The Clyde Fitch Report: My first dog was a beagle named Bootsie, who used to do a hilarious and fascinating thing. When she was given a bone to chew, she would gnaw on it until she was tired, and then she would take it to some part of the room and “bury” it. By which I mean, she would “cover” it with imaginary dirt moved from all parts of the room with her nose. When it was buried to her satisfaction, she would settle down. But if anyone in the family looked at the bone, she would jump up, grab it and with great annoyance bury it again somewhere else in the room. Everyone was supposed to pretend that we couldn’t see it.
7 comments:
AAAAAAAAAMMMMMMEEEEEENNN!!! I am going agree with this article for probably the weirdest of reasons, but yes I agree that we need more crappy plays in the world. The first, and probably the more important reason, is that with terrible plays you can make fun of them endlessly where as it is often harder to do that with a good play. The second reason is that with a crappy play you are constantly exploring the essence of the play, and thus making new discoveries with every read and run. The allow for almost limitless opportunities for everyone working on the production because there is really no right or wrong answer or approach to the play. They are also super fun (but still frustrating) for the audience to watch because they legitimately don’t know what the hell they are watching and why they paid an arm and a leg for a ticket to see it.
I hate a lot of popular and classic plays. I won’t lie about it. I think they’re often boring and out of date with today’s audience members. I cannot relate to the plot and therefore I never pay attention to the show. I love new theater. I don’t care if it’s a bad show; I prefer it to something which has been done so many times that I can recite it word for word. When I see New Works, I am always much more entertained then a lot of the other shows that I see at this school. This is the same for a lot of Broadway shows that I see. Take playground for instance; a lot of those shows were complete garbage. But, I absolutely loved them and would see them a second time. If we had more shows like that, I think that more people would be willing to see new theater.
YES.
I could not possibly agree with this more. Reviving classics is important but it makes theatre stagnant. it is boring. If you absolutely must revive an old play, do it in a new way. Every play that we worship now was revolutionary in its time. Chekov was a dare devil, and Shakespeare was a revolutionary! But what is done now that breaks the mold? We see dizzying piles of drippy musicals and heart wrenching ballads and living room dramas, but we do not see anything new. Where is the new style? It happens, for sure, in colleges and small independent theaters. But they cannot and do not thrive in the greater community. Only with name recognition can a theatre company draw a crowd. Classics are a fine way to do theatre, but as the article said, "if we produce only classics, we are in no way reflecting our own age." Our age is the only thing we can bring to the theatrical community. This age that we live in is the only thing that puts us above the geniuses that came before. So let's use it! Let's put on an open call for genius. There will be many bad plays, but that is good! Bad plays make us realize the value of good plays. They remind us why we need good plays. They inspire us to be better.
It's true that plays are generally tested based on the amount of time the've existed and been produced for, but I think that from a business standpoint (which, fun fact, theatre is indeed a business) it makes a lot of sense that producers generally follow this model. While I can totally agree that some of the best theatre is based on the current age and it's issues, and thus is being treated unfairly when examined in this manner, I feel as if this is mostly based on one of the unfortunate nuances of the trade. Making money in theatre is hard enough in the first place, so it's hard for producers to take an even larger risk by producing the latest and greatest from the underground theatre scene when they can instead produce Hairspray 10 times over and be at least slightly more ensured that they can get back what they get put in.
Of course we need more crappy plays. Sifting through the shit to find the hidden gems is one of the most interesting and entertaining parts of any industry, so why not do it in theater? We NEED new works. Our favorite “classic” plays didn’t just appear out of nowhere. They were all new untested works at one point, and although they are now renown they would of never existed if there wasn’t an opportunity for a new play to rise up. I’m sure many of these “classics” weren’t initially well received, but were revised and edited into masterpieces, so why not give the playwrights of our day a chance. If we just keep revisiting the same pool of plays again and again the conversation of theater goes stale and we exist in a world of regurgitated crap that we’ll all get sick of. If we beat the classics to death we won’t think they're classic and timeless anymore. Lets make new theater, lets experiment and make a mess, and produce utter crap, but lets do it in the goal to create new beautiful works. The conversation of theater is constantly changing and evolving. All theater artists need to be a part of conversation and that definitely includes the playwrights.
Contemporary play audiences demand more sensory experiences than some playwrights are willing to give. They want to expose character through narrative, yet all the audience seems to want is a bunch of special effects, black light, and jump scares. We can pick out a lot of great playwrights and authors from the early twentieth century because, at that time, they were regarded as somewhat celebrities. And they were as celebrated as our modern Kim Kardashian or Kanye West. Most screen and playwrights have fallen to the wayside in the advent of reality television. Or, we are more preoccupied placing stardom on idiots and gorgeous faces than the actual men and women behind the curtain. So, in essence, we don't need more crappy plays but perhaps more places where writing is accepted and critiqued in general.
Okay so I understand what this article is trying to argue. And I understand the basis behind the argument. But that being said, I, personally, am a lover of classics and it I would rather see revivals of shows that I never got an opportunity to see than see a brand new avant-garde show geared towards a "modern audience". Theater is heavily rooted in the classics and I do understand that we have to move forward, but not at the cost of the classic plays and musicals. For example I, personally, don't like the direction that musical theater is going in; the more modern plays are boring to me and intensely lack any need for critical thought (I.e. Les Mis, Spring Awakening, Urinetown). I don't want theater to go in that direction. It will eventually eliminate all need to have any kind of thought when seeing theater, and that, in my opinion, sickens me.
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