Plays / Chronology / Slide Glide the Slippery Slope / More About the Play The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2003 Humana Festival SLIDE GLIDE THE SLIPPERY SLOPE How do you construct the perfect family? In Kia Corthron’s new play, family comes under the microscope in a fascinating exploration of human cloning, genetic engineering, and the role heredity plays in shaping our personalities and our lives. Erm and Elo, the principal characters in the piece, are identical twins who were reared apart. Erm is a mess of contradictions: a strong-willed single woman living on a remote farm, a die-hard vegetarian raising cows and sheep and keeping up to date with the latest scientific developments through the Internet and an impressive collection of books and scientific journals. Elo, the city sister, arrives after a 35-year absence with an unexpected windfall, and she brings with her a childlike need to reconnect with her remaining family after the tragic loss of her 10-year-old daughter and the ensuing loss of her marriage. The two sisters, whose similarities seem to begin and end with their identical features, are soon trapped together as a storm rages outside and a debate rages within: is cloning the answer to Elo’s grief? How slippery is the slope that begins with a simple desire to give your loved one life and ends in a world filled with perfect clones? “I came into it thinking it was icky,” Corthron admits jokingly of her initial response to cloning. She became fascinated with clones and cloning at the same time many of us did—with the birth of Dolly, the sheep that, as journalist Gina Kolata observes in her book Clone, “altered our very notion of what it means to be human.” “But I came out of it,” Corthron continues, “thinking it was just a little more complex.” Corthron began her research by reading work that was pro-clone—and what she found was not what she expected. “I imagined all of these mad scientists wanting to see what they could do, just because it was so interesting, and to see how far they could go. But I realized that a goodly percentage of people that are pro-clone are infertile parents who are just so desperate to have a child that this seems like the only way. And there are also people who have lost a loved one, and again there’s desperation that this is the way to bring back their child. While it didn’t change my mind ethically, I came to realize that it’s a very complex issue, and that there were many aspects of it that I wasn’t even thinking about.” As with many of her plays, Slide Glide the Slippery Slope is packed with information—the result of months, if not years, of exhaustive research. And while one of Corthron’s great gifts as a playwright is her ability to transform complex intellectual ideas and political arguments into emotionally accessible human stories, she was anxious that science remain a central part of this play. Several years ago, she attended a workshop for artists, conducted by two bioethicists who spoke about the power that scientists hold because of the knowledge they possess—a power that is increased by a public wary of complex scientific information. These bioethicists went on to challenge the artists in attendance to “spread the word,” and in so doing, hold the scientists more accountable for the impact their knowledge has on the world. Corthron took this challenge seriously: “People are always a little afraid of knowledge, and while most people are very anti-clone, at the same time they don’t understand it, so as often happens—like, say, with the atomic bomb—people don’t want it, but if science just goes ahead and does it, people accept it. So part of my play is for us not to just accept it, but to be thinking about these ideas.” One way that she is able to bring complex scientific ideas and language to the play is through wild theatricality—a theatricality that stretches the limits of reality while remaining grounded in the rich, textured world she has crafted for her characters. This sort of style is in keeping with much of her work, which she describes as “heightened realism.” The result is strikingly original and endlessly surprising. This, as Corthron explains, is all by design. “What I usually try to do in everything that happens from moment to moment, and even from word to word, is to give the audience the unexpected.” In this fiercely intelligent, wildly funny, unabashedly political and searingly emotional play, if you expect the unexpected, you won’t be disappointed. — Tanya Palmer KIA CORTHRON Along with their sociopolitical bent, Corthron’s plays are distinctive because of the language they contain. Born in a small Maryland town and currently living in Harlem, Corthron’s voice is a blend of very different worlds. According to the playwright, the language her characters use is “not surrealistic, but it’s not quite naturalistic.” Her plays have a poetry and rhythm of their own. Though now a prolific writer with a discernible voice, Corthron could easily have missed the world of theatre entirely. In fact, she did not even consider playwriting until her last semester of college. After signing up for a playwriting class, she almost dropped it when the professor threatened (falsely) to inflict an impossibly heavy workload on the students. “I actually get little pains in my stomach to think how close I came to leaving,” she says. Luckily, however, Corthron took the class. For their last assignment, she wrote a piece about a Vietnam soldier on the day of his return to the U.S. When the performance ended, there was silence in the room. “Then when people finally did speak, it was one-word things like ‘poignant.’ And I realized for the first time that I really affected this audience, and the fact that they couldn’t speak meant so much more to me than everything in my life previously, when everybody was so verbose about how much they liked my stuff. Just then I had this realization of theatre,” she states. “This was a theatrical moment that could never be repeated, because it was this audience and these actors and this performance, and there was this connection between the audience and the actors. That’s why I’ve been writing for the theatre ever since.” After college, Corthron moved to Washington, D.C. for a year, where she took a workshop with playwright Lonnie Carter. After that, she attended Columbia University in pursuit of an M.F.A. in playwriting. There she wrote Wake Up Lou Riser and Come Down Burning, which both went on to professional productions. After graduating, however, Corthron went through some tough years. She was receiving commissions, but theatres were slow to produce her work. “It was frustrating to have that sort of limbo of being a writer on paper,” she says. “But, while I wasn’t very happy, it didn’t change my style, or what I was writing about. I didn’t tone that down; I continued in my vein. I think I became a better writer over those years.” Indeed, those years paid off, as multiple theatres began to sign on for productions of Corthron’s work. Among her successes is Breath, Boom, a powerful play about violence in girl gangs, which has had productions at London’s Royal Court Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Yale Repertory, and the Huntington Theatre in Boston. Splash Hatch on the E Going Down was also produced at Yale Rep, as well as at Center Stage, London’s Donmar Warehouse and New York Stage and Film. Force Continuum was commissioned and produced by the Atlantic Theater Company, and Digging Eleven, which Corthron considers her most autobiographical play, was produced at Hartford Stage. Other works include Seeking the Genesis, The Venus de Milo is Armed, and Cage Rhythm. Corthron was the first playwriting fellow at Manhattan Theatre Club, and she has won the Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, the Mark Taper Forum’s Fadiman Award, and an NEA/TCG grant, among other honors. With constant commissions and deadlines in mind, Corthron has become such a prolific writer that new ideas “often have to wait their turn.” While she has tried her hand at writing fiction, it seems that the stage is where her work truly belongs. As soon as she considers ideas for a novel, Corthron says she immediately realizes, “Oh, I think I want to see that on the stage.” And with the distinctive language that her plays possess, live theatre seems to be their perfect home. — Susannah Engstrom