Hollinger turned to his director, Tracy Brigden, and asked if he could take one last stab at a revision.
“I love that she said yes,” Hollinger says of his conversation with City’s artistic director. “She made a curtain speech before the first two previews explaining why the actors would be performing the scene holding scripts and celebrating the fact that City Theatre is all about developing new works. The play is all the better for it.”
4 comments:
What an great mission for City Theater to have. It seems that many theater struggling to sell tickets (meaning lots of theaters) must resort to putting on plays that many people are familiar with in order to draw a large crowd. While it's nice to keep old plays alive, it gives theater a reputation for being a thing of the past that has run out of ideas and resorts to repetition. City Theater's mission reminds audiences that there are people writing plays and devising new performances every day! I am proud to have a theater with such progressive goals in our city. It help the art grow and stay relevant and important to our everyday lives.
I love how City Theatre presents theatre as the living, breathing thing it is. Many productions that are showing these days can have a lot of action in them, but feel static just by virtue of being so similar to everything else being produced around them. "Crowd pleaser" has become a genre many theaters adhere to, instead of a circumstantial fact about a particular show. I also think that allowing the audience to see a show as less-than-perfect enables them to connect with what they are seeing on a more human, visceral level. We enjoy seeing the glossy finish, but we understand and feel what's underneath.
It's important in art to have a balance of the mainstream and the experimental. Unfortunately, mainstream is significantly more profitable, and so it isn't too often that you see a production company putting on new shows for the sake of putting on new shows. Though there is significant merit in being able to recreate a vision, or even reinterpret a show completely, there is no comparison with creating the precedent of a show. I'm glad to hear that there is such a theatre locally, and one that has proven their commitment to debuting new works for 15 years. I don't get out nearly as often as I'd like, but if ever the opportunity presents itself for me to go see one of these new productions I'd love to jump on it.
City Theatre sounds like a pretty incredible place, with some really interesting ideas about theatre. From the little I've seen, I really like the attitude the theatre takes towards what they produce, especially new works; I like the idea that getting it right, even if it means the end result doesn't appear quite as polished as it could, takes precedence. To me, getting to see the process behind a play is often just as intriguing as the play itself, especially when it comes to experimental, outside of the box work. I might even argue that experimental theatre is more important than traditional styles -- classical theatre is great and can definitely be beautiful and inspiring in its own way, but to some degree it is new, experimental work that is going to change us more.
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