Leslye Headland didn’t mean to follow in St. Augustine’s footsteps, but when she was looking for an idea for her second play, a thought occurred to her: “Since Cinephilia dealt with lust, I suddenly remembered gluttony and the rest.”
Headland has finished six of the Sin Plays, and premiered them at IAMA Theatre in Los Angeles, where she is an artist in residence.
The rules for the Deadly Sin Plays:
· The plays strive to tell the story of how youth gives way to vice, how vice leads to pain and how pain pushes us into adulthood.
· The series has three major criteria: to let a deadly sin serve as the root of the characters’ struggles, to focus primarily on characters under 30, and to have a run time of 90 minutes or less.
· The goal of the series is to create work that inspires younger audiences to participate in a theatre community and to shed light on how ancient issues are still present in an ultra-modern, media-saturated, and over-educated generation.
Cinephilia. Lust. Johnny loves films, Arden loves Johnny, and the sex is really good, so why stop? Well…there’s the fact that Johnny’s fallen for someone else, that his new girlfriend doesn’t know films as well as she thinks she does, and that Arden Just. Can’t. Let. It. Go.
Bachelorette. Gluttony. Three gorgeous, privileged, desperately unhappy women spend the night before a former friend’s wedding imbibing, engaging, and indulging their every whim (mostly for champagne, cocaine, and their cattiest impulses).
Assistance. Greed. What parts of your soul are you willing to shed for the right price? Assistants work to please their unpleasable boss, and what starts as a lucrative game starts to look more and more like a prison.
Surfer Girl. Sloth. And by surfing, she means couch surfing. For years. This symphony of self-loathing follows a girl so immobilized by her desire that she almost literally stops living.
Reverb. Wrath. Jane and Dorian have broken up. Mostly. But as he gets closer to massive success, he can’t let go of her, and she can’t say no to him. The only way they know how to purge their pain is to inflict it—consensually—on each other.
The Accidental Blonde. Envy. Lucy just won a reality-TV cooking competition. But Veronica knows her for stealing her ex-boyfriend. Veronica eventually wins him back, but discovers there’s nothing like envy to lock you into someone else’s life.
Pride. This play is in progress, but Headland promises she’s saving some great stuff for last. “I’ve definitely committed every one of the seven deadly sins,” says Headland. “But pride most of all.”
—Adrien-Alice Hansel