Two articles have come out in the past few days that make us feel caught up in some cultural zeitgeist. The first came up on the Pig Iron blog today about a new Annie Baker show at Playwrights Horizons called "The Flick". Pig Iron linked to it in reference to their recent show "Zero Cost House." In our world, however, it all felt hyper-relevant to "Enlightenment": a three-person play, two men and a woman, about a boring job filled with lots of stillness. Annie Baker's play is about people who work in a movie theater rather than an art gallery, other than that. . . The similarities aside, the article is all about how much audiences have hated the play because of all the silence. Weird seeing as all the feedback from our showings was to add more silence. Perhaps Playwrights Horizons doesn't have the right audience for our show either. . .
Another amazing piece of press that has come out in the past seven days is a huge spread on museum security guards in the New York Times last Thursday. It held everything that thematically is our show.
When combined these two pieces of writing somehow create the play we haven't completed yet. This either bodes amazingly for us and our piece: we are clearly creating the totally most current show of the moment in the moment it wants to be made. Or it's awful: we are just locked behind some sort of cultural curve and by the time we complete our show everyone will be into something else, like plays featuring only live snakes as actors or something. People will wonder how we ever got away with being such copycats. Time will tell. Best just keep making.
Click here to read the article on the silent play:
