Issue 15.2 has arrived in our offices! We’ll be mailing it out to contributors this week, and subscribers will see a nice shrink-wrapped package in their mailboxes sometime soon too.
In honor of its release, we’d like to share a special feature: an appreciation of the play included in the issue: The Strangers, by christopher oscar peña. (Many thanks to Drama Editor Brant Russell for the pick and to the Helen Weinberger Center for the Study of Drama and Playwriting for its support.)
Usually in these “Why We Like It” posts, the CR staff pens a note about what we like. However, this time, we’ve invited an outside guest to contribute: Stephanie Danler, a novelist, essayist, and creator and executive producer of Starz’s Sweetbitter. Here’s what she has to say about our most recent play-in-progress:
Stephanie Danler
Stephanie Danler: There’s cleverness in the title of christopher oscar peña’s new play, The Strangers. The word “strangers” is a paradox—a plural that denies plurality. A group of strangers isn’t a group, because the state of being estranged from others is built into the definition. There’s also an allusion to existential alienation (see Camus) and a push against Thornton Wilder’s inclusively titled Our Town, which peña tells us his play is indebted to, though he also says it’s a “contradiction, appropriation.” More accurately, his play “fucks with” Wilder’s portrait of American ennui.
We live in a moment where classics by old white dudes are running into obsolescence quicker than we could have imagined. Every writer worth his or her intellectual weight must turn a highly politicized and razor-sharp lens on the canon that raised us. While this project is moral, and can be rigorous, I often find that these didactic polemics lack heart. What enthralled me about The Strangers, from the first scene, is peña’s insistence on the sincerity of his characters. It’s a quality that’s hard to come by in art but, in my opinion, essential.
The Strangers begins with a homecoming, or more accurately, “cris returns to a place he used to know,” to a town that peña calls “everytown” and reads as America at large. Cris has been away a long time, and his return instigates a love story that grounds the play. peña is skeptical of any physical homecoming. Home in the twenty-first century is an illusory place that lives only in the mind. This is the first place he’s transgressed on Wilder’s play; there is no “town,” just the memory of one.
christopher oscar peña
Our ensemble—diverse, loud, perverse—is a deeply fucked-up spread of people. No one, no matter their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or background, escapes narcissism, or has the ability to transcend their own limited perspective. They stumble through the play causing harm, retreating, reemerging hopelessly unchanged, in a way that feels scarily similar to life.
The inhabitants of our town don’t fail epically, but narrowly: failures of empathy and failures of action. Cris’s belief in his essential unlovability causes him to push people away. Dave is a good-looking white man, but his ease in the world makes him into a weapon. Pearl is textbook clinically depressed and suicidal. Emily— in the play’s most disturbing moment—urges Pearl toward self-destruction, like she’s funneling a fountain of rage into this murderous moment. Diego’s arrogance belies self-loathing.
The racism between them is so casual it becomes comic (in the way that humans laugh when they’re uncomfortable); it’s all hurtful. These characters have their youth and their health and—most importantly—their freedom and rights. They are not the oppressed. And yet what they’re raging against is that while it appears the system has changed, people haven’t. This is still what strangers do to each other. peña’s play is a modern Tower of Babel: we cannot understand each other, so we’re going to tear this place apart. As Cris says late in the play,
it’s funny isn’t it
that dissonance
dissonancediscord
cacophony
incongruity
inharmoniousi am inharmonious.
If The Strangers were just what I described above, it would be two things: boring and shallow. It’s not enough to be current, topical, or a mirror to the contradictions and violence of an era. Art needs urgency. One must have something to say, and peña does. In a nod to Shakespeare—a playwright that peña has admitted in life to “hating”—this play hinges on the most antiquated of all our corrupted community traditions: a wedding.
peña’s most moving passages come not from the ensemble, who are too busy fucking up, but from the bystanders. The town witnesses are the truth tellers: the homeless man, the crossing guard, and the wedding planner. It’s the wedding planner who lays bare what I believe to be the true north of peña’s work:
have you ever noticed that weddings are like small universes
you and you will get together, and you’ll create a new universe
or you and you and that’ll be a different universe
or you and you and
well now we have a galaxy.
It’s in these small universes wherein strangers cease being strange to each other—not forever, but for a moment. That temporary galaxy can be our town. We create them when we try to love. peña leaves us with a short glimpse of the future in the third, surprising act, when two characters—one of them the progeny of our flawed heroes—insist on only this:
i love you
i love you
i love you…soon this will all be over.
Stephanie Danler is the author of the international bestseller Sweetbitter (Knopf, 2016). She is based in Los Angeles, and is at work on a book of nonfiction.
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