On Knowing What You're About

I had the good fortune to see a couple of extraordinary pieces of theater in the last week or so, back-to-back.  Any ONE of these plays would be worth writing about at length -- Our Town for its faithfulness to Wilder's original aims, Ivanov for its brilliant performances and deft sense of timing, Monstrosity for its ambitious scale.

Taken together, though, I think there are some essential lessons at play.

1) Don't be afraid to play with scale/scope.  We're used to performing, these days, in tiny spaces.  Don't think that the scale of your ambitions, of what your tackling, has to match your playing space.  How can you keep changing the space over the course of the evening?  How can your production AND YOUR SCRIPT keep opening up, opening out.  Teach your audience your play, and then turn the tables.

2) Be brave, bold, and resolute.  All three of those productions were BALLSY, all for different reasons.  "How," you might ask, "can 'Our Town' possibly be ballsy? What's ballsy about Chekhov's fifth-best known play?"  Our Town dared to go back to Wilder's original intentions, to strip naked, to remind us that the play is, can still be, IMMEDIATE.  Likewise the Ivanov did a great job of solving the "boredom" problem in a lot of Chekhov -- how to ACTIVATE it, what's the ROOT of it.  Monstrosity wasn't afraid to create a whole new world, to get undeniably weird, to get violent.  It wasn't afraid to barrel ahead and let us catch up to it.

3) Cultural Context matters.  One of the reasons that "Our Town" reduced me to tears is that I'm FROM THERE.  Like very few people in that audience, I have lived the world (to the degree possible) described in that play.  Thornton Wilder knew what he was about in that play, knew the world he was creating on a DNA-level.  The Ivanov, same thing.  The Eastern European cast didn't have to struggle to "fix" or "make sense" of the world of that play -- they could play within it, because they are, in some sense, the product of it.  It made them, so they could make it.  This isn't an argument to always "write what you know," but its an argument for history, and ancestry, and the honoring of ROOTS -- something toward which we tend to turn a blind eye in this culture.  But if you look at something like Tracy Letts's "August: Osage County," or Williams's best work, or Inge's or O'Neill's best work, the through-line was that they were all, on some level, tapping into the deep, deep well of their ancestry -- literal, cultural, geographic.

Kimber Lee Cleveland was talking about all the plays she's been seeing at Playwrights Horizons, about the unnameable, indescribable factor of "voice" that tends to distinguish plays that are rejected versus plays that move forward.  Listening to her, and seeing these plays, I begin to see what she was getting at -- it's about a playwright who KNOWS WHAT SHE'S ABOUT, about the guts and confidence to stake a claim, to mark a territory, to OWN the landscape of her play, of the world she's making.  The productions did that, the best plays I know do that.  There's nothing tentative in it.  There's god in it.