Say the Lines

 February 19, 2022

Bracing blue cold. Stepping out barefoot to do some recycling wakes one up instantly. 

Theater at Magnetic last night. The era of social distancing has passed there, and we sat, masked, shoulder to shoulder. K especially wanted me to see this play because it was co-written by two local playwrights as a sort of experiment. I recognize that I look at a new play very much differently from others. I try to peer past the performances to hear the play itself, which given an amateur world is not always easy. Most regard the actors. A playwright learns that applause is for the actors, how well they have done, how bravely they have soldiered through not doing well, an aspect the genuinely sweet impulse of encouragement most audiences seem to have. The author is an afterthought. This performance–it was opening night–was halting and uncertain. One saw reasonably good actors having fine moments and fluffing others. Did I truly hear the play behind that? If so, it was a disappointment, and would have been if superbly performed. Its humor stood to one side of the situation–the characters actually told jokes to one another on stage. There was nothing inept about the dialog or the direction (or the quite elegant set). It was good classroom technique in the service of nothing much. In my seminar I would have given it an A without ever expecting it to appear on stage. All so inconsequential. Nothing ever at stake. What made contemporary playwrights think a play could be made out of discussing feelings? Maybe it can, but not by these particular ones. It broke free for a moment, circled back to reiterations of viewpoints that were pious and shopworn the first time they were uttered. I hear the talk in the room when the playwrights sat down: “OK, so this guy is a lawyer and his wife is a college professor and one day they begin to feel that their communication skills have failed to keep their marriage vibrant: GO!” It’s a bad sign when the lights go down and you hear yourself praying “Dear God, let this be the end,” and it isn’t. Sat beside B the Arts Blogger. He sighed at the end the same sigh as I. Walked to the parking lot with the giant moon hanging over the railroad tracks, melted and uneven at the rim. 

A poem can be made of a fleeting–even a trivial– emotion. Can a play? Plays require labor and material and money and time and space and people pulling on their boots and hauling out into the winter air. Shouldn’t they get something more than they would have gotten sitting home before the TV? Shouldn’t there be big ideas and big events? Well, not necessarily, but big themes tend to pull the writing up to match them, and from what I have witnessed, that is for living playwrights the most needful thing. Elevation. Expansion. Daring. Doing good work is not enough to drag people from their couches. Good must ascend to ravishing, to terrifying, to transformative. 

Why are we satisfied with so little? 

Attached to all this is: what good does is my championing new theater if what people see when they go to it is wan, unchallenging, and timid? After a while people will stop trying. But, then, how do playwrights grow if their work is not staged, some of it inevitably better than others? Perhaps we should take the idea of workshop productions more seriously than we do. Yes, I would rather have seen what I saw last night than an excellent production of The Sound of Music, but in this I constitute a minority of vanishing smallness. 

Reading The Method by Isaac Butler. To me the controversy is irrelevant because what matters is not what the actor is experiencing, but what the audience is. Among method actors I have know personally in shows in which I was involved, it was never the case that “the method” improved the performance. It almost never the case that any particular technique (except effective elocution) or theory can insure excellent performance. In my experience, a person is an effective actor or he isn’t, and the difference between the two is the quality of the imagination. Purely from a playwright’s point of view, I want to counsel, “Talk loud and say the lines.” Upon those two hang all the Law and the Prophets. 

Managed to change the battery in my car key with only one minor tantrum.