My favorite theatres in town to go to are Beowulf Alley and The Rogue. But at the moment I am having a difficult time being or getting excited about their first shows. Beowulf is doing Seascape. Yes I know Albee wrote it and I know it won a Pulitzer Prize... but the whole lizard couple and all...I just don't feel it...yet anyway. And The Rogue is doing Animal Farm. Yes, I can imagine all the music and puppetry and a little razzle dazzle story telling, the politics, etc, but it doesn't touch a nerve in me as a spectator that gives or makes for the hint (or better) of excitement...not yet anyway.
I can experience a show and enjoy it objectively well enough, whatever it is. But my personal opinions and aesthetic taste in theatre is specific, perhaps narrow. I like shows where there is an obvious artistic challenge and sense of theatrical unearthing. I like great and large roles within great and large plays, where actors and directors attempt to come to concrete terms with how to make the material, the script, alive and meaningful on stage. I like theatrics but I don't like shows that are tricked out with novelty. I like emotion on the stage - real emotion, not fake, crappy indicated joy and pain, but the real deal, happiness and sorrow. I don't buy the argument for a second that if the actor cries the spectator does not or if the actor laughs the spectator does not. I do buy into Brecht's idea that you can have the spectators laughing when the character is crying and vice-versa though. Brecht always loved the real tears on stage. He called his type of theatre Epic Realism to contrast it against all the other theatres around him claiming to be Epic but which operated with a sense and style melodrama and fake behavior. Brecht said he wanted it real, like life, but set out in Episodic ways which show characters in various light and logic. By doing so he could indeed induce tears in the house while the characters were seemingly laughing on stage. I like that. And I like a good story as much as the next person - however it is told - but especially with surprises.
Like any good spectator though a show does not have to fit my personal taste or conform to "how I would do it." The Rogue Theatre has produced two of my all-time favorite plays these last couple of years, The Cherry Orchard and Six Characters in Search of an Author. Neither production was as I personally envision how the play can live on stage, but as a spectator at their productions of these scripts I was captivated in various ways.
Some theatres in town have absolutely left my consciousness, though I try my best to keep them in mind - Arizona Theatre Company and Invisible Theatre being the most prominent. There has been nothing intriguing or desirable about their shows for me, the choices of the scripts, and the actual productions themselves, over the last few years that has made me take notice or make me have to go see them. Perhaps I am to blame as much as them for this malaise, I don't know. As much as I hate to say it, they seem to present their shows with a kind of polite triteness while wrapped never-the-less in some socially relevant and entertaining context. I have arrived therefore at the "who cares" point. I hope to break out of it or be broken out of it soon.
Live Theatre Workshop verges on this same scenario for me - polite and trite. But sometimes it manages to escape itself, to free itself from its self-imposed imprisonment and make artistic headway. BTW if you have ever read the mission statement or sense of purpose or whatever they call it these days for Live Theatre Workshop let me know if you are amazed as me at all the things they intend to do - so many buzz words I got lost. Anyway, I do like the fact that at times they come up with a little gem of a production one way or another in and around the murder mysteries and bland comedies. Picnic is going to be one of those this year for them. I feel it. And their late night series, though I have seen a couple of presentations that I kind of enjoyed, is just not my cup of tea, not these days anyway.
I am making my personal preparation as I like to do as a spectator for those scheduled shows that I am excited about. For example I am re-reading and looking over Othello - even as I am finishing some thoughts on King Lear with Patrick. He has recently sent me some wonderful materials and some of his own perceptions and thoughts on that play following the discussion of it in his Honors course he was teaching earlier this month. I've got a few months to go on Othello but I like to make it "a journey." Picnic, The Glass Menagerie, Trip to Bountiful, come later in "the season" as well and I will be returning to those plays in various ways prior to seeing the productions themselves.
In the meantime, I am working on that "in" for Seascape and for Animal Farm. So, if you have any insight, great reasons, fun facts, know of sexy performers in the shows, or any reason small or large why I should be chomping at the bit as a spectator for these, please, please, please let me know.
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