The Play's the Thing

Okay, look, I get it, two-handers are tough. You have two characters with which to tell your story, and you have to somehow tell this story with as little exposition as possible. You have to show, not tell. Are you listening, Donja Love? Love's current play, Fireflies , tells the story of a married African American couple in 1963. He's a preacher, traveling the southern part of the country to speak at the funerals of other African Americans who have died due to racial terrorism. (When the play begins, the church bombing that claimed the lives of four little girls in Birmingham has just occurs.) She's a doting and devoted housewife who goes so far as to write her husband's speeches and sermons for him. But what her husband, Charles, doesn't know is that she secretly smokes, she wants to abort the baby she's carrying, and she writes explicit letters to a woman she's in love with whom she only met once, briefly. Oh, and did I mention she, Olivia, has PTSD a...

During the writing workshops I took as a student, writers were often told, "you have all of this information in your head but none of it is on the page. We don't know what you know." Someone should've said that to Alexi Kaye Campbell while writing his play Apologia . Apologia takes place in the English countryside house of expat Kristin Miller, who was some sort of political activist (just in title, we never really know what she does per say, but Vietnam is mentioned) and some sort of super famous art historian (I know what you're thinking: those exist?) who has written a memoir that excludes all mention of the sons she basically abandoned when they were children. Oh, yes, and it's her birthday, which is just an excuse for her family to gather at that very moment. Yes, this is a classic version of what I like to call a "family gathers, secrets revealed" play. So Kristin's son, the one who has his shit together, Peter, arrives with his Ameri...