Mike Mariano

You may notice that the new Wish Fulfillment is now brought to you in sparkling new HTML. So is nearly every other play on this site.

Gone are the plain text copies that I never completely enjoyed. Instead I spent months marking up each script, matching the hypertext structure and style with the PDF plays on this site.

The only stylesheet that looked acceptable in all the browsers I tested was the current manuscript-style copy, but it’s possible to make these plays look much different. All it takes are people who want to show off their impressive CSS skills.

I originally wanted to bring you HTML plays five years ago, but the output from Word and other programs was ugly, inflexible, and massive. It still is; that’s why I marked everything up by hand.

Comments and suggestions are welcome; if you miss the TXT files or have a style suggestion, let me know.

So now, after about eight years of Mike Mariano dot com (in one form or another), you can finally read my work in a web format. I call it progress.

New to the site is an updated version of Wish Fulfillment!

This is all thanks to Brooklyn College MFA dramaturgs Jen Leeson and Martina Weber for selecting my play for a December reading in New York. About half of Wish Fulfillment (the half without the character of Mom) was read alongside other plays for the MFA class.

Based on discussions with Jen and Martina, and through rewriting before and after the reading, I made some major revisions to the play. Nearly every line has been revised in some way—I never do that!

The biggest change is that the character of Kevin is gone. He’s replaced by Oprah! (sort of) I have also tried to tone down some of David’s whining and Mom’s faulty logic.

And because I never learn my lesson, I have added Stevie Wonder lyrics to the dialogue. Rock on!

I’d also like to thank actors Russ Feder (David), Glen Urieta (Genie), and William DeMerritt (Roger) for a terrific job; they got a really enthusiastic audience response. I wasn’t quite sure if any audience would be able to understand the Genie’s casual world-changing, especially one that didn’t even see the beginning of the play. But Russ, Glen, and Bill made their scenes plausible and exciting.

Coincidentally, Bill is now touring with McCarter’s production of The Arabian Nights. More genies!

We didn’t learn much about America’s reaction to its missing black population in Wish Fulfillment. White America’s worst impulses were illustrated by the Genie, and the typical bleeding-heart exasperation came from David. But whatever the nationwide response was to this example of magical racism, I didn’t dramatize it.

To compensate for that gap in my work, here’s an excerpt from Jonathan Kozol’s cover story—“Still Separate, Still Unequal”—in the September issue of Harpers.

…“It’s more like being hidden,” said a fifteen-year-old girl named Isabel I met some years ago in Harlem, in attempting to explain to me the ways in which she and her classmates understood the racial segregation of their neighborhoods and schools. “It’s as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don’t have room for something but aren’t sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don’t need to think about it.”

I asked her if she thought America truly did not “have room” for her or other children of her race. “Think of it this way,” said a sixteen-year-old girl sitting beside her. “If people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone, that we had simply died or left for somewhere else, how would they feel?”

“How do you think they’d feel?” I asked.

“I think they’d be relieved,” this very solemn girl replied.