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Jul. 7th, 2007 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
merrilySo, it's Fringe Time in Toronto, and I have ten free tickets, and am using them in a blitzkrieg fashion.
The Fringe is a glorious mess of a festival... I mean, it's well-run and tightly organized, but the plays run the gamut of fabulous to emo-nonsense.
The last show I saw yesterday was "The Devil's Advocate," a play about unrequited love and zombies. I was leery about the unrequited love bit, but I firmly believed that zombies=awesome. Apparently, however, you can give your script zombies, but that doesn't mean baby-eating will ensue. Nor does it rule out earnest, long-winded monologues that try to be existential. Sad, eh? And completely contrary to my expectations.
First, and most easily fixed, it was difficult to hear you. Please slow down and speak up. I know you can't sound-check yourself -- the perils of being actor & director -- but you can get someone to do it for you. The rest of the cast was audible; you, quite frequently, were not.
Second, I was confused about your use of space. Your set choices were wise -- I liked the three doors ranged around the stage, but most of the time I didn't know where the action was supposed to be taking place. The choices your cast made (or you told them to make) about entering/exiting/moving in the space confused things further. I'm thinking particularly of a scene where a zombie seemed to exit into someone's apartment, through a door he did not enter to get into the scene. Perhaps this was just a mistake on stage, but it seemed indicative of most of the show -- often the cast didn't seem to feel firmly grounded: at least, not enough to communicate it to the audience.
I think part of the problem was that you had too many settings -- a rooftop, a coffeehouse, a park (? I think), the devil's waiting room, an apartment hallway, and a couple of others which I couldn't figure out. That's a lot for a one-act show. However, I probably wouldn't have quite so confused about the number of settings if I was certain about where the characters were, and you could have made that clearer with some additional dialogue and some subtle lighting changes.
The black-outs between every scene also compounded the problem of not knowing where I was.
Third, you had a lot of expository monologues, and I found it hard to pay attention. I loved the final scene because you mostly avoided monologues and instead had your two actors have a conversation. It was the best scene in the show because both of your actors knew exactly what their characters were doing and why, and they connected to each other. If you had kept this model -- dialogue mostly, little-to-no soapboxing -- for the rest of the play, it would have been much more interesting to watch.
In closing, regarding the liner notes you put in the program, if you have difficulty explaining to your friends what your play is about, you probably need to clarify it to yourself and do a rewrite of the script.
Seeing bad theatre makes me realize that I miss doing theatre. I miss it a lot. I get impatient with bad theatre because generally there are elements I can identify, as an informed audience member, that are easy to change and would improve the show. I find it frustrating. Maybe this is vastly egomaniacal, but geez, it's not like I'm Mandy Patinkin. I'm just a drama-school grad like any other drama school grad, and surely other people can see these things too.
Anyway. It is clearly time for me to go back to theatre - to at least take an acting class, probably also to start auditioning again.
Today I am going to go see Duel of Ages, and possibly also the Gladstone Variations show.
The Fringe is a glorious mess of a festival... I mean, it's well-run and tightly organized, but the plays run the gamut of fabulous to emo-nonsense.
The last show I saw yesterday was "The Devil's Advocate," a play about unrequited love and zombies. I was leery about the unrequited love bit, but I firmly believed that zombies=awesome. Apparently, however, you can give your script zombies, but that doesn't mean baby-eating will ensue. Nor does it rule out earnest, long-winded monologues that try to be existential. Sad, eh? And completely contrary to my expectations.
First, and most easily fixed, it was difficult to hear you. Please slow down and speak up. I know you can't sound-check yourself -- the perils of being actor & director -- but you can get someone to do it for you. The rest of the cast was audible; you, quite frequently, were not.
Second, I was confused about your use of space. Your set choices were wise -- I liked the three doors ranged around the stage, but most of the time I didn't know where the action was supposed to be taking place. The choices your cast made (or you told them to make) about entering/exiting/moving in the space confused things further. I'm thinking particularly of a scene where a zombie seemed to exit into someone's apartment, through a door he did not enter to get into the scene. Perhaps this was just a mistake on stage, but it seemed indicative of most of the show -- often the cast didn't seem to feel firmly grounded: at least, not enough to communicate it to the audience.
I think part of the problem was that you had too many settings -- a rooftop, a coffeehouse, a park (? I think), the devil's waiting room, an apartment hallway, and a couple of others which I couldn't figure out. That's a lot for a one-act show. However, I probably wouldn't have quite so confused about the number of settings if I was certain about where the characters were, and you could have made that clearer with some additional dialogue and some subtle lighting changes.
The black-outs between every scene also compounded the problem of not knowing where I was.
Third, you had a lot of expository monologues, and I found it hard to pay attention. I loved the final scene because you mostly avoided monologues and instead had your two actors have a conversation. It was the best scene in the show because both of your actors knew exactly what their characters were doing and why, and they connected to each other. If you had kept this model -- dialogue mostly, little-to-no soapboxing -- for the rest of the play, it would have been much more interesting to watch.
In closing, regarding the liner notes you put in the program, if you have difficulty explaining to your friends what your play is about, you probably need to clarify it to yourself and do a rewrite of the script.
Seeing bad theatre makes me realize that I miss doing theatre. I miss it a lot. I get impatient with bad theatre because generally there are elements I can identify, as an informed audience member, that are easy to change and would improve the show. I find it frustrating. Maybe this is vastly egomaniacal, but geez, it's not like I'm Mandy Patinkin. I'm just a drama-school grad like any other drama school grad, and surely other people can see these things too.
Anyway. It is clearly time for me to go back to theatre - to at least take an acting class, probably also to start auditioning again.
Today I am going to go see Duel of Ages, and possibly also the Gladstone Variations show.