En Mortem
Last year, when Graney wrote his first play, he resolved his continuing struggle to release truth through fakery. In The 4th Graders Present an Unnamed Love-Suicide he imposed the pageantry, the huge passions, and the declamatory style of Greek tragedy on a band of contemporary ten-year-olds supposedly performing a play written by a classmate who killed himself.
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Graney intended The 4th Graders to be performed by children, an idea as preposterous–what do fourth graders know of murder, suicide, and obsessive love?–as it is apt: who else but children are tender enough to experience tragedy every day? He settled for a cast of adults, and the results were electrifying, somehow elevating playground squabbles to mythic levels. The true and the fake were rolled up into one impossibly contradictory reality so bold it could only be accepted or rejected on its own bewildering terms.
Graney builds his entire play out of moments too naive to be taken seriously, too openhearted to be ignored. He fashions a theatrical experience that rings true because it’s admittedly manufactured and because the playwright’s heart can be heard beating beneath the lines. The key lies in his unadorned language: the characters seem to speak straight from their cores. Even the blustery, exaggerated Mike Rice eventually admits that, like Johnny, he feels profoundly impure: he talks at length about the guilt he felt after masturbating in a gas station restroom while thinking about the woman and five-year-old girl he saw at a public pool.
