Thinking Makes It So
Posted on | February 20, 2007 | No Comments
I got out of the reviewing biz because, partly, I didn’t really have the stomach for going on public record pointing out the faults of other people’s labors of love (or even vanity).
My theory – honed from years of watching plays as private citizen, theatre student and practitioner, not to mention stints as a freelance critic for ThreeWeeks at the Edinburgh Fringe and, most recently, TimeOut Chicago – is that the vast, vast majority of theatre is mediocre. I would wager production quality falls on a bell curve. Think about it: when’s the last time you experienced a production that was – from start to finish, from design to direction, from walk-on to leading performances – stone cold amazing? There’s always something that’s less than stellar. Most of the time, when people say a show is fantastic, I see a production that at best supports or at least gets out of the way of one or two solid actors. But I also see poorly imagined sets, pedestrian sound design, awkward or repetitive staging, a lackluster supporting cast. And this, my friends, crops up as often at the Goodman or Steppenwolf as a coffeehouse way out on Chicago.
And when people talk about an awful show, what they usually mean is a boring show. In my experience, many shows called awful are actually on par with shows considered fantastic in all but one or two ways, but those ways are typically the most noticible: the script is weak, there is no chemistry in a critical relationship, the direction is shoddy*. Sub-par theatre is so easy to do because (watch the circular logic here) great theatre is so hard. So many things have to go right, all at the same time, and be repeated every night for a given show to really work. Like with “fantastic” performances, audience members walk away remembering the one or two things that went wrong or weren’t strong.
What has set me off on this jag was reflection on Court-Martial at Fort Devens, currently running at Victory Gardens. Here is a new play (hooray!) by a Chicago writer (hooray!) at a leading Chicago theatre (have you heard about their Tony?), featuring a female-led (more of this, please) mostly African-American (again, more of this) cast, about an important early chapter in the Civil Rights Movement (how can you not be pro-Civil Rights?). It also got pretty glowing reviews. And it was exceedingly dull.
Is there anything awful about this play? No. Is it fantastic? No. It was well-constructed, competently directed, acted with conviction. It was also on far too large of a stage for it’s intimate scale, and all hands could certainly have taken more of an interest in fleshing out the emotional lives of its main characters**. So what do you say about this play in a final analysis? Is it a bad play with some good aspects, or a good play with some bad aspects? In my experience, this is the question reviewers face nine times out of ten.
*And what is the leading killer of performances? Pacing and stakes. As a matter of course, bad (meaning needlessly plodding) pacing is often employed in an effort to shore up moments of emotional import which are sagging: “I’m not really feeling Hamlet’s crises …” says the misguided director. “I know! I’ll slow it down!” More often than not, we’re not feeling it because they’re not feeling it. Fix the actor’s moment, and you fix the play’s moment.
**The biggest problem, frankly, was that this history play hit all the history play potholes, in the same way Frost/Nixon does: it plods through all the plot points like a History Channel documentary. The characters are wooden caricatures acting out the Passion Play of civil disobedience. There is nothing surprising about the way they react or the way the plot unfolds – and consequently the only moments given emotional weight are the set pieces we all expect, robbed of all veracity – the moment of confrontation with the racist superior officer, the Moment of Truth on the witness stand, etc.
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