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Main Street Theater March 20 - April 16, 2022

About the Playwright

Liz Duffy Adams’ play Or, premiered Off Broadway at WP Theater and has been produced over 75 times, including at the Magic Theater, Seattle Rep, and Roundhouse Theatre. She’s a New Dramatists alumna and has received an Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, Women of Achievement Award, Lillian Hellman Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Weston Playhouse Music-Theater Award, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, and the Will Glickman Award. Her Artistic Stamp virtual “play” in letters, Wild Thyme, was nominated for a Drama League Award in 2021.

Her work has also been produced or developed at the Alley Theatre, Contemporary American Theater Festival, Humana Festival, Bay Area Theater Festival, Portland Center Stage, Syracuse Stage, New Georges, Clubbed Thumb, Cutting Ball, Shotgun Players, Greater Boston Stage Company, and Crowded Fire, among others. Other plays include Born with Teeth; Dog Act; The Salonnières; Dear Alien; Wonders of the Invisible World; Buccaneers; Wet or, Isabella the Pirate Queen Enters the Horse Latitude; The Listener; The Reckless Ruthless Brutal Charge of It or, The Train Play; and One Big Lie.

Publications include Or, in Smith & Kraus’ “Best Plays Of 2010”; Dog Act in “Geek Theater,” Underwords Press 2014; Poodle With Guitar And Dark Glasses in Applause’s “Best American Short Plays 2000-2001”; and several plays in acting editions by Playscripts, Inc. and Dramatists Play Service. Adams’ portrait appears in Sally Davies’ collection, New Yorkers (Ammonite Press 2021).

Adams has an MFA from Yale School of Drama and a BFA from New York University, and was the 2012–2013 Briggs-Copeland Visiting Lecturer in Playwriting at Harvard University. She has dual Irish and American citizenship, and lives in New York City on land that once belonged to the Lanape, and in Western Mass on unceded Pocumtuc and Nipmuc land.

Teaching

Liz Duffy Adams was the 2012–2013 Briggs-Copeland Visiting Lecturer in Playwriting at Harvard University, where she was awarded two Certificates of Teaching Excellence based on student evaluations. She has also taught virtually or in person at Texas Tech University, Indiana University, Lehigh University, SUNY Purchase, University of Manitoba, Amherst College, Mt Holyoke College, Primary Stages’ Einhorn School of Performing Arts, PlayPenn, and Playwrights Foundation.

Awards

Awards include a 2012 Women of Achievement award from the Women’s Project Theater, a 2010 Lily Award for playwriting, a 2008 Weston Playhouse Music-Theatre award, a 2006 NYFA award, a 2017 Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Will Glickman award for Best New Play in 2004 (Dog Act). She has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Djerassi Resident Artists program. She was profiled in “American Theatre” magazine, December 2004.

Main Street Theater's 2022 production

In the words of Liz Duffy Adams...

My plays start with a landscape. Most of them take place outdoors, and even in those that are set in a room, I need the sense of the wider landscape outside. Dog Act began with looking out of a train window at a wintry marshland, and imagining a small group of people toiling over it in the distance. [1]

[1} ArtSake, article “Where Does a Work of Art Start for You”, 2013

Image: The set of Dog Act, 2022 Production; Set Design: Afsaneh AayaniPhotography: Pin Lim / Forest Photography

On Writing Dog Act

What was the inspiration behind Dog Act that seamlessly blends raucous vaudevillian and Shakespearean traditions together? [2]

There were many sparks for this play. The one before had ended with the characters – train passengers – stranded on the far side of apocalypse, and in a way DOG picked up where that left off. I knew there would be a sacrificial act, because I was thinking about the world’s long history of dying gods, and about betrayal, forgiveness, and history. And I thought that it would end by the sea, because that’s where I wrote most of it, on a New England barrier island down the coast from a nuclear power plant; on the road that leads to the island’s narrow bridge, there was still a faded old protest sign from the 1970s that says "No Evacuation Possible". That was part of the genesis of the play. Other inspirations: Shakespeare, yeah, in a lot of ways. And a bit of Peter Pan, science fiction in general, and thousands of years of the history of the traveling player, from the Greeks to the 20th century vaudeville circuits. Also, dogs.

What was your writing process for Dog Act?

I wrote it slowly and obsessively, day and night over the course of a summer, with a lot of long walks in between. I was incredibly lucky that summer and didn’t have to do almost anything else, and I was alone except on weekends. So I could wake up and write by moonlight in the hot summer night, with the sound of waves booming in the distance, then sleep in and spend the rest of the day writing at the dining room table. I really had the most terrific time working on it.

[2] Broadway World, by David Clarke, 2012

The Virgin of the Apocalypse, Miguel Cabrera 1760

The iconography of Cabrera’s The Virgin of the Apocalypse derives from chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation. This comes as no surprise since subjects related to the apocalypse and the Virgin Mary were increasingly important from the late seventeenth century onwards in New Spain. In chapter 12, John of Patmos, the author, describes a woman “clothed with the sun” and pursued by a dragon who wants to devour her child. [3]

About the Artist

Miguel Cabrera was one of the most celebrated and prolific artists of viceregal Mexico in the eighteenth century—painting everything from casta paintings and portraits to large-scale religious altarpieces and small devotional paintings. During his lifetime, he achieved great renown, and even attempted to create an official Academy of Painting in Mexico City modeled after the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid.

[3] Khan Academy - Humanities Dept., article “Miguel Cabrera, Virgin of the Apocalypse”, Melisa Palermo

Image: Jose E. Moreno as Dog, 2022 Production; Photography: Pin Lim / Forest Photography

Doubt that the moon broke free of our doubtful gravity to fall endlessly into the endless night..

- Dog, Act I

If the Moon were to one day simply disappear, there would be some disastrous consequences that would have an irreversible effect upon life on Earth. [4]

OCEANS

Earth’s oceans would have much smaller tides - about one-third the size of what they are now. Tides churn up material in the oceans, which allows coastal ecosystems to thrive. Animals in these environments – crabs, mussels, starfish, snails – rely on the tides for survival. Without a coastal ecosystem, this could have ripple effects for other land and sea animals and could lead to mass extinctions.

Additionally, tidal movements help stabilize Earth’s climate. Ocean currents are driven by the tides, which distribute warmer water around the globe and influences the global climate. Temperatures could potentially be more extreme on the Earth without this influence.

SEASONS

Lastly and probably the most worrying, the Earth’s seasons could change substantially should the Moon disappear. We experience seasons on the Earth – spring, summer, autumn and winter - because the Earth is tilted. Relative to the plane we orbit the Sun, Earth’s tilt is about 23.5 degrees. It is the pull of the Moon’s gravity on the Earth that holds our planet in place. Without the Moon stabilizing our tilt, it is possible that the Earth’s tilt could vary wildly. It would move from no tilt (which means no seasons) to a large tilt (which means extreme weather and even ice ages).

[4] Royal Museums Greenwich, article “What would happen if the Moon disappeared?”

In terms of sheer volume, there has never been a time when apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories have been produced in greater profusion and variety than we’re seeing now. Dystopian narratives hold a perennial fascination for us. [5]

1998 - 2013

Until recently those end-of-the-world narratives were mostly the province of religious texts. With the invention of the novel (early eighteenth century) and universal literacy, an inexorable shift began. It was slow at first, but gradually those themes and ideas became the province of popular fiction consumed by large numbers of people.

Each wave of doomsday plot devices throughout the decades is different from the one before, and those changes tell us something about ourselves. Or at least, something about our nightmares and neuroses, which the apocalyptic narrative both plays on and partially assuages.

Image: Tamara Siler as Zetta Stone, 2022 Production; Photography: Pin Lim / Forest Photography

Every generation sees its own doomsday through the prism of its day-to-day reality. The popularity of apocalyptic fiction seems to rise and fall in line with real-world fears and tensions and insecurities. [5]

1960s

The writers who were coming to the fore in the 60s had experienced World War Two firsthand; they had seen how a seemingly stable world order could tear itself apart in a sudden paroxysm. But if their uncertainty about the future was rooted in the past, their main reference point was still a contemporary one. Their biggest nightmare, time after time, was environmental disaster.

Rachel Carson’s environmental book "Silent Spring" documented the adverse environmental effects caused by the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Carson accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, released in 1962, blew the lid off the pesticides industry and brought the term food chain into everyday use. Revealing how chemicals like DDT built in concentration as they worked their way up from plants to herbivores to predators, Carson changed the way most people looked at the natural world, identifying the human impact on the natural world as the real problem that needed to be addressed.

1970s and 1980s

1972

Man-made disasters continued to be a dominant theme in the science fiction of the 70s and 80s with movies such as Silent Running, Soylent Green, and Zardoz.

The Day After, a made-for-TV movie that first aired in 1983, portrayed a fictional war between the NATO forces and the Warsaw Pact countries that rapidly escalates into a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 100 million people, in nearly 39 million households, watched the program during its initial broadcast.

Themes like deforestation and global famine were gradually eclipsed by a new sort of end-of-the-world that depended on the ever-more-plausible scenario of global nuclear war. The late 70s and 80s saw an unprecedented spike in such stories becoming a dominant cultural meme that it was no longer the province of science fiction. Whatever medium you worked in, if you wanted to imagine a future that was dislocated from the present then a nuclear war was the only entry ticket you needed.

As a side effect, human mutation is one of many ideas that suddenly becomes ubiquitous. With the end of the Cold War in 1991 and no Soviet Union to hang our anxieties on, we invented new ones. It’s around this time that the zombies come lurching into view.

1980s–2000s

The zombie apocalypse proved to be uniquely versatile, splitting into sub-genres of its own and becoming more intensely self-referential than any other type of genre.

1985

Zombies were a great vehicle for telling us about our fears, confronting us with a distorted mirror of our own instincts and drives. The shopping mall in Day Of the Dead continues to dominate the ruined suburban landscape as the world falls apart. There’s also an existential aspect reminding us that our own personhood can be rescinded, losing what it is that makes us human.

2000s

This 2004 film, "The Day After Tomorrow", depicts the catastrophic climatic effects following the disruption of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation. A series of extreme weather events usher in global cooling and lead to a new ice age.

Eco-catastrophe has returned — but with more teeth, informed by the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming and a shedload of incontrovertible evidence.

Global war (nuclear or otherwise) is still contending strongly, although these days it seems mostly to express itself through massive franchises like The Hunger Games.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence research, we also had a resurging trend for stories where humanity is destroyed or superseded by its own technology, a throwback to the 80s from The Terminator series.

Common Thread

Perhaps, if there’s a common thread running through apocalyptic fiction, it would be that it always gives us a split focus, on “the hollow left behind” and on the living who now have to reach a new accommodation with a new reality. That’s a crucial and complicated part of being human, and we need all the help we can get. Perhaps that’s why we turn so often to stories that take us to the edge of the abyss and hold our hands as we look down.

References

[1] ArtSake, article “Where Does a Work of Art Start for You”, 2013

[2] Broadway World, by David Clarke, 2012

[3] Khan Academy - Humanities Dept., article “Miguel Cabrera, Virgin of the Apocalypse”, Melisa Palermo

[4] Royal Museums Greenwich, article “What would happen if the Moon disappeared?”

[5] Electric Literature, article “A Brief History of the End of the World”, by M. R. Carey, 2018

Created By
Dwight Clark
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