Resolution, Cont'd

Zev rolls his eyes at my previous post:

I think that a lot of the terms you mention theatre being about in the last paragraph imply a resolution, by their very nature. "Entertainment" seems to almost require a resolution--one of the primal points of storytelling seems to be the desire to give a narrative shape to life. Any work of narrative, even documentary, by its nature is shaped. It may not have an ending that perfectly satisfies (not all narratives are "Law & Order"), but it comes to something. To deny that primal desire seems perverse.

And if the purpose of theatre is to transport, doesn't that imply a destination? Most people taken on a trip wouldn't appreciate being kicked off the bus halfway through. If that's a conscious choice, it's one thing (some plays use that kind of dislocation very effectively), but it being negligence seems bizarre.

Now, that's not to deny that a good resolution is very hard to do well. Asking questions that are interesting through plot action is difficult enough. Resolving them in a satisfying way is rare. But simply the fact that resolutions are rarely done well seems like an insufficient reason to chuck them--plays are rarely done well, period.

Wilson Wants It All (and were you reviewing it? I'd love to read your thoughts in more depth.) is a pretty good example of a play where the ideas, the world, the staging, and the acting were all more compelling than the actual plot structure. Indeed, there were some pretty big plot and logic holes. At the time I saw it, they didn't bother me that much, but later thinking brought them out. I would still recommend the show--there's more to theatre than narrative--but that would certainly be a caveat.

So I guess my questions to you are: do you have a problem with resolutions as such, or just with poorly developed plots? And what would the art and the audience gain by not having them?

If you have the opportunity to get donkey-kicked in the chest, Cont'd

My friend Zev asked why I was so interested in the "Word Of Mouth" review of Waiting for Godot.  There are quite a few reasons, and I'll try to touch on a few of them now...sketchily.

Three Preliminary Interests

1) "Average Joe's" I think this is really interesting because I just read this study on the excellent The Producer's Prospective blog and the absolute cheapest "Average" ticket price is $56.39.  I'm sure there are discount seats but these are people with a lot of money to spend on theater.

2) Broadway.  Like Hollywood and movies, it's important to acknowledge that Broadway is an entirely different thing to theater.  But it is representative of theater for a lot of people or, even, representative of THE EPITOME of theater.  

3) My impression is that the participants in these interviews got free tickets to the shows and I wonder if they would have gone to see Godot without this.  As soon as a person is geting paid to go to a show he wouldn't go to otherwise, he is actually a critic, not an Average Joe.  The selection of a show is a selection of a key demographic for an audience.  I don't think the producer had a fifteen year old from suburban Philadelphia in mind when finding backers for this show.  Which doesn't mean she isn't invited or that her opinion doesn't matter, but it complicates her inclusion in the show as an average person.  What the hell is an average person?

Institutional Interests

1)  Celebrity. Nathan Lane they loved,which is interesting to me because he's so Broadway.  John Goodman they loved from his film work.  This is fascinating because his familiarity worked against him.  He looked fat, but they didn't consider it a fat suit, they believed when he fell over that he couldn't get up, but they didn't identify this as good acting, they identified it as him doing poorly--in life.  In my black heart I wonder if this indicates a subliminal belief in theater work as evidence of lesser success than film work.  

2)  These quotes: "Kind of confused as to what the hell it meant but it was well written." "I went in kind of intimidated because you know it's Waiting For Godot it's very artsy and ritzy." "a classic kind of play" "an important piece of theater" "never-ending pain" "not sure all my friends would like it."  

I think that of the three Joe is the most convincing as giving us an honest impression of who he is and what he saw.  I mean, the only external influence on his experience that he belies is his desire to enjoy the show.  That's pretty much the platonic ideal of criticism.

Mary and Helen both indicate that they knew a lot about the show before going in (Mary had heard about it 1000 times, she says, and Helen was intimidated by it).  Their impressions of it seem deeply colored by this knowledge.  They seem to be wrestling with a cultural demand to like it or at least to be in on it, that Joe is unconcerned with.  In this way, Joe went to the theater to be entertained.  Mary and Helen went for something else.  If we could find out what that is and give it to them while satisfying Joe we'd be in great shape.  That was easy.   (I'm kidding.)

3) Theater as object.  This sounds silly but have you ever, ever heard anyone say "Sometimes movies can be boring?"  No.  Is it true?  God yes.  I've talked about this a little before here, but we have the very interesting burden of having a Medium that is itself the Attraction.  People think of theater as a thing.  As a single thing that can be easily characterized.  This means that the stakes are high in making it good.  No one is going to walk out of Transformers 2 thinking: I'm never going to a movie again.  It doesn't matter how bad it is.  That is not true with theater. Is this something we should fix?  Is this something we can fix?  Well, it's at least something we should know.  

For these reasons at least, and I wrote this quickly and poorly, I think the video is a profoundly interesting document.  

Dead Relatives

The Cliché Watch this week is with Zev Valancy talking about the preponderance of dead relatives onstage in new plays.  Should be an active one.

Theresa Rebeck On Structure, Cont'd

Zev Valancy, of On Chicago Theatre and a dramaturge and critic about town, had this to say about my recent post on Theresa Rebeck:

I guess I have the same question as you--where are these people attacking structure, or disregarding it? In any literary department in which I've worked, faulty structure or poor storytelling are pretty strong marks against a script. I've never heard a solid structure attacked, except when that's all there is. If the structure is strong but the characters aren't interesting, or the plot, while well told, isn't credible, or the play has nothing interesting or true to say, then those are the problems. The structure might get faulted, but only because nothing else works. I may be wrong, but I'd love to see who is actually attacking or disdaining story.

I think Zev hits it on the head. Part of the story here lies in the kinds of reviews that Ms. Rebeck's plays get, Mauritius, for instance, has been called both "Mamet-lite" (Trib) and "Mamet unplugged" (TOC), why is that?  My guess is that this really does stem from the play's suspenseful structure.  The plot takes center stage in a way which I do suppose is unusual today in theater.  We talk about plays really being about characters, we sometimes talk about Idea Plays (as though that means something).  Really though, the crisis is that attending the theater has become enough of a rarefied experience that Entertainment as such seems something to sniffle at.  Ms. Rebeck's choice to situate this snobbishness in plot says more about her own writing than about the broader context of this problem.  

Zev's comment that plot is all well and good as long as it is not all there is, is important here because I think that praise and disdain is a little more cyclical.  A lot of good plot makes it easier to miss finer points which makes it easy to dismiss writers as "lite" or unsubstantial. Fairly or unfairly.