True Believer and Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares

Writer & Critic Alex Carrigan Reviews Two Plays from Table Work Press, 2020

Table Work Press, a publisher of new plays with the purpose of “to forward the act of reading as a valid and deeply valuable avenue for engaging with the theatre,” recently released their newest anthology, entitled Two Plays: True Believer and Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmres. The collection takes new plays from playwrights Justice Hehir and Christine Sloan Stoddard that seem completely dissimilar to one another, but when read together, highlights many similar themes about womanhood, female bodily autonomy, violence and culture. What follows is a fascinating duality between two plays that are staged and performed completely differently, but are equally compelling and surprising in how they approach these topics.

In Justice Hehir’s True Believer, a group of employees at an abortion clinic in a small town in New York deal with a heavy snowstorm during a slow night at the clinic, where they discuss whatever comes to mind as they anticipate the holidays and discuss the challenges and threats of violence that come with their job. Christine Sloan Stoddard’s Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares, is a surrealistic play where a young Hispanic-American woman named Maya converses with the audience about her relationship with her mother and the specter of her deceased grandmother in a series of poetic scenes that highlight their heritage and the recurring issues they face as women and as women of color in the southern U.S. The collection also includes an opening by playwright and Table Work Press advisory board member May Treuhaft-Ali and notes on the plays by playwrights Caridad Svich and Robyn Campbell (who write about True Believer and Mi Abuela, respectively).

Both plays are written to be performed in wildly different ways. True Believer reads like a one act, single set play, mostly focused on the waiting room of the clinic, while Mi Abuela is more abstract in space and time, where certain objects like a bedroom dresser and a kitchen table enter and exit the story regularly, as each scene can be a quick exchange between the characters or a long monologue to the audience. True Believer also focuses more on a core cast who regularly move in and out from the scene in real time. Unlike Mi Abuela, the dialogue feels more naturalistic; most conversations start and end quickly or change subjects in the space of a pause. One moment can have two characters discussing how one of them called the cops on a guy who was illegally hunting in her backyard, but then quickly switches to a more serious discussion about the other person’s disability, which is implied to have been caused by a hunting accident.

In Mi Abuela, Maya can speak to the audience as she and her mother clean her abuela’s grave all while a cactus moves silently in the background. Dialogue in Mi Abuela can easily veer from monologue to discussion, and the surreal nature of the play can make it difficult to remember if the characters are speaking to one another or to the audience, and how much they are willing to reveal to their subject. It even reads like the characters are having trouble keeping track of who they are speaking to, and whether their dialogue is confession or exclamation can blur as the play progresses.

While both playwrights approach their stories in artistically different ways, its how both stories approach similar subjects that makes them more like sister plays than one would expect. Both plays can be seen as female-focused in the subjects and characters who have prominence. Male characters exist to act as mirrors of the female characters and to provide conflict. The men in Mi Abuela are more broadly characterized by how they negatively impacted the women in the story, reading more like they’re how the women speaking of them view them then they may have actually been, being deadbeat fathers and predatory sheriffs. Meanwhile the male doctors and nurses in True Believer offer more sympathetic points of view and compassion towards the women, with Theo being the closest to Cat, the ostensible central character of the play. While the exchanges between the men and women in Mi Abuela are one-sided and potentially biased, True Believer’s are more open, raw, and based on mutual respect and affection.

This then feeds into both plays and how they approach violence towards women. Mi Abuela has its women as victims of patriarchal systems that force them to suffer due to their gender and race, where white men can impregnate and abandon their lovers and children or sexually assault teenage girls because of their position of power. The women in this play have to lean into their traditions and cultures to handle their trauma. Maya leans into images of her childhood like jaguars and cactuses to rationalize her rape, and her Mami uses the power of storytelling to help her mature, moving from girl stories to women stories when she learns what happened to her daughter.

The violence in True Believer comes more from how the characters of the play are seen as outcasts of their rural, conservative community. Damage to the clinic windows, murdered cats, and the need for security on the premises are casually mentioned and then dropped from conversation so the cast can do their Secret Santa exchange. Even the one patient who appears, a teenager named Leah, spends her time riddled with fear and worry due to the fact that she’s even there and what it means if anyone knows she’s there, even though she’s merely there for a UTI test. The cast acknowledge that their profession puts them against their community, but the community they have formed within the clinic walls has made them able to tolerate it through minor rituals like sharing baked goods and discussing the design of the waiting room.

The aspect of both plays that helps make their pairing the most important is just how resonating they are with one another and with the reader. The cast of True Believer are nice, boring people whose lives are more complex than their profession, to the point where you could almost transport them to any work setting. The cast of Mi Abuela, when you look past the surreal nature of the play, are damaged, honest individuals who rely on family history and storytelling to cope with the harsh nature of life. In a way, both casts are people who are looking for ways to handle the fears and dangers of their lives, whether it’s from violent pro-lifers or rapist cops, and have built their own methods of doing so.

Two Plays is a fantastic collection for those who are looking for new plays that approach female autonomy and gendered violence in abstract and unique ways. True Believer normalizes the culture in an abortion clinic and makes the characters sympathetic as they deal with a community’s ostracization of them and their practice, while Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares is a haunting elegiac work that examines immigrant families and their response to trauma and bigotry. Both plays are complex and worth multiple reads to fully understand the text, something that makes Hehir and Stoddard audacious playwrights. Their plays make the reader wonder if the rituals and actions they take are how they can cope with the ugliness of life and if there is a way to pull greater meaning out of them, and that makes them worth a read and worth hopefully seeing them performed live once theatres are open again.

Alex Carrigan (@carriganak) is an editor, writer, and critic from Virginia. He has edited and proofed the anthologies 'CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing' (C&R Press, 2018) and 'Her Plumage: An Anthology of Women’s Writings from Quail Bell Magazine' (Quail Bell Press & Productions 2019). He has had fiction, poetry, and literary reviews published in Quail Bell Magazine, Lambda Literary Review, Empty Mirror, Passionate Chic, Gertrude Press, Quarterly West, 'Stories About Penises' (Guts Publishing, 2019), 'Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear' (Et Alia Press, 2020), and Whale Road Review. You can find his work at carriganak.wordpress.com.