I am one of those people who rereads and rewatches. Many people are not. They read a book once and no matter how much they like it, they don't pick it up again. Me? I've seen the 2005 Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice an embarrassing number of times. The line "My small rectory abuts her estate" will strike me funny nearly every time, so long as the viewings are spaced out enough.
Normally, this obsessive fandom does not extend to plays. For one thing, plays tend to be much more expensive. For another, they're not nearly as accessible. Just because you'd like to see a play again does not mean there is a production nearby. That said, if anyone makes me see West Side Story again, I'm just going to take a two hour nap.
Recently, I had the opportunity to see a play for the second time in a year. I first saw Sarah Ruhl's In The Next Room (yes, the vibrator play) on Broadway last year. Last week, a friend told me he'd gotten free tickets to see the Boston run and wanted to know if I'd like to join him. I said yes, of course, because that should be everyone's policy when offered free tickets to a show. I felt some buyer's remorse later, though. Would it still be fun if I knew what was coming?
What happened was that I learned again how much difference actors and staging can make. When I reread a book, the only change to the experience is my own growth as a reader, which can lead to either a greater appreciation for the writerly craft involved or a permanent shelving, due to the now exposed and creaking machinery of the more graceless plot twists. The experience of seeing a play is entirely up to the director and actors. Seeing a new production of In The Next Room was almost like seeing a new play.
I should have known. While waiting for my friend to meet me for the show, I passed the time by reading some of the review quotes on the poster for the play. One of them, a quote from the Boston Phoenix review, called the play a "cross between I Love Lucy and Desperate Housewives." That didn't sound remotely like the occasionally funny, often deeply sad play I'd seen and it wasn't quite what I saw in Boston, but it wasn't far off. The actual review is more nuanced than that pull quote would suggest, but pull quotes are always like that.
In the Boston production, they played up every moment of slapstick they could. Granted, the play is about using vibrators to treat hysteria, so there are inevitably going to be moments of slapstick and comedy mixed in with the larger message about women in the 1890s. The acting was good, but I recognized why the Phoenix reviewer referred to the two female leads as Lucy and Ethel. The actress in the Boston play was almost winking at the audience. It was funny, but it also kept events so much on the surface that the sadder moments that take place in the play's second half didn't earn the degree of heartbreak that I thought they should. In the New York version, they didn't get as many laughs from the audience, but I cared a lot more about what was happening to everyone.
Or did I? Did I give the Boston production a worse review simply because my viewing experience was informed by my memory of a different production that I liked a great deal? I've come around to thinking that ultimately, this is the biggest reason to see or not see a show a second time. If you can enjoy the play itself solely on its own merits, you are ready to be a grade-A repeat theatergoer. But if you're like me and you tend to see plays only as the sum of their parts, you're going to get cranky when acting choices, direction, and set design fluctuate.
This isn't exactly groundbreaking for anyone who sees plays frequently, but for someone who can't resist the re-view, it's been interesting to think about the difference a live performance makes. When the repeat experience is a static piece of media, I enjoy it a lot more. The verdict? Clearly, my friend should take me to more free shows.
There's no doubt that theater, by its very nature provides for an almost guaranteed variation in your experience if you see a play more than once. Everything tends to be different, from the actors to the directors to the sets and even including the theater size. That alone says the experience has to differ unless you get (sorry for the movie reference here) Nathan Lane trying to be Zero Mostel in The Producers. Directors almost always try to place their own stamp on a production, especially for plays that have been performed countless time (Shakespeare, for example) so there's a real likelihood that play won't even occur in the setting the playwright intended. Given all of this you ought to ask yourself "how would I stage this?" to see whether there are other things that you'd want to see in the play. In that sense, the play gives more than a book or movie because it has something the others can't offer.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, you could see (as many did) Phantom of the Opera, or pretty much any musical, a hundred times and nothing would change because the songs are it and don't change, and only the quality of the singing will differ.
I will work on the free plays thing.
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