Michael Rau ’05 knows how to set the scene. Anyone who entered the Greene Room of Alpha Delta Phi to see “This is a Play” last weekend was confronted first with lettuce pinned to the walls and assembled in a great ring on the stage. Next, the audience noticed that each program was marked “Jessica’s Copy,” clearly a photocopy of the script belonging to stage manager and assistant director Jessica Chayes ’07. The program was covered with scrawled notes about casting, scheduling and the lettuce budget. A “Prologue” was printed as in insert and depicted, in script-format, director Rau standing on stage and melodramatically announcing the show’s thank you’s. Before the house lights were down, the audience could sense from more than just the title, that “This Is A Play” by Daniel MacIvor, would be about theatre, its conventions and its meaning to us.
And, probably about lettuce too.
All of these assumptions were confirmed as the show began. The funny, movingly absurd 30-minute play at first seemed to have no story, but it actually had two. The superficial plot is that of “A Stranger Among Us,” which the three actors are acting: a poorly written melodrama about long-lost siblings, shady pasts, sexual awakenings and lettuce.
The real story is the one they actually tell us. They make us privy to their thoughts as they acted, speaking the craft choices behind their lines more often than the lines themselves—or, in one section, the line’s place in the sequence of the scene: “I say my third line—I say my fourth line—I say my tenth line.” But they give far more than that. We learn about the admiration the wide-eyed Female Actor (Nadia Wilson ’06) has for the “director,” with whom she is either having affair or is about to. We see the fragile bravado of the vacuous Male Actor (Jeremy Paul ’05), who is pampered by the writer and who at every turn attempts to channel Robert DeNiro. And we feel the bitterness and dissatisfaction of the “Older Female Actor” (Zoe Goldberg ’04) who, in her experience, has trouble putting up with the stupidity around her.
While the show was fueled by comedy, it was also undeniably dealing with real artistic issues.
“At first I think everyone was just concerned with making it really funny,” Chayes said. “But as the rehearsal process continued we realized that it wouldn’t be funny until the actors really understood their characters.”
This understanding bore out well in the final production. Throughout the “play” the actors grapple with their personal, creative demons, and in the end each of them finds, despite themselves, their own kernel of meaning in the ridiculous play: each of them “understands something.” This play holds that we take value from theater, and from art in general, regardless of the absolute value of the source. Rau makes clear that the experience of artistic meaning occurs within.
The show dealt heavily in acting craft, arguably assuming that the audience had some knowledge of how actors, directors and writers work. The audience, however, seemed to follow everything that happened onstage, so laypeople most likely got as much out of the show as did theatre practitioners. There was a wealth of material in this sliver of a play: the references to actors relying on method crutches got much laughter, and the cast was very true to life in both their use of craft-choice terminology—using active verbs to describe their motivations, such as “I attack her”—and in their depictions of the actors’ interior monologues. It’s true that when they claimed to be upstaging each other they were actually moving downstage, but otherwise the show’s depiction of theatrical work was irreproachable and should have felt familiar to anyone who’s ever worked on a play.
Max Goldblatt ’05 provided the original score. The music played between the various scenes with Goldblatt philosophizing over it on the true ownership of ‘original’ work he eventually determines that it is defined by who gets paid for it. Goldblatt is clearly a gifted sound designer. Light designer Greg Malen ’07 also did good work, especially considering the technical limitations of the space.
One of the most interesting moments of the show came toward the end, when the Older Female Actor gets to one of the few lines she actually likes. It contains the name of the ‘play,’ “Strangers Among Us,” and one of the things she likes about it is something key to the rest of the show: “it makes me feel like I’m on stage.” It is strangely compelling that she is moved by a simple reminder of her job.
This sort of artistic meta-commentary has abounded in theater this semester. Visiting artist Anne Bogart’s “Score” explored the creative psychology of Leonard Bernstein; the use of plays-within-plays and modernized archetypes in Goldblatt’s own “Want’s Unwisht Work” served to make the audience examine its relationship to theatre;
“Piccadilly Pow-Wow” revived the art of storytelling, begging the question of what separates it from other arts. Forthcoming shows this semester look to cover similar ground: Theater Professor Gay Smith’s “Countess/3” will recombine three different operas with their mutual dramatic source, creating a blend of artistic media; “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde” will focus on a man whose life and art were inextricable, and playwright Moises Kaufman includes himself among the cast of characters.
It’s a bad semester to be the fourth wall. But if you like art that makes you laugh, feel and think—and question the nature of your thoughts, feelings and laughter—it’s a good semester to be a theater-goer.
THIS IS A PLAY by Daniel MacIvor; directed by Michael Rau ’05; stage manager/assistant director Jessica Chayes ’07; light design by Greg Malen ’07; score by Max Goldblatt ’05; set design by Max Goldblatt and Ray Tintori ’06; costumes by Celia Reddick ’06.
WITH Zoe Goldberg ’04 (Older Female Actor), Jeremy Paul ’05 (Male Actor), and Nadia Wilson ’06 (Female Actor).
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