I
saw a play last night. At least, it was supposed to be a play. I must
admit that my concept of a theatrical "play" carries with it certain
connotations, among them the inclusion of design elements. The set and
lighting design tell the audience where the characters are, where scenes
take place, and even when one scene has ended and another begins, or
when the characters leave one location and go to another. Sound design
can do the same. Costume design gives us clues as to who characters are
before they ever say a word -- Are they upper, middle, or lower class?
Are they in power, are they leaders, or are they part of the masses?
What is their profession? If there are opposing sides, costume design
helps distinguish the factions from each other for us. In any [good]
production of West Side Story, you could tell the Jets from the Sharks
even if they were all cast as the same race. Costume design is an
essential element in creating the potential magic of theatre: Imagine a
production of Doubt in which the characters wear t-shirts and jeans, or a
production of The Glass Menagerie in which Laura is clad in Converse
sneakers, hipster torn jeans, and a hoodie. Or a production of To Kill a
Mockingbird in which Mayella Ewell and her father are dressed in
expensive silks and furs and Scout wears a puffy satin dress with bows
in her hair. Or a production of Les Miserables in which Jean Valjean
wears his tattered rags, beard, and greasy hair from beginning to end
and Javert delivers his (spoiler alert) suicide song while looking as
perfectly suave and together as when he made his first entrance. These
choices would all radically alter the intention of the playwright. A
play (or musical) is so much more than just the words on the page being
said (or sung) on a stage with an audience watching.
Which
is why I'm inclined to think of what I saw last night more as a
run-through than a play. A $120/ticket run-through. There were no
programs; the costumes were ill-fitting street clothes that offered no
contextual clues as to the characters' profession, location, place in
society, loyalties, power level, or even gender and never changed from
beginning to end despite an ensemble cast playing multiple characters
(think that sounds confusing? Let me remind you: no programs); the
changing set elements consisted of a white plastic folding table and
folding chairs; there were no hand props that I can remember; and the
only changing costume element was the presence of hats that made no
contextual sense and did nothing but confuse me more. (Imagine, if you
will, to call back to an earlier example, one of the nuns in Doubt
entering the stage with a cowboy hat, or some of the characters in Les
Miserables wearing baseball caps, or Tom in The Glass Menagerie throwing
on a construction helmet. These choices all make about as much sense to
me as the hat changes I saw on stage last night.)
I
might, perhaps, be able to overlook such curious choices (which, to be
perfectly honest, came off as lazy to me on the director's part rather
than simply strong choices that I dislike or disagree with) if the
direction of the actors was superb.
It was not.
To
begin with -- literally, to begin with -- I could not understand half
the words one of the actresses said in the first scene. The first job
of an actor is to be heard, so if you can't speak... game over. Furthermore, with an
ensemble cast playing multiple roles, and with zero help from costumes
to distinguish these roles from each other, it is imperative that the
actors make their different characters distinct from one another, which
there didn't seem to be any effort to do. Not being familiar with the
play beforehand (it is a classic, though I don't think it should ever be
necessary that audiences have any familiarity whatsoever with a play
before seeing it), I was at a complete loss as to where one character
ended and another began when played by the same actor. Adding to my
confusion was my inability to grasp if the male characters were being
played by women to be gender neutral or if their gender was actually
being switched to female, since the pronouns were switched to female but
without any accompanying hint that these characters were
actually females. This could have been answered immediately with costume
design, but since there was no costume design, that left it up to the
director and the female actresses, who did nothing to clarify the
matter.
I'm all in favor of what Stratford
Festival did this summer with gender-bending casting. They had a female
play Prospero as a woman in The Tempest, while on another stage women
played male characters in Julius Caesar as men, but without throwing
their voices low or wearing beards or doing anything to make the
audience feel they were watching a woman straining to be a man. The
women, clad as men, carrying the swords of men, walking as men, speaking
the words of men, simply became their characters. Meanwhile another
production at Stratford, The Comedy of Errors, created an entirely
gender-fluid society where no one was distinctly male or female.
These
were all choices, and whether the audience liked or disliked the
choices, the directors' visions for those productions were distinct,
purposeful, and communicated clearly through direction, acting, and
design elements.
In this production, however, I
found the issue of gender simply a muddled mess, and if the director
had a point to make, or even a distinct choice, it was lost on me. Every
time I heard a character referred to as "she," I scrambled to figure out
which actress played the character and whether the character was
actually a woman or just pronouned as such because of the gender of the
actor playing him/her.
At intermission, I asked
my fiancé if he understood what was going on plot-wise (I did not). He
said he had trouble staying awake through most of it and didn't have a
clue what was happening beyond the very general blurb being used to
describe the show in press materials. We might have read the program to
help us, but... no program.
By the end of
the show we were even more confused, especially since we both thought
the main character died but then clearly was alive in the following
scene (this is where design elements come in handy -- a quick look at
the script this morning tells me that the scene where we thought he was
killed was actually the director merging the end of one scene into the
beginning of another scene with some very confusing theatrics).
I
read in and out of the script this morning. Not only did the play I
read make infinitely more sense than the one I saw (It has settings! And
props! And actions! And characters!), but, hmm, how do I put this.... I
have a really good memory, and what I read on the page is a bit too
different from the words I heard on the stage last night, and I am quite
sure that's not actor error.
In short, for
$120, I expect a heck of a lot more on stage than actors saying words,
not all of which are even the words the playwright wrote, with little
design elements and weak directorial choices.
And
the real shame in all this: One of my favorite stage actors is in this
play. He is fantastic, as always. I planned on writing a very
different blog post about this production. But it turns out one actor cannot
save a dismal production.
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