From the Ledge

I’m a big supporter of new plays – I love that sense of anticipation and discovery when you’re waiting for the curtain to rise on a play you’ve never seen or read before.  As an audience member, I bring with me to the theater my preoccupations and my priorities, my opinions and my biases, so the new plays that attract me the most are the ones that traffic in big, global themes, that recognize they are part of a bigger world and enthusiastically engage with it: August: Osage County and its generational dysfunction or Ruined and its socio-political gender struggles (ok, so I just mentioned two Pulitzer Prize winners that received their world premieres in Chicago. Yeah, so shoot me).   I’m quite skittish then with plays that seem to be to be too introspective, too preoccupied with their emotional responses, plays that a New York Times theater review I once read characterized as “hothouse” plays – delicate, sensitive, bent over by the weight of their own brooding. And really, really focused on their playwrights’ worlds, rather than a world at large.  In Chicago last weekend, I saw the Gift Theatre Company world premiere production of Andrew Hinderaker’s Suicide, Incorporated; in New York this past week, I managed to catch the Tony-nominated Next Fall by Geoffrey Naults.  I laud the playwrights for releasing new voices to the cosmos; both, though, lacked the wondrous edge, the sock-to-the-gut experience that I look for in the best new plays.  And in Next Fall’s case, “best new play” is a phrase I would never, in a million years, attach to it.

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