Three Plays

A Los Angeles-based play, Guide Dogs rejects the triad of smog, traffic, and earthquakes for an exploration of reading and interpretation through civic unrest at city hall, the texts of LA figures (literary critic Marjorie Perloff and social critic Mike Davis), and the “Lightning Field” by Walter de Maria. Some Cars, an embodiment, holds out against “the architecture of containment,” inflecting the hard surface of Kienholz’s art in a drive to uncover tragic action deferred through a small windshield, imperfectly. Speech Acts with Trees is an inside-out Western that takes apart “narrow specializations with commanding views,” landscape tradition and conquest. Is a parable of sacrifice an obsolete railroad by the time conventional knowledge sets up shop in the “new” town? Are these Three Plays really one play along a topological fold? * “Meadows brings a rare musicality to her writing for the stage, and her eye for the telling discontinuities of contemporary life animates these plays with vivid and unsettling tensions.” —Guy Zimmerman, artistic director, Padua Playwrights “Wry and observant, Deborah Meadows' ambivalent oracles and philosopher-clowns seek "a nourishing shape that one could live in without tiring of its perimeter", but find just as readily an anthroposcenic welter, marked by false flags and the untidy promise of myriad revolutions – each adjacent, reluctant, and imperfectly contained.” —Andrew Maxwell, Poetic Research Bureau director, Candor is the Brightest Shield author “A philosophical autopsy performed on the event horizon of a perpetually collapsing world made language. Painstaking yet abandoned, Meadows teases language to spill its secrets, cracking a harrowing case: this.” —Juli Crockett, playwright, lead singer of the Evangenitals *