{"id":65798,"date":"2022-10-28T14:52:17","date_gmt":"2022-10-28T20:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=65798"},"modified":"2022-10-30T16:19:59","modified_gmt":"2022-10-30T22:19:59","slug":"morag-shepherd-avoids-the-realist-trap-with-a-play-of-sudden-shifts-and-strange-powers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/morag-shepherd-avoids-the-realist-trap-with-a-play-of-sudden-shifts-and-strange-powers\/","title":{"rendered":"Morag Shepherd Avoids the Realist Trap with a Play of Sudden Shifts and Strange Powers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Plan-B Theatre Company in Salt Lake City opens Morag Shepherd’s “My Brother Was a Vampire” Nov. 3 (photo by Sharah Meservy)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cImagine making plays as if Beckett, Churchill, Shawn, Fornes, Gambaro, Anouilh, Kennedy, Sondheim \u2026 hadn\u2019t happened.\u201d
\n\u2013 Caridad Svich<\/h4>\n

As a theatre student in the late \u201990s, drinking Pabst beer and staging “True West” on the six-foot stage of Groovacious Records in Cedar City, a pastime for me and my fellow free spirits was ranting about the Theatre of Complacency and the imminent blinding ascendency of Revolution. Twenty years on, I have more categories for art than \u201ccomplacent\u201d or \u201crevolutionary,\u201d but I\u2019m still certain of this: there\u2019s playing it safe and not playing it safe.<\/h4>\n

Utah playwright Morag Shepherd never plays it safe.<\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a>Like Churchill or Fornes, Shepherd hews to the dreamlike, trying to capture in her elliptical lyric dialogue what cannot be said with any satisfaction. As Shepherd puts it: \u201cI suppose it\u2019s fair to say that I am more interested in sub-text than text. I\u2019ll write it all out, and then pretty consistently cut [out the obvious].\u201d Using wordplay and disturbing images, Shepherd evokes feelings about huge human problems \u2014 mental health, how we trap ourselves in relationships, the fear of death \u2014 without tying herself to realist plot progression. To the extent that there is a revolution in playwriting in the U.S., much of it centers on challenging the familiar story structure in which problems are presented and solved. Like the Shepard who wrote “True West,” Morag Shepherd rarely gives us narratives with solutions.<\/h4>\n

For whatever reason, the rejection of realism is more contentious in theatre than, say, visual art \u2014 or so it seems to me as a theatre guy. Most people are willing to walk through an art museum and linger awhile with the macabre portraits of Ivan Albright, even if they wouldn\u2019t hang them on their walls; but look at the programming of large-house theaters in the United States and you\u2019ll understand that departures from realism require the curation of companies like Salt Lake Acting Company, the erstwhile Sackerson, and Plan-B Theatre Company, where Shepherd\u2019s latest play, “My Brother Was a Vampire,” will open on November 3rd.<\/h4>\n

How to describe this play? In the jargon of the Writing Excuses podcast<\/a>, which focuses on fiction but offers advice to all writers, it\u2019s a relationship story with a sub-element of horror. Many of Shepherd\u2019s plays put relationships first. “My Brother Was a Vampire” pries into a brother\/sister relationship that\u2019s loaded, dark and wryly funny. The notes at the top have a crucial hint about the style. Shepherd tells the director and actors: \u201cThese characters know each and go for the jugular, and then are extremely tender and sweet.\u201d One can see the influence in this piece of “Gruesome Playground Injuries” by Rajiv Joseph, which Shepherd co-directed in 2021 at Wasatch Theatre. “Gruesome” is a play about friends not siblings, about frustrated love not death and disease, but Shepherd was inspired, I think, by its wonderfully droll tone and short scenes. Here\u2019s a taste from Shepherd of what I\u2019m talking about:<\/h4>\n

SKYE
\nMom is dead<\/h4>\n

CALLUM
\nI know you think that\u2019s funny
\nBut it\u2019s not<\/h4>\n

SKYE
\nI\u2019m not being funny
\nShe\u2019s dead<\/h4>\n

CALLUM
\nI know
\nGod
\nDo you have to say it like that<\/h4>\n

SKYE
\nHow do you want me to say it<\/h4>\n

CALLUM
\nYou\u2019re making it a joke<\/h4>\n

SKYE
\nShe died vacuuming the carpet<\/h4>\n

Let this really land<\/em><\/h4>\n

CALLUM
\nOf course she died vacuuming the carpet<\/h4>\n

SKYE
\nDoing what she loved the most<\/h4>\n

Long pause<\/em><\/h4>\n

Of course, the title is “My Brother Was a Vampire” and this kind of dialogue can swing quickly into horror. A stage direction from later in the play will demonstrate: \u201cCallum tries to talk. He can\u2019t. He struggles. Callum starts to panic, almost like he cannot breathe.\u201d This is a story with sudden shifts and strange powers, which have no realist explanation. A realist vampire story tells us where the vampire curse came from, what the monster\u2019s powers are, what the monster\u2019s weaknesses are, and then that good conquers evil. In this story, vampirism and magic exists in order to lead us \u2014 with humor \u2014 closer to our fears. As dramaturg Gordon Farrell puts it, in his explanation of the post-World War II absurdists, \u201cFeeling this terror is simply the price we pay for being alive\u201d (The Power of the Playwright\u2019s Vision<\/em>). Shepherd uses a sense of the magical to call us deep into our fears, our sense of being out of control, of being inexorably subject to Hamlet\u2019s \u201cwhips and scorns of time.\u201d<\/h4>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Sydney Shoell as Skye and Benjamin Young as Callum in Plan-B’s production of “My Brother Was a Vampire” (photo by photo by Sharah Meservy )<\/p><\/div>\n

Like Caridad Svich, whose work has been seen at Salt Lake\u2019s Pygmalion Productions (“Spark” and “Red Bike”), Morag Shepherd makes plays in the stylistic wake of twentieth-century writers who saw a trap in the realist vision. The world is full of unforgettably moving realist plays, of course \u2014 and Shepherd has written more or less straightforward romantic drama (“Hindsight”) \u2014 but if you sit with Shepherd\u2019s work, then you can see what trap she\u2019s trying to avoid: pressing emotions into the service of political message. Though she also wants to uphold the uniqueness of theatre. Shepherd wrote to me, \u201cI think there needs to be a strong reason for why the stage as opposed to another medium.\u201d<\/h4>\n

There are more mediums than ever before. Our entertainment options are vast: radio, film, network TV, streaming TV (with its quite different dramaturgy), podcasts, videogames, TTRPGs, and virtual reality.<\/h4>\n

What makes the theatre unique in the face of all this? Well, when there are literally hundreds of realist dramas to choose from, many of them Problem-Solution, it\u2019s refreshing to watch something that pulls us into a slipstream of emotion and puts us face-to-face with what really matters: sisters, brothers, inner monsters, and the someday-inescapable fact of our blood running out of us.<\/h4>\n

My Brother Was a Vampire<\/em>, Plan-B Theatre Company<\/a>, Salt Lake City, Nov. 3 – 13.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cImagine making plays as if Beckett, Churchill, Shawn, Fornes, Gambaro, Anouilh, Kennedy, Sondheim \u2026 hadn\u2019t happened.\u201d \u2013 Caridad Svich As a theatre student in the late \u201990s, drinking Pabst beer and staging “True West” on the six-foot stage of Groovacious Records in Cedar City, a pastime for me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1701,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[4198,1624],"class_list":["post-65798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theatre","tag-morag-shepherd","tag-plan-b-theatre-company"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 08:08:50","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1701"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65798"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65805,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65798\/revisions\/65805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}