Contemporary Theatre Playwriting in the 21st Century by Philip Cuomo

Over the past year and a half I have been in conversation with Natasha Terranova, who is now a second year student in our Two Year training program. Natasha is a published poet and has a deep understanding of the written word. As a Conservatory student, she has been required and encouraged to see plays. We have been talking about what is new and exciting in the Portland theatre scene. She is particularly excited about the plays she has seen from some of the country's newest playwrights. Adam Rapp, Peter Sinn Nachtieb, Jenny Shwartz and Sarah Ruhl. In fact, she is acting as stage manager on a production at the Conservatory of Sarah Ruhl's Melancholy Play. In our conversations we have begun to categorize the commonality in these playwrights and their plays. 

I think these plays are aware of their own inherent theatricality, a self-awareness that draws the audience forward and into the world of the play. They have an understanding of the energetic contact between performance and audience in the immediate time and space. They are sophisticated and clever in use of language and stagecraft, and could only be product of the theatre, not of any other artistic medium.

My perception has been influenced by the TBA Festival and the works of the avant-garde or fringe theatre (Richard Foreman, Marie Irene Fornes, Bill Irwin), and a performance movement to experiment with time and space to create immediacy. In talking about the Contemporary plays produced in this season in Portland, and those workshopped at the JAW Festival by writeres like Will Eno, Jordan Harrison, Adam Bock, Kimberly Rosenstock, and others, I have recognized similar experimentation in more traditional playwriting.

The best of the avant-garde and the best of contemporary theatre may break the traditional narrative conventions of time and space, may break the fourth wall, but they keep the story at the center, using it to communicate big ideas and bring the audience on an emotional journey. I define Contemporary Theatre as smart, theatrical plays exposing the soft vulnerable human center to an audience in the immediate time and space of performance.