STORY STUDY - MEDIUM: THEATRE - “The Submission”
When you’re a writer or any kind of artists, and you reached the point where you finish your current project, you want to feel joy and relief that it’s finally finished. But then, you take a step back and think about the place you were in your mind when you made it, and suddenly, you feel disgusted and ashamed.
Written by Jeff Talbott, The Submission is the story of a playwright who has, according to himself and his boyfriend and best friend, that he has written his best play yet. His worry is that it won’t be chosen to get produced at a prestigious play festival because the content and subject matter does not match his ethnic background, therefore it won’t be taken seriously.
The playwright has an idea to instead submit a play under a pseudonym, and hires an African-American actress to pretend to be the playwright in order for it to get produced.
The plan actually works, but as the success of the play progresses, the playwright discovers how his product that everyone loves was written with so much hatred and jealousy within him.
The main character, Danny, believes that because the world, or at least America, is striving to make ethnic minorities more inclusive, he as a gay white man is being pushed aside. Oh, of course the Tony Awards gave best actor or actress award to the Black, Mexican or Asian. They’re trying to be politically correct. They are being made to feel better, while he, a gay white man, feels like he hasn’t gone through enough discrimination that an organization doesn’t bother to make him feel better.
The actress that he hires, Emilie, shows him that despite him going through discrimination as a gay man, he is still a “white” man, and therefore knows nothing about the discrimination that a person of color has to go through. Everything he feels is rooted in jealousy and, over time, racist.
The tone and characters of the play makes you uncomfortable as the story progresses to its explosive argument/climax. You know that feeling you get when someone in front of you says something like “of course, I don’t mean all (blank) people…”, and then you cringe? It’s that kind of play.
I came across this play at a theater bookshop in New York. I was going through titles that had something to do with film, theater, writing, etc. (of course), and I found this. I had no idea what I was in for outside of the setup: a playwright hires an actress to pretend to be the writer of his play. What I didn’t expect was the nature of the play, and its intention.
The Submission is a cautionary tale about being honest with yourself and the people who care about you. If you’re not careful, it will build up to a point where you believe that every bad thing that you suffered through is because someone else, when, of course, it’s just a case of unlucky circumstances.
Flip the page, and check it out.
