Sap, a full-length play by Madeleine Lobdell

Abstract

My senior project, Sap, is a play about all the things I love most in the world - complicated girls, soft boys, sweets and trees. It's a play that's lived in me for a long time because all these things are huge parts of my own life, and I finally realized that the best place to bring all these things together was a maple orchard. I spent so many Saturdays in February watching my dad hook buckets to trees and hope he got some sap, so my family could get the good syrup. At some point, I thought, "What if this job was the backdrop for some messy teens to figure their shit out" and I never stopped thinking about it.

My play has three characters, Penelope, whose mother owns the orchard, Wes, her cousin who lives at the orchard with her after losing his parents, and Declan, the cool boy she's had a crush on for years. They're all in high school, and go through many of the typical high school story tropes - the popular guy starts hanging out with the outcasts, there's a school dance, a confession of love involving song. But I wanted to make it so my characters were not who we typically see in these tropes. There are two main love stories, one gay and one of self-love, because Penelope is fat and is struggling with her body image. The outcasts, Wes and Penelope don't have makeovers, and stop being the only openly gay kid in town and the fat girl. Instead, this is a story about embracing those things.

As mentioned, Penelope is fat. I don't want to say plus-size or chubby or anything else. She is fat. Her journey in this play is about realizing her fatness, trying to change her fatness due to pressure from her mother and in an attempt to get a boy to like her, and, in the end, it's about her finding strength despite her fatness. Her's the story I set out to tell with this piece.

The boys, Wes and Declan, have a fraught relationship of their own, one that begins with them barely being friends. They are another trope that has been made queer. Their story could be described as enemies to lovers, but Declan never looked at Wes as his enemy. Declan appears in Wes and Penelope's lives because he is so intrigued by Wes, and what led him to coming out so publicly in their small town. Their story didn't exist at first, because Declan was going to die. But this isn't a play about death. This is a play about all sorts of love.

Lastly, I need to mention the fourth character, the maple orchard. I put my characters in a space that felt so familiar yet so foreign to me. I've never been a part of a professional syrup making set up. I had to scour websites and manuals from local orchards, have extensive chats with my uncle who taps his own trees and makes his own syrup, and even test out a few maple recipes. Because of this, I believe my orchard is a character of its own. An orchard is a space full of hiding spots or treetops to shout from. It's a space full of hidden sweetness and strong limbs, made for climbing. Sap is a creation that holds all of those things.