Play Cycles

This is way, way out of order, but I'll see if I can just get my scattered thoughts down (and close a bunch of open browser tabs).

I'd say that there are basically three sorts of play cycles (here I am considering anything with three or more plays in it, so Angels in America won't make the cut).  First, there are strict trilogies (or tetralogies and beyond) with quite a few shared characters.  Sometimes there is a significant passage of time, and sometimes the action is compressed into a day or a week, with quite a few variations as the number of works increases (i.e. some compressed works intermingled with ones with longer timespans).  Actually, in rare cases the passage of time is the main feature in a linked series of plays, and the cycle may span a century or more, with naturally only a few characters in common, though a family history may be covered by the plays.  Second, there are groups of works with strong thematic overlaps but no shared characters.  Third, there are plays that are set in one city or region but with generally little else in common.

I generally find the last category fairly boring, unless the same events are approached from different angles.  Annie Baker's The Vermont Plays (The Aliens, Circle Mirror Transformation, Body Awareness, and Nocturama) certainly doesn't succeed for me as any kind of meaningful cycle, even though I liked The Aliens a great deal when I finally saw Coal Mine's Toronto production.

It looks like I managed to miss the various Chicago premieres of Craig Wright's Pine City, MN plays -- Molly's Delicious, Orange Flower Water, The Pavilion and Melissa Arctic -- but they also do not appear to really have any unifying theme or shared characters.

A third loose quartet is the Quannapowitt Quartet, four one-act plays by Israel Horovitz set near Wakefield, MA.  Interestingly, they are designed to be paired with the Alfred Trilogy, which is a much tighter set of plays with a core character, Alfred Webber, also set in Wakefield, MA.  Now I've certainly never heard of any performances of these plays, and they seem to have essentially completely dropped out of the repertoire.  

In general, it is hard enough seeing specific plays that one is hoping to see that seeing a play cycle (and in the proper order!) is essentially impossible.  When I get around to discussing August Wilson, I have some specific comments about this.  I have to wonder if it is just an act of enormous hubris (and perhaps even a bit of contempt for any potential audience) to write a play cycle that simply will never be performed in its entirety.

I'll move next to the more thematically linked cycles.

I'm not entirely sure whether Seán O'Casey viewed his Dublin Trilogy as a true trilogy, or if they are grouped together simply because these tragicomedies set in Dublin or because they are the only O'Casey plays in print in North America (a slight exaggeration).  At any rate, the plays are The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). When I skimmed Juno and the Paycock, I found myself loathing the character of Captain Jack so much that it is hard to image I will actually watch it.  I somehow missed Toronto Irish Players doing The Shadow of a Gunman, but I did manage to catch The Abbey Players on tour with a very interesting (and postmodern) production of The Plough and the Stars, which for my money is the best of the three plays.

Sam Shepard's Family Trilogy ranks fairly high up there, at least according to critics (personally I've never been much of a fan of Shepard's work). The trilogy includes Curse of the Starving Class (1976), Buried Child (1979), and True West (1980), although at least some critics contend that it is actually a quintet of plays, adding in Fool for Love (1983) and A Lie of the Mind (1985).  I do think most and perhaps all of these plays take place in Texas or certainly the American West writ large.

Perhaps inspired by Shepard, I'd say that Martin McDonagh's "Galway Trilogy" -- The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West -- focuses on characters deeply at odds with one another, and where familial bonds are too constricting, leading to conflict.  I'm pretty sure I had a chance to catch The Beauty Queen of Leenane, most likely in Chicago, but I just wasn't in the right frame of mind.  Of the three plays, the only one I think I would actually enjoy is A Skull in Connemara, so I'll keep an eye out for that one.

I'm not familiar with the Quiara Alegría Hudes's Elliot Trilogy, a triptych about war and addiction.  It is comprised of Elliot: A Soldier's Fugue, Water by the Spoonful and The Happiest Song Plays Last.  I suspect that these are actually linked through this Elliott character, but clearly I need to investigate more before passing any judgement.

Now I've reached the interlinked plays, which are for me the most interesting type of play cycle.

Arguably, the original Mystery Plays, such as those in the Wakefield or York Cycles, covering all the greatest hits from the Old Testament and then many, many episodes from the New Testament, have only a few characters carried over across the whole cycle (essentially God and Lucifer) but there is considerable thematic unity.

In the course of writing his history plays, Shakespeare actually produced a double tetralogy.  First, Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2 and Henry V.  Then Henry VI, Parts 1-3 and Richard III.  Interestingly, Richard II is not seen nearly as often as Henry IV (Pts 1 and 2) and Henry V.  And Henry VI is almost never staged, but Richard III is very often performed.  I have not actually seen Richard II, but have seen all the others, though it was a truncated version of Henry VI that was squeezed into a single evening!

In terms of practicality, almost all productions of Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (which is actually a trilogy - Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted) are compressed into a single long play.  This is how I saw it staged in Chicago.

While I believe it is somewhat shorter, it appears that Stefano Massini's The Lehman Trilogy is generally intended to be performed in one evening.  This covers a huge swath of history, beginning with an immigrant family coming to America in the 1840s and leading up to the collapse of Lehman Brothers.  I'm not even sure this has made it to New York yet, but it's something that would likely interest me.

Tarell Alvin McCraney's The Brother/Sister Plays is three plays usually broken into two evenings, though it could be done in a single day.  The plays are The Brothers Size, In the Red and Brown Water, and Marcus, or the Secret of Sweet. I was able to see this done at Steppenwolf.  Last year, Soulpepper brought The Brothers Size to Toronto, though as far as I know, they didn't do the other two in the cycle. In general, I thought this was a powerful, provocative set of plays, but I strongly disliked the convention of having the characters read off most of their stage directions. I found it deeply alienating and quite frankly would probably be even more alienating to the audience that McCraney is presumably trying to reach than to a middle-class white audience used to such postmodern tics.

In terms of all day extravaganzas, I've made it through two. In Chicago, Beau O'Reilly put on all three parts of The Madelyn Trilogy over most of a day at the Atheneum Theatre in 2007.  The Coast of Utopia was the other.

Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia Trilogy (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage) tells the story of Russian intellectuals who paved the way for the Bolshevik revolution, focused most strongly on Alexander Herzen.  I knew as soon as I heard about it making waves in London and then New York, I would want to see it.  As far as I know, it has never played in Chicago.  I learned that Berkeley's Shotgun Players were starting to put on the plays one each year, and I wrote them and found out that the plan in two years' time was indeed to put on the entire trilogy, with a couple of days where they would do the entire thing in a marathon (just as was done in New York).  I marked my calendar and waited.  And then when the time came, I flew down from Vancouver, though I wasn't in fact the audience member that travelled the furthest to catch the shows!  It was a pretty amazing day of theatre and did live up to my expectations.  If I recall correctly, at least a few of the scenes from Shipwreck are told from a completely different perspective, filling in the action from Voyage.  But that is something you would probably only pick up on if watching or reading them in a very short amount of time.  Those of us who made it through the marathon got a button.  I actually located mine just a few weeks ago.  It is misplaced again, but when it turns up, I'll scan and add to the post. 

The Coast of Utopia would have been right up the old Soulpepper's alley, and I kept hoping it would make it to Toronto.  Now it won't fit at all with the new mandate at Soulpepper, and I find myself increasingly at odds with the company and will almost certainly never subscribe again.  I missed Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests Trilogy (1973) by a single season, and they have essentially dropped Ayckbourn from their repertoire entirely, so the only way I'll likely ever see this is on video unfortunately.  The plays cover one weekend, each set in a different part of Norman's sister-in-law Annie's house: the dining room (Table Manners), the living room (Living Together) and of course the garden (Round and Round the Garden).

I have no idea if Lanford Wilson's The Talley Trilogy (Fifth of July, Talley’s Folly and Talley and Sons) could be done in a single day or would benefit from such treatment.  

Apparently, the 9 one-acts in Robert Schenkkan's The Kentucky Cycle were indeed intended to be seen as a 6 hour extravaganza (or perhaps in two 3-hour blocks): Masters of the Trade,Courtship of Morning Star, The Homecoming, Ties That Bind, God's Great Supper, Tall Tales, Fire in the Hole, Which Side Are You On? and The War On Poverty make up the cycle.  Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize, this lasted less than a month on Broadway and was essentially consigned to the shadows of history by Angels in America.  Looking over the reviews, this looks like a series that I might read some day but probably would not seek out to actually watch in performance.

George F. Walker has quite a few linked plays.  His “film noir” Power Plays -- Gossip, Filthy Rich, and The Art of War -- all feature the anti-heroic detective Tyrone Power.  Then there is a trilogy about a family living in the East End -- Criminals in Love (1984), Better Living (1987) and Escape from Happiness (1991).  I saw Escape from Happiness at Alumnae Theatre and liked it quite a bit, and I keep hoping that the other two will pop up, or better still a company will try to program all of them in sequence.  Some critics include Better Living and Beautiful City thematically in this East End cycle, but they are definitely much more loosely linked.

Then there is the Bobby and Tina trilogy - Tough!, Moss Park and then a much later sequel The Damage Done.  I actually did see The Damage Done but was extremely frustrated that very poor publicity meant that I missed out on a chance to see a double bill of Tough! and Moss Park.  Much more recently, he has a new trilogy linked by location (a housing project, most likely on the East Side of Toronto): The Chance, Kill the Poor and Her Inside Life.  This is one that I have managed to see all the plays.

Finally, Walker has written Suburban Motel which is actually six one-act plays with a handful of linked characters.  While I have not had much luck catching this (with Ryerson screwing up my tickets), I believe I have seen 3 of the 6.  I figure once Canadian theatres start reopening, there is a moderate chance I'll be able to catch the Bobby and Tina trilogy (as it is often programmed as theatre aimed at teens) and perhaps gradually pick up the rest of Suburban Motel.  Here's hoping anyway.  

At this point, I am shifting to play cycles that most likely could not be seen even in a single marathon event.

First, there is Horton Foote's The Orphans' Home Cycle (Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale, The Widow Claire, Courtship, Valentine's Day, 1918, Cousins, and The Death of Papa).  This cycle is quite autobiographical and has many shared characters across the plays.  I recall several years back this was supposed to be reprinted in one or perhaps two volumes, but nothing ever came of it.

Second, there are a series of Canadian history plays called The History of the Village of the Small Huts by Michael Hollingsworth. Depending on how it is broken up and reconfigured there are up to 21 plays in the cycle: New France (Parts I-IV), The British (Parts I-IV), The Mackenzie Papineau Rebellion, Confederation, The Red River Rebellion, Canadian Pacific Scandal, The Saskatchewan Rebellion, Laurier, The Great War, The Life and Times of Mackenzie King, WWII, The Cold War, Trudeau & the FLQ, Trudeau & the PQ and The Life & Times Of Brian Mulroney.  These are put on exclusively by Toronto's Video Cabaret, as far as I know.  I've seen The Great War, the two Trudeau plays (so excellent) and a mashup of Confederation through The Saskatchewan Rebellion over two evenings.  They were supposed to do The Cold War last year, and assuming they survive the pandemic, I expect that's what they will pick up with.  Assuming I stay in Toronto and they stay in business, I likely will eventually catch all the plays in the cycle.  I did recommend to them that they try to do archival recordings of these shows, but that was a bit beyond their capabilities at the time.

Finally, finally, we come to August Wilson's The Pittsburgh Cycle where he managed to write 10 plays, one for each decade, representing the Black experience in the Twentieth Century.  I will list the plays by the decade that each represents:

• Gem of the Ocean (1900s) 
• Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1910s) 
• Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1920s)
• The Piano Lesson (1930s) 
• Seven Guitars (1940s) 
• Fences (1950s) 
• Two Trains Running (1960s) 
• Jitney (1970s)
• King Hedley II (1980s ) 
• Radio Golf (1990s)

Clearly, this is a massive, massive achievement, but even for a company that wanted to devote an entire season to August Wilson, they most likely could only get halfway through the cycle.  I'm pretty sure I had the opportunity to see Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, but I thought that because there are at least some connections between the plays, I would be better off trying to see them in sequence.  Looking back, that was somewhat foolish, and I definitely should have tried to catch Gem of the Ocean at least.  August Wilson productions definitely crop up quite frequently in Chicago, and I did see a staged reading of The Piano Lesson.  And I saw Soulpepper put on Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, though I have to admit I didn't really like the plot that much.*  This is a case where the most feasible way of experiencing the plays would be to just put on a series of staged readings (perhaps while waiting for quarantine to end...), but I know so very few Black actors in Toronto that it seems like a pipe dream.  In the meantime, I will try to sit down and read the plays in order (though it is surprisingly hard to put my hands on a copy of Radio Golf, at least until Robarts reopens to the general public).

Stepping back, I've had some success seeing all the plays in a cycle (most notably Stoppard and McCraney) but far more often I've only caught one or two plays out of a cycle.  For someone who goes to the theatre as much as I do, to have so little success in filling in these gaps (and then the frustration that ensues) really speaks to the questionable logic behind writing linked plays in the first place.

* While I didn't like this play much (mostly because I thought Ma Rainey treated her band quite shabbily), I see that Chadwick Boseman's last movie is going to be a Netflix production of Ma Rainey, and I'll probably eventually watch it out of respect for him.  On a slightly more disappointing note, I see that I could have caught the revamped production of Jitney at the Goodman Theatre in 1999, not long before we moved to Brooklyn.  I don't really have a good explanation for skipping over the various Goodman productions of Wilson's plays, other than wanting to see them in the "right order."  It may well be one of the biggest lost opportunities of my theatre-going career.