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In the first issue the reader is invited into all manner of seemingly impossible scenarios—a wedding taking place inside of a cake that's also a hockey puck whizzing through a raucous game; in the cockpit of two race cars speeding around a NASCAR track, headed for the finish, father and son drivers rivaling for the win; darting between the constellations; inside of an ancient castle; dashing from a concession stand through a dessert and into the mirage of a lake; the Lincoln Theatre at the time of Lincoln's assassination; a conversation between an egg and a broom; a museum inside of an Airstream trailer. Each scenario is described in its own peculiar way, fonts and notation shift as quickly as the pages turn. This is, by no means, your typical literary journal. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Play A Journal of Plays, now in its third issue, began publication in Spring of 2003 under the helm of editors Sally Oswald and Jordan Harrison.  The two began the journal at the conclusion of their graduate studies at Brown University, where both were pursuing degrees in playwriting. Playwriting is one of the primary reasons that this journal is so unique. No other journal that I, or the editors, could find is devoted entirely to plays—no poetry, no stories, no essays, reviews or commentary. Play is just plays, front to back. There are a handful of journals that will occasionally, or even regularly include, playscripts, but no others in the US are devoted entirely to the form. The closest I could come in my research were a couple of international journals, such as the Polish magazine Dialog, which actively publishes contemporary Polish and international works, but they also publish articles and criticism along with the scripts.
One of the most exciting points of departure for Play A Journal of Plays, however, is not that it's full of playscripts, but that it's full of the kind of work that you rarely see on stage, let alone on the page. The journal is devoted entirely to experimental work, that of both established and emerging artists. The pieces range from Mark Tardi's Reciprocal of Rain—a piece that gives almost no indication of how it should be staged or who the characters in the piece might be, to a whole portfolio of puppetry pieces, to dialogue-based works like that of David Greenspan.
The nature of experimental theatrical work means that it rarely receives long runs at a theatre and the pieces typically come and go from one city or another having been witnessed only by relatively small audiences. This makes it very difficult for artists working in this type of theatre to access their peers, and also for audience members who live in a one place or another to track the work of an artist that they may have seen once at a festival or a one-off performance. Play offers artists and audiences alike an opportunity to continually engage with a community of artists pushing the boundaries of theatre. Lisa D'Amour, one of the artists whose work, along with her collaborator Katie Pearl, has been published in the latest issue of the journal, noted in our telephone interview, "It really has the potential to open up a community and inspire a lot of artists that may feel like they're working in isolation…they can all of a sudden realize that they're working in a community."
The Same But Different
With its mission to publish experimental theatrical works, every issue of Play A Journal of Plays is very different. Each one looks and feels different, not only in its size and shape, but also in its use of fonts and notation. For the first issue each play uses a different font and a different notation style. This can be a bit daunting if you're spending a few hours with that issue. But as co-editor Jordan Harrison put it when I sat down to talk about the journal with he and Sally Oswald, "In the first issue we really wanted to emphasize difference." He went on to point out that, "one of the fundamental ideas of the journal is that by finding new ways of notating plays we can find new ways of putting them on."
Neither Harrison nor Oswald are particular fans of the way scripts look on the page—i.e. the conventional inclusion of a stage manager's notes as the stage directions, tucked in among the standard formatted dialogue under or beside the character's names. They have often found that the work they were interested in seeing and publishing in the journal was "too large to be captured in playscripts," according to Oswald. Because of this fact, a large part of their work as editors is helping the artists they publish to arrive at a written document that is "a complete experience of its own." In publishing these very distinct but highly theatrical pieces they are eager to capture the experience of audiences entering an unfamiliar space, "the feeling of being unsteadily guided." Each piece achieves this in its own way, ranging from turning the stage directions into part of the narrative, to illustrating some aspect of the production, its movement, or its visual character. And the results can be as illuminating and confounding as the live theatrical works themselves.
For artists like David Greenspan, who has published in two issues of the journal and who I spoke with briefly at the launch party for issue #3, his work required no real formatting changes, as they are almost entirely driven by dialogue. For others, like Lisa D'Amour and Katie Pearl, the process of putting their trilogy onto paper was a long and illuminating process:
"I didn't know what we were going to do, I kind of figured we would cut out all of the references to movement, but Sally loved what it did to her brain, when she was having to read both the words and the directions of the movement, because it started to come to life as something that was definitely not a play. She was asking, how can we figure out a way to keep this in the reading experience, and that's when things started getting really tricky on a pure formatting level because there were stage directions that had to do with the internal life of the character and there were stage directions that had to do with the movement that the men were doing. That's when we started working on a two-column format so that you could know when the men were doing things at the same time as the main character…It was ultimately a very rewarding process."
Dan Hurlin, a puppeteer and the guest editor of the Puppetry Portfolio in issue #2, also had a number of interesting comments to make about the process of putting a work so inherently disconnected with the page onto paper when we spoke by phone. In soliciting works from various puppeteers, he noted, "I was interested in the notebook scribbles, the indecipherable notations we use when we make something." What he received represented a wide variety of things, some works, like that of Basil Twist, read like an artist's shorthand. "[Twist's piece] is a score for one of the four performers" noted Hurlin, though he pointed out that the scores were "created after the fact, for the tour and for training a new puppeteer."
The works by Theodora Skipitares and Ping Chong featured in the Puppetry Portfolio seem also to have come after the fact. Both include artifacts of their productions, primarily in the form of imagery and photos. Others in the portfolio, like Amy Trompetter's The Underworld, Jonathan Berger's Noble Fir, and Hurlin's own Hiroshima Maiden are strongly visual and include storyboards, incorporating the stage images that each artist is trying to create. For Hurlin the experience of editing the portfolio came at a time when he was wrestling with the relationship between puppetry and language: "I think that puppetry is essentially a visual medium—a marriage between design and dance. What a puppet does is move, they don't actually talk…I'm not sure that a published journal is a good proselytizing tool for puppetry." However, Hurlin noted, "it is an instructive exercise to see people's process, no matter what form they're using."
From Page to Stage
As any theatre artist knows, a theatrical manuscript rarely has a direct relationship to the piece that is presented on the stage, even if it's written in standard format and is a more traditional work. Theatre is typically collaborative and sensually dense, something that is heard, seen, felt, smelled and even tasted sometimes. The action between words can often have far greater impact than the words themselves. As Lisa D'Amour's discussion of the development of the her and Katie Pearl's trilogy for Play illustrated, to reconfigure something for the page that captures the experience of the audience is a very different matter than writing a set of instructions for actors, directors and designers.
Stephanie Fleischmann illustrated this point perfectly in her description of the production of the piece that she created for Play's series of plays printed on postcards: "What [Wade Madsen—director and performer] did with it was beautiful. It took my breath away, and though it was very, very far from how I'd imagined the play might come about on a stage, most of all in terms of the visual world/style, there was a truth at the core of what he did which was absolutely of a piece with the postcard. This was a revelation to me. The play as sprung floor, or jumping-off point for a 3-D exploration."
Theatre, particularly in its more experimental forms, demands and exists within the context of constant change. Works change day to day, let alone year to year. Neither Oswald nor Harrison have any conceit that what is published in their journal is in any way an authoritative text for the piece's they describe. Using Alice Tuan's piece AJAX, published in issue #2, as an example, Oswald noted, "This is what Alice Tuan thought AJAX was in 2004 and she probably learned a bunch of things after that…this is what she agreed on at that time was AJAX." Theatre artists, writers in particular, develop their work through production and each production is instructive in its own way. This doesn't necessarily mean that the script will change vastly as a result of a production, but simply that, unlike novels or short stories, plays must always adapt themselves to the production at hand. The journal Play is a great way for its readers to tap into the thought processes, struggles and imagination of experimental theatre artists as they move through this process.
What is interesting about the pieces featured in Play and also in their postcard project is that there is an emphasis on making the diverse aesthetic and narrative conventions on display seem plausible. Oswald and Harrison are explicitly interested in work that can be produced: "In our call for work for the postcard plays we asked for work that could actually be done by somebody on planet Earth." For one of the most seemingly unproducible pieces published in their journal, Mark Tardi's Reciprocal of Rain, they followed the script with a brief essay by Sarah Ruhl, describing her own staging of the piece for a directing workshop. This rare inclusion of an essay drives home the point that while they are trying to discover news ways of notating experimental work, they are also deeply invested in that work being produced. These pieces are in no way intended to live solely on the page.
Taking the Next Step
Oswald and Harrison are nothing if not enthusiastic about the kind of work they are publishing. They regularly seek out new material, attending performances at a wide variety of venues in New York as well as in other areas of the country which they frequent, such as Austin, Minneapolis, San Diego and Seattle. Though a large number of the works featured in the journal have been performed in New York, there are many that have gone up elsewhere, "We think of this as a national publication." Distribution is also an important part of their mission—trying to ensure that the journal is available to people throughout the US.
Not content to wait to publish work in the printed journal (as print publishing is a notoriously slow process), they are embarking on a new web journal, in conjunction with Play, which will be launching this fall. Robert Quillen Camp, another writer for the journal, has come on board as the web editor. The site will feature a selection of pieces that visitors can listen to, watch, and/or read. "We want it to feel like a gallery," Harrison noted, with a select number of works for each iteration. A handful of essays by Sarah Ruhl will be among the first things to be published online. In addition, they have recently announced their latest call for submissions, soliciting titles for plays that contributors wish someone else would write. The complete list will then be published on the site. This new venture will no doubt tease out yet more ways of describing the theatrical space and experience.
As for the pieces already published in the journal, it's difficult to pin down the new paths that they've taken as a result of the publication. None of the artists that I spoke with had received any requests for work as a direct result of the publication, but many noted that this was hardly their expectation in publishing and that the ripple effects were difficult to track. Both Dan Hurlin and Lisa D'Amour described stories of unexpected encounters with readers of the journal, including one that Katie Pearl (D'Amour's collaborator) experiences while having lunch in Austin, Texas, with a band that was visiting from Ohio: "All of a sudden they said, 'Oh, my God, you're Katie Pearl? We love the trilogy. It's so amazing, we read it in Play A Journal of Plays.'" D'Amour went on, "I think when I put [the print-version of the trilogy] together I anticipated that the audience would be theatre people who already knew me and when I heard that story I was like, oh wow, this is really opening up a kind of work to people that might just accidentally encounter it."
While it's near impossible to track who exactly is reading a particular magazine, it's probably safe to assume that a large number of the people buying Play A Journal of Plays are working in the field already. Nevertheless, it's exciting to see that there will be a new venue for audiences and artists alike to experience a kind of work that is very difficult to categorize and that effects audiences in ways that are very difficult to articulate.
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