Monday, November 26, 2018
Detroit '67
Pittsburgh in the Round: Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama’s production of Detroit ’67 has all of the elements for success – an award-winning playwright, an award-winning director, a strong design team, and a talented young cast. Taken all together, this production falls a bit flat.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I am a little biased since I worked on the production and I was a part of the process from the beginning. The critic focused on the acting and not on the other parts of the production. The show is a pretty long show and one can get bored because of the lengthiness of the dialogue and moments but I disagree that it was flat. Having been a part of the process, there is an importance to the dialogue and for you to understand the play in its entirety one has to listen to the dialogue. I also disagree with the critic about unfilled silences. Those moments did not need words to be spoken, the other aspects of the production (lighting and sound) spoke in those moments and allowed for the audience to experience what the play intended to do. In this critique of the play, the critic did not acknowledge the role of the different aspects of the production which I find a little annoying.
I am on the deck crew for Detroit ’67, and I have to say I think this critic is a bit off in their review. As someone who has seen the show many times and watched each aspect of the show come into place during tech week, I think it’s clear that the critic missed many amazing moments on the show while they were focused on criticizing certain aspects of it that the did not like. They talked about each actor doing a pretty good job but said that Kameron was “the stand out performance.” I agree that Kameron did an amazing job but I think the critic disregarded how talented some of the other actor’s are. They said that he was “the most emotionally available” on stage, but that’s because Lank, as a character should be the most emotionally available actor on stage – just based on who his character is compared to the other characters. I think this critic really overlooked all of the really fantastic moments of the show and was too focused on their critiques to really understand why some things were done (i.e. long dialogue, long transition scenes—they’re important to the point of the show and the message you should get from it).
I have a hard time with this review simply because I personally found all three hours of Detroit ‘67 riveting and engaging. Most of the positive remarks that were made were rather broad while the criticisms were specific and pointed without substantial explanation. While the review is mostly positive, it reads to me as unfairly negative as well. One sentence at most is given to each design element, with a rather cursory glance at the execution of the work over any attempt to highlight the symbolisms and tensions created by the designers. That isn’t to say that I disagree with all of the reviewer’s points, because there are aspects that definitely ring true. However, I don’t think I can stand by the fact that the actors’ ages remind us we are watching a university performance as a valid criticism. I also disagree with the issue of too many silences; I felt that the wonderfully designed music and soundscapes filled many gaps in dialogue with grace and character.
Post a Comment