Can life reflect art? Why do we become attracted to the wrong people? Is it possible to become a superhero in real life? What happens when AIDS is spread, all unknowingly, among those we love and have loved?

These are only a few of the ideas tackled in just one of Old Pueblo Playwrights’ New Play Festivals. The themes, style, and content of the plays written at OPP are as varied as the playwrights themselves. They have written comedies and dramas, plays that circle around back on themselves and plays that leap off into the great unknown.

Has your spouse become a different person, or is it only your attitude that’s changed? What is the nature of family in a time when attitudes about gender roles, biological relationships, and sexual orientation are changing? And what’s the proper etiquette when your ex-wife wants to give a Viking funeral to your dead cat?

Our regular meetings on Monday nights have demonstrated a similar dizzying variety. We have heard readings of plays set in the distant future and the remote past, plays that end with a kiss and plays that end with a savage dog attack, plays based on news headlines, or on the lives of the playwrights, or plays with plots that could only have come from their imaginations. Even at our yearly Play In A Day festival, where playwrights are required to use the same props and share a line of dialogue, we have seen mysteries, comedies, dramas, surrealism, and plays about love, death, and BDSM.

No two the same.

What’s my point here? That imagination is still fertile out here in the desert; that the human mind is endlessly creative; and that, in Tucson at least, modern American theater is therefore alive and well.

At Old Pueblo Playwrights, we’re trying to take this boundless imaginative energy and refine it and work on it and improve it until each play is also the best work of theater it can possibly be. That is our purpose, and why the organization exists. To help playwrights get their message across. To let them know whether or not, at the most basic level, the author and the audience are communicating across the invisible “fourth wall” in front of the stage.

So come on over and let the playwrights know what you think of their work.

– Ry Herman

OPP President, 2005-2007