Audience Response

After seeing two pretty high profile shows these past two weeks (Hamlet at Arts Emerson, and the Lily's Revenge at ART) and also being on the receiving end of various audience reactions as part of Uncle Vanya... it seems like there should be a blog post in here somewhere, no?

I don't like to write reviews (except if it's of a show I'm in, in which case it will be unabashedly and acknowledgedly positive... I think I may keep doing that) because well, I'm not a critic! But I am a theatre person, so of course when I see things I inevitably respond to them as such. On the one hand, I am inherently aware of the artifice involved and try as hard as I can to go a long with it's intended effect while appreciating it as such.

One thing to be said about Hamlet and the Lily's Revenge, both of them had a lot of that going on. And both of them I enjoyed throughly, while parts of them I was less crazy about.

My Uncle Vanya cast mate Kate said something really profound after seeing the Old Globe's production of Hamlet... something to the effect of "it reminded me that even though it's a very famous/important company from a very famous/important city, things can still not work in a production and those things don't necessarily circumvent or prevent that or make that any less likely to happen" only she said it much more eloquently and profoundly and specifically in the context of our ensemble, a fundamentally fringe company making theatre in a place that is decidedly not a theatre destination or important place. But still, tonight we had audience members saying to us "that was the most incredible theatre experience I've ever been to or been a part of" so there you go!

How did I respond to those big productions from big fancy companies? Let's start with Hamlet. Other people's reviews I've read have said their Ophelia was problematic. Now, I don't know and I don't expect I'm likely ever to meet the actress who played Ophelia so I feel OK nodding generally in agreement with that assessment... but I mean, I don't know. What's Ophelia supposed to be like that she wasn't? OK well I guess a more compelling performer in the role... she could have been more intense. Other things she could have been too I'm sure that I can't think of. The point is, I don't claim to know Hamlet all that well. I guess I know it better than a lot of Shakespeare's plays, because I was sort of in a production of it in college (the anti-Hamlet I've blogged about previously) and for me the best way to become actually familiar with any theatrical work is to do it. Or probably to see it a bunch of times, and I think I'd only seen Hamlet performed once before, and watched the Ethan Hawke version... that's about my experience with the piece.

So who am I to try and deconstruct what did or didn't work about it? Other people have opinions based on past experience with the work. I only have my experience seeing it this one particular time. Ophelia feels easy to point out, because I read that in a review before seeing the show so I'm sure it colored my response to an extent. An had I known the actress playing her, or had a personal connection of some kind to her (as is often the case when I see plays) I'm sure I would have felt differently!

Anyway, how did I actually feel about the show separate from the meta context of the event itself which was as I was watching it bringing attention to the meta contextualization taking place *pause for breath*? Like I said, I liked it! It was funny. My Dad is fond of arguing that Hamlet shouldn't qualify as a tragedy because it's so full of funny lines. And I like the idea of staging Shakespeare in such a way that is entertaining while not undercutting or underselling the text or the story itself, because Shakespeare was fundamentally writing to entertain people, and so the profundity of violence and coarse Elizabethan phrases, along with the ruminations on human nature and inventing the human or whatever (also not whatever, he was a pretty great writer).

I had two favorite parts about the production, one was the sound design, specifically the use of foleys (which is a way of saying old timey sound effects) and the music. All of the players played their own instruments and sang, just like an old timey troupe of players would have done back up until the death of vaudeville more or less. The other was the conceit of a young Hamlet, Ophelia and Laertes. Hamlet was really good. All of the ensemble was awesome in their different parts, but Hamlet was really good. And I don't know, I know some versions of the text suggest he's in his 30s, but that never made sense to me. Insert argument for Hamlet being a teenager or whatever here. I don't care about the dramaturgy. I guess just as a still young person, with comparatively little distance between now and being 17 (although of course that gap is growing, it was an especially visceral experience) it elevated the stakes for me, somehow. And it gave the sense for me that the characters were more existentially trapped than if they'd been older people more able to reason. It made Hamlet's mistakes more justifiable as an inability to handle the sensory overload of his father's death/murder and his mother's incest. He's like, 17, of course he's going crazy at all this shit! Oh, and of course Ophelia doesn't know how to handle it either. Oh fuck and now her boyfriend killed her father, oh and she drowned herself (question mark?) oh no poor thing...

But then at the end, the players play their instruments, and Hamlet gets up and so does Ophelia and they dance together. And sincerely, that was my favorite moment of the play. I felt my eyes water just a little bit. It was so sweet and moving, their dancing in the afterlife or whatever it was or wasn't, and the audience clapping/applauding to the beat of the music.

I also liked Lily's Revenge. I'm even less able to be objective of the production, because I actually know people who worked on it. But I'm happy to say I throughly enjoyed it. I loved the costume and production design, which is clearly where most of those Harvard/ART "dollar-dollar bills y'all" went, and especially the movement (which was done by my dance teacher Yo-el, hi Yo-el!) and I thought it was really fun and engaging.

Was it innovative? That's a deeper and trickier question. I was talking to a friend of mine after the show who has much more history than I do with queer theatre, and was around when the various performance art aspects it was integrating were being conceived, and in that department he wasn't particularly impressed and for the sake of not misquoting him I won't go any further. I did recognize the constituent cultural studies materials around gender and cultural and societal norms being referenced and accessed throughout the piece... more or less, I think. And I guess it didn't read to me as a member of generation Y as an attempt to "shock" ala Rocky Horror, the popular reference template for this genre of work, although it did clearly gesture flamboyantly towards Brecht and all the verse and meta theatricality reminded me of Marat/Sade and Peter Weiss. So in that sense, it was of a piece for me of our current cultural landscape of repurposing and remixing. German post modernist theatre technique meets Japanese Noh theatre meets a drag show. The significance of which I'm still processing.

Anyhow, one way or the other it was definitely a spectacle, and an event I'm glad I experienced. As for the length, that didn't really bother me too much. The pacing and placement of intermissions was such that I didn't feel a compelling need to check my phone's clock and I'd been encouraged against doing so by being given a wax paper baggie thing to place my deactivated phone in to. Given the interactive nature of the production, I was concerned what significance that would harbor later on, but it was essentially a gimmick meant to remind you to engage with the "here and now" of the performance, one of the play's themes.

And of this moment, those are my responses as an audience member and "theatre person" to the plays I've been able to see when I haven't been in the theatre myself, doing my own show! I think I like this format, maybe I'll try revisiting it... maybe.