Mark Subias (ed.) - The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary American Plays

W hat a pleasure to read the four plays in this volume. Each is fresh, original and distinctive. Each is verbally deft, and delights in language and its power to entertain, disturb, and just plain dazzle. Each is about human connection the pain and the difficulty of human connection. And each of these four plays is hopeful, and ultimately optimistic.

Kin by Bathsheba Doran is a series of touching and delicately drawn scenes that reveal the tenderness and uncertainty between people: two lovers, a daughter and her father, two best friends. Even the conflict between urban life and rural life comes into play to comic and serious effect (there is even a bear!). The ending is joyful a wedding where chaos eventually turns to order as in the best Shakespearian comedies. Ms. Doran writes intelligently and sensitively about the foibles of human relationships and the mysteries of what she calls the landscape of the mind.

Middletown by Will Eno is a verbally dextrous take on Our Town filtered through the bleakly comic absurdities of The Skin of Our Teeth. This is a play of language but, like Our Town, a play with a heart. People may be looked at as specimens, as examples of life, yet they reach out, lonely and questioning, as we all do. They are involved in the tiny details of their lives and the large issues of humanity. This is a play about men and women in the middle of life separated by birth and death a serious mystery, then the middle part, then another mystery. Mr. Eno is brilliant, warm, adventurous; he has written a lovely play about the beauty and sadness of life.

Completeness by Itamar Moses is another good play about connecting and what it takes to be a human being. Graduate students in computer science attempt to solve problems that run parallel to their personal problems. We see, that for all their academic intelligence, they are ordinary folk who hide behind their articulate scientific jargon rather than confront the problems of love, commitment, and human completeness. Mr. Moses is an intellectual dazzler who nonetheless writes natural and heartfelt characters and puts them in real and true situations.

Finally, Gods Ear by Jenny Schwartz is based on a sad premise: a man and a woman try to come to terms with the near-drowning and eventual death of their son. Their marriage (an absent husband) is in tatters. Again this is a play with an ordinary domestic situation blanketed in astounding verbal riffs; everyday speech turned upside down. Playful, loony rhythmic speeches of lyrical poetry. Sort of Ionesco goes to early Sam Shepard but with an original authors voice. Ms. Schwartz is a linguist and an imagist, and her play is an amazing and daring creation.

So there you have it: four wonderful plays by four writers with bright pasts and bright futures. I saw all four plays in New York and I feel compelled to add that all these plays were well served by impeccable productions. It was thrilling to see them and it is thrilling to read them. The United States is in a golden age of American playwriting whether we acknowledge it or not and the four talented writers in this volume strongly attest to that.

Andr Bishop, Artistic Director,
Lincoln Center Theater, January 2012