Plays About People Talking

Petey: There's a new show on the pier.
Meg: Oh, Stanley could be in it, if it's on the pier.
Petey: This is a straight show.
Meg: What do you mean?
Petey: No dancing or singing.
Meg: What do they do then?
Petey: Just talk.
(pause)
Meg: Oh.

Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party

When the curtain rises on that little three-walled room, when those mighty geniuses, those high-priests of art, show us people in the act of eating, drinking, loving, walking, and wearing their coats, and attempt to extract a moral from their insipid talk; when playwrights give us under a thousand different guises the same, same, same old stuff, then I must needs run from it, as Maupassant ran from the Eiffel Tower that was about to crush him by its vulgarity.

Treplev, in a particularly poorly-translated speech from Chekhov's The Seagull

I saw Happy Medium's production of Douglas Carter Beane's The Country Club last night at the Factory Theatre.  Expertly acted, fantastic chemistry between the characters, nice set, very well-directed, a really terrific production.

Except that I disliked the play itself, on principle.  It's witty, erudite, got some great zingers, etc., which was entertaining up to a point, but in addition to its conventional and obvious structure, it represents an outmoded genre of theatre that I for one am tired of, one that I think does damage to live theatre in general: Plays About People Talking.

(It's also a specific subgenre of PAPT that I, as a lefty, find tedious: Plays About Affluent White People Talking About How Miserable They Are.  But that's not my principal point.)

Douglas Carter Beane fails to effectively answer one essential question: Why Is This A Play?

To re-phrase: what is so intrinsically theatrical about this story that it can only be told as live theatre, as opposed to a movie or a TV show?  And if the answer is "nothing," then that's an issue.  Is this only a play because nobody bought the film rights?

In addition to The Country Club, there are other notable contemporary examples.  Among them:

• Collected Stories and
• Dinner With Friends by Donald Margulies
• The Substance of Fire by Jon Robin Baitz
• Burn This by Lanford Wilson
• Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and
• The Lisbon Traviata and
• Master Class by Terence McNally
• Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley
• Seascapes With Sharks And Dancer by Don Nigro
• pretty much everything by Neil Simon

(I'll add more as they come to me.)

Counter-examples that I've seen lately:  Most of Whistler's work, especially Tales From Ovid, and IDS's Eurydice.

There was nothing intrinsically theatrical in The Country Club.  There's no connection or engagement with the audience, directly or indirectly.   The fourth wall remained intact.  It was your basic fishbowl play.  We sit and watch people in a one-way fishbowl.  We see in, but they don't see out; the fish do not acknowledge the watchers.

I can easily forgive plays written before the advent of motion pictures, since live theatre was the only creative outlet for performed stories (so Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Shaw easily pass).  But Treplev was right: since the advent of film, television and other live performance media, the theatre needed to find new forms.  Plays like The Country Club are a relic of an obsolete performance style.

Arguably the theatre's greatest strength, in addition to the immediacy and connection of live performance, is its use of alternative symbology, and that symbology's transportive nature.  Onstage, a frying pan can represent a steering wheel.  A feather can represent a bird.  Two actors standing on ladders are George and Emily flirting through their open windows.  Onscreen, a frying pan is a frying pan.  Onstage, a thing is what we decide it is.  Onscreen, it is what it is.

Some plays work because of their use of language; what's transportive onstage would sound overly flowery and unnatural on film.  Hence the poesy of Stoppard, Albee and Overmeyer, the hypnotic memory plays of Pinter, and the gutter poetry of Mamet work better onstage than onscreen.  They don't aim for realism, but acheive a heightened hyper-reality or conversly a dreamy surrealism.  So they get a pass.

Ultimately, PAPTs do long-term damage to the art form.  Why should my above-cited Meg and Petey pay as much as $100 per ticket for the same experience they could get at the cinema for $10, or at home on TV for free?

We need to sell the experience of live (non-musical) theatre as something more than People Talking.  Most of my list keeps getting produced only because there are movie stars in them.  How sustainable is that in the long run?

Agnes of God, 25 Years Later.

Originally posted as a Facebook Note, 5/19/11

They're all in their Sunday best; I'm on the right in denim.

As difficult as it is to believe, it's been a quarter century since the seminal theatrical experience of my life that put me on this maddening, frustrating, challenging, and exhilarating path.

I joined the Traip Academy drama club as a freshman, and that fall I performed in a show called And Stuff, a collection of short scenes dealing with heavy 'teen issues,' suicide, sex abuse, peer pressure and so on.  It was hardly great drama, but for me it was steps above my previous school play experiences (I still may need therapy after Mulligan Stew... {shudder})

Traip's drama club, despite our cramped facilities, was one of the region's finer high school theatre programs.  Our 'theatre' was a cramped stage in an undersized gym.  Mr Simmel, the English teacher who doubled as drama coach, took great pride in doing what he considered 'real' theatre, serious dramas, no musicals ("If you want to do Oklahoma," he said, "go to Portsmouth" - referring to PHS's vast auditorium and full-time theatre faculty).  A few years earlier, Traip's entry in the regional one-act play competition was Flowers From Lidice, a holocaust drama which received accolades and was one of Maine's two entries in that year's New England Drama Festival.

Mr Simmel was leaving at years' end to go to grad school.  He also had a trio of talented senior actresses.  Apparently wanting to go out with a bang, he decided that this year's spring one-act competition entry would be a cutting of John Pielmeier's Agnes of God, about a nun accused of smothering her newborn child, which she claims may have been fathered by an angel, if not God himself.  There were no roles for the boys; if seniors Ed King and Mike Spiller had any qualms about it, I was never privy to it.  Agnes was played by Angie White, the Mother Superior by Susan Allen, and Dr Livingston by Anna Jasper.

They went all out on this production.  The chorus director Mr Rutherford inserted arrangements of the various movements of the Requiem into the script, performed by an offstage quartet (Tim Wenck, Veronica Bennett, Anne Saunders and Lisa Lassiter).  We even had a set crew (Ed, Mike, Mike Gaffney, Teresa Jasper, Michelle Lauckner, myself and others), with Dave Williams pulling the various levers of our antiquated lighting system.

The first rehearsal I attended was late in the process.  I sat down with my homework on the gym floor.  And as soon as the offstage chorus started in on the Kyrie Eleison, my mind was blown.  I hadn't experienced anything that struck me on so deep a level.  Angie, Sue and Anna blew the doors off the place, and they weren't even at performance level yet.  The stigmata effect hadn't even been added in yet.  Still, my eyes were opened as to what theatre could do.  Not just entertain, not just make you laugh, cry or think, but to grab you on a deeper level.

Over the next couple weeks I saw Mr Simmel re-work some scenes, work one-on-one with the three actresses, bring them to new levels, etc.  Maybe he saw that I was so riveted by the process that he didn't mind that I really had no reason to be there.

We went to the regional drama festival at Cape Elizabeth HS outside Portland ME, and the various productions were on the whole no match for us.  We were playing chess while they were all playing checkers.  When Angie poked the blood pack, the front of her white habit becoming drenched with crimson as the cyclorama went from blue to blood red, the audience's collective hair stood on end.  We were one of two productions, the other being Cape Elizabeth's staging of Woody Allen's God, that were selected to the Maine State festival, and all three actresses were named to the All-Festival cast.

A few weeks later we boarded a minibus for the eight-hour trek up to Presque Isle for the states.  The competition was much more varied and talented.  I recall a cutting from Brighton Beach Memoirs and a collection of avant-garde pieces by an artsy school in Portland, among others.  Our performance wasn't smooth; there was a major line-fluff at the climax that instantly filled me with panic.  Nonetheless, we were one of the two productions selected for the New England Drama Festival (the other was a nice production of Spoon River Anthology).  Angie and Sue were named to the All-State cast.  On our return to Kittery we were greeted with a police and fire truck escort, and a celebration in the gym - we felt like champions!

The trek to the New England Drama Festival at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford CT was plagued by near-disaster: our minibus broke down somewhere in central Massachusetts, Mr Simmel nobly battling a smoking engine.  We were stranded at the side of the road for a couple hours before a replacement bus was dispatched.

We were blown away by the theatre - an enormous edifice seating some 1500 people, designed by I.M. Pei.  Our set, which took up most of the Traip gym's stage, was dwarfed.  The head of the Festival made it clear that this was indeed a showcase of New England's finest high school theatre by declaring "The competition is over!" to a vast round of cheers.  Jason Robards made an appearance at the opening ceremony.

The selections were, on the whole, a wide variety of styles and genres.  A Vermont school did an avant-garde version of the Billy Goats and the Bridge Troll, another did a cutting of Peter Weiss' The Investigation, and another did a cutting of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (which put me to sleep, as do most productions to this day...  I was tired, OK?) Our production went smoothly, but wasn't as warmly received, as I recall, by the adjudicators as the previous rounds had.  Angie was selected to the All-Festival cast.

Other various memories from that time - we adopted Ogden Edsel's "Dead Puppies Aren't Much Fun" as our theme song.  Mike Gaffney started a round of the telephone game with the phrase "Angie White Likes A Hot Beef Injection."  Dave Williams recited the logician's monologue from the Monty Python Holy Grail album verbatim.

Somehow in the midst of all of this, during that spring I had a memorable weekend in Quebec City with the French Club, as well as an exchange concert with a school in Connecticut, and was on the wrestling team.  I don't know how I had the time.

I studied theatre at the University of Maine with Mike Gaffney and Sue Allen; I worked with her and her father Bruce in local theatre for years afterward.  Mr Simmel teaches English and Drama at UMaine Farmington.

To this day, our Agnes of God is the standard by which I measure my theatrical experiences.  I've seen full productions of the play, and I argue that Mr Simmel's cutting, even though it cut out some significant events and plot points, delivered a much more powerful punch, trimming Pielmeier's occasional 'playwright tricks.'  And for a rather shy, awkward only child, I suddenly felt part of a large family.  The cast and crew were my brothers and sisters.  This was a true ensemble.  We worked together for a common cause, supporting and uplifting each other.  Maybe it was this more than anything that hooked me on theatre for life.

My three years after Mr Simmel's departure were nowhere near as rewarding, and the quality of the work wasn't as good.  Traip had a few competition pieces in subsequent years that made it to the State competition, but as far as I know they haven't represented at the NE Drama Festival since.  The drama club has since passed through many hands, and occasionally was organized by the students themselves with little to no faculty support.  The school was renovated significantly in the 1990's, and they now have a stage in a much, much larger gym.

Can't believe it's been 25 years.  Tim Wenck passed away a few years ago.  Ran into Teresa Jasper (Anna's twin sister, who was either in the chorus or the crew, I don't rightly recall) the other day.  As for the rest of you, wherever you are and whatever you're doing, you're part of *the* pivotal experience of my life, and you'll always have a place in my heart.