Savannah Reich on AZ Espinoza

Dear AZ;

Last night I went to see a reading of your play “Homeridae” at Azukafest. I downloaded this play from New Play Exchange and read it a couple of years ago, and I remember thinking that it was a tightly intellectual piece that carried me all along with it in every moment. It reminded me of Stoppard, not in tone, but because it’s a play about ideas, and because the play teaches us to think in a certain way. I love that the play teaches us, because this is really a story about teaching and learning, and how being Black in the university affects a person who wants to teach and to learn. 

One thing that I realized at the reading last night was that this play is so funny! Obviously nothing is ever quite as funny on the page, but this cast really made me think, oh, this is a comedy! Sam Rise as Mac, the twitchy, anxious, overqualified adjunct professor and Homer scholar, trying to inspire his students and seem cool to his weed dealer, made me laugh so much I was worried about missing the dialogue. This is an amazing playwright-actor chemistry, Sam should probably be in all of your plays! And then Matthew Armstead’s calm, magnetic energy as Homer / the statue of Homer was the beautiful opposite of Mac, in a way that was unexpectedly hilarious. All the characters were awkward as fuck and kind of bad at life but also brilliant, and I could just watch that for hours. 

I remember talking with you a few years ago about how if we weren’t artists, we probably both would have wanted to get PhDs and be academics. This play really scratches that itch for me. The characters Mac and Nessa love to study and learn, but the university forces them to make a choice between being respected as academics or getting to engage with the deep, unknowable truth, which I experienced as a metaphor for making art. Every character in this play is traumatized in a different way by the anti-Blackness of the institution, and in a way, that makes them want to win the game and show everyone that they can’t be crushed. In another way, it makes them want to take their excellence elsewhere. Can academic rigor and creative truth co-exist? It’s a question I’ve never seen explored in a play before, and by the end you had me rooting for every character to find a way to have both. This intellectual and beautiful play shows us that you have found a way to have both, and it feels like you are showing your characters, and us, the way. 

Xo, Savannah