Revival, Adaptation, and Creation

My friend Jack sent me a link to this article from the New York Times.  It treats, among other things, the preference (diverted to London, but certainly true in Chicago and probably everywhere) of adapting "classic" plays for modern audiences; of exploring and exploiting the fresh relevance of work from another time.  This practice is really a lot more complicated than it looks.

First, it begins with one of two foregone conclusions, either a) We're doing The Cherry Orchard, or b) It is good to do The Cherry Orchard.  It proceeds to a question, how will we sell tickets to The Cherry Orchard?  And it results in something like a modernization or an objectification of The Cherry Orchard (for instance).  

The problem, in light of the conversation of the last two Cliché Watches, is that those two foregone conclusions are troublesome right from the start.  Why exactly do we need to do The Cherry Orchard? True, it's a great play, and "an important play" (a Theater History Play), and it has a famous author.  What else?  

A problem with all the adapting that's going on is that it restricts the "need" for new plays. Plays from the past are abstracted to their themes and then reassembled to be about very specific contemporary situations.  If this continues, it will be easier to keep new work that is actually about contemporary situations off grand stages and we will continue to accumulate a solid and impenetrable bezoar of old work and a disparate fog of one-off new shows.

Revival and Responsibility online

My first post on this blog was a re-titled version of my original essay "The Aesthetics of Revival" which was published by the Midway Review and is now available as a pdf from their website along with the rest of the issue.  Check it out here.  (Sorry, it's a little slow.)

Justify my Show?

There really is a commonly held belief that a new production of an old show has somehow to justify its existence and while I have covered this a little bit before, I think I want to tackle it again.  On one level I like the discipline of such a belief, and I think having producers and directors deeply ask themselves before embarking on a new production, "why do I get to do this?"  might aid in the avoidance of some bad work.  But the troubling thing about this tendency is that it misunderstands the theatrical experience (and excellence) to a rather stunning degree.  That is, it understands scripts as the fundamental unit of theater and theater, then, as a principally literary form--something to be read in a high-school class, or puzzled over in a library carol--defined by direct discourse immediately delivered by characters taking opposing sides in a struggle.  This misses the whole point!  Theater is something that happens on a stage with actors and an audience, and a script, while helpful, has long been proven inessential to a play.  An author has written a script.  Great.  But it isn't theater until it is recited onstage.  The real thing to justify is reading it in a classroom.  

Moreover, I fear the present necessity of justifying revivals has actually led to an unfortunate anxiety about them, an anxiety which has forced people instead of making excellent productions to resort to elaborate ideas.  These ideas distinguish shows and sell them, make a narrative about why a new production is relevant or necessary but distract from the truth.  The truth is that the play--not the production--is relevant and necessary; if it weren't it wouldn't be worth doing again.  The "idea production" will only be a game of smoke and mirrors to distract from the play itself unless the decisions are motivated and excellent.  One should only ever need to say, "I saw an excellent production of Hamlet last night," not "I saw a Hamlet set on Mars last night."  Could a great Hamlet be done on Mars? Well, yes, of course.  But Mars won't make it great.  Good acting, good direction, good design, and by god, a damn fine script will make it a good show.  Whatever gets in the way of these things will be deadly.