Friday, March 16, 2012
Theater Talkback: The Trade-Offs From Page to Stage
NYTimes.com: Reading and theater-going are largely separate activities. Though they walk side by side through my life, occupying more waking hours than any other activities, the lines between them seldom blur. Reading is private, even in a subway car; theater is a collective experience, in which you’re always on the same page (literally if not figuratively) with a lot of other people.
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2 comments:
The idea of reading The Great Gatsby on stage with a story going on around it, while intriguing and perhaps innovative, strikes me as bizarre and unwieldy. As Chemers notes in ch. 4 of Ghost Light, "it's all about the performance" because the text of any story lacks a good deal of the story - a part that we leave to our imagination when reading, and is hopefully shown to us when we are in the theatre. Here the text still requires imagination, but is supplemented with something which, while getting at the ideas of the text, is a modern and transposed representation of an orignal text, so I am skeptical. I suppose I would have to actually see it.
This is such a cool idea! Not a lot of people have the time or the desire to sit down and read a play, but to have it read aloud as a part of a production allows the text to be much more accessible to a wider range of audience members. I like how this almost staged-reading type show incorporates other actors to make the text literally come alive. I would love to see something like this!
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