Day 24: High Wire Act

It sorta felt like the writer of today's play had read the past 24 days of the needtheater blog and decided to combine all of the things I had ranted most strenuously against into one story. There was the requisite sneer towards Hollywood vapidity, gobs and gobs of quirkiness and, perhaps most damaging of all, an unwillingness to confront its themes and tell its story with complete clarity and honesty. Hey, at least it was about poor people!

It got me thinking about the high-wire act that is theatricality. Theatricality is a word literary managers will often throw around. It speaks to the fact that theater and the theater space represent fantasy worlds, no matter how realistic a writer's style. Theatricality describes a writer's ability to highlight and utilize this aspect of the form to say things that aren't always clear in our day-to-day life, and it's an absolutely necessary part of any good play. But a writer can very easily overshoot the mark when it comes to this theatricality. Here are a few of the unfortunate results:

-Obnoxious protagonists: In this play, the protagonist has suffered the death of her parents and has been left to care for her disfigured brother. Her resulting stunted maturity manifests itself in a neediness that, when heightened by the need for theatricality, becomes annoying. I could barely stand a character that I am supposed to be actively rooting for.

-Unintentionally comedic given circumstances: The disfigured brother lives in a cardboard box in the family home's backyard and wears a Phantom of the Opera mask to hide his disfigurement. Again, this is heightened behavior. And in this case, it pushes things towards the absurd and away from the tragedy that this behavior is supposed to represent. It makes the play funnier than it should be but less effective than it wants to be.

-Too much description: The easiest way to use theatricality is to describe the world as it exists in the play. It describes the protagonist's conflict or the brother's circumstances. But we also need to know what can be. These are the stakes of the play and our understanding of them creates tension and keeps us engaged. The more a play gets caught up in description of what is, the easier it is to lose sight of what can be.

These kinds of effects are what lead to a loss of clarity and honesty. But as is often the case with plays like this, today's story has a profoundly touching, emotional core out of which all this theatricality has grown. And it puts the play into a purgatory that I've talked about before. Too potentially good to be bad. Too potentially bad to be good. A great director and cast can find this core and make it all the more resonant because the journey to get there was unusually tough. It can be stunning. But the wrong artists can turn it into a mockery. It's a pretty thin margin of error. Just like walking the high wire.