Funny, Strange, Provocative: Seven Plays from Clubbed Thumb Book

Clubbed Thumb is a New York-based theater company; it is an organization devoted to showcasing works by emerging, experimental American playwrights. Funny, Strange, Provocative: Seven Plays from Clubbed Thumb collects several plays that exemplify Clubbed Thumb's innovative repertoire.
The term "voice" is often overused or incorrectly applied, but this is precisely what connects the anthology's seven plays. Each play offers a unique vision, yet the works share definitive stylistic similarities. For example, all of the plays explore the possibilities of language, and there is a close relationship between language and music. The dialogue in a Clubbed Thumb play reads as lyrical. The language is alternately something you can dance to, a force in which---like cosmic quicksand---you can sink, dissolve, and completely disappear. The language makes you smirk, roll your eyes, cringe, and for writers it also inspires us to push our linguistic limits further.
In Sheila Callaghan's play Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake), the dialogue reads like lines of poetry. The play's main characters are Janice, an eleven year-old girl who serves tea parties with bleach, Janice's mother, and The Apartment where they live. The play is set at Christmastime, one year following the tragic death of Janice's father. (He fell out an open window while adjusting the angel on top of a Christmas tree.) Janice's dialogue combines songs and fantasy, all fueled with injections of acid. The Mother often speaks in incomplete sentences; her grief and disconnection from the world are apparent through her words. Because of this, a poetic style emerges from her lines. When the Mother is expressing her concern about Janice to Barbara, The Mother's sister, she says, "her (Janice's) voice tilts with a purple cast/and sometimes her hair is wire/And sometimes her breath is yellow/Napalm/like rotting fruit and stomach acid/as though she swallowed a pear months ago/but can't digest it."
I've always been attracted to narratives that explore the absurd, but too often these works value style over substance. Absurdity can often be used as an excuse for a cheap joke, but the absurdity itself doesn't illuminate deeper issues of character, plot, or thematic development. The true genius in Crumble is that Callaghan shows absurdity as the only path to emotional understanding. Indeed, Sheila Callaghan and David Lynch cook their soup in the same Dutch oven, and Callaghan includes an eclectic mix of ingredients. Crumble describes headless dolls stuffed with explosives, celebrity obsessions, Christmas lists that request raw meat, and a barren woman who lives with fifty-seven cats. Callaghan's work is hilarious, but the absurdity is always underscored with overwhelming themes of rotting, disintegration, and loneliness. The characters in Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) act in extremities so that others might notice their suffering and grief. The play is an intelligent, creative, heartbreaking, and raucous meditation on survival, connection, and pop culture.
I chose to explore Callaghan's play, but the other six plays in Funny, Strange, Provocative are all similarly brilliant. This is an excellent anthology to read and discover talented, maverick playwrights. There is, however, one significant drawback: Reading these plays will make you want to purchase the first plane ticket to New York and check out, firsthand, the experience of watching a Clubbed Thumb play.