Tuesday, 11 October 2005 02:08 pm
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deckardcanineI, my parents, and a friend have now done our first ushering job of the Arena Stage season. Except that for the first time, I took on another task: stamping the parking tickets and collecting money. Thanks to a new parking lot in the area, I had to stamp only one ticket the whole night. Oh well.
The play was Sara Ruhl's Passion Play. It's the first Arena performance I can remember needing two intermissions. Each act features players in a passion play in a different setting: Elizabethan England, Nazi Germany (you can guess how those plays went), and small-town America during and after the Vietnam War. The actual actors held similar roles from one setting to the next; it must have been a challenge for the one guy who played Queen Elizabeth I, Adolf Hitler, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.
First, the good news. Despite a length of about three hours, PP felt pleasantly short. It never really got boring. We enjoyed the costumes and acting, especially the actress of the Village Idiot/Violet, who mastered juvenile speech and behavior patterns.
Unfortunately, I learned with the Wolf Trap Theater's production of Stephen Schwarz's Pippin that no matter how well a play is presented, if the story and script aren't so hot, it won't garner a good overall rating in my book. As we went home, none of the four of us, regardless of theology, knew what to make of it. The players sin, question interpretations, and cause suffering to themselves and others, yet the troubles are so diverse that none gets satisfactory treatment. It's a gourmet of religio-ethical issues, and the samples we taste are no bigger or fresher than our typical between-meal snacks at home. Art is supposed to make us either ask new questions or discover new clues to answers; this apparently does neither beyond a junior-high level.
We found ourselves grading each act separately. The first one could use some work in fleshing out. The second is probably the best and could pretty much stand on its own. The third and longest(?) relies heavily on analogs to the previous two acts. While the Village Idiot is the Shakespearean wise fool for Acts I and II, Act III has the ramblings of a war veteran, and it's difficult to parse the wisdom from the insanity. His fourth-wall-breaking monolog at the end doesn't really help the play's coherence.
"Well," you might say, "maybe it's better to focus on the play as entertainment more than art." Indeed, if Animal Crackers is any indication, some Arena productions make no attempt at edification or beauty in the usual sense. PP does have its share of silly moments, some of which won applause after the initial laughter. But absurdities sometimes pervaded at inconvenient times, like a lover's suicide. And as unique as it was to see a hallucinated(?) Elizabeth I holding a 1970 assault rifle, it got no appreciable chuckles and mostly just felt pointless. I can tell that the emotionally charged play wants to be taken seriously on the whole. I am not against odd and amusing moments in serious dramas; it works sweetly in Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive. There's just a trick to it, and Ruhl didn't have it when she wrote PP.
In other news, our trash can came back, with someone else's bag full of trash in it. We made the address clearer on it.
The play was Sara Ruhl's Passion Play. It's the first Arena performance I can remember needing two intermissions. Each act features players in a passion play in a different setting: Elizabethan England, Nazi Germany (you can guess how those plays went), and small-town America during and after the Vietnam War. The actual actors held similar roles from one setting to the next; it must have been a challenge for the one guy who played Queen Elizabeth I, Adolf Hitler, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.
First, the good news. Despite a length of about three hours, PP felt pleasantly short. It never really got boring. We enjoyed the costumes and acting, especially the actress of the Village Idiot/Violet, who mastered juvenile speech and behavior patterns.
Unfortunately, I learned with the Wolf Trap Theater's production of Stephen Schwarz's Pippin that no matter how well a play is presented, if the story and script aren't so hot, it won't garner a good overall rating in my book. As we went home, none of the four of us, regardless of theology, knew what to make of it. The players sin, question interpretations, and cause suffering to themselves and others, yet the troubles are so diverse that none gets satisfactory treatment. It's a gourmet of religio-ethical issues, and the samples we taste are no bigger or fresher than our typical between-meal snacks at home. Art is supposed to make us either ask new questions or discover new clues to answers; this apparently does neither beyond a junior-high level.
We found ourselves grading each act separately. The first one could use some work in fleshing out. The second is probably the best and could pretty much stand on its own. The third and longest(?) relies heavily on analogs to the previous two acts. While the Village Idiot is the Shakespearean wise fool for Acts I and II, Act III has the ramblings of a war veteran, and it's difficult to parse the wisdom from the insanity. His fourth-wall-breaking monolog at the end doesn't really help the play's coherence.
"Well," you might say, "maybe it's better to focus on the play as entertainment more than art." Indeed, if Animal Crackers is any indication, some Arena productions make no attempt at edification or beauty in the usual sense. PP does have its share of silly moments, some of which won applause after the initial laughter. But absurdities sometimes pervaded at inconvenient times, like a lover's suicide. And as unique as it was to see a hallucinated(?) Elizabeth I holding a 1970 assault rifle, it got no appreciable chuckles and mostly just felt pointless. I can tell that the emotionally charged play wants to be taken seriously on the whole. I am not against odd and amusing moments in serious dramas; it works sweetly in Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive. There's just a trick to it, and Ruhl didn't have it when she wrote PP.
In other news, our trash can came back, with someone else's bag full of trash in it. We made the address clearer on it.
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Scroll back, if you will to my poem "The Moon Came up on Trash Night"
:D