Kodachrome (Adam Szymkowicz): Less Than the Sum of Our Town and Almost, Maine

As a producer the hardest thing to do (besides everything) is to parse the difference between good and compelling. It’s not hard, in fact it’s fairly easy, to make something good, something with no obvious faults, and even a few things in the plus column. It’s much harder to make something that will get people into their cars to drive across town, to part with some money, and, ideally, to live in their heads long after they leave.

Kodachrome, I think, falls on the wrong side of that line. A crueler version of me might say employ the word “twee”, this devilish individual might even break out “pretentious” and would almost certainly say something like “it thinks it’s the new Our Town, when it’s anything but,” however I think that misses the mark. There’s nothing wrong about Kodachrome, but there just isn’t enough right with it to make me care.

Kodachrome can easily be reduced to “Our Town with an ADD problem” or “Almost, Maine with a narrator.” Like Our Town it deals with life in a small town while finding beauty and merit in an average life; like Almost, Maine it’s a show of many disparate characters dealing with the fractured states of love. Unlike other of those two it doesn’t have much new to say and doesn’t have an interesting way to say it.

That’s maybe a little harsh, so in its defense I will say that the show is very cute, it’s heartfelt, and those that stick around for the ending will find a little bit of interest there. I think the show would be excellent for a student group, or a community theater (in all sincerity I wish local theater Company Onstage would do it, it would suit them well,) but it is not the stuff that gets me out to downtown Houston.

Our play proper follows a Photographer (oh yes, all characters are identified by their jobs, even when they have given names.) She shows us around her small Connecticut town, the people who live there, and the heartbreak many of them are facing. She moves us from scene to scene quite quickly (this play firmly finds itself in the modern cinematic style of writing,) and although characters usually have their designated pairs, they mix in with everyone else too.

By the end almost everyone is left a little unsatisfied, but ultimately ok (the characters, not the audience,) as they either gain or lose love. There isn’t much else to say, sadly.

Good (CP Taylor): Breaking Bad but with Nazis (Original Flavor, not neo)

There’s a great deal of hand wringing lately over the massive swing towards sequels and IP in film, with many elder statesmen of cinema indicating that it is part of an extended adolescence for culture. Adults aren’t trying to be adults anymore; they want media for children.

And while I think this is more true than not it is also an inside-out problem: the film industry is like this because the masses want it to be, politics are divisive because we want it to be, any number of business are closing down because we want them to be: we are responding with our attention, our money, our votes to things, and people are adjusting accordingly.

And one of the more interesting aspects of this is the pull between entertainment and artistry. It’s not to say these are opposites, but often what is commercially successful is escapism and it is hard to get people to buy into something which will make them feel “bad”.

Recently I saw a local production of What the Constitution Means to Me, and the people I went with reacted negatively to some of the content of that show because they wanted entertainment, they didn’t want to be confronted with certain aspects of reality.

CP Taylor’s Good seems difficult to produce within this context. It’s a story about a horrifying time and place (WWII Germany) and how a person can be led down the path to supporting the aims of the Nazis. They signal early on in Act I what the ending will be and there are few surprises down that long walk towards an ostensibly compassionate humanitarian deciding that of course, some members of the camp need to die for health reasons, naturally, and honestly if they were smart at all they would have left Germany long ago, so it’s really their fault.

It’s a brilliant script and a tough read. We sit in that tension for a long time, seeing Halder make worse and worse moral choices because they lead to better and better outcomes for him personally. Although the play never strays far from the Nazis, the play itself is grounded solidly in Halder’s home life, giving us a picture into the stresses he encounters daily.

All of that is on the textual level and ignores all the layers of theatricality that Taylor puts into the script: a small band that follows Halder around playing music to distract him and heighten what is happening onstage, the stream of consciousness construction which gives the reader no time to get comfortable in a time, place, scene, or conversation, making us as addled as Halder himself. It’s a play that earns the singing Hitler that shows up, which is something I can say about only one other work of American theater.

And all of this is on top of the very clear parallels a skilled team could draw to our modern life: whether that’s with school choice, trans-issues, or anything else. We all feel that our daily problems trump the small insecurities of any one particular group, and we do so until it’s either too late or we convince ourselves that really they should have helped themselves out a long time ago.

But who would come to see it if that’s what was put on? Who wants to pay for the privilege of being told that you’re not doing enough?

Children (AR Gurney)

AR Gurney seems to have been the master of plays that I love before I knew I loved them (or him.) He always writes small-scale conflicts, very personal and intimate. If his characters were to be erased from existence, little about their world would change, but, like Our Town, there is beauty in their ordinary lives.

Well, not entirely ordinary, in Gurney’s case, as his plays tend to be about people wealthy enough to be leisurely, though not important enough to be notable. In Children, which is the earliest play I’ve read by him so far, he explores a family over a July 4th weekend. Mother, as she is known, is hosting her two eldest children, when they find out the youngest brother, whom they haven’t seen since their father’s death five years previous, is suddenly coming up as well.

Although credited as an actor in the production, the younger brother never makes a full appearance on stage, holding some brilliant tension as we expect him to barge on at any moment and show us this titan who has been stymying everyone since the day he was born.

Pokey (the youngest)’s sudden arrival is brought on by the fact that their mother will soon remarry a family friend, and according to the dictates of the will, this house will pass on to the three children. Barbara and Randy have designs of their own which they quickly begin scheming on, even as their mother frets about making a perfect weekend now that she gets to see Pokey again.

In all of his play AR Gurney seems to ask “what is the value of the orderly Status Quo”? and in Children he turns his eye towards the family. Why should Mother work to appease Pokey, who seems to care little for the comfort of his family, why should Barbara and Randy hold onto the view of life their father and mother wanted them to have, why should Pokey raise his children in the same stilted manner as Barbara and Randy raise theirs?"

By the end Gurney arrives at what he will later explore in The Middle Ages: comfort is stultifying, but if you reach outside of it you will be exiled for your curiosity. As Mother reveals in her final monologue Pokey is the only one of her children who ever tried to grow up, but in doing so he has stepped outside the bounds of how she knows how to love him, and so the family has to be separated, while the status quo has to be kept for Barbara and Randy, who are happy in their confinement.

The Monogamist (Christopher Kyle)

One of the standard conventions in theater is that a place takes place now, regardless of when it was written, it is meant to be read as “the present.” Of course there are historical plays, and plays that are so specific to their time that they no longer can be based in the present for which they were written, but if a person were to put on, say, Alan Ball’s Five Women Wearing the Same Dress it would likely be set in 2023 (or whenever) rather than 1993, when it was first produced.

So it is always interesting to see a play that self-consciously is set in the recent past to when it was written, because it says a lot about the playwright’s thinking: this story can’t be told now, it has to be told two, three, five years ago. How did we get here? The playwright asks, it starts just over that hill, it seems to say.

The Monogamist by Christopher Kyle was written in 1994, but takes place in 1991. As in, I’ve never heard so many characters say “It’s 1991, Dennis, the rules are different now.” As though 91 was a turning point and no one ever told me about it.

I think whatever that point was in onle in Kyle’s head though, because as funny as this play is, and as sincerely as it seems to take itself, I can really only call it empty in that it wants to say something, and it wants it desperately, but it doesn’t seem to follow through on actually saying it (at least, not as far as I can tell.)

We’re plopped into the life of Dennis, a 40-year old poet of little recognition whose latest work is about how he’s looked up and realized he’s only been with one woman his entire adult life, not that he minds it, he just finds it interesting, and unlike the values he would have professed in his youth.

Soon after, he catches his wife in bed with one of her student’s, which sends Dennis reeling, both his relationship and his art leaving him all at once. He soon finds himself sleeping with a young student, perhaps in retaliation, and we round out the ensemble with a late 20’s cable access host who has always been interested in Dennis, professionally (and sexually.)

According to Kyle the play is about Dennis trying to find a way for his art and his personal relationships to co-exist meaningfully with one another. With that in mind the show can be read that way, but it wasn’t my experience as I went through it blind. The play seems to want to ask questions about how the youth movement of the 60’s ended up producing the 90’s, but without a lot of actual insights to give.

The play itself is perfectly funny, although our characters are a bit archetypal, I could see passing an enjoyable evening with this show, though I can’t see what would move an artistic director to select it.

Even now I find myself wanting to write more about it, but without a lot of amterial to draw from.

Ultimate Beauty Bible (Caroline McGraw)

I’ve had trouble putting down thoughts of this play, because they have not formed.

If I shine a light on the structure of the play I’d say it is a straightforward and unsurprising conventional play of the middle of last decade: sensible characters in a situation pursuing their goals and finding victory or defeat as one would expect. There is a small hiccup, though not at all uncommon to the era, of a character who only shows in interstitial monologues and has no bearing on the plot, but let’s set her aside for a moment.

If I look to the content of the play I’d say from one perspective it is still very standard: modern love and career, tinted by the sudden specter of death. There’s betrayal, there’s sexuality, there’s an attempt at being competent in this world. It is perhaps notable that playing in a distinctly, and unapologetically feminine space: our characters work at a fashion magazine and talk about beauty products, clothes, etc. at the frequency and depth you’d expect these professionals to. It’s not girly, at least I don’t read it as such, it’s just the reality of the world, and it’s a world we don’t enter very often.

Without any disrespect to Carolyn McGraw the play’s language isn’t groundbreaking or particularly evocative. Yesterday I talked about Suitcase, which had a distinct musicality, I’ve read plays where the language is heightened to great affect or has its own dialect, or any number of engrossing devices, but this play, as well written as it is, sounds like everything else.

On the surface this would seem to point to a perfectly normal play: a thing which you’d pick if it met the needs of your actors, or if the themes particularly spoke to you (which is not true of me,) and that it is otherwise a satisfactory experience and nothing more. The meatloaf of plays.

And in a way that is what I feel, but something inside me chafes at labeling it as such. Something asks me to consider it deeper or to give it another look. I don’t know what that is, and I don’t think I’ll have the ability to indulge it, but perhaps I’ll stumble upon a more profound thing to say later.