30 PLAYS IN 30 DAYS: Play #9 "Brilliant Traces" by Cindy Lou Johnson

 

I have decided for the month of September to read 30 plays in 30 days. It is my belief that, if possible, a play should be read in one sitting to get a better inherent sense of the dramatic arc. Each day, I will write a short post here about the play of the day.

Play #9

Brilliant Traces by Cindy Lou Johnson

As reported by the New York Times, Cindy Lou Johnson was looking for a title for her play, found it from a poem by her mother, Avah Pevlor Johnson. The poem, Individuation was printed in the original playbill and is printed in the acting edition, and contains the lines: "Let me dance with devils on dead stars. Let my scars leave brilliant traces"... and hence, we have the lovely title Brilliant Traces for this 2-person play. 

It was first presented by the Circle Repertory Company at the Cherry Lane Theatre in NYC in February of 1989, starring Kevin Anderson (perhaps best known as the good guy opposite Julia Roberts in Sleeping With the Enemy) and Joan Cusack (who really needs no introduction at all--- she's simply awesome). 

Brilliant Traces starts with an arresting opening image of a woman (Rosannah Deluce) in a wedding dress, coming into a small barn in the middle of nowhere Alaska, from a snowstorm. She mentions she has been driving for days until her car died, and she's been walking for over an hour in the cold--- she manages to get this brief explanation before fainting. The owner of the house, Henry Harry, who moved to nowhere to get away from the world to become a "gray man", gently places her in a bed, and waits for her to wake up. Once she does, the action of the play takes place in a 70-80 minute burst where the characters struggle (sometimes physically and violently) to connect. And while sometimes Rosannah comes off as the prototype for the "manic pixie dreamgirl" before such a trope existed, and Henry Harry often comes off as the "tortured, quiet recluse with a past", one cannot deny that Johnson gives each character vibrant words and energy.  Indeed, for quite sometime, Brilliant Traces provided rich two-minute monologues for young women particularly auditioning for theater schools. I confess, I found some the situations a bit too quirky, but it is hard not to fall under the spell of the characters. As I have stated before, energy is very important, and in a quick show like this, I think you would be hard-pressed to not be taken in by it in production if it is cast well with terrific performers (as it sounds like it was for its premiere). 

I have not been able to find a great deal of information on Cindy Lou Johnson, only enough to know that she has also written for television, and wrote and directed a film called Claude. Brilliant Traces was adapted into a Canadian TV movie in 1998, adapted into French. I did find a video from 1989-1990 from the American Theatre Wing, where she was on a panel with other cool theater artists, including Wendy Wasserstein. On this panel, she talks about having written fiction for years, but that the characters in Brilliant Traces wanted to perform. She describes the process of developing the play at the Eugene O'Neill Conference as a complete education in the craft of writing plays, and understanding how play productions actually work, as she had no real idea previously. She has fond memories of the wonderful playwrights who were of great support and gave her sense of structure. 

I would never argue that Brilliant Traces is a great play, but I think it is a good one, and, again, it is alive, and comes from a distinct voice with something to say about suffering, pain and seeking understanding and connection. This is not small feat, and give the Cindy Lou Johnson tremendous credit for this being her first play-- it is almost unbelievable, in fact, to have a debut so accomplished in character, with a great showcase for two actors to really shine.