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GLYN MAXWELL and PHOENIX THEATRE ENSEMBLE
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| Playwright and poet Glyn Maxwell |
Resident playwright premieres his verse-play Wolfpit running April 7th through May 4th at Theatre 3.
"Most new poetry is unmemorable not because it's obscure, or self-absorbed,
or trivial…”, says the English playwright and poet Glyn Maxwell.
Indeed, Phoenix Theatre Ensemble's new playwright in residence believes that
the problem is simpler and more primal “… most young poets have
lost their sense of human sound. …All the wit and learning in the world
can't compensate for an inability to render persuasively the distinct voice
of an actual breathing person. To me, the beauty of [pentameter] is that its
regularity is so much a metaphor for the way we exist in the world, for the
limitations of mortality and the oxygen we breathe, it’s a metaphor for
time."
Elise Stone, Phoenix Theatre Ensemble's script curator and founding member, first became aware of Maxwell's work after his play, The Lifeblood, was performed as part of the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Intrigued by a web site's description, she says she "went searching for Glyn." To which she adds, with a laugh, "He must have thought I was stalking him, because I tried several different avenues. Finally, my message must have gotten to him, because he basically wrote back and said, 'Hi, Elise, what's up?'" She asked to see his work. The members of Phoenix reviewed a few selections and, based on the strength of a table reading, offered him two slots in Phoenix's then-upcoming season. After the first production, they offered him the position of playwright in residence. Maxwell accepted.
The collaboration began this past November with the play Broken Journey, a reinterpretation of the late Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke's short stories, immortalized in Akira Kurosawa's film, Rashomon. Eschewing samurai-era Japan for an anonymous American roadside, the play shifts between the different viewpoints of a gruff biker, a murdered man (channeled, comically, by a police-employed psychic), his flighty girlfriend, and a newspaper delivery boy who just happens to witness the defining incident. A New York Times critic noted the playwright’s “ sharp sense of drama and a keen ear for its language."
And the same will most likely be said of Wolfpit. First performed in Scotland in 1996, the play feels much like a dream. As one character says toward the end: "All I can remember/are words that didn't mean, and a wild story/so black it took a Northman to believe it./I don't remember anything I believed." Maxwell's poignant look at a community upended has a sweet irony to it. He says, "Everywhere I go, deep down, I'm looking for a theater community." With the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, it appears Glyn Maxwell has found one.