The Daily News
The major player in a show.
1 Sometimes when we are doing a show, we amazingly forget about the people for whom we have rehearsed. The audience.
2 Last night I was a paying customer, an audience member, and for the second time in a row, I was just that. It’s fun seeing a Workshop show from that perspective.
3 It’s funny, because as a director, I used to get so involved in the shows that sometimes the very scripts would lose their meanings. I often wouldn’t even listen to plot after a while because I would direct the timing, the blocking, the enunciation, the articulation, the lighting, sounds, and all that stuff. After a while the words become meaningless. I know it sounds strange, but it’s quite true, and also quite normal for both directors and cast members.
4 Sometimes I would literally forget what the scene was about. I would have audience members come up and say, “He didn’t have anything in his bottle when he poured the wine! Didn’t you notice?” And I would figure the audience wouldn’t care, and that only someone LOOKING for that sort of thing would notice. We would always rehearse without it and I never noticed, so I never thought it was that big a deal. I thought those audience members were just being overly critical, and that nobody would really notice those little things…
5 Well, as an audience MEMBER, I now see things more clearly. Last night, for example, a scene where a gun was supposed to appear didn’t have the gun, and the actress just pointed her fingers at the other characters. I thought it looked REALLY stupid, but then I just wrote it off as a student-directed show.
6 But then I also thought, “Hey, wait a minute! Uh…why is anybody even remotely scared if the person is threatening with four clasped fingers?” And I also thought, “Even if this is student-directed, that sort of thing should have been WAY obvious to the directors.” They said at one time they were worried about a gun on stage, and my response was that it was ludicrous; a plastic gun aimed upstage is a theatre staple. Hundreds of thousands of high school plays with plastic guns are probably being performed this very weekend. So that should NEVER have happened, not in this life, and not in the next, student-directed or not.
7 Didn’t work for me; didn’t work for the audience.
8 But it has to come back to accountability. Who are we doing a show for? The audience. It has to make sense to an audience. No gun. Scene with gun. No gun. Uh…hello?
9 Another thing that was done was the scene Bedtime, a lyrical little play about a little girl who is frightened about the end of the world. This was a very sweet, wonderful play that suddenly turned into a horror story, and the entire ending of the play, and of the Show, was transformed. It looked and felt ridiculous, like a cast reaching for two many laughs and audience response, and it just ruined that lovely little piece for me. As an audience member who is a big fan of this production, I felt it was a huge, awkward change that just plain ruined things.
10 Listen: I was absorbed in this great acting and in listening to the flow and poetry of the scene when it became interrupted, and it kept getting interrupted by lines that clearly were not written. And instead of it ending lyrically and beautifully, the way it has, it ended with an ending that the playwright didn’t even write.
11 It threw off the curtain call and looked ridiculously amateur. It disturbed me because it is such a beautiful piece, and seemed a literal horror to a patron who is a big fan of that play.
12 Sometimes students need to realize that trying to put TOO much into a show cheapens the show, and that more often than not, less is more. Several audience members were looking around with looks on their face that said, ”Huh?”
13 It looked as though the students were having a ball changing everything, but that the audience was left out of the mix, so it wound up looking WAY self-indulgent and amateur. This is typical behavior during the run of a show, and the director usually steps in and tells the student, “Hey, do the show that we rehearsed, and the one that was written by the playwrights, okay?”
14 And the only reason I write this is so they will perhaps get this message and straighten it out so the show they originally staged is the one people pay to see.
15 It’s pretty common behavior for casts and sometimes crews to try to add things that seem funny to themselves but not necessarily to anyone who came in to see it. It was a major blunder, but hopefully they will get this and realize that a playwright writes a play a certain way, and that the play should be very close to the writer’s original intent. Not to do that is insulting to the writer, and very disappointing to a fan of that particular play.
16 I should hope the cast and crew would get this message. Ultimately, it’s up to them to stage things however they wish, but it is also a VERY common thing for a company to try way too hard to get laughs, and wind up with a show that looks nothing like what they rehearsed for two months. Much of that sort of stuff looks and is thrown in hastily, and it measures in missed lines, slower cues, confusion, and in this case, a very confusing curtain call.
17 So I’m happy to plug Behind Closed Doors here if it is going to be the same play that was rehearsed, but this certainly gave me pause. It needs to be fixed, and fast.
18 Great intentions but poor judgment. It had the audience at the end scratching their heads. It came off as self-indulgent and not at all what the playwright had intended.
19 That being said, I still thought the overall show was kicking, live, but I’ve certainly seen it much better.
20 Hopefully it will be back to its original form by closing night. It’s just too wonderful of a show not to.
21 I really hope they listen to this old brown shoe.
22 He’s not a dumb man, and knows theatre.
23 Show me what you really have.
24 I’ll be in the audience Saturday night, 8 p.m.
25 Take the criticism any way you want kids. But I can be a rough critic, or I have utterly no credibility.
26 Break-a-leg on Saturday night. Show me what you guys are made of.
27 Take it home boys and girls.
28 Peace.
~ a concerned audience member~
Go see this. It’s awesome.
Oh, and the flag was up on Thursday night.
~H~
