Clarence Coo was born in the Philippines and grew up in a crowded, multilingual household in Virginia. He writes about language, class, and sexuality. His plays include On That Day in Amsterdam, The God of Wine, The Birds of Empathy, and Beautiful Province (Belle Province). His work has been produced or developed at Primary Stages, the Atlantic Theater Company, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, New York Theatre Workshop, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. He has received fellowships from the Dramatists Guild of America, the Lark, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Playwrights Realm, and he has been the recipient of the Yale Drama Series Prize. He is a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab and an alumnus of New Dramatists. In 2023, his play Chapters of a Floating Life was the winner of the Weissberger New Play Award.
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Beautiful Province (Belle Province)A Play
MR. GREEN: Two verbs! Granted, they are irregular. But that’s no excuse, for these forms —
Do. Not. Change.
They are immutable!
More reliable than the people in your lives. More stable than governments. More dependable than churches or philosophies. These verbs are your deliverance!
Commit these patterns to memory. Determine the person, the number, the tense. Then remember the form. That’s all there is. To conjugation.
Conjugation. Such a beautiful word. Such a beautiful act.
Beautiful Province (Belle Province):A Play -
Beautiful Province (Belle Province)A Play
MR. GREEN: I wish you’d drink that.
(Pause.)
“I wish you would drink" is expressed in the Subjunctive. In French, that’s a complex grammatical form not usually introduced until the higher levels. But you’re mature for your age so I’m using the Subjunctive.
JIMMY: The Subjunctive?
MR. GREEN: Applied in an expression of desire or doubt. As in, “I desire it if you would drink that.” Much more civilized than a direct command such as “Drink that.”
JIMMY: It smells gross.
MR. GREEN: Another sentence in the Subjunctive: “I doubt I would be happy if you don’t drink that.”
JIMMY drinks.
Beautiful Province (Belle Province):A Play -
People Sitting in DarknessA Play
MAGDALENA: Remember when we kissed?
During rehearsal. You as Huck. Me as Mary Jane.
Can I be honest?
That kiss? That wasn’t in the book. I added it to my version.
EDMUND: I guessed that.
MAGDALENA: And did you feel something? During the kiss? A feeling of happiness?
EDMUND: No, I didn’t.
MAGDALENA: It will be different tomorrow.
During the actual performance. With the audience. With all the people watching. Then you’ll feel it.
People Sitting in Darkness:A Play- Print Books
“ . . . elusive and haunting . . . funny, desperate, insane . . . some sort of magnet that kept drawing us back, its intriguing story, its tone, sustained to the very end . . . I loved this play for its dark corners, the way it didn't wait for you to catch up." —John Guare, judge of the 2012 DC Horn Foundation/Yale Drama Series Prize [on Beautiful Province]
Selected Works
- Print Books
Everyone in the plays of Clarence Coo is in love, and they remind us of how we survive when love fails us. He brings an extraordinary tenderness and eccentricity to material that might easily be treated sensationally; reality and fantasy weave together, becoming a metaphor for a possible world where inner conflict doesn’t exist. His plays are ambitious in scope yet minutely observed. What illusions, he asks, do we create to replace the ones ripped away from us? How do these help us survive? Coo’s work delves into troubling, even heartbreaking material with playful aplomb and considers the way language, literature, and myth both separate and unite us.