When an avant-garde playwright privileges sound over meaning, how does language continue to function? Is it, properly speaking, still language? Some of the most interesting works of the last hundred years have asked these questions, and the modernist technique still has bite. When words stop making easily-parsed sense, they become more musical, more strange, more powerful. We look into the way that three of our Prelude playwrights interrogate the word and talk about techniques for achieving understanding when typical communication has gone topsy-turvy. Prelude.11 curator Helen Shaw facilitates the discussion between playwrights Sibyl Kempson, Jeffrey M. Jones, Mac Wellman, and Otso Huopaniemi, whose work is featured in this year’s festival.
