(Please just stick to ing'glish)
WHAT RANDY SAYS ABOUT HIS NEW PLAY MAHAZAR AG DOD! (Please, just
stick to in’glish) Randy loves Joyce, really loves Joyce, and is sometimes really, really randy
The idea for this play came to me after waiting for my father’s death with my
mother and my two sisters, watching him die. The play, however, is more than a
private journey. I also took and fused bits and pieces of what I knew about two
other families.
The survivors in my play ran and escaped the cruelty and darkness represented
by their father, Professor Johnson. His imminent death forces them to return to
the nest and again face what they have tried to put behind them. Even the two
youngest members of the clan, though at the beginning not totally free, are by the
end of the play positioned to win.
Ramming physics down brilliant kids’ throats, the downward spiral of a physics
professor’s career, and rebellion: those things are the catalyst for each
character’s story. For the oldest son, his career in literature parallels his father’s
but without the downward spiral. A genius, this son is told by his father that he is
not worth a tinker’s damn for rejecting a career in physics. Yet in literature, he
has what his father has never had: an original idea.
MAHAZAR AG DOG! comes from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s work
is also a major catalyst in the play. In fact, Act One ends with a chain reaction, or
fission, originating with the sound bha, which leads to an explosion of words the
equivalent of an hydrogen bomb. At the end of the play a similar chain reaction
is stopped.
The play is also all over the map. Set in one place, the exterior and interior of
Johnson home in Tempe, Arizona, the play takes the audience to places around
the world, including Taos, Apache Junction, San Francisco, the Port Authority
Bus Terminal and West 42nd Street in New York City, Columbia University,
Bombay, the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, Zamboango, Tawi Tawi, and other
places, many of which would probably be unfamiliar to the average playgoer.
