Pterodactyls

Cast

Production Team

Dramaturgical Information

by Jillian Brewer, Dramaturg

Nicky Silver

Nicky Silver grew up in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia with his parents and one sister.  Desperate to leave behind his high school experience, Silver applied early admission to New York University after the eleventh grade. Successful in his plan for escape, he was admitted into the Experimental Theater Wing of the university. In the Experimental Theater Wing which operates under the idea of exposing students to contemporary and traditional aesthetics as a tool to help them construct their own style, Silver learned that he was not interested in any of the acting or avant-garde theatre work he was taking part in. After he graduated from the program, Silver began writing his own plays. He wrote a handful of full length and short plays, most of which didn’t survive the only exception being his second full length, Bridal Hunt.  However, this early start to playwriting came to a screeching halt. In the beginning of the AIDS epidemic that swept through the United States in the 1980’s, Silver lost someone very close to him. As a result Silver stopped writing entirely for two years.

It was not until he was approached on the street by a small theater company familiar with an earlier play of his that he began his career as a playwright again.

"Then one day I was walking down the street, honest to God, and someone said to me, ‘Did you write a play called Bridal Hunt a few years ago?’ ‘Why do you ask?’ I responded, wanting to know if he liked it before I fessed up. He liked it. He had a theatre company and they were looking for a play for six actors, all in their twenties, on a bare stage. He commissioned me for about three hundred dollars. And let me tell you, he got exactly three hundred dollars’ worth of art. They play stunk.”

Despite Silver’s own feelings of his play, the owner of The Vortex Theater, asked Silver to write for him. For six years, Silver was commissioned by the Vortex to write plays whenever they couldn’t rent out the space to someone else. He would be given four weeks to write a play, four weeks to rehearse it and a night to build the set. During this time he continued to work the not so glamorous day jobs typical of  artists: retail and restaurants. His experiences working these jobs particularly at Barney’s influenced the development of some of his characters, most notably the Duncans in Pterodactyls.

Frustrated by the inconsistent and unpredictable nature of this work, he decided he would take his next play somewhere else. The next play that was written with this envisioned opportunity of production outside of the restrictions of the Vortex was Pterodactyls. Many companies were interested but often wanted to change elemental parts of the piece. Unwilling to be pushed too far away from the intentions of the play, Silver waited to find the right producer.  The  Vineyard Theater Company in New York City ended up being that producer.  Pterodactyls was first performed fifteen years ago in October of 1993. It was Silver’s first play to be reviewed by the New York Times, its run was extended due to its success and it was later published in its entirety in American Theater magazine in 1994. It marked the take off of Silver’s career as a well known and respected contemporary playwright.

Silver and Absurdism

As Silver's oeuvre of work grew, his comedic style garnered him comparisons to Kaufman and Hart (The Man Who Came to Dinner), Phillip Barry (Philadelphia Story) and Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf). Despite these flattering comparisons, Silver is hailed as being one of the new uniquely talented playwrights of our generation to revive the theatre of the absurd in the United States. When the movement first began it was the artists’ way of reacting to the disillusionment of World War II. It addressed the emptiness and failure of language and problems which were magnified by the severe conditions surrounding the characters. The lines between reality and illusion were often blurred and through non-realism in actions and staging and the realism of communication between people and human existence are revealed.

Theater of the absurd’s undeniable connection to realism is seen clearly in Nicky Silver’s work. An important theme that comes up throughout Pterodactyls is people's inability to communicate with each other. This failure or breakdown in communication can be found in older absurdist works as well. The theme of communication is seen in Silver’s style as well as the content of his plays. His belief that the world is a mix of the grotesque and the absurd would then naturally be best revealed through the pairing of comedy and the harsh realisms of life. Some of the many topics touched upon in Pterodactyls include AIDS, class and economic status, death, family, relationships between parents and children, love, fear, and denial.

Main Line

Two of these connections to realism- denial and class -are touched upon throughout the entirety of the play. Pterodactyls takes place in the fashionable living room of the Duncans, an upper class family of Main Line, Philadelphia. Main Line is named after the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad made in the early 1800s, the first railroad to run through Pennsylvania. Main Line started as a summer vacation spot for the elite because it was a practical location to escape from the city. Those who came for the summer built extravagant mansions and eventually people began to settle there establishing a community of high end shopping, businesses and wealthy suburbs.

The general superior attitude of Main Line is still present. One can go to Rittenhouse Square which has numerous stores carrying designer labels or to one of the many fine dining establishments. Today, Main Line has countless websites (because those of the upper class have always had the privilege of defining their own past, present and future) that boast headlines such as “Polo for a Cause” and even “Shopping for a Cause.” Real estate, shopping and dining are considered important resources to Main Line’s economy. Another important aspect of Main Line life is the documentation of the magnificent parties being thrown around town.

Though we never leave the living room of the Duncan’s Main Line home, we most definitely feel the community's influence in Grace's obsession with status.  Friends from the club, designer labels, retail therapy, her penchant for planning excessive affairs and maintaining her and her family’s appearance are of the utmost important to Grace. It is especially apparent in the humorous and frighteningly absurd treatment of Emma’s lower class fiancé, Tommy.

AIDS

Unlike the artists of the first absurdist movement, contemporary playwrights do not have the disillusionment of World War II to fuel them. However, there has been a panoply of possible modern happenings to choose from. The AIDS epidemic for one, has certainly provided just as much disillusionment from which to respond.

The AIDS crisis started to become apparent in the United States in 1981 when it was first mentioned in medical literature. When the epidemic began, it was only truly addressed by the gay, lesbian and medical communities. Many homosexual men, especially in New York and California, were dying and there was very little known or being done about it. Early medical reports were looking at it as a gay man’s disease, going so far as to call it GRID, the Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. It wasn’t until 1982 that Center for Disease Control more correctly renamed it AIDS, the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. By 1981 thirteen hundred Americans of homosexual and non-homosexual backgrounds had contracted it.  Regardless of that fact, AIDS continued to be looked at as the gay plague.

Despite the horrific nature of the disease and so many dead, mainstream media did not pay it any notice for two years. In 1983 AIDS finally hit the media, which as a result caused a massive backlash against homosexuals. People avoided gay populated areas and places frequented by gay customers. Out homosexuals were being fired from jobs they already held or not being hired out of ignorant fear. There was even legislation put forth to quarantine all with HIV or AIDS in camps for the rest of their lives. Though its origins were not known, much of society thought it  to be a homosexual male, some even linking it back to the idea of Patient Zero, Gaetan Dugas a homosexual flight attendant. Others blamed Haiti, Africa, monkeys, Polio vaccines, and even the wrath of God. The misconception that only drug users and homosexuals had this disease made people pay little attention to it. The federal government did little to nothing to support AIDS services, research and education. Even President Reagan was advised to turn a blind eye and never even uttered the word AIDS in a public forum until his second term in office in 1985 with15,948 cases reported and 5,636 deaths that year in the US alone. It wasn’t until 1987 that he made his first formal address about AIDS and 1990 that he apologized for his neglect of the issue.

The gay community formed support groups and organizations while the rest of the country looked on. Because of this denial and apathy, one third of a million Americans had died of AIDS by the mid 1990s when Pterodactyls was being written. Since then it has affected almost every nation in the world and has become a pandemic. Millions are still dying.

Men, women and children of all classes, races and sexualities were feeling the effects of AIDS. Many great artists of all fields were lost prematurely. Rock Hudson's death in 1985 marked the beginning of losing well known artists to AIDS each year. Art's influence over culture caused this devastation to the nation's creative community to be more visible and hit harder. Nicky Silver and many other artists responded to the crisis in their work. The country’s apathetic view of AIDS resulted in countless works being written. The AIDS play became its own genre. Works such as One, Warren, The AIDS Show, As Is, The Normal Heart, The Band Played On, Falsettos, Jeffrey, RENT and Angels in America were bringing knowledge and outrage to the subject. Artists were not only bringing awareness to the fact that an obscene number of people were dying of AIDS, they were also humanizing those with the disease and showing that just as many people were also living with AIDS.

Pterodactyls achieves many of the goals of the  AIDS play, however no play can be simplified to being about one subject. Nicky Silver uses the extinction of the dinosaurs, the Duncans, and other historical stories to illustrate how dangerous denial in all situations can be to the world.