Liquid Plain

I went to Naomi Wallace’s Liquid Plain with high hopes. After all, Wallace is one of today’s most famous American playwrights. I left disappointed – my hopes had been drowned in a sea of clumsy playwrighting. 

Plays about slavery in America are in vogue right now, and it felt like Wallace was trying to tap into that for her installment in OSF’s American History Cycle. Wallace seemed to be tackling every single story she felt hadn’t been told about slavery in America yet, and this made the play feel unfocused. She fell into the amateur playwright trap of too much exposition and too much concern for her own prose at the expense of the play’s actability. Otherwise capable actors struggled with Liquid Plain’s seemingly endless litany of expository walls of text.

The weight of failure rests mostly on Wallace’s shoulders – such a renowned playwright should be expected not to present something so unfinished. But, since the dramaturg’s work appeared with such clarity in the copious research that clearly went into Liquid Plain, dramaturg Julie Felise Dubiner also shares the blame. As a new play development dramaturg, her job wasn’t just to provide the playwright with a plethora of stories to write about. Her job was also to encourage Wallace to focus, to find the story that compelled her and then provide research to help her dig into that. Both playwright and dramaturg finished about half their job, and then put Liquid Plain on the boards. Another year in development and Liquid Plain might be ready for an audience, but it wasn’t this season.