A Two-Hour Tour
Let’s get the title out of the way first. The word “posh” supposedly derives from an acronym for “Port Out, Starboard Home,” indicating the most desirable accommodations aboard ships from England to India and back. Merriam-Webster, for one, doesn’t buy that etymology at all, but in any case that’s the relatively simple explanation for the seemingly abstruse title of foolsFURY Theater’s collaboration with playwright Sheila Callaghan, Port Out, Starboard Home, now premiering at San Francisco’s Z Space before moving to La Mama in New York in November.
Oh That Norman
The Norman Conquests isn’t your standard trilogy. The plays in Alan Ayckbourn’s comedic 1973 triptych don’t happen one after another but all at more or less the same time with the same characters in different areas of the same house: Round and Round the Garden in the garden, Table Manners in the dining room, and Living Together in the living room. Ackbourn crafted them in a rotating fashion, writing the first scene of the first play, then the first scene of the second play, then the first scene of the third, before proceeding to the second scene of the first play, and round and round between the three plays until they were all finished. That’s more or less how the action plays out, too. Some events in any two plays are clearly happening simultaneously, while other scenes fill in the gaps of time the other plays skip over. The idea is that you can see them in any order, and that’s more or less true. (I wouldn’t recommend starting off with Living Together, but more on that later.)
