Boys and Girls (NHB Modern Plays)

By Dylan Coburn Gray

A play in verse following four young people across one night in Dublin.
Dylan Coburn Gray's play Boys and Girls was first performed at Dublin Fringe Festival in 2013, winning the Fishamble Best New Writing Award. It was also nominated for the Stewart Parker Trust Award.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Jun 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781788502115

Dylan Coburn Gray

Dylan Coburn Gray is a writer and theatre maker based in Dublin. His plays include Boys and Girls (Dublin Fringe Festival 2013, winner of Best New Writing Award, nominated for the Stewart Parker Trust Award); Drawing Crosses on a Dusty Windowpane (Dublin Fringe 2015); Citysong (winner of the Verity Bargate Award; Abbey Theatre Dublin and Soho Theatre London 2019); Briseis after the Black and Blackcatfishmusketeer (Dublin Fringe 2016); and This is a Room (Dublin Theatre Festival 2017). He is a collaborating writer with MALAPROP Theatre, with whom he has co-written JERICHO (Bewleys Cafe Theatre) and EVERYTHING NOT SAVED (Dublin Fringe 2017).

Book preview

Dylan Coburn Gray

BOYS AND GIRLS

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Original Production

Characters

Boys and Girls

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Boys and Girls opened in 2013, Drawing Crosses on a Dusty Windowpane was written throughout 2014 and 2015, and Citysong was written at the end of 2015. These three plays sum up two very important years of working out what and how and why I wanted to write. (Then MALAPROP – the collaborative outfit I make work with – came along, and everything got a lot more complicated.)

Citysong is the single play I’ve written so far that most embodies everything I’m about as a writer. But you can find the seeds in Boys and Girls. There are things in Boys and Girls too that I would not write now: pop-culture references that were dated the moment I wrote them down, jokes in the voices of young men that can only be so ‘ironically’ sexist if they require you, the audience, to sit there and listen to them. I’m still proud of it as a document of a time in young Irish adulthood. I’m still proud of it for having a kind of nerdy compassion at its heart. I still think there are worse things to aim for than stylish sincerity.

There’s an arc to these three plays. It’s not scale, even though the four people of Boys and Girls become six in Citysong with a detour through monologue for Crosses. I think the arc is me learning to be other people, and the journey is further each time. The work I love is all about truth, moments of unexpected recognition or realisation. The leap into someone else’s experience that all at once takes you home. That said, I’m not mad on writing that is self-consciously #relatable, funnily enough, because I think it often has a conspiratorial subtext.

Don’t we all do this?

Aren’t we all like this?

Which invites the punchline to the old joke:

Who’s ‘we’, white man?

It’s sameness without difference, the leap without the chasm.

If the un-looked-for truth is what you look for, it would be stranger if your writing didn’t sooner or later spiral out from the world you know best and find easiest to write. Meaning writing itself gets harder, but that’s to be expected. The further you want to leap, the more of a run-up you need. Someone once said to me you get one good work out of doing what comes naturally, and from there it’s all learning to be someone else. I think about that a lot. I like that a lot. The idea that the means is the end: connection,