Light as a feather, stiff as a… aw, never mind. CHRIS BENNION
At first, the title 99 Ways to Fuck a Swan might sound like it’s daring you to clutch your pearls. But once you realize/remember it’s a reference to the Zeus and Leda myth, it begins to take on the cloying feel of a graduate-school in-joke—and it is. While studying at Yale University (of course), playwright Kim Rosenstock took a class from Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatist Paula Vogel (of course), who gave her students an exercise: Write a play in 48 hours and delete nothing. “I just thought it would be funny to hand my fellow students a title page that said 99 Ways to Fuck a Swan,” Rosenstock told This Stage magazine a few years ago when the play had its Los Angeles premiere. “So I had that title, I turned the page, and I wrote.”
