Day 29: The Middle Ground

So now that we are on Day 29 of my planned 30 days of plays and are coming to the end of the line, it seems fitting that so many of the scripts I am now reading are reflecting back on some of the things I have already written. After all, there's really only so much one can say about theater, am I right? Or maybe there's only so much I can say. I am definitely fighting the feeling that I'm increasingly sounding like a broken record here. Anyway, yesterday's play offered some new insights into my theory on the most effective times to write about global catastrophes. And today's play takes us back to Day 12's rant about scary plays. In particular, it speaks to what I said about theater's annoying and self-destructive need to bury what could be its most viscerally exciting stories under fat, dense and unappetizing layers of intellectualism.

Today's play starts as a laid-back comedy about kooks hanging around a dive bar and, through various twists and turns, ends up as a thriller. The writer has built himself a very nice career out of writing unchallenging but reliably crowd-pleasing plays of all kinds and he does a good job of avoiding the usual pitfalls of the thriller genre, never getting too wrapped up in explaining the hows and whys of his plot and instead focusing his efforts on the gradual racheting-up of tension and looming disaster. He's confident and experienced enough to know that though it might be easy to poke holes in his plotting as you read it, when put on stage, no one is going to care one way or the other as long as their heart is beating fast. So why, why oh why, does he waste so much time in the midst of things on a full explanation of the 9/11 conspiracy theory (another 9/11 play! I'm such a fucking genius, it's scary)? That's not to say this stuff isn't interesting. But to plop what amounts to a long lecture in the middle of a tightly orchestrated thriller does way more harm than good.

Look, I understand that legit genre plays are fighting an uphill battle. In response to getting our asses kicked for years by other narrative forms like film, TV and video games, theater has shielded itself behind its reputation as "the serious one." Unless you're going to go full bore in the opposite direction and do a spoofy musical or goofball comedy, then your theater better have some greater meaning to it, some possibility for intellectual and emotional transcendence. I suppose this is a kind of rationalization for the higher ticket prices and greater commitment of time and energy that theater demands compared to those other forms. But it has created this weird absence of a middle ground between silly and artsy, and this is where the genre play really needs to reside. This is what I had hoped for out of this play, not something that sought to educate or enlighten us but one that could aim for the head, the heart and the guts in equal measure. Unfortunately, it seems we have ceded this middle ground over permanently.