NYTimes.com: "An acridness hung in the air during the New Group’s revival of Wallace Shawn’s “Marie and Bruce” the other night, something I don’t often experience at the theater. It was the thick, curdled aura of an audience’s collective discomfort.
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Theater Talkback: The Joys of Feel-Bad Drama
NYTimes.com: "An acridness hung in the air during the New Group’s revival of Wallace Shawn’s “Marie and Bruce” the other night, something I don’t often experience at the theater. It was the thick, curdled aura of an audience’s collective discomfort.
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4 comments:
I think these feel bad dramas are just we need every once in while. They provoke us and make us feel uncomfortable. They also make us confront ideas and feelings that we would rather not. This sort of theatre is just as important as any other sort that lets you leave the theatre feeling happy or complete. Its just as important because it needs to wake us up. If this sort of all too familiar disatse in a marriage bothers us then we should change it. Theatre like this brings to our attention things we would rather pretend do not exist and that is wrong, we should acknowledge the things that make us uncomfortable and sad because then we can change it.
I agree with Sonia. Feel-bad dramas are very necessary to theatre. Though feel-good shows are great and can really lift your spirits, feel-bad dramas are very much able to delve into emotions and spark change within an audience--a key goal of theatre. Seeing reality, or as close to reality as we can get, onstage can be striking. Sometimes, seeing onstage what we experience ourselves, can help to calm our fears and reassure us that we are not alone.
I tend to resonate pretty well with this type of performance. One of my favorite movies last year was "Greenberg", and like most of Baumbach's other films, the characters are for the most part unlikeable, and although they may slightly change over the course of the story, the audience never gets the sense that they have realized the error of their ways. But, unlike a lot of feel-good stories, these stories actually have realistic endings. Seeing this perspective on life can help audiences figure out how to (at least try to) change these aspects of their personality, even if that isn't really possible.
A feel-bad drama would certainly expose aspects of real life that we tend to try to make feel okay. I think in society we try our very best to make yucky feelings feel okay and the better feelings to feel more important. And as someone who is pretty in touch with the bad feelings, I'd be interested to see what kind of reactions people have to these type of plays. You might feel better knowing that bad feelings are normal. Or you might feel depressed knowing that bad feelings are so normal. I might be uncomfortable watching this particular show like, with my parents. Its one things to be exposed and relate to those feelings in yourself, but I would have trouble wondering what my parents were thinking watching that show.
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