Editors Note

Ryan Douglass, Jeanmarie Higgins, Michael Schweikardt

Usually, a playwright’s text inspires a designer to imagine a world in the form of a scenic model. Volume 2 of Prompt explores ​worlds that might be imagined if designers’ scenic models inspired playwrights to create new texts. In our current issue, a figure in Joseph Lavy’s play, Pityriasis Rosea, asks, “Why be faithful to the playwright when the playwright will not be faithful to you?” Issue 2 continues this conversation about what happens when the playwright comes second in the order of theatre collaborators, responding to the discarded models of scene designers with a play. This issue is further defined by monologue, as we have chosen models that contain a single figure within them--in cardboard, wire, or as a projection.

In Promise by Lucinda McDermott, a 97-year-old woman is caught within Brian Clinnin’s set. Despite the downstage paper figure of a man dressed in “business casual”(this figure an object likely displaced from another of Clinnin’s scenic models?) McDermott focuses on the twisty white trees that surround this man, and as she does, creates a 97-year-old woman at the edge of dying. As McDermott puts it, this old woman is “woven into the tendrils of scuppernong Mother Vine and  Drift Wood.” And embedded into Clinnin’s discarded world the playwright embeds the very history of race and colonialism of Roanoke Island, North Carolina. 

We are struck by how many of our writers combined the dual prompts of their specific set model and the issue title, “Monologues,” to imagine a last ending. It’s in Raven Monroe’s play title, On Apocalypses: Yggdrasil at the End of the World, whose character lives within James V. Ogden’s scenic world of what look like ancient totems: “A small white figure stands on a vast gridded floor. Delicate branches invade in the space above. Two large decaying metal discs hang suspended from wire” against an expanse of white.  In The Heath, Caridad Svitch uses Richard Finkelstein’s set, an enclosure of shattered glass over darkly lit stairs, with the spun wire figure of a lone man to inspire a Beckettian/Shakepearean character, a lunatic Lear on the heath waiting for someone who never appears. 

From the mythic to the realist, Melody Munitz’s play, Don’t Look Down, imagines designer Melpomene Katakalos’s model (“a metal gridded wall stands at the back with ladders on either side”) quite literally, putting the characters she creates in motion, climbing the ladder to hide from society’s judgment. And in Labyrinth, a lone man sits waiting for a jury’s judgement, at the downstage edge of a wood planked deck, their feet dangling over the edge of Alessia Carpoca’s set. The figure speaks to a beloved, remembering better times, times when he had power--houses of gold, kisses, train hopping.

Finally, in Psalm 104, Erik Ehn responds to Jim Clayburgh’s discarded model. Clayburgh’s model clearly contains scenery from other shows, as “pianos and chairs perch high on a forest of stilts. Behind the largest black piano, a white cut-out figure stands with an arm and a hand outstretched. A wide metal truss hangs precariously over the entire composition.” Here, Ehn imagines a couple on the last day of the world, one partner in outer space as the other stays home. The delight they find in the ending is as unnerving as it is hopeful.

In the second of our Theory Speaks podcast, Samer Al-Saber talks to us about his and Gary English’s editing collaboration on Stories Under Occupation and Other Plays from Palestine. In our far-reaching conversation, Al-Saber talks about performance responses to strife in Palestine this past May, his new play, My Arab, and “representation in solidarity.” We’d like to thank Samer for his thoughts and his time, as well as everyone who contributed to this issue. To the folks who got the issue and podcast ready to go, particularly our intern, Serena Davanzo, thanks! And for his work on Psalm 104, we are grateful to director Joseph Megel. Next up - another set of models with another set of playwright’s responses, this time musicals.