Six Plays

by Mickle Maher, Loren Kruger (Foreword by)

Overview

This anthology features six plays by celebrated Chicago playwright Mickle Maher, who has been described by the Houston Chronicle as “one of the most original voices in American theater today,” and by the Chicago Reader as “a master at creating complex, paradoxical works that encompass their own contradictions.” Maher’s plays engage classic literature as a jumping off point for seriously unusual comedic dramas, often dealing with the absurdity, difficulties, and rewards of artistic endeavor. His work has been influenced by or compared to Eugène Ionesco, Maria Irene Fornes, Kenneth Koch, and Edward Albee, among others. This edition is designed to be useful for schools and other organizations that wish to mount productions of Maher’s plays, which generally feature small casts and simple scenery and stagings, and thus can be easy to produce.

The anthology includes:

An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening
On the night Faustus concludes his bargain with Mephistopheles, he apologizes to a group of random people for his failure to keep a diary of his fabulous life.

The Hunchback Variations
Ludwig von Beethoven and Quasimodo present a panel discussion on their failure to create an impossible sound called for in a stage direction in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

Spirits to Enforce
Twelve telefundraisers with secret identities work to raise money for a superheroic production of The Tempest in a bid to save Fathomtown from Professor Cannibal and his band of evil doers.
There Is a Happiness That Morning Is
Having engaged the evening before in a highly inappropriate display of public affection on the main lawn of their rural New England campus, two lecturers on the poems of William Blake must now, in class, either apologize for their behavior or effectively justify it to keep their jobs.
Song About Himself
In a dystopian future, a woman made extraordinary by her ability to speak relatively clearly tries to connect with others on a mysterious social media site created by a rogue artificial intelligence.

It Is Magic
Deb and Sandy are auditioning Tim for the role of the Wolf in a production of The Three Little Pigs, but there’s a mysterious haze in the basement of the Mortier Civic Playhouse and that, in addition to interruptions from the director of the Scottish play that’s going on upstairs, is making things difficult. Then, Liz shows up and throws the whole room into (further) chaos. It Is Magic reveals the deep, ancient evil at the heart of the community theater audition process.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781572843103
Publisher:	Agate
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Mickle Maher is a co-founder of Chicago's Theater Oobleck, with whom he has produced plays for more than thirty years. He lectures on playwriting at the Universityof Chicago, and lives with his wife and son in Evanston, IL.

Loren Kruger is Professor of Comparative and English Literature, and Theatre and Performance Studies at the Universityof Chicago, and has been watching Mickle Maher’s plays since 1988. She is the author of several books, most recently A Century of South African Theatre (Bloomsbury), Imagining the Edgy City (Oxford UniversityPress), and the award-winning Post-Imperial Brecht (Cambridge UniversityPress), and her articles on theatre in Chicago and elsewhere have appeared in many publications, including Critical Stages, The Drama Review, Theater, Theater der Zeit, Theatre Research International, and Theatre Journal.

Read an Excerpt

[Lights up. Sandy and Deb are at the table. Deb, the director, has piles of notes and such in front of her. Tim is across the room, standing, beginning his audition. He’s wearing a kilt. They’ve been in this room for two hours. Tim has been asked to repeat the following speech approximately thirty times. Everyone is extremely on edge and on their last nerve and feel like THEY are NOT being LISTENED to.

Tim begins. For the thirty-first time. Deb interjects here and there, sotto voce. These interjections are barely heard and do not interrupt Tim’s flow at all. In fact, he makes a point of plowing over them.]

TIM
Hi, I’m Tim Padley. And I’ll be doing The Wolf from the as-of-yet untitled adaptation for adult audiences of The Three Little Pigs by Deborah Chandler.

This story happened long ago, in the first of times, when things were not yet quite real. It happened only once, this story, because unlike so many other events of this world, this one was too momentous to repeat itself.

DEB
(good good)

TIM
It’s the story of the first trio: the Brother Pigs, The Three Pigs. In later tellings, they were The Three Little Pigs, but they were not little. No, the Brother Pigs Three, the first pigs of the planet, were large and grim as battleships, their iron-heavy trotters split the earth as they paced, their jowls swayed like church bells, their bellies were boulders.

DEB
(good. now:)

TIM
And the first of these, the First Pig, having no idea in his huge pink head what a house was — as there had not yet been a house — set to making one anyway, a pure genius, requiring no previous models. Straw was his medium. The Second Pig, excited by his brother’s example, but not wanting to be entirely derivative, chose sticks. The Third Pig, thick and idle, late to the game, arbitrarily picked bricks, and on hot days suffered terribly, much more than his brothers in their light, ventilated structures.

DEB
(yes! yes.)

TIM
Together, they were a neighborhood. A community.

But I, The Wolf, the first wolf, with no wit for architecture, was exposed and alone on the earth. Alone. Feared, shunned, and so hungry, so hungry for love. Outside the world’s heart, I wanted only to be LET IN.

DEB
(yes!)

TIM
That first afternoon, then, I ran to the golden House of Straw. Large as a cathedral, as a coliseum, it was a second sun, come to ground. I scrambled its massive straw steps, across the straw portico, swung the knocker and begged admittance. “Please, \ PLEASE —”

DEB
Need to stop you, Tim.

TIM
Oh, no.

DEB
Those last lines again.

TIM
Sure, sure.

DEB
Go ahead. From scrambled its massive straw steps.

TIM
I scrambled its massive straw steps, across the straw portico, swung the knocker and begged admittance. \ “Please, PLEASE —”

DEB
Sorry.

TIM
Ahg.

DEB
Here’s the difficulty:

TIM
AHG.

DEB
this monologue is actually a speech from inside The Wolf’s mind. It might seem like he’s telling the story out loud. But my intent was it’s all in his head. So, ideally, we wouldn’t see your lips move.

TIM
You don’t want my lips to move? Like a ventriloquist?

DEB
No. That would just be a trick. Just remember: There is no audience. Sandy and I are not here. It’s in his head. So your lips move, but give us a sense of something beyond the body, beyond slobbery babble babble.

TIM
— babble? —

DEB
An animal addressing himself inside his head, with no regard for us. Like how my cat does.

TIM
Perfect.

DEB
Go.

TIM
I scrambled its massive straw steps, across the straw portico, swung the knocker and begged admittance. “Please, \ PLEASE —”

DEB
Good. Now keep that same flavor and release it going forward.

TIM
I scrambled its massive straw steps, across the straw portico, swung the knocker and begged admittance. “Please, PLEASE —”

Behind the door, I heard the pig shift his bulk on his throne of a thousand bales. He muttered something, a refusal, in a sort of rhyming chant, a swinish incantation, that spoke darkly of his scant facial hair. An embarrassed silence.

And then —

DEB
Sorry.

TIM
[Sobs.]

DEB
Have to stop you. Just please, that last bit, again. He muttered —

TIM
He muttered something, a refusal, in a sort of rhyming chant, a swinish incantation, that spoke darkly of his scant facial hair. An embarrassed silence. And then —

DEB
I’m so sorry, Tim.

TIM
Deb!

DEB
Again. And this time remember that this is an audition.

TIM
I haven’t forgotten that this is an audition, Deb. How could I forget that?

DEB
In my opinion you have forgotten that. You increasingly have a fiery abandonment about you that is more suited to a realized performance on an actual stage than an audition here in this basement room.

TIM
Okay.

DEB
They’re separate species, auditioning and performing. So give me an audition, not a tap dance with sparklers.

TIM
Speaking of performance, Ken needs me upstairs at places in three.

DEB
Ken needs you upstairs to perform in a minor role, and I need you down here to audition for my lead. Go, please.

TIM
An embarrassed silence.

And then…magic.

DEB
(perfect!)

TIM
Unexpected. Unrequested.

The air in my lungs gathered itself to a wind, the wind to a storm, the storm to a violence unknown in nature, unknown, even, to the Gods. Up my throat, through my teeth, my ache, my loneliness came in one blast of typhonic NEED. And in a gust it was done: the House of Straw — its towers and battlements, its great dome — was swept away in a pale whirl, and its pig lay flat and trembling, his snout in the dirt at my paws.

DEB
(yes)

TIM
We were both of us, surprised. The first —

DEB
Stop, stop.

SANDY
Christ in a corset!

DEB
Sandy, please.

TIM
It’s fine, Sandy.

DEB
It is fine, yes. Because, the fact is, Sandy, a good audition is one where the actor gets interrupted quite a lot.

SANDY
Really.

DEB
You wouldn’t think so. If this were a play and Tim was being interrupted in his performance every other minute, that would be a bad sign. An indication that the magic of theater had failed. But here \ when

TIM
I’m \ just

DEB
— let me do the talking — here it’s the opposite: interruptions mean the magic is succeeding. I see something in what he’s doing. And I want to seize that in the moment and conjure something from it.

TIM
So what do you want to try?

DEB
Try?

TIM
Yes. Yes.

DEB
Right. Yes. Well, it’s just not good.

TIM
Oh, Deb.

DEB
It’s not good, Tim.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION/PREFACE
1. AN APOLOGY FOR THE COURSE AND OUTCOME OF CERTAIN EVENTS
2. DELIVERED BY DOCTOR JOHN FAUSTUS ON THIS HIS FINAL EVENING
3. THE HUNCHBACK VARIATIONS
4. SPIRITS TO ENFORCE
5. THERE IS A HAPPINESS THAT MORNING IS
6. SONG ABOUT HIMSELF
7. IT IS MAGIC
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Mickle Maher’s There Is a Happiness That Morning Is:

“Masterful. .. this is what theater is supposed to be.” —Houston Press

“Savagely funny… Maher’s ‘There Is a Happiness That Morning Is’ is a joy, an unexpectedly raucous celebration of art and ardor—and public sex.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Delightfully original… If you prize imagination, intelligence and genuine passion, you’ll be on cloud nine through all 90 minutes of this utterly unpredictable experience… With its grace, wit and profusion of clever rhymes, the language alone is reason enough to attend… There is an exhilaration that true inspiration brings—and that’s exactly the high delivered by There Is a Happiness That Morning Is.” —Houston Chronicle

“Maher’s most powerful play to date…soul shaking.” —Chicago Reader

“An enjoyably lunatic endeavor.” —Chicago Tribune

“A bizarre, brilliant play that is capable of reordering your brain a bit.” —Austin Chronicle

“Consistently and thrillingly entertaining.” —Cleveland Scene

“90 witty and entertaining minutes of poetic and comic bliss.” —Cleveland Jewish News

“Almost endlessly engaging and frequently hilarious.” —Time Out Chicago

“Riveting and wonderfully ridiculous.” —News-Herald

“Funny, witty, literate, and profound.” —Windy City Times

“Fun, stark, strange, and ridiculous.” —Broadway World


Praise for Mickle Maher’s Spirits to Enforce:

“Mesmerizing… the stuff that great theater is made of.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Entrancing…beguiling…the play is like a dance, a 90-minute linguistic ballet… a rollicking, cerebral delight.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Hilarious, layered, well-executed—the show leaves you feeling fuller than when you walked in.” —Austin Chronicle

“A dazzling algebra of memory, identity, and the fluid but fixing cruelty of time.” “Highly Recommended/Critic’s Choice” —Chicago Reader

“Highly entertaining and thoroughly imaginative.” —The Shakespeare Review

“Enters a language-rich dream world that draws inspiration from comic-book morality tales, Shakespeare, and from the great globe itself…once the revels are ended, you feel like something earth-shattering has taken place.” —Milwaukee Magazine

“Delightfully unconventional… With Spirits to Enforce (Maher) mixes the most unlikely elements into an enthralling show that’s absurd, funny, and touching.” —Chicago Free Press

“This show is amazing! It’s like ‘The Tempest’ fell into a vat of toxic waste and now has the power to make us laugh…really hard.” —Chicago Theater Beat


Praise for Mickle Maher’s The Hunchback Variations:

“Theater Oobleck playwright Mickle Maher is a master at creating complex, paradoxical works that encompass their own contradictions. While his comedies leave a somber aftertaste, his forays into satire with a serious edge are gut-bustingly funny…In The Hunchback Variations Maher mocks academic examinations of the creative process even as he engages in a complicated deconstruction of creativity.” —Chicago Reader

“Tantalizes with swirling bits about the nature of creativity, grief, the endless universe, the physical world, the theater…a thinking man’s vaudeville. You won’t soon forget it.” —Houston Press

“Terrifically funny for even non-geniuses… I haven’t laughed this much at a show in an awfully long time.” —Applause Meter

“Seriously crazed…acquires rueful resonance, even amid the resolute absurdity of it all.” —Houston Chronicle

Named “One of the top five productions of the year” by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch


Praise for Mickle Maher’s An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening:

“A decade ago, the initial run of this diabolically clever monologue established the singular genius of playwright Mickle Maher, insouciantly infecting the Western canon with his dark brand of whimsy…(and) did we mention the play’s hilarious?” —Time Out Chicago

“Intellectually spry and surprisingly funny…a fascinating piece of avant-garde Chicago brain candy.” Highly Recommended —Chicago Tribune

“An Apology…quite simply put, is one of the most incomparable undertakings that has graced the stage… (a) complete masterpiece.” —Chicago Stage Review

“It’s hard to miss Mickle Maher’s brilliance in this ingenious retooling of the Faust legend.” —Chicago Reader

“One can see… not only Maher’s passionate engagements with language at diverse levels—from the rhetorical mastery of syntax and cadence to the semantic wizardry of words, their ability to conjure habitable worlds out of bare ice and air—but also two of the issues that drive Maher throughout his various theatrical follies. There is the idea of the impossible or meaningless project as not just an intellectual limit or an aesthetic curiosity, but an ethical necessity: a ‘life-duty.’ And there is the sense of inescapable loneliness heightened by the attempt to communicate, as though the fundamental ethical task is to make one’s own singularity intelligible and thereby transcend it—a task which in Maher’s universe seems inevitably doomed to failure.” —John Beer, The Point

“Superb…miss (this play) at your peril.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


Praise for Mickle Maher’s Song About Himself:

“Nearly perfect… a world of ridiculous, ominous inadequacy.” —Chicago Reader

“Wonderfully, exceedingly weird.” —Chicago Tribune

“Subtle, elegiac.” —Houston Chronicle

“A rich psychological and metaphysical landscape.” —Newcity

“An engaging, resonant ode.” —Time Out Chicago


Praise for Mickle Maher’s It Is Magic:

“Hilarious tragedy.” —Chicago Reader

“A harrowing, hilarious journey into the eldritch heart of the theatrical experience.” —Austin Arts Watch

From the Publisher