punkplay

by Gregory S. Moss

A history of America in the 1980s, an idiosyncratic genealogy of punk rock music, and a personal narrative of growing up as an outsider, punkplay is a mix tape tribute to the excesses and energy of adolescence. Mickey, a thirteen-year-old suburban misfit, is befriended by an angry runaway named Duck. Together, the boys attempt to reinvent themselves using punk rock, but as reality threatens to crash in on them, their fabricated world of amped-up music and shocking band names becomes just as oppressive as the society they're desperate to reject.

Genres: Plays

70 pages, Paperback

Published June 7, 2010

About the author

Mr. Moss is a writer and performer from Newburyport, Massachusetts. His plays include The Destroyed Room, Good and Services, The Uses of Enchantment and punkplay. His work has been developed with and produced nationally and internationally by La Comedie Francaise, The A.R.T., The Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Empty Space, Playwrights Horizons, PlayPenn, New York Theatre Workshop and others. He is currently a 2011-2012 McKnight Fellow at The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. He is the recipient of a 2006-07 Lucille Lortel Playwriting Fellowship and a 2010-11 Jerome Fellowship. He is a graduate of Brown University's MFA program in Dramatic Writing, and a former member of Soho Rep's Writer/Director's Lab and Ars Nova's Playgroup. His play, punkplay, premiered at Clubbed Thumb, and was recently produced at the Steppenwolf Garage, where it was named one of Time Out's "Top Ten Plays of 2010." Current and upcoming presentations of his work include House of Gold (EST LA and La Comedie Francaise, Paris),The Argument (Interrobang Theatre Project, Chicago), Billy Witch (Studio 42, NY), punkplay (Just Theatre, San Francisco [West Coast Premiere]) and sixsixsix (Old Red Lion, London [world premiere]). Writing and updates are housed at www.gregorysmoss.com.

Reviews

[Hank Lin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Channeling on punk rock, late stage capitalism, and Calvin & Hobbes, punkplay is about all those things you cling hold to fast as an adolescent, that are absolutely necessary to your survival, that you inevitably shed free of when you grow up. Two kids in suburban nowhere, America, while away their time listening to punk rock. They discuss alienation, drugs, sticking it to the man, band names, sexual awakening, and being real. They do everything together, go to school, sleep in the same room, cut & dye each other's hair, watch porn, betray each other with the same girl, fight each other, abandon each other. They're deeply, deeply in love. In that way you were so in love with your childhood friend, that you never talked to again since college, your Hobbes, your Winnie the Pooh, your Peter Pan. The person who was so deeply entrenched in who you were that when you became ashamed of who you were as a kid and wanted to be an adult, inevitably you became ashamed of them, too. But they're still a part of you, still a part of your DNA. Like punk fucking rock.

By the way, the characters in this play spend a majority it on roller skates (of which they are unaware).