Five years after launching Play A Journal of Plays, we are pleased to present DEVICE, an online chronicle of plays in all media.  We’ve brought on playwright and sound-artist Robert Quillen Camp to helm this new project, and to collect all manner of play-like things for your immediate enjoyment. DEVICE will feature pod-casts, videos, portfolios, pictures, and guest postings from the most exciting theater and performance artists working today. In our first month, you’ll get to check out sound-based theater, read some extraordinary stage directions, glimpse fragments by one of our favorite writers, and pick up some free play titles. DEVICE is the latest in our devotion to the life of plays on the page. 
- Sally & Jordan

Stage directions have always had the potential to bring the playwright’s voice to the reader’s ear more intimately than dialogue itself. From Tennessee Williams’ “the bird I hope to catch in the net of this play,” to Kroetz’s dialogue-free Request Concert, playwrights articulate their theater most plainly between the white space and the spoken word. Stage directions become core narrative devices in three recent manuscripts: Molly Rice’s short play Deathbox, Gregory Moss’s punkplay, and The Kindermann Depiction by Steve Moore and Carlos Treviño. For Rice and Moss, stage directions take on a distinct voice and character. In Kindermann, formatted in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, a disturbing micro-universe is choreographed entirely without spoken words. These three plays affirm how many young writers are redefining a convention once meant to be seen and not heard.

The plays (right-click to download):

• Deathbox by Molly Rice
• punkplay by Gregory Moss
• The Kindermann Depiction by Steve Moore and Carlos Treviño

-Sally & Jordan

[This is the first in a series of Sarah Ruhl's essaylets on theatre that DEVICE is publishing this fall.]

1. On Titles — Comedy and Tragedy
Tragedy is most often named for the tragic person; whereas the comedy appears to be named with nouns or phrases from the world at large. For example: Romeo and Juliet. As opposed to: As you Like it. Or take: Titus Andronicus  versus A Midsummer’s Night Dream. (In my own work Eurydice for a tragedy and The Clean House for something more absurd.). Nouns signify the world and the structure of the world over and above the individual. Is this because tragedies are about the loss of one individual soul? The tragic perspective privileges one person over the continuity of the system, the structure, the life force, whereas comedies (which often end in marriages) are named with phrases, linguistic structures, which signify the description of a life structure, going on, on and on, after the play.