Drawing Crosses on a Dusty Windowpane E-Book

Carys D. Coburn

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Modern Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 37

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

'This is a memory, a threnody, a memorial, an elegy, they're all salves when you can't just McCartney and let it be.' A play about losing someone close to you, about the human need to remember and connect. Carys D. Coburn's Drawing Crosses on a Dusty Windowpane was first performed at Galway Theatre Festival in 2016 after a work-in-progress showing at Project Arts Centre as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival 2015.

Leseprobe

Dylan Coburn Gray

DRAWING CROSSESON A DUSTYWINDOWPANE

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Original Production

Note on Text

Drawing Crosses on a Dusty Windowpane

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Boys and Girls opened in 2013, Drawing Crosses on a Dusty Windowpane was written throughout 2014 and 2015, and Citysong was written at the end of 2015. These three plays sum up two very important years of working out what and how and why I wanted to write. (Then MALAPROP – the collaborative outfit I make work with – came along, and everything got a lot more complicated.)

Citysong is the single play I’ve written so far that most embodies everything I’m about as a writer. But you can find the seeds in Boys and Girls. There are things in Boys and Girls too that I would not write now: pop-culture references that were dated the moment I wrote them down, jokes in the voices of young men that can only be so ‘ironically’ sexist if they require you, the audience, to sit there and listen to them. I’m still proud of it as a document of a time in young Irish adulthood. I’m still proud of it for having a kind of nerdy compassion at its heart. I still think there are worse things to aim for than stylish sincerity.

There’s an arc to these three plays. It’s not scale, even though the four people of Boys and Girls become six in Citysong with a detour through monologue for Crosses. I think the arc is me learning to be other people, and the journey is further each time. The work I love is all about truth, moments of unexpected recognition or realisation. The leap into someone else’s experience that all at once takes you home. That said, I’m not mad on writing that is self-consciously #relatable, funnily enough, because I think it often has a conspiratorial subtext.

Don’t we all do this?

Aren’t we all like this?

Which invites the punchline to the old joke:

Who’s ‘we’, white man?

It’s sameness without difference, the leap without the chasm.

If the un-looked-for truth is what you look for, it would be stranger if your writing didn’t sooner or later spiral out from the world you know best and find easiest to write. Meaning writing itself gets harder, but that’s to be expected. The further you want to leap, the more of a run-up you need. Someone once said to me you get one good work out of doing what comes naturally, and from there it’s all learning to be someone else. I think about that a lot. I like that a lot. The idea that the means is the end: connection, which is always a transformation, working at turning ourselves into ourselves who are new.

In art as in life. The one great task! To reach the point where performance becomes.

Dylan Coburn Gray

April 2019

This is the Introduction to Citysong and other plays; the collection in which this play first appears.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Róise and Kris and Ruth and Cian and Steve and Jen and Sarah and Neil and Graham, Colm and Kalle and Stephen and Erin and Linda, Robbie and Emma and Aisling, Sophie Jo and Aoife and Ben and Jim, Brian and Mark and Áine and Erica, Soho and Fringe and Project and ITI and Fishamble and Culture Ireland and Dublin Youth Theatre, Madeline Boughton, Aoife and Leah, Jasmine and Holly, Breffni and Claire and John and Maeve and Molly, the Galvins, my mother, my father, my sister, Carla. And a shout out to Paul. Wish you were here.

D.C.G.

Drawing Crosses on a Dusty Windowpane was first performed at the Mick Lally Theatre, as part of Galway Theatre Festival 2016, after a work-in-progress showing at Project Arts Centre, as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival 2015.

Performer

Claire Galvin

Director

Liam Halligan

Lighting Designer

John Gunning

Sound Designer/Composer

Sean James Garland

Producer/Publicity/Marketing

Carla Rogers

Note on Text

Spaces between blocks of text indicate pauses. These can be filled with music, or action, or left as a moment of consideration with/for the audience.

The audience is always there. If you’re not speaking, you’re listening.