Every week, I compose listings on the week's new plays for Metromix NY. I'm often disappointed by the titles that playwrights choose for their work, so I'm reviewing their titles now. Not the shows (I haven't seen them yet) just the titles. To read about the content of each show, click through its link to my listings on Metromix NY.
CRADLE AND ALL
A quote from the rhyme “Rockabye Baby”. It's an astute reference, since it alludes only obliquely to the grisly fate of that nursery baby. Hopefully, the play itself deals as darkly with the theme of new parenthood.
DESPERATE WRITERS
This title's awfully bland and only kind of functional. It conveys its subject but nothing of the tone.
JUMP
An imperative verb can be okay, as one-word titles go. But even if this one accurately describes the show's content, it's way too common a title to work well. Plenty of songs have used it (see especially Van Halen and Criss Cross), and a quick check on Wikipedia shows that it's also been used for a movie, a TV show, a TV episode, albums, a funk band―and this very show, a Korean martial arts performance!
A LITTLE JOURNEY
Probably not a jukebox musical about the '70s/'80s rock band. “Journey” is a conventional structure for a tale, which suggests this play won't be too experimental in form. That “Little” is kinda cute, but journeys are short, not little.
MANIPULATION
Abstract nouns like this make weak titles, especially when they're unambiguous. Manipulation promises intrigue and subtextual motives for its characters, but it's also terribly pretentious.
CRADLE AND ALL
A quote from the rhyme “Rockabye Baby”. It's an astute reference, since it alludes only obliquely to the grisly fate of that nursery baby. Hopefully, the play itself deals as darkly with the theme of new parenthood.
DESPERATE WRITERS
This title's awfully bland and only kind of functional. It conveys its subject but nothing of the tone.
JUMP
An imperative verb can be okay, as one-word titles go. But even if this one accurately describes the show's content, it's way too common a title to work well. Plenty of songs have used it (see especially Van Halen and Criss Cross), and a quick check on Wikipedia shows that it's also been used for a movie, a TV show, a TV episode, albums, a funk band―and this very show, a Korean martial arts performance!
A LITTLE JOURNEY
Probably not a jukebox musical about the '70s/'80s rock band. “Journey” is a conventional structure for a tale, which suggests this play won't be too experimental in form. That “Little” is kinda cute, but journeys are short, not little.
MANIPULATION
Abstract nouns like this make weak titles, especially when they're unambiguous. Manipulation promises intrigue and subtextual motives for its characters, but it's also terribly pretentious.
NARRATOR 1
A meta title! Is the show named for its protagonist? Is the subject a duel between Narrators 1 and 2? As promising as that sounds, it also suggests that the show features the device of direct address, which I abhor as undramatic.
THE SHAGGS: PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD
The deliberate misspelling of slang with several meanings (among them, longish hair and casual sex), the long, grandiose subclause: if this sounds like a 1960s rock band's album, that's because it is. Only rock cultists will recognize the reference though, to an execrable sister-act that Frank Zappa and later Kurt Cobain dug.
WOMAN BEFORE A GLASS
The words might be generic in other situations instead summon up an image that's enigmatic and compelling. Who is the woman? Why is she looking in a mirror? Or is she in front of a glass cup, and what's in it and why is that significant?
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