Laughing Out Young: Laughter in Evan Placey’s Girls Like That and Other Plays for Teenagers (2016)

• Main Author: Claire Hélie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès 2019-10-01
• Series: Miranda: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
• Subjects: Evan Placey; youth theatre; laughter; distancing and empathy; youth effect
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/20064

Evan Placey, an Anglo-Canadian playwright, writes for teenagers. In spite (or because) of the serious and painful themes he tackles in his plays (coming out in Banana Boys, social determinism in Holloway Jones, bullying in Girls Like That, gender reassignment in Pronoun), the characters laugh, and so do the audience. In Placey’s plays, humour – be it linguistic, cultural, contextual, steeped in the news or in the playwright’s field experience with young people – belongs to a specific youth culture; but laughter, more than humour itself, gives the play a youth effect. Besides, whether on stage or among the audience, laughter is no solitary experience; it is a collective one and it is contagious. It is also a defence mechanism against all those things that cannot be understood or controlled. And since the best defence is a good offence, laughter can unite by excluding everything that is marginal, which hints at its tragic dimension. Laughter, in Placey’s work, therefore serves to create a continuous tension between distancing and empathy.