ManBox: A Goodbye Play

Authors' Names

Jadd DavisFollow

Presentation Type

Oral Presentation

Category

Visual and Performing Arts (includes Creative Writing; sculpture, painting, video, dancing, music, reading, etc.)

Abstract/Artist Statement

"ManBox: A Goodbye Play" is an original short play that explores the limitations an individualistic patriarchal society forces on members of the dominant hegemony - in this case semi-autobiographically as I am a white male who grew up in the Western United States. In it, the protagonist runs up against multiple walls as he attempts to say something meaningful to a loved one, trying to access something more significant than his rudimentary emotional vocabulary will allow. I wrote this play in response to watching my father grapple with the loss of his own father, seeing him tie himself in knots of stoicism and an insistence on a certain masculine narrative that left him cold. In this play, I combine my previous graduate work in Theatre and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies (MFA class of '21) with my current pursuit of an MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling to explore the manner in which individual men are failed by the very system that insulates them.

Mentor Name

Veronica Johnson

Personal Statement

I have been wrestling with issues of grief, identity, what wounds us and how we heal for the better part of a decade now. My interests led me initially to pivot from a professional career in the arts to pursue an MFA in Theatre. Those studies, while exciting, led me from the realm of the imagination to the realm of reality - in the form of counseling. As I've worked with real people, the themes that I hoped to explore as an artist have only come into starker relief. Much of my work as a counselor-in-training has been with men and fathers, and I see a tragic pattern of underdeveloped emotional skills amongst many of my clients. Certainly, I am still working to develop my own sense of gender identity and emotional vocabulary as I try to navigate a more-or-less male adulthood and fatherhood of my own. I have found something satisfying in working backward - in terms of my own academic trajectory - to create an artistic embodiment of the themes that tend to rattle around my current milieu. This play has been immensely therapeutic to write. I suspect audience members will see commonalities, if not in their own embodied experience, at least in those of some men in their lives. I occasionally allow myself to indulge in the terrifying act of hope. I can remember a number of seemingly innocuous moments that shifted my personal trajectory by shaking up my narrative. It my little hope that plays like this might shake up a person or two - and that over time may cumulatively bring some clarity (or curiosity) to others who may be wrestling with a ManBox of their own.