New Downtown Now: An Anthology Of New Theater From Downtown New York

by Mac Wellman, Young Jean Lee

At a time when most serious drama being written and produced for the American stage aspires only to mainstream acceptance and high-toned mediocrity, an innovative new generation of playwrights based in New York City has emerged, crafting works that challenge and undermine the conventional structure, language, and characterization of commercial theater while rejecting outdated notions of the avant-garde. New Downtown Now brings together ten new works that exemplify the playfulness, excitement, and possibilities of the theater. Characterized by fragmenting structure, hypnotic rhythms, kaleido-scopic imagery, unpredictable characters, and lyrical language, these plays resemble puzzles from which the writers are teasing revelations. Though disparate in subject matter and style, with characters ranging from a sushi chef to a soldier and settings from a taxicab to a live television broadcast, these highly original plays share a commitment to formal experimentation that places them beyond the psychological clichés of the majority and the cold condescension of postmodernism. The anthology includes Interim by Barbara Cassidy; Tragedy: a tragedy by Will Eno; Nine Come by Elana Greenfield; Shufu-Sachiko and Enoshima Island by Madelyn Kent; The Appeal by Young Jean Lee; The Vomit Talk of Ghosts by Kevin Oakes; Ajax (por nobody) by Alice Tuan; Apparition, an uneasy play of the underknown by Anne Washburn; Demon Baby by Erin Courtney.Mac Wellman is the author of numerous plays and the recipient of three Obie awards, most recently in 2003 for lifetime achievement. He is professor of playwriting at Brooklyn College. Young Jean Lee is a playwright and director, and member of the Obie award-winning company 13P. Jeffrey M. Jones is a playwright and curator of the Obie award-winning Little Theater at Tonic in New York.

Genres: Plays, Theatre

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[James Binz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Is this where drama is headed? This was almost unreadable and looked truly unwatchable. Maybe this needs to be experienced?

[Rick Larsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Innovative and mind-bending, just like me!

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredible anthology, which demonstrates (sadly) that there's a ton of amazing stuff going on in the world of theater, and we'll never see most of it. Living in New York is too large a price to pay (literally and figuratively) for most people, period.

So here are ten plays by nine authors. There are at least five authors in here who negotiate a strange path between figurative and normative speech, and hit absolute bullseyes, achieving remarkably assured, unconventional, and yet completely convincing visions for what theater might be. Madelyn Kent, Anne Washburn, Young Jean Lee, Elana Greenfield, and Barbara Cassidy are almost all new names to me, and now I want to read / see everything I possibly can by them. I'm afraid it won't be much -- but at least now I know I should be trying.

I personally didn't go for Kevin Oakes or Erin Courtney's plays, though I admire their skill as writers (psyche-as-horror/freakshow, either overt or covert, seems too well-trodden a path to me). And the remaining authors seem to be holding themselves back -- they've got everything in place to show us something clear and striking, but they're too nervously looking over their shoulders to follow through. (For example: Will Eno seems almost desperate to avoid political cliches -- so why is he so willing to embrace psychological cliches? And why the weird moralistic tone, culminating in full-blown homophobic porno-morality play, in Alice Tuan's supposedly transgressive "Ajax?")

Just some thoughts. As far as I know, this book is the only way to read the work of some of these writers, who in my opinion are doing the most interesting writing so far this century. So, my qualms about individual works don't prevent the book as a whole from being essential to any theater library.