Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "If lately you find yourself spending as much -- or more -- time thinking about a play than you spent watching it, that's not surprising.
Over the past year, a number of area productions have either left audiences arguing about what really happened or wondering about the future of the play's characters."
7 comments:
I agree with this article, and think theatre, like any other art form, should speak for itself at times. However, theatre is a bit weird because it can go in so many different directions. Fine art in the form of paintings and drawings, in my opinion, is most effective when it is somewhat ambiguous, just because of what it is and it's general purpose and how it is presented. Theatre doesn't need ambiguity necessarily because so much of it is also based on entertainment. But this is the beauty of theatre, it just depends on what you want to do. This quote in particular really struck me: "I think playwrights don't want to hand the answers to the audience at the end of the play." Playwrights are literary artists, and although their stories are performed, playwrights are very much like authors of works of literature, and shouldn't always make the point blunt and obvious, but leave it up to the reader's interpretation, because usually there is more than one.
One of my favorite mechanics that made the older horror movies was the implied and the unshown. While ambiguous is technically different from this since it generally is not used to make the audience imagine exactly what some crazed being did with a pick axe or just exactly how a cheer leader's arms got stuck in a leaf shredder, it does cause the viewing audience to become more engage in what they are viewing. As Sharisse said, "... theatre, like any other art form, should speak for itself." I think that more and more frequently directors strive to get an exact message and idea across t, which while welcome in theater, does not cause the audience to think like art really should.
Theater is meant to be engaging. It is not only entertainment, but a form of intellectual, emotional, and educational exercises. If the audience is walking out of the theater all with the exact same understanding of what happened and what it means, then we haven't done our jobs. If a piece is to engage with an audience, it has to do so at an individual level, not in general terms. The play requires that each audience member bring his or her own experiences, opinions, and thoughts to the work and allow those to be questioned and subsequently become more resolved or discarded. If people are coming away going, "oh, wasn't that a nice play?" Then we as theater artists have missed the point.
I agree with the above statements. There is definitely something to be said about good theatre that challenges their audience to think and not just blatantly spoon feed them the answers. However, there is a fine line between just the right amount of ambiguity and too much. If it is overdone, then no one is going to be able to make head nor tail out of what happened, and the entertainment value is wasted.
I definitely agree with what this article is saying. I personally really like it when a play gives me something to think about later. I defintely dont think that it is bad writing in any. The exact opposite actually, I think that it takes more talent to write a play that is interesting that leaves us thinking or has an open ending. Because you have to write it in such a way that people will actually care about the characters and the plot enough in order to make assumptions or decisions about them later.
Theater is an art form that should have ambigious endings sometimes. As Sharisse noted, playwrights are literary artists, just like book authors. In many books, we are given situations and taken through stories, but not necessarily given a clear cut ending, and left to speculate as to where the characters go from there. Theater pieces should have a similar effect, as they should give audience members the pieces of puzzle, and take them through a story, but leave them to draw their conclusions form what has gone on. It shouldn't leave the audience with obvious endings, it should allow them to the think and ponder as to where the characters go from the ending.
I think it's definitely very important that an audience member leaves the theater and spends a certain amount of time contemplating what they just experienced in the theater. While I would hope that shows are entertaining enough to interest audiences on a basic level, I think these pieces of theatre should force the audience to think about the characters and imagine themselves in the characters' situations. If audiences do this, it means that the piece affected them, that they are able to connect with the show on a much deeper level, and that the piece of theatre is significant enough to show audiences a different way of looking at the world and what happens in it.
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