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Tomorrowland
3m, 4f Anna has left graduate school to join the real world, as a writer on a children's television show in Orlando, Florida, she finds that world to be more surreal and absurd than anything she's left behind. Tomorrowland takes a darkly comic look at death, Disney, and the search for meaning in a world that worships the young and the fake. "Briskly hilarious comedy about a brittle New Yorker who abandons her doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf's use of parenthesis to write scripts for ki
78 pages, Paperback
First published December 29, 2009
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November 17, 2014
Neena Beber is part of a crop of young, talented, award-winning playwrights that I'm just getting to know. Others I'm just now reading are: Samuel D. Hunter (2014 MacArthur Genius Award), Melanie Marnich, Annie Baker, Amy Herzog and Keith Huff.
"Tomorrowland" takes place in the TV studios of a children's show, 'Emily's Room.' The play's protagonist, Anna, is the show's lead writer. She is assailed by the show's producer and director who want the change the program's direction. Meanwhile, Anna is assailed from within, haunted by a crisis in her personal life that must not mingle with the show's goals. But Beber weaves together all these elements to create a piece of theatre that explores the virtues of fantasy (the virtual worlds) over reality. In her own life, Anna left one reality, deeming it unreal, to create another, which relies on the unreal to generate real profits. Meanwhile, the young (unseen) subject of the children's show is growing up too fast. The breasts that have become prominent in this 13 year old actress render her useless. Should she be replace by a boy as the show's focal point? Should she simply wear overalls and other camouflage that will hide her new, womanly curves? Is womanhood dismissed by this conundrum? Meanwhile, we get glimpses of Anna's abandoned doctoral dissertation, on the use of parentheses in the works of Virginia Woolf. Are women, like the asides slipped into parentheses, parenthetical to humanity? Are Emily's breasts like the curves of the parentheses and must be held, themselves, within parentheses? It is all both heady and visceral, with a satisfying ending in a world that never satisfies.
"Tomorrowland" takes place in the TV studios of a children's show, 'Emily's Room.' The play's protagonist, Anna, is the show's lead writer. She is assailed by the show's producer and director who want the change the program's direction. Meanwhile, Anna is assailed from within, haunted by a crisis in her personal life that must not mingle with the show's goals. But Beber weaves together all these elements to create a piece of theatre that explores the virtues of fantasy (the virtual worlds) over reality. In her own life, Anna left one reality, deeming it unreal, to create another, which relies on the unreal to generate real profits. Meanwhile, the young (unseen) subject of the children's show is growing up too fast. The breasts that have become prominent in this 13 year old actress render her useless. Should she be replace by a boy as the show's focal point? Should she simply wear overalls and other camouflage that will hide her new, womanly curves? Is womanhood dismissed by this conundrum? Meanwhile, we get glimpses of Anna's abandoned doctoral dissertation, on the use of parentheses in the works of Virginia Woolf. Are women, like the asides slipped into parentheses, parenthetical to humanity? Are Emily's breasts like the curves of the parentheses and must be held, themselves, within parentheses? It is all both heady and visceral, with a satisfying ending in a world that never satisfies.
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