Melissa James Gibson Overview

Melissa James Gibson is at once an anomaly among contemporary playwrights and a sterling emblem of her contemporary theatrical period.  As anomaly, she imbues each work with a singular integrity that seems almost defiant of the current overriding trend of theatrical collectives and hive-minded groups.  As emblem of her contemporary theatrical period, she displays in her texts evident and considered examination of various notions of theatricality; in this way, she is similar to such playwrights as the late Sarah Kane and Tarell Alvin McCraney and such theatre groups as The Talking Band and Elevator Repair Service, among others.  What separates her from these contemporaries is a subtlety in approach that allows for more nuanced appreciations of the inherencies of the stage - little in her work bears the theatrical fireworks of Tony Kushner or Ontological-Hysteric Theater, others with whom she may reasonably, with considerable caveats, be aligned - without casting her work into the often outsize and hyperbolic territory of these other artists.  She has cited as among her favorite writers Christopher Fry, Mac Wellman, and Suzan Lori-Parks, and with each she does share certain affinities and concerns; to offer a cursory account: with Fry, an appreciation of the unexplained minor absurdities of life; with Wellman, an indefatiguable formal experimentation; with Lori-Parks, an interest in locating within colloquial speech its mythic and allusive substructures.  But the nuance of her approach to each of these elements is largely what allows for what may, quite sadly, be considered the more "traditional" elements of her plays: their humanity, their concern for the piquantly painful and bizarre within the ostensible ordinariness of quotidian life.  This is what distinguishes her from many of her contemporaries; this is what makes her work not only acutely contemporary but also timeless.