FINALLLLLLY we get to play.
Submitted by dana on Tue, 05/26/2009 - 13:36.
The show opened last weekend. We had jam-packed houses for most of it. The feedback was fantastic. Lots and lots of interesting commentary and complementary words for all of us actors.
Frankly, i had no idea how it was going to be received. It IS a bit of an odd show. I've taken to thinking of it as a bizarre, hallucinatory, comedy-thriller-drama-romance written with fabulous dialogue that sometimes crosses into a poetic format.
The cast is finally starting to kick back and have fun as well. I love that we have the cafe available to actors... everything is 1/2 price while they are employed by Stage West. That makes for fun beer/wine nights after the shows... My drink of choice is Stella Artois.
3 more weekends!
It IS an odd play. It's
It IS an odd play. It's very cinematic -- relatively short scenes, and a wide variety of settings -- it was written with apparent disregard for difficulties of staging, though of course you all made it LOOK effortless. As I mentioned when we spoke, the basic premise (which was revealed in the Star-T review, so I guess it's not a spoiler) reminds me of the movie "While You Were Sleeping" (though, given the similarity in premise, it would be hard to imagine two stories going two more different places thereafter) -- a man who is unable to communicate (in one case dead, in the other comatose) and a woman to whom he is a stranger who pretends to have known him, and has to fake her way through the complications that ensue when she meets his family. In the movie, the woman's motivation is a crush; in this play, her motivations are a mystery. I spent the first scene thinking "What are you doing? Why are you doing it? No, no, stop, you don't know what you're getting into" -- while knowing full well that if she didn't, there was no story.
I might get more out of the play if I saw it again, or read it, but after first viewing, I feel like there's less to it than meets the eye. We never learn why your character injected herself into the stranger's life (unless she was telling the truth about her "real" job -- and if she did, it was about the only truth she told -- and we are supposed to think it indicates she is an inherently sympathetic person). The exploration of the dead man's family dynamic -- while certainly melodramatic -- never produced any real insight. And the big "reveal" at the start of Act 2, while welcome for relieving the audience's "What is going on here?" curiosity, also robbed the story of much of its tension. As for the dead man's monologs, I couldn't get much meaning out of them, either.
So I guess I have issues with the play even BEFORE the last half of Act 2 when it gets REALLY strange. I can actually rationalize some of that strangeness if my reality-based mind insists on it (though I can't say HOW I'd rationalize it; that WOULD be a spoiler). But, on the other hand, the acting is uniformly excellent, there are some very funny lines, and, even though I didn't peceive any BIG ideas being explored or revealed, there were some quite interesting small ideas.
So, I'd say it was a minor play, done as well as it could be. And I thank you and the rest of the troupe for your excellent performances.
Michael
Thanks for your thoughts,
Thanks for your thoughts, Michael! Today many of the reviews came out and almost all of them were along the same lines as yours. "The play was weird/Not sure what Jean's motivation for her journey is supposed to be" and "Superb acting."
It never really occurred to me how annoyed some critics might get about the lack of background for Jean. For me, it was a grand gift from the playwright. It let me really create. I had to find every ounce of Jean from the few clues provided by Ms. Ruhl. It was an exhilarating and exhausting process. Now on the other side of it, i am so pleased. I am truly having a great time playing the role. Also, I'm grateful for the response from all of the critics to the acting in the show. It's been overwhelmingly positive. That ALWAYS feels GREAT so many thanks for the kind words, gentlemen.
A couple things:
I do think that Jean's day-job as mentioned IS her real day job.
I also think a little bit of background on Jean would be good for the audience. My take is that she is alone in the world. No relatives - they've all died - and no close relationships. Her parents died in a car accident shortly after she graduated high school. Since then, she's had a few relationships that never grew into anything substantial. She desperately would like a family, especially children but the hardships she's seen has made connecting with a prospective mate very difficult. She has an old-world way of looking at the world. Technology has always repelled her. She clings desperately to what was, always afraid to venture into what could be. Her job at the holocaust museum allows her to keep the memories of millions of people alive; to tell their stories. She relishes those connections and hopes one day to find someone who will listen to her own story of loss with an open mind and ears.
That's a little bit about her... as I play her, at least.
As always, it's nice to have you visit Stage West. Thanks again for the thoughtful commentary!
You made me think about
You made me think about something I'd never really thought about before. The first time someone sees a play or movie, or reads a book, is unlike all subsequent times. The first is the only time they are experiencing it "in order" -- all subsequent times (unless, obviously, it's been so long that they've forgotten it entirely, and it's "like new"), they are watching it with foreknowledge of how it comes out.
As I recall, part of the training for actors -- part of your task -- is to behave, while performing, as if you were doing everything for the first time -- as if you were living it the way we all live life, from moment to moment, anew -- even though, in actual fact, you've rehearsed it carefully and know exactly what you will say next, everyone else will say next, and will happen next. There's a name for that challenge, but I can't remember it. A simple example is taking a pie in the face without flinching.
But what occurs to me now (because of your comment that it never occurred to you that the lack of backstory might annoy people) is that, even if actors meet that challenge of making the performance seem new, there is a related challenge it's probably unfair to ask them to meet -- to remember, after memorizing a play, what it was like to read it for the first time; to understand how the play will seem to an audience seeing it for the first time, who aren't familiar with how it comes out.
In this case, what I think happened is, in the first scene, I was befuddled as to why your character acted as she did, and subconsciously, I filed it away in my memory as an unanswered question, and expected that it would be answered later. I expected a "reveal," I expected that it was a puzzle that had been raised intentionally, because later the answer would be important and meaningful when we were told it. It's a similar thought process (for the audience) to the mystery of what the dead man's job is -- and, while I thought the answer to that was revealed too openly (I expected your character to discover it for herself, gradually, as she manuevered her way through the minefield of relationships she'd wandered into), the answer of your character's initial motivation wasn't answered at all. So I guess by the end of the play, subconsciously, I had a feeling that the author had created an expectation and then not bothered to fulfill it.
And THAT makes me think of a couple of things. One is the nature of narrative, how we all bring expectations to a movie, play or novel, based on all the works we've experienced before, and how there are some ways in which works can be unconventional and defy those expectations and have it work, but there are other ways in which, no matter how "edgy" or "out there" an author decides to be, he or she had still better keep in mind the basic "contract" with the audience.
Another is that, in this case, the playwright may have given us one clue that I missed (in addition to the one I got, about your character's occupation). She didn't have her OWN cellphone, did she? That's why you concluded she is old-fashioned and a technophobe? To confirm that, she did not know how to work HIS phone very well -- when it would go to voice mail, how to retrieve messages. (But even at that, she knew more than I do. I wouldn't know how to ANSWER one of the silly things.)
With all that said, I don't want to dwell on the one detail too much. If there had been "more to" (or if I had gotten more OUT OF -- the fault may be with ME, not the play) the family dynamics (shrewish mother, overlooked brother, scorned wife, yeah, but what matters is what you DO with it), or the dead man's monologs, or the vision of the afterlife, or the other elements of the play, I might not have noticed the one question that went (at least partially) unaddressed.
I sure do talk a lot. I hope the rest of the run goes splendidly.
I can't let this remain
I can't let this remain unanswered. 4 of the 5 critics who saw the play, though raving about performances - except for one who said I had a blank expression on my face throughout the play -, said the play lacked answers. It seemed to piss them off.
1. I'm glad it prompted a reaction. So many of today's plays are safe, safe, safe.
2. A play that doesn's answer questions about a character's motivation/background relies on something that people seem to lack these days: imagination. What's happened to the simple, beautiful act of imagination? I spent years in a children's theatre troupe instilling the idea of imagination into youngsters only to find, now, that there are a multitude of adults who could use a brush-up course! :)
3. I remember the first time I read this play. Clearly. I loved it, without knowing what word would come next, what turn the play would take. I still love this play. I'm excited to get on stage every single night.
4. I love plays that fill you in on every last detail. I love seeing a story unfold, layer by layer by layer. But I also like plays like Dead Man's Cell Phone where we are presented with a series of events. We only see those events. Then we go away forced to reconcile what we've seen with what we imagine must have prompted the events in the first place. It's a fly-on-the-wall set-up. Sometimes that fly gets the most interesting prospective of all.
Thanks for the commentary Michael. I sincerely enjoy it.