Writings belong of David Finnigan

Interplay wrap-up

August 24, 2009 on 5:29 pm | In Uncategorized |

So World Interplay was fairly extraordinary. 50 playwrights from around the world locked in a hellish backpacker’s hostel so ridden with herpes that we were afraid to touch anything that wasn’t each other for 12 days. And in the midst of it all, plays. Incredible plays. I’ll provide more thoughts as I go through them all, but of the 15 or so that I’ve read so far, here are some initial highlights.

Ms Borglund taught me that growing up is messy.

Hanna Borglund’s In Tina’s Head. Hanna is a 25-year old writer from Stockholm and In Tina’s Head is a 60-minute monologue about a young woman’s attempts to comprehend the impact that her relationship with an older man had on her when she was a girl. That doesn’t really give you any sense of it, though, it’s not that straightforward in any sense. It’s skewed. It veers from one-sided re-enactments of key moments in Tina’s life to bile-spitting interviews conducted with Tina’s sister and rival, to manic self-glorification. All of which is muddied by the fact that Tina is also playing the lead character in a (fictional?) play called Miss, about a female teacher who conducts an affair with a student.

There’s no easy way to say for sure what’s happening in the play, except that all these warped fragments provide brief glimpses into the inner life of a raw, unbalanced psyche. Except except except maybe we’re all just as raw and unbalanced as Tina. Maybe there’s no such thing as a normal, healthy sexual awakening. For better or worse, I identified a lot with Tina’s frantic, contradictory self-justifications. And who hasn’t analysed their love life for some kind of pattern or another?

TINA: Look - my make-out lists. I’ve been collecting make-outs since high school. Look at this one: Ages. And this list, it’s my favourite one: All my hairstyles. And with this conclusion: I get to make-out the most when I have short hair. And the statistics: During which season do I get to make-out the most? Summer. Which difference in age is most common? Two years older.

Gamerman: emotionally mature and so forth.

Ira Gamerman Split. Ira’s the hyper-articulate frontman of a raggedly elegant indie outfit named Even So and an unnecessarily sensitive and inciteful writer. From Baltimore. Or somewhere. Split is a relationship story about the break-up of one relationship and the beginning of another, but it’s not strained or awkward or awful because it’s genuinely fucking hilarious. The protagonist is coached through the intricacies of relationship politics (including my favourite scene; ROUTINE VIRGINITY TAKING BACKFIRES) by two imaginary friends: Vince Vaughn circa-Swingers and Mr Eskimo.

ADAM: Are you really an Eskimo?
MR. ESKIMO: No. Eskimos murdered my parents and enslaved me for years. Mr. Eskimo is my slave name. I don’t have a real name anymore.
ADAM: Wow. That’s-um. That’s pretty nuts.
MR. ESKIMO: Yes. But they’ll get theirs… IN HELL!

One of the first hits when I typed ‘Glyn Roberts’ into Google image search.

Glyn Roberts’ Shitzerland. This is the true demonstration of the power of the playwright. Roberts is a Melbourne writer who has spent a number of years as a politically aware dilettante drifter in the guts of Western Europe, and Shitzerland is like what you’d write when you know a lot of things about a lot of things and decide that you just don’t care any more. It’s more or less the story of a woman who wakes from a coma in a private hospital in Switzerland and gradually comes to learn about the circumstances which led to her being there. Really, though, it’s a fascinating example of a writer who has created a group of truly unloveable characters, and then delights in torturing them. It’s freezing cold, razor-sharp and utterly brutal.

Odette: He looks after you Isabel, you can’t go 50 metres without our help.
Isabel: I ran three kilometres the other day.
Odette: That’ll be the Negro in you I suspect. But when you collapsed whilst trying to remove your own heart with a stick, that was completely French.
Isabel: Practice that’s all. I’m Ukrainian.
Odette: Then I’m surprised you bothered to use a stick.