This weekend, you have two very different new plays to choose from — "Die Already!" a horror comedy, or "The Fairy Tale Monologues," a feminist musical. Both are from San Diego playwrights, and both are worth seeking out.
I know that a feminist musical and a horror comedy may not sound like they have a lot in common, but these local productions do share a few key elements.
Shared DNA
First, they are both created by local artists who are multi-hyphenates. Michael Mizerany is the writer, producer and director of "Die Already!" at Diversionary Black Box, and Sarah Alida LeClair is the writer, actress and composer of Riot Productions' "The Fairy Tale Monologues" at Moxie Theatre. LeClair is also the baker behind the food in the play, which will also be served on opening night. Yes, that is an added incentive to attend tonight!
Second, both playwrights play off of pop culture — Mizerany off the horror genre and LeClair off the fairy tales we grew up with.
And finally, both are also award-winning veterans of the San Diego International Fringe Festival. Mizerany started at Fringe showcasing his work as a dancer and choreographer before shifting to writing sexy and award-winning gay rom-coms. An abbreviated version of "The Fairy Tales Monologues" premiered at this year's Fringe and took home Most Outstanding World Premiere.
Both appreciated the freedom Fringe afforded them.
"A lot of times I was told in dance, 'Well, you can't do that.' I'm like, 'Why can't I do that? I can do that.' So at Fringe, I did what I wanted and sold out theaters," Mizerany said.
LeClair had a similar experience.
Outside of Fringe, LeClair often encountered "people telling you this is unpalatable, or nobody wants to see this kind of woman, or these relationships are A, B, C, D. You prove that wrong in the moment where you're like, well, but 400 people came to see it and loved it. It's a real freedom when you don't have to think about, like, is this commercial? Which I think is a great thing about Fringe."
'Die Already!'
"Die Already!" was born during the pandemic, when Mizerany was looking for distraction and decided to try writing. A very short version of the play was created as a radio drama for Cinema Junkie via Zoom during the pandemic. Now it has changed and evolved into a full-blown play.
"Die Already!" is a queer horror comedy that skewers genre tropes with savage delight. Mizerany described it as "Scream," but gayer.
It's Halloween night in a small gay bar in Hillcrest, and Branigan Prescott has exactly one thing on his mind: ending a two-month dry spell. Dressed as Jason Voorhees with meticulous attention to detail and armed with a rubber machete, he's ready for anything. Enter Chase Hardesty, dressed as Kevin Bacon's death scene from "Friday the 13th," and the two horror-obsessed fans seem destined to hook up. But when the couple end up in a cabin ... well, you know it's going to be a bloody affair.
Mizerany has been a horror fan all his life and noted that part of the appeal of the genre was that "I also felt like I was an outsider. Like I didn't fit in, that people underestimated me. And then that's where I found the final girl. I felt like I would be that person. And so I think that's always been, like, in my psyche a little bit. In this show, I've sort of, like, took the tropes and spun them around. Like, there is no final girl. There's a final boy. And the person who's being chased knows all the tropes."
All the sex and violence of the story play out in the intimacy of the stage at Diversionary's Black Box.
"I love that space. It's super small, intimate," Mizerany said. "The audience is right there, and there's a body right there, and they're struggling. It's very violent. So I think if you're in the room and you're that close and you experience it, lots of my shows have aspects of that, of violence or of drama. And you're in the room for that. And it's really a visceral reaction."
If you think you have what it takes to survive the night, then check out "Die Already!" this weekend and next at Diversionary Black Box.
'The Fairy Tale Monologues'
Once upon a time there was a princess hiding a trail of bodies, a witch and a prince in a torrid affair, and a baker’s wife trying to figure out how to find happiness. If that's not how you remember the fairy tales you grew up with, that's because LeClair has decided to flip the familiar stories and mine them for new thematic nuggets.
LeClair's starting point in tackling fairy tale tropes was to ask: Why are the mothers always dead to begin with?
"In the Grimm's fairy tales, they usually begin with the mother is dead to begin with. And that's how you know that this is our hero because their mother was dead and they live alone in the forest or whatever. So asking, like, why did the Grimm Brothers and storytellers in general have to eliminate mothers in order for someone to be worthy of a story?" LeClair pondered. "Why did we have to be written out as women? And then it's asking questions about: Is a princess story silly because it's considered feminine, or is it actually like the forgotten stories of all these girls in arranged marriages, all these girls who had to survive what was thrown at them, that had no choice, that could have made an advantageous match into something that could benefit them if they were smart, if they were clever, if they were able to do things like that? And we kind of minimize those stories and think of them as silly Disney tropes when they're really the stories of survival."
The play serves up fairy tales with a sly feminist twist, sharp humor, deep compassion and music. LeClair described her style as "funny till it's not."
In addition to princesses, the play looks to witches.
"And how we always consider witches to be ugly and old and unlovable," LeClair said. "Even sometimes in 'Into the Woods,' the witch is rejected by everyone around her. And in reality, women that were naturalists and healers and midwives would have been incredibly empathetic since they passed their knowledge down matrilineally. That meant someone was having sex with them so that they could have daughters. So yeah, we're trying to reclaim that evil witch and stepmother trope into something that's more about flawed and failing human women."
"The Fairy Tale Monologues" runs this weekend and next at Moxie Theatre. And if there are still tickets left for tonight's opening performance, I highly recommend grabbing them so you can enjoy LeClair's baked goods and savor the flavors of the show before the first word is spoken.
