The daughter of an evangelist must come to terms with her own faith and doubt while traveling on the revival circuit in the Great Plains in Majkin Holmquist’s Tent Revival. The aftermath of a rape is depicted for both the assailant’s mother and the victim in Genne Murphy’s The Girl is Chained. Recidivism within a Philadelphia family occurs in a span from the 1980s’ crack epidemic to today’s opioid crisis in Josh Wilder’s Marty and the Hands that Could.
The three new plays, by playwrights graduating from the Yale School of Drama, will have their first-ever productions in the annual Carlotta Festival of New Plays, showing in repertory at the Iseman Theater.
The festival runs from May 9 to May 16.
Maikin Holmquist called Tent Revival “a love letter to Kansas,” where she taught eighth-grade English and staged plays in community theater before pursuing an MFA as a playwright at Yale. The people on the stage — including a figure called the Player who enacts various characters — are people Holmquist knows, the kind of people that aren’t often the subject of drama. And for that reason Holmquist tasked herself with “presenting an accurate picture,” particularly of female characters within a “traditional agricultural community,” without “backing away from difficult problems and people.”
In Holmquist’s view, support of Trump in the 2016 election made the religious conservatism of the Midwest seem “hypocritical.” The relation of “the evangelical movement and U.S. politics” is “a topic I’ve been obsessed with,” she said, “most of my life.” Key to Tent Revival is the experience of a character named Ida, who — at least temperamentally — Holmquist identifies with as “a quiet person,” more private than public. Ida’s father, Robert, lost his farm due to a drought and, shortly after, “heard the call.” Ida then has to consider the meaning of her own faith within the context of her father’s public mission. Ida narrates the story, and “what’s happening on stage” in the play “is her narration.”
“Religion and theater are akin,” Holmquist said, with drama’s suspension of disbelief requiring “a kind of faith.” The theatrical nature of evangelical performers like Robert causes Ida to see her parents, her people and her religion “in a new light.” For Holmquist, the notion of evangelical preachers as “charlatans” is too familiar and “not dramatically interesting.” Robert acts on “good intentions and true belief,” though he is, Holmquist hopes, “a morally complex character.”
Third-year director Rory Pelsue, whose powerful thesis production of Stephen Sondheim’s Passion featured a stripped-down stage, directs Tent Revival on a set that consists of a sweeping drape for the tent, and five chairs. The design relies on the strength of the story and the characterizations without costume changes or scenery. Holmquist calls the approach “metatheatrical,” a way of pointing to the theatrical nature of preaching, but also allowing for the simpler and more direct appeal to the audience of Ida’s voice.
The trial of sexual offender Brock Turner in 2016 was the catalyst for Genne Murphy’s The Girl is Chained. At the time, the playwright was in her second year. She wrote a draft of the play that was met with a strongly favorable reaction among her peers.
“The actors very much wanted to do it,” Murphy said, and gave her “much feedback” that became a part of the process. She wanted to explore “two women, on opposite sides of the assault,” and took some of her inspiration from statements made by Turner’s parents and from the much-publicized victim statement that went viral.
Murphy said she “wrote the first scene the way I felt it,” and that took her play into “two very different theatrical styles.” The first part she described as “dark, absurdist comedy,” and the second part as naturalism. In both parts, the question is “how to work through the complex feelings of the characters” — in Act 1, a mother, husband, and son, and in Act 2, a career woman with her same-sex partner, almost 20 years later. The switch from “heightened theatrical images” in Act 1, set in the late ‘90s, on the eve of the son’s sentencing, to a more straightforward presentation on the eve of an important meeting for the victim, in 2018, is built into the play’s conception.
There are considerable “logistic problems and production challenges,” Murphy said, in creating two entirely different styles in the same play without a break. In choosing this play for production, Murphy said she was swayed by her collaborators who called the play “timely and important” and a “story not told this way before.” The value of the play, for Murphy, is facing “a subject that scares you, something you’re not sure of, where every scene is a hurdle.” Her director on the project should be up to the challenge: Shadi Ghaheri directed a searing production of The Trojan Women at the Yale Summer Cabaret last year as well as an absurd and touching contemporary take on King Lear. Her thesis project, Death of Yazdgerd by Bahram Beyzai, transported viewers to a long ago time and place with stylized speech, acting and effects.
Josh Wilder is “trying to create myth” in his play, Marty and the Hands that Could. His foundation in theater, he said, was the Iliad and Greek theater, and in this play “I went to back to basics, what I know.” With this play, he “finally clicked” with a goal he has had for years: to incorporate the myth of Sisyphus, the ancient Greek who was punished in Hades by having to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back to the bottom — forever.
For Wilder, what he knows also includes life in South Philadelphia. His play is set on a front-stoop in the neighborhood among “people I grew up with,” and takes place over three days. It’s Marty’s 25th birthday and he’s back from a stint in jail, trying to reintegrate with his family, including his father, an uncle and two aunts (all siblings), and his cousin Junior. The hands in the title, Wilder said, “applies to every other character” in the play. “Fresh out of prison, Marty is vulnerable and needs to rely on others.”
In the play, the Sisyphean element could be seen as the cycle of drug busts and addiction that has plagued the family like a curse, so that “an understanding of recidivism and its effects” is key to the play. In terms of staging, Wilder approached the play “like a piece of music” — including original songs — and as a “contemporary tragedy” that let him go back to an early interest, “magical realism and what it means to me.”
He likes when “magic happens onstage and the audience believes it,” as in Gem of the Ocean, his favorite play by August Wilson. Lucie Dawkins, whose thesis show was the complex and multivalent Pentecost by David Edgar, directs Wilder’s play; trained in classical languages at Oxford, Dawkins brings a knowledge of ancient tragedy to Wilder’s contemporary version.
The three playwrights each bring diverse interests and backgrounds to the same project: writing a great new play that speaks to today’s audiences.
The Carlotta Festival runs at the Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel St., from May 9 to May 16. Visit the Yale School of Drama’s website for tickets and more information.
