Kate Mulley

I’ve just returned from a trip to London where I caught three shows that were very tied to their native land.

Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art is a charming, well-staged play about art and theatre and creation and collaboration. Set as a play within a play, the action of the play takes place during one rehearsal of a new play about WH Auden and Benjamin Britten at the National Theatre, during which the director has left the stage manager in charge while he attends a conference in Leeds. The actors all have their issues with the play and the playwright. Bennett has an innate ability to create witty, quippy dialogue that made me laugh a lot (despite having gone almost right from Heathrow to the National). It’s also about how closeted sexuality changed  during the 20th century and the play is full of insightful bon mots. It’s a very National play. I sensed some self-congratulation amidst the audience (it was a Sunday matinee after all), but I probably was guilty of it myself. In fact, I was so charmed by the world Bennett created that I bought a signed copy of the play in the bookshop afterwards. Looking back on it a week later, I wonder what I found most moving about it or most powerful, and I cannot recall. The use of Britten’s music was appropriately moving and the acting and design were top-notch. But I kept thinking that this is not a play that could take New York by storm the way that The History Boys did, though, mostly because it’s a play so much about it’s own creation.

The next play I saw was Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. This too is a play that feels as much as an event created for its particular circumstances than anything else and I was disappointed to be seeing it in the West End as opposed at my beloved Royal Court. I had told my father that we were seeing the new English state of the nation play and at the end he said that if this is considered the state of the nation he was glad he wasn’t British. The play almost entirely belongs to Butterworth’s fantastical imagination and how it manifests itself in Johnny “Rooster” Byron, a rebellious, drug dealing squatter who lives in a trailer in a park in Wiltshire. He’s being evicted because of a new estate nearby. The play is chockful of literary, theatrical and regional references and is grand in its scope, but it really only captures one day in Rooster’s life, with his band of misfit children, his sad friend Ginger (of course he’s named Ginger), the local publican and others. In that way it’s actually very similar to The Habit of Art, the scope is grand and yet culturally specific and yet it only takes place during one day (St George’s Day, which is also Shakespeare’s birthday). It’s a stunner of a play, one that makes me want to be more ambitious and more brave with my own writing. I love when that happens.

On Wednesday and Thursday I had the pleasure of seeing Sarah Sigal’s Alice’s Adventures in the New World at the Old Red Lion(full disclosure, Sarah and I were roommates in London). The play follows Alice, a young Irish girl who finds out that her late mother is in fact not dead, but divorced, as she seeks out her mother on an adventure from Victorian London to the Wild West. It’s an all-female cast, an unapologetically feminist play and an absolute delight. I’m still humming songs from the play days later and found a second viewing to be enriching and illuminating (even though it was the result of a cancelled flight back to New York). With influences ranging from Brecht to Edith Wharton to Annie Oakley, the play deftly walks the line between comedy and pathos as the audience grows along with Alice, as she learns that becoming a woman is full of sacrifices and hard decisions. Sarah’s an American, as is the director Jessica Beck, so it’s a very clever piece about discovering life as an American in the UK/Ireland and the reverse. And I realized that if Sarah can write a musical, I can too.

I’m a little late posting about this, but I went to see Clybourne Park at Playwrights Horizons last week and really enjoyed it. I loved The Pain and the Itch when I saw it at the Royal Court back in 2007 and had high hopes for this new play by Bruce Norris. It’s a riff on A Raisin in the Sun. A couple is moving out of their house in Clybourne Park and they find out that a black family has bought the house. 50 years later, in the same house, a white couple hope to renovate and move into the same house. It’s a grim play, with lots of laughs and self-recognition. It plays with stereotypes effectively and efficiently and while I was surprised by what felt like an abrupt end of Act 1, by the beginning of Act 2, I understood its necessity to the structure of the play.

The cast was great, the direction solid, with constant banter, arguing and conflict. A lot of fun to watch and definitely lots of material for post-theatre discussion.

In non-theatrical news, Pierce Brosnan came into the book shop last week and rendered me cotton-mouthed. After he left the information desk, a customer asked if we got celebrities in the shop often, I said “yes, but this was our first Bond.”

I’m also just starting to get myself into my work for Nylon Fusion Collective. I’m both dramaturging their production of Fuente Ovejuna and starting a Writer’s Collective. Applications for the Collective were due today and we have two weeks to select the members. Lots of strong applicants makes it a tough job, but I’m looking forward to reading some plays, getting to know new writers and seeing how we can develop some exciting new work together.

I have a post from a month and a half ago with this title that’s been sitting in my dashboard waiting for me to write it. Other than a few phrases about things I wanted to include, I didn’t really know what I planned to write. But now it feels like time to write something.

Back in December I attended a meeting organized by the Dramatists Guild about gender parity in the theatre. One doesn’t really need to see the statistics to know that the majority of plays produced are written by men, but the ones that are out there are pretty frightening. The meeting was pretty enlightening (and actually reminded me a little of the scene from The Heidi Chronicles where they have the women’s meeting? Would Wendy be proud!). Sometimes it’s really nice to get a group of people in one room to talk about all the issues, perspectives, etc. We had a second meeting in January and I’m a member of the Mentoring committee, which we’re still in the process of defining, but are definitely on the right track. It’s nice to think that I’m actively working to change this, through my writing and through my time and effort with the Guild.

The book shop is another place where this comes up frequently. Recently someone approached me and asked me for a play written by a woman in the past 10 years, for an assignment at NYU. I think I accept more responsibility than I should when customers ask me for help, but I especially did with this one. I hemmed and hawed, wondering what play I could give this 19 year old actress that could really change her view of theatre. I settled on A Number by Caryl Churchill (I think we had run out of Far Away). I now find it interesting that the play that I thought summed of plays by women in the past 10 years is one for two men written by a 70 year old British woman. And that I tried to sell it to the girl by saying “Daniel Craig was in it in London.” I’m hoping she loved it and went out and read more plays by Churchill and recognizes the way that she has changed British (and by extension world) theatre in the past 40 years or so. She was certainly a revelation for me.

And finally, I have a title/concept for a new play and can’t wait to start writing. I love this feeling of burgeoning creativity, it’s been awhile.