They Would Live Likewise, A Play in One Act by Sydney Tatum Gamble

Drama, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The night before his daughter's wedding, Arthur writes obsessively at his kitchen table, working hard on a book he has no hope of finishing. His wife, meanwhile, hosts a bizarre celebration in their home. The bride-to-be is a child. The mother-in-law abandons her own dying mother to attend the party. The groom gives a toast about lightning storms, black birds, and stained glass windows. But once these guests have cleared out; once their cake and champagne have been cleaned up; Arthur must face his own fiction and wonder:

What keeps us from living differently?

Day after day, milestone after milestone, we lose our lives as we live them. This play is therefore an elegy delivered with urgency. It strives for the sincere in the uncanny, the intimacy in the minimalistic, redundant, and mundane. In this city, a nail polish stain and a shared breakfast become their own shattering life events. They Would Live Likewise was written in 2019 and first performed at the Massman Theatre in 2022.

Sydney Tatum Gamble is a writer, researcher, and choreographer from Clayton, California. Her plays and dances have been staged from Chesire, Connecticut to Los Angeles, California. She is currently in her final year of undergraduate education at the University of Southern California, where she is receiving degrees in Narrative Studies and Law, History, and Culture.