Signature Theatre’s press release announcing its next production, Really Really, begins like this:
“An elite university. A not-to-be-missed party. A startling accusation.”
Rumors have circulated that Really Really is loosely based on the Duke lacrosse case of 2006, but playwright Paul Downs Colaizzo is reticent about the plot.
When posed what the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner characterized as “a basic question: What’s your play about?,” Colaizzo hesitates.
“That’s actually not a basic question,” he replies. "That's actually proved to be a very hard question."
Colaizzo explains that, "when people ask me these questions, I tend to answer thematically because that, to me, is what the play is about -- but usually that’s not what people are looking for.”
Reticence or intrigue?
The reticence – or intrigue, depending on how one looks at it – extends to members of the cast, as well. During an interview with actress Bethany Anne Lind, she responds to a question about her character, Leigh, by looking over to Colaizzo shyly and saying, “I don’t know what I’m allowed to say.”
Audiences may uncover the intrigue after Really Really opens, but in the meantime they will have to settle for the thematic background information that the playwright is willing to discuss.
Really Really is Colaizzo’s first professionally produced play, at the age of 26. He found his inspiration for the play, he says, in what he calls the “post-abortion generation” of people born since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.
The post-abortion generation, he says, is “the most wanted generation in American history, because there was the option not to have us.”
The conscientious desire of that generation’s mothers and fathers to have offspring led to a lot of what is called helicopter parenting and the inculcation of self-esteem in children without regard to actual achievement or, as Colaizzo puts it, the idea that “everybody gets a trophy.” This, in turn, resulted in “an incredibly entitled and narcissistic generation that is sort of an anomaly in American life.”
Colaizzo describes “this period of time,” in which is own generation was brought up, as one that saw every child as “wanted and loved” and told that every one of them is “amazing, just for being them.”
Economic divide
When that generation reached young adulthood after being pampered during a period of economic abundance, they suddenly faced the economic crisis of 2008 and the recession and slowdown that followed. College graduates who expected a job immediately after graduation were sorely disappointed. Failure and the necessity to cope were new to them.
This situation, Colaizzo explained, led to a “divide” between those who really were resilient in the face of the challenge” of the economic downturn despite the “entitlement teachings” they grew up with, and “those who went the other way,” the ones “who live in their parents’ basements” and who accept the poor job market as a given and have given up looking for something better to do with their lives.
This is the background of Really Really but, Colaizzo asks rhetorically, “Will you see any of that in the play?” The answer is no.
A rugby team, a party, an aftermath
The closest Colaizzo gets to describing what happens in his play is to say it is "about a rugby team. It takes place after a party on campus, the morning of the return from the party, and [during] the next two days that follow.”
In the course of the play, “the truth of what happened at the party comes into question. It becomes every man for himself,” in that “there’s suddenly a risk to each character’s future.”
The question is, Colaizzo concedes, “at what level will these characters and members of this generation go to protect [their futures] in an unpromising world?”
Really Really has its official opening night on February 12 at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia.
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