. Ostensibly based on the playwright’s mother’s life, it is a lyrically honest look at the collision of ethnicity, culture, and individuality. It has already been adapted into a novel and a musical and is enjoying numerous contemporary productions in reaction to our contemporary ethos of violence towards API communities and the general fear-stoked antithesis to immigrants in general. I suspect it’s time for an Atlanta production!
MARCUS; OR THE SECRET OF SWEET
By Tarell Alvin McCraney
Originally Produced at the McCarter Theatre Princeton NJ May 2009
Atlanta Production by Actor’s Express March 2015
The third of McCraney’s Yoruba-infused Brother/Sister plays to be included in a DPS collection, this was a total joy to revisit, especially with images from Actor’s Express’s outstanding 2015 production informing how the words manifested in my mind.
From my 2015 review:
We are in the bayous of Louisiana, and a hurricane is coming. Marcus Eshu is a young man at a crossroads -- he is determined to learn the nature of his long-lost father, afraid that he may have inherited his father's "Sweet," his penchant for preferring men to women. Haunted by dreams, Marcus is given solace by his friends Shaunta and Osha, who have conflicted reactions to his quest. Marcus’s mother, Oba, is blind to him, and does what she can to protect him from himself. Stir into the gumbo a mysterious stranger from the Bronx, an older spell-caster named Elegua, an uncle with secrets of his own, and a "dream figure" who may or may not be a trickster from legend. It all bubbles and brews and swirls with liquid lyricism and concludes on a (mostly) satisfying note that is fair to the characters and to the archetypes they embody.
The real star here is Mr. McCraney's dialogue and structure and plotting. Stage directions are spoken, subtexts are made not-so-"sub," dreams and prophecy and memory blur into one, friendship and betrayal dance in a cruel waltz, seduction is wet and sloppy, and the bayou forest emerges as an enchanted realm, a place for growing, for regression, for discovery, for sanctuary.
THE NINA VARIATIONS
by Steven Dietz
Originally Produced as a staged reading by Milwaukee Repertory Theatre March 1996
Although this may sound like a mere academic exercise for Chekhov Geeks – and it is very much that – it is also a compelling read, a funny (ish) view of two characters we may (or may not) think we know – Treplev and Nina from The Seagull. The play is essentially the last scene of Chekhov’s masterpiece, retold 43 times. Each variation is a spin on the characters – a “peeling of the onion” (as it were) of all the subtextual possibilities for the scene. The remarkable thing is that any of them would work in The Seagull, surely the greatest compliment that could be paid to the original play, to its complex simplicity and to its possibilities for actors. Sure, you could easily call this play a piece of “fan fiction” and it is assuredly that. But it’s also impossible to get out of your mind. Next time you schedule The Seagull (or even Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fu#^+%ing Bird) you could make a worse decision than to also schedule a fund-raising reading of this piece. For the record, Mr. Dietz writes that it could be performed by two actors or by any number of actors up to 86.
THE HEIDI CHRONICLES
By Wendy Wasserstein
First Produced at Playwright’s Horizon, NYC, December 1988
Staged Reading at Atlanta’s Agnes Scott College October 2023
Winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Sometimes it’s a joy to reread an old favorite, to revisit a show you thought you knew, even if it’s only to see how the passage of time has affected it. Or how your own “more mature” point of view filters it.
The Heidi Chronicles examines the Women’s Movement through the life-lens of Art Historian Heidi Holland, from her teenage idealism in 1965 through her more mature (and not-really jaded) perspective in 1989, as she begins life as a new mother. Throughout the years her relationship with two men – gay pediatrician Peter and womanizing lawyer/editor Scoop – and her passion for female artists ignored by the male-dominated museum ethos inform and color her friendships with other women and with the world in general.
This piece is still relevant, in spite of its period-specific attitudes and references and I suspect will always be relevant. Wasserstein’s 2006 death truly robbed us of one of American Theatre’s premier voices.
I hope you get a chance to check out any (or all) of these plays and hope you find them as satisfying to read as I did. Better yet, I hope they create a desire to see them live on stage! Ideally, they will find their way into an upcoming season.
As usual, thank you for indulging my Bibliowallow! There will be more soon!
-- Brad Rudy (BKRudy@aol.com)
#DramatistsPlayService