Playwright's Perspective: Milo Cramer
From the playwright of NO SINGING IN THE NAVY
This week, we’re excited to share Milo Cramer’s Playwright’s Perspective ahead of their upcoming premiere of No Singing in the Navy, directed by Aysan Celik, which begins March 18. Tickets are now available for No Singing in the Navy — read about the inspiration for the play below, and get yours today.
In the same way that Jesus Christ is *the* subject of European painting - painted over and over, over hundreds of years, in countless styles and contexts, for reasons both political and divine, gradually acquiring a rich patina of meanings and interpretations, becoming a complex site of discourse while remaining a concise image - SO TOO are sailors (even, yes, silly sailors) *the* True Subject of the American Musical.
I’m trying to say that the iconic image of the white-capped, blue-kerchiefed sailor seems to me a succinct metaphor for American identity: optimistic to the point of delusion, scrubbed clean of detail and history, aggressively innocent (if we perform innocence hard enough… do we become innocent?), imminently doomed (24 hours on shore), seductive, goofy, macho, loveable, stupid, beautiful, violent. In her 2004 essay Strange Bedfellows: Musical Theater and the Military, performance scholar Judith Sebesta documents the long, twisted romance between American imperialism and Broadway, noting that dozens of 20th century musicals were “unflaggingly supportive of the U.S. military and extremely successful.” Yikes! And yet… those are the shows I grew up singing. What to do?
I’m interested in musical theater as an incredibly niche and bespoke U.S. aesthetic tradition, hyper-local to this very street, 42nd Street, like a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And even though musical theater is much maligned, even though it can be flimsy and commercial, even though art gallery people once made fun of me for being into it - fuck everything - musical theater is undeniable. It is blisteringly idiosyncratic, it retains something of the old world, it can never be defeated because it is unashamed, in fact it destroys shame(!), it traffics in magic, it opens doors to other realms (the sailor cap a PORTAL), little children know it instantly in their hearts to be good, Trump eerily loves Cats and Les Mis - musical theater might just be the most dangerous force on earth. At its deepest (secret) level, No Singing wants to honor and frame the dumb little songs we all make up to get through (survive) every day: the weird ditties you trade with your lover cooking breakfast, the mighty operas you compose with your niece while watching crabs.
This show was developed intimately with and for these three actors - Ellen, Elliot, and Bailey - who I met in graduate school in San Diego and fell recklessly in love with. When the actors inhabit the sailor archetype, we get to see both this foundational genre trope refracted 3x through an inquisitive contemporary lens, and we get to see the actors themselves, amazingly themselves, playing (shredding) on a huge and liberating canvas. Also in San Diego, appearing like a miracle, was director Aysan Celik (who teaches courses on Buster Keaton, and once cut a safely choreographed sequence because “it’s better when the actors get to do whatever they want”) plus indispensable music teammate Padra Crissafulli and virtuosic pianist Kyle Adam Blair (who once called the score “Gershwin meets Yellowcard”). San Diego, in a sinister twist, is a military town: warships dot the horizon, Top Gun-style jets drill maneuvers in the sunset. Sailors stroll the beach - actual sailors! You can’t believe your eyes - it’s too good to be true - mythic creatures sprung impossibly to life. But wait… are those guns at their hips? Is this adorable sailor… about to commit war crimes? Or die? You feel scared of them - you feel scared for them - you feel turned on - you feel pity - you feel humbled. You feel acutely you are on conquered land, at the edge of a warming continent. And there we all were, picking our noses and studying theater! While the last scraps of American democracy withered around us! Ancient Athens comes to mind, theater & democracy & war, something about that. And something about… On The Town.
Finallyyyy I want to add, without getting grossly specific, that my time working on this show - and a lot of the past few years, for me and for everyone - have been marked by anxiety, loss, and grief. The trope is true: we get one day on the seashore. We spend it making sandcastles. I try to remember that it’s all sandcastles: the Pentagon is a sandcastle, and Taylor Swift is a sandcastle, and The Milky Way is a sandcastle, and I’m learning that even my family is a sandcastle, and so is this happy play.
Milo Cramer’s Obie-winning solo show School Pictures has been featured on NPR’s This American Life and produced in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and at Playwrights Horizons, where it was named the #1 show of 2023 by Vulture. Other works include Business Ideas (Clubbed Thumb Summerworks 2025, winner of the Alliance Theatre’s Kendeda Award, upcoming publication through Concord Theatricals), Cute Activist at The Bushwick Starr (“a brilliant match of material and theater… a fable for our times” - NYT), and Minor Character: Six Translations of Uncle Vanya at the Same Time created with New Saloon and seen at The Public Theater / Under The Radar. MacDowell Fellow; MFA: UCSD.
