Months into this pandemic, Seattle’s theatres are still dark and the Central Library’s amazing play file is still behind closed doors. Nonetheless, there are still ways for you to access play scripts virtually and stay engaged with some stimulating contemporary theatre as we all await the theatres’ re-openings. Here are three plays that are available to you even during the library’s closure as E-books on OverDrive.
Sweat by Lynn Nottage. Nottage is one of the strongest and most influential playwrights of our time, and her 2015 play Sweat, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is shining evidence of this. The play takes place in a bar in Reading, Pennsylvania and focuses on the struggles of the working class of that area. It explores problems of income inequality, gentrification, and racism among the people in that community, and it also jumps between different moments in time show the evolution of these problems over almost a decade. It is certainly a biting portrait of what economic oppression looks like in the 21st century, and its entanglement with many other social injustices. Sweat was to have opened the 2020 Season at Seattle’s ACT Theatre.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Based on the book of the same title, The Year of Magical Thinking is a one-woman show based on Didion’s experiences with grief after the tragic death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and needing to care for her very ill daughter, Quintana Roo, in the same year. While the book, which was published in 2005, only chronicles the year after John’s death, the play expands on Didion’s experiences with grief by also dealing with Quintana’s death in late 2005 (which Didion later processed in another book, Blue Nights, published in 2011). It is a haunting monologue that offers some moving meditations on love and loss in instances of dramatic tragedy.
Fences by August Wilson. Though perhaps not “contemporary” in the truest sense of the word, the legendary August Wilson’s Fences is nevertheless a modern classic from the 20th century and a very important piece of Black American theatre. Notably, it was also recently turned into a feature film by starring Denzel Washington (who also directed) and Viola Davis, and the movie’s excellent critical reception demonstrates how valuable this story still is today. Written in 1985 and set in the 1950s, the play tells the story of an African American family living in Pittsburgh and the various challenges each family member faces due to racism and segregation, and examines how these external forces insidiously affect their interpersonal relationships as well.
~ Posted by Hannah P.
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