The especially interesting thing about this season programming process is that submissions are read blind, without any sense of the gender, race, age, sexual orientation, etc of the playwright, all the way up to the finalist pool. This means that there is no potential for internalized, unrecognized racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc for most of the process. Seven out of the eight playwrights this season were chosen from around 900 anonymous submissions. And look how the season has wound up!

Of course, this model works mainly because the O’Neill is a development center, not a producing organization. A large regional theatre couldn’t read all the plays they are considering blindly, because they are usually interested in producing at least a few classic or well-known works. However, if a season that is largely programmed without concern to gender or race can end up with only one white male playwright, how does the Guthrie rationalize all of theirs?

The O’Neill is also in an interesting position in terms of audience. Most of its performance spaces are fairly small, and many seats are always taken up by conference participants. The O’Neill doesn’t advertise widely in an attempt to attract an audience; they have devoted fans, mostly Southeastern CT locals, who come see many or all shows in a season, and the rest of the audience is usually made up by people associated with those involved in the productions. Because they are not in the position of struggling to sell tickets, as regional, off-Broadway and Broadway theatres are, commercial appeal plays no part in season programming.

So I’m not comparing the same type of organization, I realize that. But if nothing else, the NPC season proves that there are exciting female playwrights out there. There are wonderful, worthy plays being written by women. There are lots! Maybe the regional theatres just need to seek them out a bit more. And that’s where the Guthrie’s season comes in to question–if they were actively seeking interesting new works, they would absolutely find some (or, I mean, at least one) by women. I am left to conclude, then, that they are not truly looking for such works, and therefore ignoring their explicit mission of producing, along with “classic literature,” “new work from diverse cultures.”

The central problem seem to be that many Artistic Directors and those on planning boards seem to think that plays by white male playwrights attract a larger audience. I have seen no proof of this, and since theatre audiences are predominantly female, this really doesn’t make sense. Perhaps it is just based on the fact that classic plays, those in the cannon, seem to draw a larger audience and, due to years of misogyny and racism, the cannon is heavily white male-dominated. But people can change; if theatre start programming more strong plays by women and minorities, theses plays will have a chance to enter into and change the cannon. Or, conversely, people will begin to realize that oftentimes new theatre has the potential to be just as engaging and exciting, if not more so, than the classics.

The show is the result of a collaboration between SITI Company, ArtsEmerson and Emerson Stage, and the influences of each was evident. SITI Company, under the Artistic Direction of Anne Bogart, is built on ensemble collaboration. They also use a physical approach to acting designed by founding member Tadashi Suzuki. ArtsEmerson is committed to bringing new and legendary works to Boston, and Emerson Stage is the producing department of Emerson’s Performing Arts department. This collaboration meant that the creators of the work were professionals from the SITI Company, and most of the ensemble of actors were Emerson students. The entire cast was extremely talented, and though it was clear who was a student and who was a professional, this was mostly due to age. The collaboration between these three companies was not only special for the city of Boston, but a great opportunity for the students who were able to participate in a world premiere. It blurs the line between educational and professional theatre (much like the BCAP does), which I feel is very important, so as to not have students graduating who have only ever worked within their schools.

Cafe Variations resists easy categorization–there’s too much music and dancing for it to be a play, and yet it’s not quite a musical. But the fact that it breaks categorical boundaries is one of the things that makes this piece refreshing. The central plot structure is pretty basic; one of the actors at the talkback said that Anne Bogart was interested in exploring the traditional “boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl” narrative in a new way. And that is what she does. The play opens with a woman sobbing over a waiter at a cafe, and ends with the same woman in tears over the same man. The opening moment is somewhat of a prelude; shortly after we see the couple’s first interaction, and follow their relationship through the play. We see them only in short scenes, though, as we are also introduced to five other couples. It is hard to get too emotionally invested in any of the characters or relationships since everything moves so quickly, but I did find myself close to tears at the end of the show, when the waiter breaks up with the woman and sings “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” Other than that, though, the only other relationship I had any emotional attachment to was an older couple. In one of the most amusing and touching segments of the show, they play strip poker, nervous about making themselves vulnerable to each other, but both obviously craving companionship and intimacy in every sense.

Bogart made great use of space in the moment when the older couple has a fight, and the woman climbs off the stage and runs through the audience, ending up back in front of the stage, and ultimately exiting through a side door in the theatre on to the street. It broke the fourth wall in a way that was different than it had been done before. The characters had at various times been singing and speaking to the audience before, but this was the first time they actually left their space and entered ours. The show hadn’t been living in a world of realism before this moment, but this took it solidly out. Having the actress not only leave the space of the stage but physically leave the space of the theatre was a surprising choice, though. I saw a matinee, so when she opened the door, sunlight flooded into the dark auditorium in a way that was disconcerting, though not unpleasant. I imagine passers-by must have been startled and amused to see a woman in a 1950s-style dress with a full skirt burst out of the theatre in a frenzy. It’s great, though, because it in a small way involves them in a performance, and blurs the line between performer, spectator and uninvolved bystander. The transition was probably most jarring for the actress herself, as she is forced to leave the private world of the theatre, in which everyone has chosen to be there for one central purpose, and once again enter the ‘real world.’ I wonder if she was able to stay in character the whole time, or if it was a struggle for her not to allow the change to take her out of the moment completely.

One of the central ideas that this piece plays with is the concept of “fractals.” There are ten characters, but each of them is played by three actors: A, B and C. Each actor represents a different part of the person: a fractal. This stems from the concept that as people, we are more than one thing; we exist outside of our selves. One actor explained fractals as the options when playing Russian Roulette: whether you pull the trigger and it’s empty or there’s a bullet, the other option is possible and exists in another universe. So maybe in one world, one version of ourselves does stay in a particular relationship with someone, while another version makes a different choice. It’s a fascinating idea, and one that is absolutely worth exploring, but I’m not sure that this production really utilizes it to its fullest extent. Perhaps the influence between the three actors playing the same character was subtle and I just didn’t pick up on it, but honestly if they hadn’t been dressed in the same colors, I’m not sure I would have noticed it at all. Maybe part of the problem was just that there were too many people on stage. It felt cluttered at times, and difficult to focus on any one thing. At the same time, though, the point of the show isn’t to get a realistic portrait of a relationship between two singular people. It’s more of a montage or collage of relationships that leave us with a greater understanding of how love can enter our lives, grow, change, succeed or fail. During the talkback, one older woman asked the actors why it was that the show didn’t have a happy ending, adding, “It would have been nice if [the woman in love with the waiter] got what she wanted in the end.” The actors smiled at this, and then one responded that “whether a relationship has a happy or sad ending depends on when you decide the ending is.” This comment was really thought-provoking for me, and I think it helps to illuminate the show.

Cafe Variations was gorgeously designed, with the women in full-skirted 1950s-style dresses and the men in tailored suits. The set was stunning as well: a glittery, beaded curtain hid the on-stage orchestra from view, and a sparkling chandelier hung above center stage. The decadent décor perfectly complimented the lush Gershwin tunes, which the actors sung beautifully. The real intellectual value of the show, though, comes from the dark underside to these lovely sounds and images. Chuck Mee’s text, though sometimes as unabashedly romantic as the Gershwin lyrics, is often biting, and addresses the potential scary side of relationships. Anyone is dangerous, because anyone you get attached to has the power to hurt you. This is no reason not to enter into a relationship, but it is something we often forget in the flush of new love.

The choreography for this piece was a mix of traditional musical theatre-style dance, with individual tap sequences as well as full choral numbers, an Apache-style dance fight, and stylized movement throughout. I learned in the talkback that every single movement was precisely blocked, so as to free the actors from having to think about their bodies and instead be able to be free in their emotional lives. It was obvious that nothing was spontaneous; even the waiter’s pratfall in the beginning felt more like he was commenting on a pratfall than actually trying to execute one for laughs. One of the most effective aspects of this movement choreography was the segment between a man and a woman that was repeated at different times throughout the production by different couples. It involved them sitting, reaching out to touch each other lovingly, then getting in some sort of dispute, standing up, one reaching out to the other who would throw off their hands, sending their arms in a wide circle and then landing back on the other’s shoulders. This sequence expresses a range of emotions in a short span of time, and by removing specific dialogue from it, it becomes immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever been in a relationship. We can place our own context or assumptions upon the blank palate of the movements, making us actively involved in the performance. Having different couples perform the sequence also emphasized one of the show’s central ideas, which is that relationships are universal; even though each one is unique, they have more in common with each other than they have differences.

One of the most interesting things this show explores is gender. For most of the time, all the couples are male and female. The interactions between them culminate in a huge full-cast dance battle, in which moves and words (“A man in just a vibrator with a wallet” was one of my favorites) are hurled back and forth. After this, the traditional relationship structure begins to break down a little bit. Two men fall in love, and one couple swaps clothes, so that the woman is wearing a tux and then man is in a dress. It was lovely for me to see two men having a romantic conversation on stage; the fact that it was presented in a very nonchalant way–no different from any of the straight couples–felt refreshing and important. The clothes-switch was a little more difficult to derive meaning from because I wasn’t really clear on what that particular couple had been doing before they swapped outfits. This goes back to my feeling that maybe there were too many people on stage. Still, I think the details of their relationship are not important, and that the production was trying to emphasize the possible overturning of gender norms. In a production that otherwise looked traditional in every sense of the word, this was a nice moment of transcending expectations.

I think Cafe Variations has a lot to say not only about relationships and love, but about the structure of theatre and the rewards that come from breaking form. This piece is neither a musical nor a play, and that is fine and exciting. Breaking both these forms and combining pieces from each ends up creating a visually stunning, emotionally engaging piece of theatre.

Over There is a play by Mark Ravenhill which premiered in March 2009 at London’s Royal Court Theatre, and which I was able to watch on digitaltheatre.com. It tells the story of twin brothers who were raised on different sides of the Berlin wall, but come together after its fall. The boys, Karl from the East and Franz from the West, are not only identical, but they experience things from each other’s lives and can speak in perfect unison. The extended metaphor of the play, in which the two brothers represent their respective sides of Germany, is a simple but at times an incredibly effective one. Though it does feel a bit heavy-handed by the end, overall Ravenhill explores large societal issues in a moving, elegant way.

One of the strongest aspects of this production is the actors, twins Harry (Franz) and Luke (Karl) Treadaway. Their slim bodies and angular faces are not only attractive to the point of approaching feminine prettiness, but become blank slates onto which ideas of cultural identity gender are projected. They also literally becomes slates for an array of costumes and even food products. Their appearances are vital to their characters. In the beginning of the play, they are incredibly different–Franz wears a checkered button-down shirt, and his hair is neatly slicked back into place, while Karl wears a simple t-shirt, and his hair is disheveled and falls over his forehead. Near the middle of the play, as their identities begin to meld, they wear identical suits, and Karl attempts to mimic Franz’s put-together hair style.

The actors stand out vividly in a simple set. It is a box, with sterile white-blue ceiling, floor and walls that make the voices slightly echo. It is harshly, evenly lit, which makes it feel like a TV set. This gives the play a hyper-realistic quality that takes it to the point of surreal. I couldn’t completely get this from watching the film, but having been in the Royal Court Theatre I can imagine that this set must have been extremely jarring when countered with the theatre’s dark, traditional interior. The lighting also allowed the details of the actors’ bodies to be perfectly visible, making the times when Karl is covered in food even more visceral and jarring than they would have been if his body was in shadow, or even softly lit. It is not a play that shies away getting dirty; nothing is hidden, neither in the language nor the blocking, and the lighting emphasizes this. It is clearly illustrated at one point near the beginning, when the brothers masturbate together while watching a porn video. The director chose to put the imagined TV screen in the audience, so that the actors stand at the edge of the stage and touch themselves literally right in front of the audience’s faces. The way it’s staged makes it graphically impossible to ignore.

Another important aspect of the set is that it has no doors; it is literally just a box that is missing the fourth side. At the beginning of the show, the actors walk down the aisles in the theatre and climb on stage into the set which neither of them leaves until the end. The closed set is representative of their relationship: they are literally trapped with each other, and can’t escape each other because they are so closely linked. Anyone with a sibling, especially a twin, could surely relate to the sometimes claustrophobic feeling of being stuck with another person forever. These two characters, especially, don’t have any other family, except Franz’s son, since both their parents die early on in the show. They are isolated in their world with only each other. More broadly, since the brothers’ relationship mirrors that of East and West Germany, the set can be seen to represent the unified country, in which two separate cultures which used to be one but have grown apart and developed different ideologies, are forced to coexist. This is the overarching metaphor of the play, and it is clearly visualized by the set.

The space the brothers occupy is sparsely furnished, with a debris of boxes, cans and containers stacked up along the back wall–mostly alcohol and food. When the Berlin wall actually falls, near the beginning of the play, it is shown by Karl picking up the tallest stack of boxes and tumbling them into a pit in front of the stage. Visually representing the fall of the wall this way makes it immediate and personal; something Karl actually made happen, even though his character had nothing to do with it. Having the wall made out of cardboard boxes also represents the materialistic divide between the East and West.

Objects are used representationally in other ways as well. First, we see a bag of white Tesco flour as the ashes of the twins’ father. He dies shortly after the fall of the wall, and it is implied that he simply couldn’t live in the new world, since he was passionately Communist and lived all his life in East Germany. Another symbol is Franz’s son, who is born near the beginning of the play and grows a few years throughout it, represented by a yellow sponge. The child is the only other character in this piece besides the two brothers, and becomes a huge point of contention between them by the end. Part of this is his potential to learn different ideas–a child can take in and be taught almost anything. He can absorb ideas, which makes the sponge an apt stage metaphor. The child as an abstract idea also represents the future, and the question of what language and political ideology he should be taught becomes an argument between the brothers. Karl wants to instill Communist ideals in him, which Franz strongly opposes. Near the end of the play, Karl rips part of the paper bag containing the flour that represented the father’s ashes and places the paper on the sponge, like a hat or scarf. Physically combining these stage metaphors is a clear representation of Karl trying to force his, and his father’s, Communist ideals upon the next generation.

The language the child speaks is also a topic of debate. Language plays an important role in this piece, and underscores the cultural tension the play explores. The play is in English, and the actors have been speaking it the whole time with their natural British accents. When Franz addresses his son at one point, he speaks in German. We quickly learn that this is representative of him speaking English–since the characters of German, they have been speaking German the whole time. When he tells Karl why he speaks to his son in English, Franz says, “We’re going to need English; we all need English.” Though he later disavows everything American, at first Karl agrees, and says that he would like to learn English as well. We see the brothers role-play in order to give Karl a chance to practice: Franz puts on an apron and speaks English with an American accent tinged with a German one. He pretends to be a Californian waitress, and flirts with his brother, who attempts to converse in more stilted, awkward English.

The drag performance in this moment, though not a particularly serious or convincing one, revisits but reverses the situation in which the play began. At the opening, Karl is dressed as the American waitress, but more fully than Franz: he actually wears a dress, heals, padding and a wig. Franz is eating breakfast at the diner, while Karl seductively mops the floor and flirts with him. This prologue morphs into a conversation between the two brothers, and the linear plot of the play begins. The end of the play, though, revisits the diner scene. Franz ultimately kills Karl by smothering him with a mop, symbolizing West Germany dominating East. Karl continues talking once he is dead, though, and Karl realizes that the only way to silence him is to eat him, so he does. He squirts barbeque sauce all over his body, and then puts his face in his torso and pretends to take a bite, getting sauce all around his mouth. “We are one,” he declares, when the deed is done. It is the ultimate act of domination; the West has literally and figuratively consumed the East. After this, Franz places the blonde wig back on Karl’s head, and Karl once again becomes Karly, the flirtatious waitress he was in the opening. He strips naked but stands with his penis hidden between his legs so that he looks like a woman. He spoons Franz, and the play ends with Franz’s line “I love you, Karly” and the men kissing as the lights black out. It’s a complicated ending, and one that was problematic for me. I don’t know if the prologue and epilogue scenes take place in the same time in the future–Franz mentions that his son is grown up and in college–and that the rest of the play is in the past, or if they are simply abstract scenes that don’t literally fit into the timeline. It makes sense for them to take place years after the present action of the play, but then who is the female Karly? She might be just a woman in whom Franz sees something of his lost brother, and is attracted to in that sense. Or she might me an incarnation of Karl. If we look at the scenes in a more abstract sense, they could be a commentary on the gender roles into which we often force the concepts of East and West. Karl, as East Germany and more broadly the Eastern nations of the world, becomes the submissive female, while Franz is in the position of power as the West since he is being waited on. I think either interpretation is valid.

In its discussion about gender as related to Eastern and Western cultures, Over There reminds me of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. In Hwang’s play, the stereotype of a Western man’s fantasy about the perfect submissive Eastern woman is explored, and then turned on its head. Gallimard, a French diplomat, falls in love and is in a 20-year relationship with Song, a Chinese opera singer who he believes is the perfect woman but is, in fact, a man and a governmental spy. Song’s lines from Act 3, Scene 1 perfectly illustrate this idea: “The West thinks of itself as masculine–big guns, big industry, big money–so the East is feminine–weak, delicate, poor…Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes. The West believes that the East, deep down, wants to be dominated–because a woman can’t think for herself.” Song is able to convince Gallimard by playing into every stereotype he believe in and being completely submissive. Likewise, Karl is ultimately dominated and destroyed by Franz, and literally becomes a female. Both these plays show us what is wrong with these stereotypes, though. M. Butterfly ends with Gallimard realizing that he is the one who has truly taken the traditionally “feminine” role in the relationship, since Song held the power all along. It also shows us that questions of gender and sexuality (and, by extension, East and West) are much more complicated than our binaries would suggest, and that in the end, they don’t matter at all. At the end of Over There, even though Karl is a woman, he is in the position of holding and comforting Franz, and it is Franz who declares his love, to which Karl does not verbally respond. Though one character appears as male and the other as female, they are not sticking to conventional roles and therefore throwing our assumptions about who is truly dominating who into question.

Over There is a complicated, visceral exploration of the relationship between brothers, genders, and nations. I am so grateful that it is available online, because though I think it is a play that should be seen widely, it is unlikely that I would ever have had a chance to experience it live. It’s a shame, because we need more pieces like this which truly challenge our cultural assumptions.

And then last night I saw Hookman, and I was caught off guard by how much of the play is about rape. I knew it dealt with themes of “female sexuality,” but it went way beyond that. When Lexi, in the first scene, says, “I think I was [coughs something that sounds like ‘raped’] last week,” I was immediately on edge. This is a play about rape, this is a play about rape…I’m going to hate this. But I didn’t.

In the end it’s not a play about rape; it’s a play about how horrific events haunt us and make us unable to function for a time, and ultimately about dealing with what happened and being strong enough to move on.

I thought the play handled rape well, considering it could have gone horribly wrong. The idea that every man Lexi encounters turns out to be her attacker (Hookman) shows how survivors of sexual assault have a hard time trusting people afterwards, and how their experience colors everything else in their world. The play was also clearly coming from a point of social satire, which made the humor acceptable. One of the main tenants of rape culture is trivializing sexual assault by joking about it, but that is not what was happening here. Still, even recognizing and accepting this, I didn’t laugh often during this performance. It’s just not something I am personally ready to laugh about, and I wonder if I ever will. People in the audience around me thought the scene where Yoonji is drunk in the snow with Hookman was hilarious, for example. And it was funny, because you have Mariah Carey playing while this girl almost throws up on a guy and then he slashes her face off. It’s so absurd that it’s funny. I get that. Except the situation of a severely intoxicated girl alone at night with a guy is not absurd, it happens, and it’s not absurd for the girl to get hurt. And that’s not something at which I can laugh.

Ultimately, the scariest thing about Hookman wasn’t the blood or the violence or the urban legend, it was the fact that real rapists don’t have a distinguishing feature like a hook for a hand. They could be anybody. It’s not the hook that’s scary, it’s the man. But Lexi, very much an “every-woman” character, having the strength to fight, overcome and let go of her attacker shows that she is a survivor, not a victim, which is an important, empowering message.

So why is this?? It seems so obviously wrong. If men are the ones sharing most stories, whether they are creating them or reporting facts, we are receiving almost everything we encounter through a male lens. Almost everything is being filtered through the proverbial Male Gaze. Why??

I guess a lot of it has to do with out-dated but culturally ingrained notions of gender roles; of “separate spheres.” Women are traditionally not meant to work outside the home. This originally came from a fear that this would exhaust their “life force” and drain them so that they were unable to produce children. This is obviously a notion that no one could possibly give credit to anymore, and yet the implications linger. Even when women did begin to enter the work force, they were still meant to stay out of the public eye. The man’s sphere is public, the woman’s private. It seems like there are still remnants of this philosophy at work, since there is a disproportionately small amount of women in the media; the ultimate public sphere.

In terms of creating work, there used to be the belief that women could not be playwrights because they did not know enough of the world (due to being confined in their private spheres). Women, of course, did have broad ranges of experiences within these spheres, but it was believed that they weren’t interesting or dramatic enough to be turned into art or stories to be shared. I think we are still dealing with this idea as well. A movie that centers around a woman, for example, is a “chick flick,” a genre piece, and the perception is that it is meant for a female audience. A film about a man, though, can express universal truth. Man’s experience is the human experience; a woman’s experience is the female experience. Filmmakers work under the assumption that a woman will go see a movie about a man, but a man is much less likely to see a movie about a woman. This may be true, but if it is, it is only because we are all socialized to believe that the male experience is universal, while the female experience is a niche.

I don’t know how to change this. I guess the only way is to, well…change it. Get more women out there writing, reporting and selling stories. Maybe we will have to make our stories more compelling than the men’s in order to get them heard. Maybe we’ll have to work twice as hard. But I’m certainly willing to try.

In that class, for certain pieces on the syllabus, a small group has to prepare some sort of interpretation or presentation. The group assigned this play took scenes and themes from the script and made a roughly 10-minute, silent, black and white film of it. It was actually an incredibly interesting way to look at the play. It is, after all, image-heavy, something that is almost lost when reading the script. Kennedy’s stage directions suggest mood and feel as well as specific instructions, but still, the reader must imagine the actual visual.

One of the strengths of the video was its simplicity, and this is as much, if not more of, a testament to Kennedy’s writing as it is to the skill of the students who made it. They didn’t try to interpret or comment on the material, but simply present the images and let them speak for themselves. One shot that really stuck out to me focused on Sarah’s legs and feet, as strands of hair (it was unclear what they were using for the hair) fell into frame and accumulated on the ground. It was obviously not actual hair, but that just added to the disturbing, surreal feel. The moments with hair did resonate with me both times I read the script, because losing ones hair is such a potent metaphor for body image dissatisfaction, lack of sense of self, and general fear, all of which are strong themes in this play. Seeing it, though, or at least a representation of it, really brought the point home.

I guess what this is all getting at is that I made a discovery of a way into a play from a source that I wasn’t expecting. I didn’t think I’d be moved by a student-made video of a play that is complex play, but which I was proud to have “figured out” on my own. But the power of the image transcended the fact that it was being reenacted in a college apartment by a white girl. I feel the play on a new level now, and my desire to see it in performance has only increased.

I think I responded to this piece so strongly because it hit so close of home–I’ve done all the exercises depicted in the show and understand very well the impact they can have on your relationships with people, and with yourself. I loved how Baker used small moments from the exercises, and exchanges during breaks, to build a clear story arch for each character. It’s a testimony to simplicity and truth in theatre.

One of the difficulties about the production that I saw, however, was that all the actors were around the same age. An element of the play was lost by not having the generational differences of the characters come into play. Though the actors did their best to express the struggles of their middle-aged characters, it was clear most were trying to stretch their personal experiences into their characters. Lauren felt like the most honest character, because an actress who is probably around 20 was going back to the age of 16.

This is often a difficulty in college (or high school–obviously the issue is more pronounced in high schools) productions. It makes me wonder whether schools, who are casting mostly from within pools of actors around the same age, should attempt plays with wide-ranges of character ages. Of course, one tried to avoid this completely, there would be very few plays to choose from. Still, this production wetted my appetite for a professional one–I wish I had been able to see it when it was at the Huntington. I think that a lot would be added to the performances if the actors were of varied ages and had a broader range of personal experiences to draw upon.

The key for them, though, is not to pick people like me to bring up on stage. I love being in front of an audience or in front of a camera…or both! Sure, I’d kiss a woman on stage. But I don’t know if it would be as interesting or dramatically compelling for the rest of the audience to see someone on stage who is essentially in their comfort zone. Now, of course, there still would be a level of discomfort because I (or any person with a performance background in this situation) would be unfamiliar with the situation, text, etc, but it wouldn’t be as pronounced as it is when the audience member is really taking a leap.

The man in the DVD of Kitchen who was chosen for the “screen test” portion was significantly less interesting to me than the woman in the “Sleep” scene. He seemed to me to have a level of confidence that bordered on irritating. At the same time, the participant Ilana described who was so shy she had to hide under the covers doesn’t sound like a particularly pleasant viewing experience either. But maybe we need more discomfort in the theatre. It’s too bad that it had to come at the expense of that woman, but she absolutely put herself in the situation and could have taken herself out at any point.

This new movement to break down the fourth wall, in fact to break down all the walls, is so exciting and beautiful and wonderful to me. “Demystifying” the theatre was one of the words that came up today in class, and I think it’s a really great one for what happens in this kind of piece. For much of my life I loved theatre as a sacred, vaguely magical event that I engaged with in a very serious way, whether I was acting or viewing. If you’d asked me a few years ago, I probably would have thought that demystification was a bad thing, because it risks taking the magic out. But now I feel like bringing in people who don’t necessarily love theatre with the fervent passion that those of us who make it do is one of the best things that could happen. The energy of freshness, spontaneity, and surprise that comes from a non-performer is something that no actor, no matter how talented, could really replication.

So I suppose if I have deemed myself unfit to participate in these interactive theatre pieces, my best option is to go out and create some myself.

Clearly, the difference came down to the fact that the creators of Love Never Dies were trying to make the audience forget that they were seeing a stage show, while those involved with Phantom made no attempt to hide the theatricality of the event, even if they weren’t particularly emphasizing it. I think both these approaches have merit, and I don’t have a strong preference toward either. I wouldn’t be surprised if, as this becomes a more popular practice, which I think it will and should be, more shows are filmed in a way that does not emphasize the fact that it’s a live performance in a theatre. This will probably draw a larger audience, as some people who are not theatre fans may be turned off if a movie feels too much like a show.

Overall, I would say I am personally a big fan of this trend toward filming shows. It’s great to be able to intimately see the actors’ responses and gestures. Though it will never, ever replace the experience of sitting in a theatre, I think this is a great way for people to have access to art to which they would otherwise not be exposed.

I’m excited to see this play get produced not only for personal reasons, but because I think it is a unique play that will bring something new to the national theatre scene. Dan calls it a “tweenage epic,” and it really is epic in scale. There’s an on-stage boat race/battle, for one thing. It reminds me of the sea battles we talked about in DR101, though this one won’t (presumably) involve flooding the stage. The point is, it’s theatre on a grand scale. Not technically grand–it’s not a play that asks for elaborate sets or effects–but with a grand scope. It’s fast paced, with many different characters, settings and situations. Though I’m all for Ibsenite dramas, I do feel that sometimes things need to be shaken up a bit, and a play that feels like an adventure film is not a bad way to do it.

One of my other favorite things about this work is that it’s about children, but not for children. It’s an adult work that is focused on preteen characters and their delusional but also truthful worldview. In today’s often distressing, often depressing world, I think this play will be very well received. It’s escapism but it’s not mindless. It’s entertaining, but with a point.

I’m not doing the play any justice in my attempt to explain it. But just trust me: Troublemaker is a fresh, exciting work and I’m so pleased it’s getting produced. I just hope I find some way out to Berkley to see it…