MEGAN #19
THIS NEWSLETTER IS ABOUT PLAYS AND PLAYWRITING 🇺🇸
(NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH MY PREVIOUS NEWSLETTER ABOUT MY EMBARRASSING LOVE FOR MUSICAL THEATRE AND SINGING!!!)
SHORT:
I like writing plays. I like reading plays. If you think plays are boring, respond to this and I will send you some NOT BORING ONES!
(if you don’t like those I will follow up with a long spiel about well you WOULD like them if you SAW them ONSTAGE because although plays r a LIteRary ART it’s actually sO important to see them on their feet yada yada)
MEDIUM:
I like writing plays about contradictory spectrums of personhood. About religion and belief and affinity groups and flipping boxes over and over again until you don’t know what direction you’re facing.
What I love most about theater is that it forces people to sit in long-form, nuanced, reflective space. We often package identity in a tight, branded bow, but theatre lets you blow that wide open. People have to sit and watch your characters sort through jagged, incongruent pieces of human gunk.
During my senior year of college, I was in desperate need of such sorting. I had completed Media Studies requirements. I graduated from Brown’s Swimming and Diving program. I was doing sketch comedy as a faux-confident lesbian who was addicted to using humor as a coping mechanism. I could tell you about Foucault and John Mulaney and the history of Saturday Night Live, but I could tell you nothing about myself.
Then I took a playwriting class. I was obsessed with the way my professors and classmates thought about why things should be plays and how they could be plays and the importance of bodily performance– not just form, not just content, but how they worked together to create grounded, embodied experiences.
Through playwriting, I’m learning how to slow down and reconnect with my physical self (as opposed to frantic, cerebral, “heady” self that people lauded throughout my young life).
LONG:
The first play I had a full-body, “holy shit” connection to was God’s Ear by Jenny Schwartz. The play is a wave of phraseology and terminology – and it hit me as such. I am a compulsive person who thinks cyclically (oftentimes in very frustrating, detrimental ways). God’s Ear was able to transform brain-bursts and grief into a story that was palpable and communicative without Schwartz having to do all the hand-holding. It was fragmented and messy but had extreme emotional clarity. I was hooked. I made it my goal to loosen my grip on “message” in my own writing– let the emotion inform movement (<— awesome, Megan, u are so DEEP!)
As I previously mentioned (above), I like writing plays about contradictory spectrums of personhood. About belief and affinity groups and flipping boxes until you don’t know what direction you’re facing. Part of this stems from my own nonbinary identity and frustration with the fixed and the formal (I guess???). The other part relates to what I find most exciting about theater as a medium: how you can force people to sit and watch long-form, oft-unpolished interactions (a.k.a. sorta trap ppl in their seats).
The first play I wrote, Sarah Sits Shiva For Herself, is Jewish and at times I worried it was too Jewish but now I’m like actually I think it’s amazing.
I love Jewish dialogue. I love how it ping-pongs, spirals, and is brutally honest yet frustratingly withholding.
I love how Jewish death rituals make you sit and unpack a human life. I tried to heighten this with the form of the play. Make the audience move through a similar sitting, settling, and grieving process. The characters do not leave the space. Nobody else enters. Everyone must sit with cancer and old age and and edible arrangements and lesbian sex until someone calls it a night.
It’s a personal objective of mine to play with content and form in a way that only serves to heighten my writing. I try to weave movement, visuals, and music through pieces in a way that feels diegetically or extra diegetically earned and embedded.
This newsletter sounds like a college paper. WHATEVER. Keep reading if you CARE! If you DARE! (what am I saying… )
When working on Dox Modern Middle, my video-dance-drag play, I sifted through and interrogated how each prayer, dance, video, and interlude served the piece. The whole play is a drag show, but the interludes and pauses are just as important as the flash-glam-transformative drag numbers. I looked to work like Clare Barron’s Dance Nation and You Got Older for help on clarifying and integrating transitions that felt important, not just necessary ( <— AGAIN 2 GREAT & NOT BORING PLAYS! idk who I’m angry at… but I just AM!)
Another objective of mine is to use comedy (stupid, dark, high-brow, low-brow, you name it) as a means of furthering truth. I am interested in human comedy and communication, not robotical, wordsmithery demonstrating my personal prowess or scientific joke writing skills. I want characters to make jokes and be proud of them. Be funny, but funny in their world.
As a whole, I hope to build on the queer-Jewish legacy of something like Indecent (or just like… theater? I DUNNO I FEEL WEIRD SAYING INDECENT - that play wrecked me and is just… so good)… ANYWAY I hope to build on the queer-Jewish legacy of Indecent-like-things through new writing that skews modern and glitchy (but has a deep awareness of the past). Queer, trans, and Jewish writing owes so much to its forebearers. I hope that each of my plays demonstrates an appreciation for what came before. For the history and forms that we’re constantly re-contextualizing ourselves in. A bit of old and a bit of new.
THIS WAS HUMILIATINGLY EARNEST. WHAT A TWIST / SHIFT FROM THE USUAL. HOPE YOU ENJOYED THAT! If not, OH WELL!
I hope nobody I know reads this.
That’s not true.
Is it?
Idk.
To quote a brilliant MFA student who I had a crush on at Brown and definitely reads this newsletter:
Thank you for reading this newsletter! Reminder that you can still fill out This Survey with your thoughts, questions, prompts, etc! Wanna read the older, FUNNIER ones? Click here!
-Meg
Social- @megspope@mpopetweets
Venmo- @mpope-venmo-26
Website- meganpopework.com
Donate to The Audre Lorde Project
^ all the world’s a STAGE ETC. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This was so profound and I've added God's Ear to my reading list! I loved how honest and vulnerable this felt, and I can only imagine that it must have been really hard. Thanks for this.