When
I was in the third grade, it was my turn to be in a play, and when my class
did The Little House on the Prairie, I was incredibly excited to get not
the lead but the biggest part line-wise (34 -- I counted). It came as quite the surprise to some of my classmates and even teachers who thought of me as the quiet girl to find out that the quiet girl could project. And loved being on stage. Come fourth
grade, I DID get one of the leads. And I loved it. Already a
performer in dance and in the plays and puppet shows and movies my
brother and I made at home, the plays at school offered a way to express
myself and tell a story to an audience with not just my body but my
voice, too. It was thrilling, especially in a school where everyone
thought of me as shy, a labeled I always hated.
Then came fifth
grade, which was awful in many ways, including the fact that the school
did a musical: I didn't sing. Gone was my outlet to act. And then came
my middle school, which I loved except for one major flaw -- theatre was
all but nonexistent there, and the only performance opportunity was a
musical in the sixth grade -- and I still didn't sing.
But I still loved the magic of plays. When my class saw the Indianapolis Repertory Theatre's production of The Glass Menagerie, I was spellbound. I still remember Tom sitting outside on the fire escape smoking his cigarette in silence as if it were yesterday. He was no more than 15 feet from me, yet he was decades away, living and breathing in front of me but existing in another time and place and reality. I was entranced. That theatre company's Macbeth worked the same magic on me, and it is that production, not the one I saw on Broadway, that stays with me and comes to my mind when I reread or think of the play.
In high school, I finally found my way back to acting on stage in my junior year when I auditioned for When Shakespeare's Ladies Meet and landed the role of Ophelia. And for the next two years I was happily able to actually express my love of acting regularly -- in plays and drama class. Not musicals. In a high school I intensely disliked, the opportunity to act, to tell stories on stage through a character, with a playwright's well-crafted words, was a gift I greatly appreciated.
Theatre took a back seat during college as I focused on television production and direction, and then when I graduated and moved to New York.... Well, in New York, I learned that musicals, not plays, are what make Broadway run. Though I have always loved musicals, too, and I disagree with those who say one discipline or the other is better, the two are simply entirely different things. Plays are life, in front of you, transforming the audience to a fly on the wall, with an intimacy that musicals by their very nature can rarely attain. Musicals use the music to help set a tone, to give the actors a base on top of which to work, to transport the audience to another dimension where the rules of expression are different. In plays, the actors must rely on the world and atmosphere they create on the stage with their words and actions, their looks and breaths, their silences and impulses, to achieve an emotional state rich enough that the audience is ensnared. There are no grins plastered on in plays, no kicklines, no jazz hands, no breaking the fourth wall to smile out at the audience in song, no thrilling high belted notes or flying through the air, no dramatic bass drums or eerie violins or perky piccolos....
Plays are life, as full and rich as can be, without the outlet of song and dance to ease the overflow of emotion. If Fred Astaire could not break out in dance in Swing Time's tense "Never Gonna Dance" lead-in scene, which feels like a snowball gathering weight as it rolls down a hill until he has no other choice but to explode or dance, what would he do? What about Gene Kelly, as he mourns the loss of his relationship with Lise in An American in Paris? Plays answer that question.
Well, the best plays do. I have to admit that when I got to New York City, I was disappointed to find that plays here are underappreciated not just by audiences but by producers. Theatrically trained actors are often pushed aside and relegated to minor roles or Off-Broadway plays while the big, dramatic, weighty Broadway roles too often go to television and film actors who lack the theatrical training and technical tools to do the role justice and explore the nooks and crannies of a character to its fullest potential on stage. Having a "name" attached seems to mean more than casting the actor who can best play the role. As a result, I found myself thinking the plays I saw back home in Indiana contained a much higher level of acting ability for the stage than many of the near-unaffordable ones produced here. Consequently, over the years of being in New York, my love of seeing plays has dwindled somewhat, as most plays here have become either high concept -- as if they felt the need to belligerently assert their right to exist here in such a competitive field, and in so doing, forgot about character and story-telling -- or cast with screen actors. There are of course exceptions: I've enjoyed wonderful Broadway straight-acting performances by Julie White, Raul Esparza, and Arnie Burton, loved one movie-star-led Broadway play (The Elephant Man), and in one major Off-Broadway play thoroughly admired the performance of a film actor, Richard Armitage, who was actually a classically trained theatre actor first. But the Broadway plays that allow theatre talent of that level to shine are just that -- exceptions. This seems doubly true if the play in question is a drama or dramedy. In fact, there are currently 30 Broadway shows running, according to the Internet Broadway Database. Three of them are plays. Of those, one stars a movie actor who is theatrically untrained and inexperienced, one falls under the umbrella of "spectacle" (Harry Potter), and one is a broad physical comedy starring theatre actors.
The concept of seeing a Shakespeare play, or even a classic like The Glass Menagerie, with all bona fide A-list-quality theatre actors instead of television or movie stars seemed impossible.
And then, three years ago, I went with my parents to Canada's Stratford Festival, where we saw Hamlet.
It was everything a play should be: exciting, unexpected, intensely human -- delving into the complexities of where an individual goes emotionally when they can't erupt into song and dance as a release. Jonathan Goad's Hamlet was one of the most complex, nuanced, fully articulated and lived-in performance I've seen in theatre, using every tool of voice, face, and body to inhabit his Hamlet, which I raved about in a previous blog post and so will not do again here (much). In fact, it was his first monologue that hooked me, for rather than delivering it statically as too many actors might do, it felt almost like a musical number in its movement, bringing the audience along on its ebbs and flows. I had never seen a soliloquy elevated to the emotional level of a song before, and it left me on the edge of my seat. And it wasn't just Hamlet who was excellent but the entire ensemble -- none of them TV stars, all of them trained, all of them as good as any movie star.
Three years later, after convincing my fiancé to take our first ever vacation together (not an easy feat, and I will find room in another blog post to talk about that), and selecting the Stratford Festival as our anchor destination, I had an opportunity to see two more plays at Stratford, both again starring Goad, this time as Brutus in Julius Caesar and Atticus in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Both plays in under 24 hours.
On the same stage.
Yes, at 8pm he was Brutus, and at 2pm the next day he was Atticus. Cassius, played by Irene Poole, became the adult Jean Louise Finch. Marc Antony, played by Michelle Giroux, became Maudie Atkinson.
It was a stunning transformation, and even if I hadn't loved the plays on their own, that ability to completely shift styles, eras, and dialects, to become a completely different, unrecognizable character while telling a story, is everything that made me fall in love with the magic of theatre so many years ago. Even knowing the casting, my fiancé was unable to see or hear any of Poole's Cassius in her Jean Louise. Goad's Atticus was gentle, strong, loving, warm, and fiercely moral, with a fire underneath his calm -- nothing of his Brutus remained.
One of the discoveries my fiancé (who is a former Broadway stage manager) and I made on this first-ever vacation was that over our years together, though I have come home many times geeking out about a production I just saw and talking his ear off while he does his best to focus on what I'm saying and ignore the TV screen even though he doesn't really know what I'm talking about, his disinterest in paying to see theatre has resulted in him not having actually ever SEEN a performance -- play or musical -- with me that I then geeked out about for hours on end. So upon seeing Caesar and making this realization, he at first laughed and loved being part of my geeking. By the next morning after seeing Caesar, however, when we went down to the hotel café, he was pretty much out of anything to say back. He was also pretty much asleep. And there were home-made chocolate chip pastries, so I really can't blame him for wanting to focus on those.
But I wanted to talk more. In fact, I'd had less sleep than he because I was on such a theatre high, and I woke up right where I'd left off the night before, going a mile a minute, needing to discuss it.
Enter the magic of theatre...
The sole purpose of our hotel's existence was for Stratford Festival guests, so everyone there had seen or was about to see plays. For the second morning in a row, a couple (different from the previous morning's) was asking strangers if they'd seen Julius Caesar. The previous morning I had engaged in conversation with the couple asking but obviously hadn't had anything to contribute about the play myself, and the couple had expressed their regret that they'd be leaving before they could hear my opinion. This time, however, with a different couple asking about the same play, I jumped on the chance to talk about it, just as my fiancé jumped on his chocolate pastry and probably wondered why I was talking to strangers when it was too early for him to even open his eyes.
And half an hour later, we were still talking -- about Caesar, about Mockingbird (which I had yet to see), about their themes and importance, about theatre in general. And my fiancé was an enthusiastic participant, too.
Within a few hours, we saw To Kill a Mockingbird. And my fiancé absolutely loved it and cried, and I again geeked out about what we'd seen, and he got right into the spirit of it, even expressing how much he'd love to see Goad as the Henry Fonda role in his personal favorite Broadway play, 12 Angry Men. And he even admitted he was happy I'd made him come on this vacation, and especially to Stratford.
I don't know that, with the current mindset of casting screen actors onstage in New York, a couple days of seeing straight theatre on Broadway could have such an effect... whether Broadway plays could make strangers reach out for intellectual and emotional conversation, could make a seasoned, dispassioned ex-Broadway stage manager tear up, could unite an entire city around one theatre company. I certainly don't think a cast of TV and film actors could fully perform Julius Caesar at 8pm and To Kill a Mockingbird at 2pm the next day and do both roles full justice. And I wish Broadway could find its way back to loving theatre for the effect it has on people more than for the money it takes from people.
Because whether it's at an elementary school, regional theatre, or one of the world's most famous stages, the power of theatre to provoke thought, unite, connect, and inspire never ceases to amaze me.
But I still loved the magic of plays. When my class saw the Indianapolis Repertory Theatre's production of The Glass Menagerie, I was spellbound. I still remember Tom sitting outside on the fire escape smoking his cigarette in silence as if it were yesterday. He was no more than 15 feet from me, yet he was decades away, living and breathing in front of me but existing in another time and place and reality. I was entranced. That theatre company's Macbeth worked the same magic on me, and it is that production, not the one I saw on Broadway, that stays with me and comes to my mind when I reread or think of the play.
In high school, I finally found my way back to acting on stage in my junior year when I auditioned for When Shakespeare's Ladies Meet and landed the role of Ophelia. And for the next two years I was happily able to actually express my love of acting regularly -- in plays and drama class. Not musicals. In a high school I intensely disliked, the opportunity to act, to tell stories on stage through a character, with a playwright's well-crafted words, was a gift I greatly appreciated.
Theatre took a back seat during college as I focused on television production and direction, and then when I graduated and moved to New York.... Well, in New York, I learned that musicals, not plays, are what make Broadway run. Though I have always loved musicals, too, and I disagree with those who say one discipline or the other is better, the two are simply entirely different things. Plays are life, in front of you, transforming the audience to a fly on the wall, with an intimacy that musicals by their very nature can rarely attain. Musicals use the music to help set a tone, to give the actors a base on top of which to work, to transport the audience to another dimension where the rules of expression are different. In plays, the actors must rely on the world and atmosphere they create on the stage with their words and actions, their looks and breaths, their silences and impulses, to achieve an emotional state rich enough that the audience is ensnared. There are no grins plastered on in plays, no kicklines, no jazz hands, no breaking the fourth wall to smile out at the audience in song, no thrilling high belted notes or flying through the air, no dramatic bass drums or eerie violins or perky piccolos....
Plays are life, as full and rich as can be, without the outlet of song and dance to ease the overflow of emotion. If Fred Astaire could not break out in dance in Swing Time's tense "Never Gonna Dance" lead-in scene, which feels like a snowball gathering weight as it rolls down a hill until he has no other choice but to explode or dance, what would he do? What about Gene Kelly, as he mourns the loss of his relationship with Lise in An American in Paris? Plays answer that question.
Well, the best plays do. I have to admit that when I got to New York City, I was disappointed to find that plays here are underappreciated not just by audiences but by producers. Theatrically trained actors are often pushed aside and relegated to minor roles or Off-Broadway plays while the big, dramatic, weighty Broadway roles too often go to television and film actors who lack the theatrical training and technical tools to do the role justice and explore the nooks and crannies of a character to its fullest potential on stage. Having a "name" attached seems to mean more than casting the actor who can best play the role. As a result, I found myself thinking the plays I saw back home in Indiana contained a much higher level of acting ability for the stage than many of the near-unaffordable ones produced here. Consequently, over the years of being in New York, my love of seeing plays has dwindled somewhat, as most plays here have become either high concept -- as if they felt the need to belligerently assert their right to exist here in such a competitive field, and in so doing, forgot about character and story-telling -- or cast with screen actors. There are of course exceptions: I've enjoyed wonderful Broadway straight-acting performances by Julie White, Raul Esparza, and Arnie Burton, loved one movie-star-led Broadway play (The Elephant Man), and in one major Off-Broadway play thoroughly admired the performance of a film actor, Richard Armitage, who was actually a classically trained theatre actor first. But the Broadway plays that allow theatre talent of that level to shine are just that -- exceptions. This seems doubly true if the play in question is a drama or dramedy. In fact, there are currently 30 Broadway shows running, according to the Internet Broadway Database. Three of them are plays. Of those, one stars a movie actor who is theatrically untrained and inexperienced, one falls under the umbrella of "spectacle" (Harry Potter), and one is a broad physical comedy starring theatre actors.
The concept of seeing a Shakespeare play, or even a classic like The Glass Menagerie, with all bona fide A-list-quality theatre actors instead of television or movie stars seemed impossible.
And then, three years ago, I went with my parents to Canada's Stratford Festival, where we saw Hamlet.
It was everything a play should be: exciting, unexpected, intensely human -- delving into the complexities of where an individual goes emotionally when they can't erupt into song and dance as a release. Jonathan Goad's Hamlet was one of the most complex, nuanced, fully articulated and lived-in performance I've seen in theatre, using every tool of voice, face, and body to inhabit his Hamlet, which I raved about in a previous blog post and so will not do again here (much). In fact, it was his first monologue that hooked me, for rather than delivering it statically as too many actors might do, it felt almost like a musical number in its movement, bringing the audience along on its ebbs and flows. I had never seen a soliloquy elevated to the emotional level of a song before, and it left me on the edge of my seat. And it wasn't just Hamlet who was excellent but the entire ensemble -- none of them TV stars, all of them trained, all of them as good as any movie star.
Three years later, after convincing my fiancé to take our first ever vacation together (not an easy feat, and I will find room in another blog post to talk about that), and selecting the Stratford Festival as our anchor destination, I had an opportunity to see two more plays at Stratford, both again starring Goad, this time as Brutus in Julius Caesar and Atticus in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Both plays in under 24 hours.
On the same stage.
Yes, at 8pm he was Brutus, and at 2pm the next day he was Atticus. Cassius, played by Irene Poole, became the adult Jean Louise Finch. Marc Antony, played by Michelle Giroux, became Maudie Atkinson.
It was a stunning transformation, and even if I hadn't loved the plays on their own, that ability to completely shift styles, eras, and dialects, to become a completely different, unrecognizable character while telling a story, is everything that made me fall in love with the magic of theatre so many years ago. Even knowing the casting, my fiancé was unable to see or hear any of Poole's Cassius in her Jean Louise. Goad's Atticus was gentle, strong, loving, warm, and fiercely moral, with a fire underneath his calm -- nothing of his Brutus remained.
One of the discoveries my fiancé (who is a former Broadway stage manager) and I made on this first-ever vacation was that over our years together, though I have come home many times geeking out about a production I just saw and talking his ear off while he does his best to focus on what I'm saying and ignore the TV screen even though he doesn't really know what I'm talking about, his disinterest in paying to see theatre has resulted in him not having actually ever SEEN a performance -- play or musical -- with me that I then geeked out about for hours on end. So upon seeing Caesar and making this realization, he at first laughed and loved being part of my geeking. By the next morning after seeing Caesar, however, when we went down to the hotel café, he was pretty much out of anything to say back. He was also pretty much asleep. And there were home-made chocolate chip pastries, so I really can't blame him for wanting to focus on those.
But I wanted to talk more. In fact, I'd had less sleep than he because I was on such a theatre high, and I woke up right where I'd left off the night before, going a mile a minute, needing to discuss it.
Enter the magic of theatre...
The sole purpose of our hotel's existence was for Stratford Festival guests, so everyone there had seen or was about to see plays. For the second morning in a row, a couple (different from the previous morning's) was asking strangers if they'd seen Julius Caesar. The previous morning I had engaged in conversation with the couple asking but obviously hadn't had anything to contribute about the play myself, and the couple had expressed their regret that they'd be leaving before they could hear my opinion. This time, however, with a different couple asking about the same play, I jumped on the chance to talk about it, just as my fiancé jumped on his chocolate pastry and probably wondered why I was talking to strangers when it was too early for him to even open his eyes.
And half an hour later, we were still talking -- about Caesar, about Mockingbird (which I had yet to see), about their themes and importance, about theatre in general. And my fiancé was an enthusiastic participant, too.
Within a few hours, we saw To Kill a Mockingbird. And my fiancé absolutely loved it and cried, and I again geeked out about what we'd seen, and he got right into the spirit of it, even expressing how much he'd love to see Goad as the Henry Fonda role in his personal favorite Broadway play, 12 Angry Men. And he even admitted he was happy I'd made him come on this vacation, and especially to Stratford.
I don't know that, with the current mindset of casting screen actors onstage in New York, a couple days of seeing straight theatre on Broadway could have such an effect... whether Broadway plays could make strangers reach out for intellectual and emotional conversation, could make a seasoned, dispassioned ex-Broadway stage manager tear up, could unite an entire city around one theatre company. I certainly don't think a cast of TV and film actors could fully perform Julius Caesar at 8pm and To Kill a Mockingbird at 2pm the next day and do both roles full justice. And I wish Broadway could find its way back to loving theatre for the effect it has on people more than for the money it takes from people.
Because whether it's at an elementary school, regional theatre, or one of the world's most famous stages, the power of theatre to provoke thought, unite, connect, and inspire never ceases to amaze me.
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