Thursday, January 26, 2012
Short plays: the key to dramatic perfection?
guardian.co.uk: Living in Cambridge has many advantages (architecture, libraries, punting), but access to contemporary playwriting is not one of them. But this week spring has arrived early with the advent of Hotbed, a festival of new plays produced by Menagerie Theatre. The theatrical equivalent of a three-day bender, Hotbed is now a decade old (as someone who first collaborated with the company back in 2002, that anniversary is yet more unwelcome evidence of advancing age). But there've been some great memories from that ten years – all of them short.
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The point that I can understand is the fact that every time someone wants to see a show, they want the magic to last more than 10 minutes. What really stuck out to me was how the shorter plays can be just as meaningful as the longer productions, sometimes more so. A shorter play is a work of time management because it has to convey an entire story in a shorter time span. For a shorter play to be affective, every single moment has to go into making the bigger picture. Everything has to have meaning and a desired purpose because for every second that it doesn't, means time is wasting.
I think that for some playwrights, that challenge in itself is part of the allure and definitely separates certain writers from the others.
As far as the festival goes, I think that besides the occasional show in an internet cafe, this is the best way to present work like this. When the plays are combined into a single performance, there is more for the audience to absorb. I think that the separation of stories and ideas is a great to take the audience out of their comfort zones and to pay attention to the individual performances.
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