5th Play - Break by Ben F. Locke and William Anthony Sebastian Rose II
Playwrights Ben F. Locke and William Anthony Sebastian Rose II
I saw a reading of Ben F. Locke’s play Following at Redtwist Theatre and was blown away! It was hysterical, but also touched on some powerful themes. I also had the privilege of meeting the playwright at that performance. I found them on New Play exchange and downloaded several of their plays!
Summary: “We've all heard of couple's counseling to keep a relationship together but what happens when you go to counseling to break up? An interracial couple, a thruple and two best friends all come together with one goal in mind: to break up. Break asks the question: How badly do we want to change and where's the line between what we say we want and what we actually want?” New Play Exchange
Laura’s thoughts in brief: The playwright notes on the New Play Exchange website that this play is a work in progress. I hope I read the most recent version! The premise of this play is both surprising and hysterical. What appears to be a counseling session turns out to be a how-to-break-up-with-your-partner session, surprising both the audience and some of the characters. To be fair, if I was one of those characters that got that surprise, I probably would have walked out as soon as that was revealed! However, the characters are so fun and interesting we suspend our disbelief and take the ride with them. It seems to be a multi-day work session, with the characters spending a couple of nights at least. After the initial “break up” session, characters are assigned different roommates than their partners which was interesting. Night hijinks ensue and things get silly and messy. I loved that there was a thrupple in this group, and there were even two friends “breaking up,” although at first I thought the two women were a couple. Friend break ups are real, and sometimes it’s extremely hard to end those. I also loved that the one white person, Aaron (his character description is “30’s. White. Yeah, that’s it. Just white” - NICE!), is so “woke” that he is totally annoying, and yet you do see that he’s really trying to support the Black woman he loves. Even so, he’s still QUITE annoying, but slightly more dimensional. There is a lot of craziness and silliness, but there’s depth underneath it all. We see a lot of relationship toxicity, and even though some are there to end it, some are just not able to do it. I think the one critique I had was that it seemed that many of the characters were too easily persuaded to being sexually attracted to a different gender from the one they came in with. As much as I love the idea of everyone being pansexual and attracted to the person, not the gender (as many of us are), I had trouble believing it would happen to so many of the characters. That may be partly because I thought that Kaite and Anjela were a couple for most of the play. Clarifying that as a friend break-up early on in the play would help that, I think. Also, why doesn’t anyone punch Montrose, the cocky “counselor” in this experiment?! I wanted to. He deserves some consequences. But, overall, it would be a lot of fun to see all the wild goings on physicalized on the stage in front of me - I really hope to get to see a production of this one day, and I look forward to reading more of Ben’s plays!
READ MORE! I don’t know if there have been any productions yet, but here’s the link to the New Play Exchange website where there is more info about the play: