Tell Me About Those Glory
Days
A Cory Vincent
Column
For my show and
tell, I decided to do one of my current favorite musicals, The Glory Days. The Glory Days was written by James Gardiner with
music and lyrics by Nick Blaemire. It mostly was performed Off-Broadway, but it
did get the green light to perform on Broadway, closing after exactly ONE
performance on Broadway. I don't see why, because to me, this script is
fantastic. If you’d like to read the musical, you can get it right here:
http://www.playscripts.com/play.php3?playid=2040
It follows four friends: Jack, Andy, Skip, and the protagonist Will. All of these guys have just completed their first year of college, and in the summer between semesters, they all get together to catch up and just have a good time. The problems begin to arise when the boys find out that they aren’t quite the same as they used to be. Skip went off to an ivy league school, and holds some unconscious resentment against his friends who didn’t do as well in school as him. Jack took a month off of school and just went backpacking across the country…where he discovered he was Gay. Andy is a giant homophobe, and this sets him off, which makes Skip mad that he is such a low-brow bigot, and the friends threaten to separate and never see each other again. Which leaves it all to Will, who may or may not secretly be in love in Jack, to try and put them back together. Will he succeed? Find out! Read the musical! It’s awesome!
There are several dramaturgical choices that made this play great, but some carry more weight than others. The first is that the four boys are 100% of the characters we see. Throughout the show they mention girlfriends, bullies, parents, lovers, sisters, friends, and a whole plethora of people we see as reference only. We never see them, hear them, or have any contact with these people. The effect it has is to narrow the play’s worldview. This world only cares about how these four friends interact WITH EACH OTHER. The other tangential relationships just provide further input. They may color the way a person ultimately feels on an issue, but it’s all about what the four friends are doing in this tight knit group that builds the action of the play.
For the second big dramaturgical choice I have to terminology from Hornby and mention a Motif. Throughout the play, we keep hearing about the popular kids and the football team. How they kept shutting them down, and the friends found “their own way” to deal with things. This works beautifully as a mirror, because when the put downs came from the popular jocks and the cheerleaders, our character could brush it off and deal with it because they had each other. That was their way. When the put-downs started coming from within the clique, that’s when they had a problem. They had no safety to come back to and help pick them back up, and so each one started falling off into this strange despair. Every time the play mentions the football team, it is almost always followed by how they either overcame a challenge in the past, or them failing to overcome a problem in the present.
And that’s it! That’s all I have to say about The Glory Days. It is cute and quaint, and more importantly, this play is about us. About me, a lot of the time. I’ve never been “popular” or a super athlete, and I had this exact kind of oddball support structure. I’ve also been where Will is, when the oddball structure breaks down and nobody wants to exert the effort needed to pick up the pieces. So it speaks to me on a lot of levels, but on a broader level, as theatre kids WE have this structure. People think we are weird or queer or crazy, and we don’t let it hurt us because we have our theatre friends to pick us back up. So this is you guys too, and definitely worth a read.
http://www.playscripts.com/play.php3?playid=2040
It follows four friends: Jack, Andy, Skip, and the protagonist Will. All of these guys have just completed their first year of college, and in the summer between semesters, they all get together to catch up and just have a good time. The problems begin to arise when the boys find out that they aren’t quite the same as they used to be. Skip went off to an ivy league school, and holds some unconscious resentment against his friends who didn’t do as well in school as him. Jack took a month off of school and just went backpacking across the country…where he discovered he was Gay. Andy is a giant homophobe, and this sets him off, which makes Skip mad that he is such a low-brow bigot, and the friends threaten to separate and never see each other again. Which leaves it all to Will, who may or may not secretly be in love in Jack, to try and put them back together. Will he succeed? Find out! Read the musical! It’s awesome!
There are several dramaturgical choices that made this play great, but some carry more weight than others. The first is that the four boys are 100% of the characters we see. Throughout the show they mention girlfriends, bullies, parents, lovers, sisters, friends, and a whole plethora of people we see as reference only. We never see them, hear them, or have any contact with these people. The effect it has is to narrow the play’s worldview. This world only cares about how these four friends interact WITH EACH OTHER. The other tangential relationships just provide further input. They may color the way a person ultimately feels on an issue, but it’s all about what the four friends are doing in this tight knit group that builds the action of the play.
For the second big dramaturgical choice I have to terminology from Hornby and mention a Motif. Throughout the play, we keep hearing about the popular kids and the football team. How they kept shutting them down, and the friends found “their own way” to deal with things. This works beautifully as a mirror, because when the put downs came from the popular jocks and the cheerleaders, our character could brush it off and deal with it because they had each other. That was their way. When the put-downs started coming from within the clique, that’s when they had a problem. They had no safety to come back to and help pick them back up, and so each one started falling off into this strange despair. Every time the play mentions the football team, it is almost always followed by how they either overcame a challenge in the past, or them failing to overcome a problem in the present.
And that’s it! That’s all I have to say about The Glory Days. It is cute and quaint, and more importantly, this play is about us. About me, a lot of the time. I’ve never been “popular” or a super athlete, and I had this exact kind of oddball support structure. I’ve also been where Will is, when the oddball structure breaks down and nobody wants to exert the effort needed to pick up the pieces. So it speaks to me on a lot of levels, but on a broader level, as theatre kids WE have this structure. People think we are weird or queer or crazy, and we don’t let it hurt us because we have our theatre friends to pick us back up. So this is you guys too, and definitely worth a read.
I can immediately see why you would be attracted to this show, but it's possibly the same things that would turn me away from the show. I love how bold the character choices seem to be, but they seem a little too..."neat" for me. A homophobic just happens to be bff's with a guy who just happened to recently discover he was gay and guess what! our other friend is gay too! It just seems a little too cookie cutter for me, having said that I haven't actually read the play so I could be completely mistaken. I do love the idea of this play being about nothing but the relationships between the four. That way we don't need extra bull shit people cluttering up the stage. We can focus on who and what we should be focusing on and that's it.
ReplyDeleteI like how you related the play to yourself, and possibly others. It makes more interested to read it. I'm kind of curious about what Will was doing while the other guys were either backpacking, in Ivy league school etc. I guess I'll just have to read the musical to find out. I also like how you mentioned that there are no outsiders in the play. It forces the audience to only see things from the boys' point of view which is all that matters.
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