Day 104: The Awkward Squad, by Karin Young (Day 105 is day off)

Penultimate "Plays for Today by Women" installment. Interesting take on the class divide, using memoires of the mining strikes as a parallel for more recent financial problems in a family with roots in the mining community but aspirations of a middle-class life. Naturally everyone's apparent success is short-lived and there are secrets each is keeping from the others, making for an engaging read and I'm sure, an exciting play in production. Not much in the way of monologues apart from the character in her late 60s, but definitely one to keep to hand if I ever need pair or group work scripts.

I feel like I'm running out of things to say specifically about all these plays, I may need to rethink why I'm doing this project. Firstly the reading is to get a better feel for what's out there as well as returning to a few old favorites. I've probably read more plays in the last 100 days than I had in my entire life previously. This blog is meant to be a check that I am focussed while I'm reading, that I can take something away from it and articulate that in writing. It's partly telling that the blogs written when I haven't had the opportunity to talk to someone else about what I've been reading tend to be shorter, and more often seem to be full of missed points or even straight up admissions that I didn't like the play. That's a tricky one to solve - ideally this blog should be a way of having that discussion myself, without the need for an external ear. I have never been all that good at factual writing. Essays at school were a chore, even lab reports and projects at university were a slog. Where this project has fallen down has almost exclusively been the writing side of things. So, I might try mixing things up a bit. Maybe in future posts sometimes there will be character explorations, or fiction written taking the play as inspiration. I'll probably feel a bit silly doing things that way for a while, but if it refreshes the blog a bit and makes it easier to maintain, then that can only be a good thing.