The Greatest Play in the History of the World... (Ian Kershaw)
Although it may have looked like I was gone my reading merely took other forms, primarily history of American socialism and a project which I’ll theoretically talk about in the next week or two.
However! March will mostly be a return to play or theatrical reading (with maybe some novels thrown in) so you can expect this daily deluge once more. The focus this month is on things I need to read: books I’ve borrowed, things I’ve stashed away for a rainy day, etc.
Our first foray this month, The Greatest Play in the History of the World… is chosen because I am hopefully doing a lighting design of it later this year.
As an Audience Member
The play is a monologue, with an unknown performer (named ‘Actor’) telling a story about love, loss, risk, and getting unstuck. She tells us about a few residents who live on Preston road, none of whom speak, but all of whom are onstage in the form of shoes the actor hopefully purloins from the audience.
It’s a sweet story, it’s a love story, and it’s a story who hides itself rather well by ping-ponging between the perspectives of its characters and telling the story of the very real golden record which we littered space with.
The method of story-telling keeps me at arms-length. By that I mean the actor is a story-teller, and the story-teller isn’t involved in the story. The person we’re watching isn’t obviously changed by this story, and there’s nothing textual about why the story is meaningful to her, and so, on the page, I feel insulated from its meaning and it's characters because they’re not being relayed to me in the usual way: words, movement, bodily representation, etc.
There’s an opportunity in that between the director and the actor to find some subtextual meaning, and there’s plenty of forced room in the script where the actor improvises with the audience, but and that is its own kind of magic, but one that is unknowable at this stage.
One of my favorite recent musicals Ernest Shackleton Loves Me is a pretty wrapper around an anodyne message: don’t give up. If Kershaw’s The Greatest Play in the History of the World is similar in it’s conventional message about the wonder, the magic, the surprise of tomorrow and what is it that you want preserved forever, then it will be a worthwhile night of theater.
As a Designer
I better have thoughts about this, huh?
Obviously I’m going to focus on lighting, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say anything about the other departments.
This play is a madhouse: shoes represent people, the geography of the play is important but there is no suggestion as to how it wants to be seen, and the audience needs to be accessible at all times. This offers a lot of opportunity to a gleeful scenic and props designer to be as large or as small as they want. The play feels like a whimsical trifle and so I’d want the design to have lots of little surprises: objects used in unconventional or transformed ways.
Recorded sound is very important as well, and I think there’s a lot to be done to make the sonic landscape more three dimensional than you often see in productions.
Lighting though, let’s talk about lighting. Same principle idea: play into the whimsy by having surprising light, ideally wondrous light. Something that makes you sit back and smile like you did as a child at the planetarium for the first time. Light coming from unusual places and light doing unusual things.
For such a lovely show it is surprisingly dark: it takes place in the middle of the night, our chief character is a gloomy dude, and for most of the runtime the ultimate goal is unclear. I’d want to work from the image of dawn bleeding night out into day. Smart small and dark, show the possibility of darkness, then end it with some hopeful warmth as we end. Lamps are probably involved.
As a Writer
I still have difficulty with one person shows, especially ones that (on the page) are not revelatory for the speaker. Shows that happen to someone else don’t make as much of an impact for me.
But I do feel that this play achieves what I find very hard for myself to do: it makes space for the team to create their own version of this story while not feeling incomplete. I often say that what I love about theater is its collaborative nature, and that’s true, but as a writer there’s a burning desire to make sure that everyone gets it right, which leads to the scores of playwright’s notes that I find condescending and unhelpful.
This play trusts itself, it doesn’t ask you to do things its way (apart from the shoes) and feels complete, but like you can still add to it. As I said earlier in this post, there’s room for the team to make some magic happen, and that’s what I’d want to take away from this: the reminder that room for magic is an important aspect for any play.
I don’t know how to do that. And I don’t think it can be rote. There probably isn’t a formula that can be replicated, and that’s why magical experiences are rare and sought after. But I think about it, if I keep an eye out for it more often, I maybe be able to coax that room out.
Fundraising: Tilden v Barker
In this 23rd year of our new Willenium we look at two nineteenth-century titans of the only industries that matter in America: banking and cannabis medicine, and how they'd do at fundraising for their various causes.
Can Samuel Tilden finally notch a win in our topsy-turvey system or will our current model of small-dollar donations leave him as cold as he was all his life?
Also, we had feudalism in America! Who knew?
Send retractions to contact@pronoiatheater.com
Support the show at paypal.me/pronoiatheater or venmo: @pronoia
De Leonism: Socialist v "Socialist"
Another deep dive into a dying political party!
The Socialist Labor Party is America's first socialist party, and it enjoyed (qualified) success in its early years. A series of schisms over proper application of theory drove the membership down and today it is a dessicated corpse of what it once was. How did Socialism express itself in the late 1800s, what did it want, what did it get, and how are they connected to a late 19th century novel about the abolition of prostitution? Find out!
Halftime Show: Socialists v Military
Boy howdy is Aaron off his game for this episode, luckily we've got Andrew Stout to carry on the conversation.
Dennis, Aaron, and Andrew talk about the Superbowl Halftime show and what it might look like if socialists of America's yesterday ran it instead. We've got everything from a dancing Jimmy Hoffa to a man drowning in a river (there's no not sad way to introduce that fact.)
Send retractions to contact@pronoiatheater.com
You can support the show at paypal.me/pronoiatheater or venmo: @pronoia
Systems of Rehearsal Pt. II (Shomit Miller)
Unfortunately for me the final chapters logarithmically increased the amount of barely intelligible artistic babel and doubled down on the assertion that Peter Brook is a bad (or at least, uninteresting) artist because he synthesizes styles instead of having his own precious, unique holistic style of acting.
To add onto what I said yesterday, it’s frustrating that we’ve corrupted an art form which should be about the beauty that comes from collaboration and turned it into a referendum of one part of the organism. I don’t want to think about the director when I go see much of anything, and I don’t want to think about the writer, and I don’t want to think about the actors, I wanted to think of the story and how it affects me, my life, and my thinking, and this omnipresent focus on the factory that creates the art, I think, hinders our own ability to judge things and to place them in the context of our lives.
That expectation isn’t very practical though, I suppose.
What have I learned? I’ve learned the way that three prominent people approached the art of theatre and how they tried to communicate that to people (and ultimately how they each turned away from their original ideas in favor of something less tangible.) I didn’t learn much that I could put into everyday practice, except that maybe inducting my actors in my way of thinking might be a good way to make them think higher of me.
Bah.