Clare Barron is explaining, over a crackly phone line, her hopes for Dance Nation. In a previous interview I’d read, she said that “my ultimate theatrical experience is for everyone to cry”, a line which spoke to me, summoning up the power of being in a dark room where everyone’s mutely sobbing. But as we talk, she elaborates that “I want to write plays where people have an extremely emotional experience, but I don’t want to have one moment where we all cry. I want it to be a surprise, that’s sort of like my whole thing.”
3 comments:
Reading an article like this just gets me so excited about the future of theatre. I love to read stories about playwrights stepping outside of the box content wise and writing shows about what really matters to them and about their experiences instead of what they just think the audience wants to see. I have heard of Dance Nation and seen a couple monologues from it, but I have never read the entire show, and am now very excited to read the whole thing. Something I found really interesting about the way this show is done is having women of all ages play these teenage girls. And I love when Barron explains that this play is about how being a teenager affects your entire life because that is her experience. I was most excited when I read that Barron teaches playwrighting and is helping to get more young playwrights to stay true to themselves in their own writing. The article mentions the play The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe, and the whole time reading this article I just kept thinking about that show. I saw that show last year and it is one of my favorite shows because it really is just about teenage girls and I could relate to every single character on that stage in some way. Watching that show, I couldn't help but think that this show was written for me and for people like me. And I cannot wait to see more shows like that.
This article describes the efforts of playwright, Claire Barron, to defy norms in playwriting and in society. I think what she’s doing to explore how teenagers are affected by people in their lives is especially intriguing and I was struck by her comment of, “I just remember being told ‘you’re good at this!’ and then you believe you are good at this, and all of a sudden that’s what you do with your life.” It’s so easy to just buy into whatever you’re told, especially if it’s so positive, and, personally, it can be hard to tell whether you actually enjoy what you’re doing or if you just ended up with it because enough people convinced you that you were good at it. I think it’s so refreshing to hear from a playwright who is trying to explore things that have never been explored that deeply before, specifically the female experience. I went into the article not expecting much and expecting that she would just say the same things I’ve heard before but I was very pleasantly surprised. Barron has a very important message that she wants to spread and the article made me very excited to see what she does next.
Collaboration is a key tenant of theatre and a main focus of theatre education. When opening the article, that’s what I expected it to be about and for the headline, there was very little information about the collaboration that took place in the writing of Dance Nation. I can’t complain I enjoyed the article anyways. As the beginning of your teenage life starts, 11-14 is such a key age with many extremes, weather they be highs or lows. This show seems to capture that life phase in its entirety. I thought the choice to cast actors of varying ages, specifically not teenagers, added to the meaning of the show. With older cast members, Older audience members can see the behaviors of a 13 year old in a 38 year old’s body and reflect on the true action, instead of simply writing it off as a “teenage behavior.” Additionally the audience can still have a reflection on their own teenage years through these characters. Overall Dance Nation seems like it will have a very powerful effect on its audience no matter the age, just as the playwright intended.
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