What’s in a name?

Titles of plays are interesting things. You can't copyright a title, so it's very possible that there are two plays out there, unknown to the writers, with the exact same title. With our recent production of Ghost-Writer, we had to contend with the recent Roman Polanski/Ewan McGregor film called The Ghost Writer. "Is that based on the movie?" people would ask. Strangely, no one asked if it was based on the early-90s children's TV show with the same title.

There was also the issue of the hyphen. The play's title is Ghost HYPHEN Writer, an important plot detail and a subject addressed quite specifically in the play itself. But it was challenging to get every source out there to note the hyphen, so we often saw it written as the hyphenless Ghostwriter.

With our 2nd play of the season, Goldie, Max & Milk, we figured there would be some comma and ampersand confusion. We hadn't anticipated trouble with the names themselves. Sometimes the play got called Goldie, Maxie & Milk. Sometimes people thought that the "Milk" in the title represented Harvey Milk. My very favorite, though, was Golda, Max & Milk, which could have been a play about a single lesbian mother and the former Prime Minister of Israel.

In a few weeks, we'll be opening The Cha-Cha of a Camel Spider. The hyphen in this title is the least of our worries. "The what?" people ask. And then other questions: "Is it a musical?" Or "What's a camel spider?" Lots of questions, none easily solved by the show's description:

What happens when “soldiers of fortune” outnumber our army troops? Fortified with a BFA in Slam Poetry Performance, a young woman finds herself caught up in a frightening and darkly comic journey with two rogue mercenary soldiers and a vaguely magical Afghani cab driver who has a penchant for Led Zeppelin.

And then there's the length of the thing, never mind the words. I can't post a message on Twitter using the full title, because it takes up 29 of my 140 characters. For now, I'm abbreviating it as CHA-CHA. Typing the name in ads or other brochures requires clever spacing to avoid unwanted line breaks. These weren't problems we had with our season opener, Cane. But this is a play brought to you by Carter W. Lewis, the writer of last season's hit, The Storytelling Ability of a Boy (33 characters), and next year's premiere, The Americans Across the Street (31 characters), so I should have been prepared.

No matter what you call it, it's a great play: a dark comedy about politics, war, family, and a young woman's belief that "poetry can change reality." It opens here at Florida Stage on May 4, 2011. 

— Kimberly Patterson, Marketing Associate

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