Girls Like That (Evan Placey)

In this critiques I don’t have a section called “As a Director” because I don’t like to think of myself as a director. I frequently have to be one, but that’s by necessity, it’s not something I really enjoy, and Evan Placey’s Girls Like That is the exact kind of director’s playground that I don’t want to be invited into.

A choral play, Girls Like That has nineteen characters and few attributed lines. The ensemble tells the story and it’s up to each production to decide how to distinguish the characters. The effect is as close to a first-person plural viewpoint as I’ve seen on the stage, which is a rarely seen, but also welcome way to tell a story.

Doing this emphasizes the role of the community, and while most of the individual statements are made from the “I” perspective, the effect of the whole thing is that the ensemble is acting as a unit- as disparate as its motives may be from time to time.

We’re introduced to the St. Helen’s girls, a group of twenty schoolmates who have been together their school career. Most of the play is spent in their senior year (or whatever the British equivalent is) though we do occasionally flashback to their younger years or some (seemingly) unconnected women from the past.

We’re introduced to the girls at five and they immediately arrange themselves into a pecking order (described very literally and gruesomely) with a girl named Scarlett at less than the bottom. During their senior year a nude photo of her is released and the play follows the efforts of the girls to understand and to often condemn Scarlett for her actions.

Over the show the girls realize, and often dismiss, their own callousness and the shallowness of their relationships, while coming to grips with how they view themselves and how they’re viewed by the world.

A beautiful repetition occurs throughout the play where the girls find themselves at a party, or in a circle, and they describe how they lay across one another, whose body is on whom’s. Early on this is a way to show how they’re connected and together, but by the end it becomes a symbol about how they hold each other down and keep themselves from doing what they know is right.

As a Producer
While the play is something similar tonally to things we would do, it’s focus on a younger ensemble as well as the dated nature of its common referential material make it less likely to be a candidate for us to produce it.

As a Designer
The play is a blank slate. With the exception of implying the costumes of the characters their is practically nothing said about what is happening or what we’re looking at. However, the number of bodies onstage probably limit the practical range of choices available.

As a Writer
I called out the choral structure of the show at the top because it’s an inspiring project and something that I would like to try someday. I don’t know how that fits into my current projects, but it has lit excitement in me the way little else has lately.

Graceland (Ellen Byron)

I love old plays, both the artistic product of a script, but also the physical object. When you grasp it you hold an old tool that someone used to craft something, only dissimilar from a saw making a table in its permanence.

Graceland is an old play in an old, used volume, my copy has lots of notes, circles words, question marks, blocking diagrams, and it’s made more powerful because I saw the production the script, and the craftsperson who used it, that was made out of it. And it helped me remember it, and it transported me back over a decade ago to a memory I haven’t revisited in full for a long time.

Graceland is a one-act play about cruelty, devotion, and kindness. About looking for meaning in hollow activities and holding onto hope. About letting your own dreams go for a stranger in need.

It does a lot in twenty minutes.

Two women show up outside Graceland three days before it’s to be opened to the public for the first time. Both of them are jockeying to be the first in line. For one, it’s a point of pride, for the other, it’s her only chance to make sense of a world that’s done her wrong.

Even if we can see the ending coming, even if we know that the one woman must soften and yield for the person who needs it more, the journey there is lovely and painful.

As they argue back and forth they begin to show a little bit of themselves. The older woman (40’s) is in a stable marriage full of commitment, but low on love, and she spends her time being fanatical about Elvis Presley. The younger woman (22) loves Elvis because her dead brother loved him, and since he died in the war things have gotten worse for her, as a cruel wannabe big man in a small town marries her and dominates her.

The play takes a slow route to get us to the end, and the two become friends and even, as one ending suggests, protectors of each other.

As a Producer
This play fits much nicer within our purview than Eric Bentley’s of the past few days, notably because it shares a few qualities with my own writing: comedic, difficult to love characters, and personal optimism in a difficult world. This is easily the sort of show we could do, if we decided we wanted to put on a night of one-acts written by someone else.

As much as I appreciate the script though, and I do, I don’t love it. It feels like an old friend who I miss occasionally, but don’t need to stay close to.

As a Designer
More than anything this is a props and costumes play. There’s a lot of opportunity, and responsibility, to paint these characters as specific as they are on the page.

As a Writer
The script shows a deftness of character and a carefulness of dialogue that I hope to be able to match one day. Byron’s pace is excellent, never hurried, and showing just enough newness to move you from one moment to the next without revealing its hand too soon. I don’t know how to get there, but I want to.

From the Memoirs of Pontius Pilate (Eric Bentley)

I swear I didn’t plan it, but I did happen to find myself reading a play about Jesus’ death on Good Friday. What luck.

My own rule is that I reserve judgment for playwrights until after I’ve experienced three of their plays, and while these three plays of Eric Bentley’s are bound no doubt because they share thematic similarities I think I have a good sense of what he is all about: not accepting the official account of things, questioning authority, and making the dangerous (but right), choice.

In this way he is an interesting playwright, but stylistically he’s not exciting to me, almost certainly owing to a lack of comedy and an infusion of self-seriousness on his part. Not that it isn’t well earned. I suppose I will have to content myself that Bentley is merely an excellent story-teller who derives interesting, deep characters with strong senses of morality and difficult choices to make, and must accept that he can’t always be riotous on top of all that.

None of that address this play, which I enjoyed the most of the three plays of his I read. From the Memoirs of Pontius Pilate can most succinctly be described as a dark, gritty reboot of Jesus. A Batman Begins for the Lord of Lords, if you will.

We begin with an old Pilate starting a chapter on the events surrounding Jesus’ (Yeshua) death and the cult that appeared after it. In a brilliant move the play is said to be recreations of spies who took notes during what were thought to be private conversations. In this way Pilate subtly enforces the supremacy of the Roman state and lays plain the obvious failure of any attempt by the Jewish people at revolution.

Yeshua is plagued by a question: is the Messiah and wouldn’t he know it. He swings between thinking he is and he isn’t throughout the work and points out, as is historically accurate, the great number of people claiming to be the Messiah concurrently and in the past. He’s depicted as a “hick preacher from a hick town” though one that has amassed a following.

A following outclassed by Barabbas a zealot and guerilla fighter who Yeshua tries to call Messiah before having it turned back on him. Through Judas, here depicted as a friend to both though who favors Barabbas, they convince Yeshua to join his following with the fighters and so force the Jewish puppet government to back revolution, in the hopes that Rome will fear the larger numbers and surrender. This is destroyed immediately.

By scene three Yeshua is in jail and has a choice to make: does he maintain that he is the Messiah, and die (in failure) or does he slink back to his home, and potentially depress his people? Through many conversations people debate the underpinnings and philosophies of any number of these decisions, before Yeshua ultimately decides to let himself be killed and so preserve the Jewish fighting spirit. After his death, says Pilate, a friend claims that he rose from the dead and so begins Christianity.

I have little to say about this that I didn’t say yesterday about Galileo: it’s wordy, it’s powerful, it’s moving, and it’s not right for our company. This show is a great example at the strength of a simple, clear question: when is it more valuable to die than to live? And in a world of complication, especially fictional plot complication, that’s a good lesson to bear in mind.

The Recantation of Galileo Galilei (Eric Bentley)

Smack dab in the middle of Eric Bentley’s Rallying Cries is The Recantation of Galileo Galilei which explores the life of the scientist, how he came to irritate the church, and why he recanted (or as the play pedantically points out, abjures) the bulk of his late life’s work which he knew to be true.

It’s as tense as a play that’s all talking can get, and reminds me immensely of one of the great historical plays: A Man For All Seasons, which features the same themes of refusal to play politics, petulant authority, social climbers, and sticking (or not) to what one believes is true.

As a Producer
This play is right in the valley of “plays I love” and “Not what Pronoia does.” While it is arguably satirical, it isn’t comedic, and more than that it has as self-seriousness that I think we naturally eschew in our own work. I’d love to see or be in a production of it, but it isn’t right for the company.

As a Writer
Back in January I appreciated how Michael Frayn included a long essay after the script explaining the divergence from historical events his play took. Bentley one-ups him by having sparse footnotes throughout the script at critical junctures to vigorously show where (and why) he changed facts. Usually his reasoning was “we don’t want the audience asking [question irrelevant to plot or themes]” which I can get behind.

Legally Blonde (Peformance)

Although the capsule statement of April’s reading goal is “read a play every day” the actual goal is more similar to “spend 75 minutes every day reading plays,” so if there’s an especially long play it may take multiple days to finish. This is what happened today, and hopefully the play will be finished by tomorrow.

I did have the opportunity, however, to see a show last night which I walked away from with enough thoughts to fill a small blog post.

Watching Legally Blonde at TUTS last night (I believe a touring production) left me wanting and confused, but thinking that it is better to go in hard for a joke than accept a watered-down one. Let’s dive in!

My Background with the Show
About a decade ago I did lights, construction, and props for a school production, and due to a sudden illness I was also the stage manager for the performances (but not the rehearsals.) Because of this I’ve thought a lot about the show and am familiar enough with the script to know where they made changes.

I’ve seen the MTV recording of the Broadway original cast several times, but this is the first time I’ve seen the production live without working on it.

As a Designer
Watching this filled me with a tremendous feeling of theater-as-commodity. Culture has exalted idea of “Theater as ART”. Sometimes this is portrayed positively, sometimes it’s mocked, but the constant feeling is that the people building a theatrical production are doing so for ~artistic rather than for mere entertainment, or worse, commercially.

I dig entertainment, one of Pronoia’s core goals is to entertain people, to buoy them up at the end of a long day/week/life. However, there was a cheapness to this production that looked to me more like cutting corners to keep costs down that hit me on the messier side of my values (both artistic and economical.)

There were enough moments of spectacle to distract from the general lack of production otherwise: the lights were perfunctory, the set largely non-existent, and the projection was a lot of stock videos and effects.

When things worked, they really worked, but from moment-to-moment it felt like the designers said “yes, this will be fine” and moved on to the next task at hand. That’s not something I want my sets to feel like, even when I don’t have the money to do what I want with them.

When my lighting teacher wanted to put a three second light fade into a show he always recorded it as 2.9 seconds. He did this because 3 seconds was the default fade time for a cue, and he wanted a clear indication that he considered this particular lighting change, and decided to make it three seconds instead of letting the console allow him to make easy choices. Watching Legally Blonde made me recommit to making design choices feel “chosen” rather than feel default.

As a Writer
This section is the big reason I wanted to write this post: the writing changes made in Legally Blonde were an interesting, but ultimately uneven mix, of updating the script and watering down (but not removing) material that could be thought to be insensitive.

The musical first premiered around 2007: the year the first smartphone came out. Obviously technology has changed in a major way. In the script for the opening song the girls of Delta Nu are writing Elle a greeting card celebrating her supposed coming engagement. In this production they are texting her well wishes, while the texts appear above our heads in projection. Other instances of technology and culture updates are sprinkled through the show, to varying success (including a memorable change to Whipped Into Shape which moves Brooke’s fitness empire from direct-to-video sales to Tik Tok influencer). It’s a good reminder that theater scripts are living documents that can (and likely should) change over time.

As Big Fish book writer John August said “I’ve realized I’ll be writing Big Fish on and off until I die”.

Where things went wrong, in my opinion, was some joke changes. Among the sins the original musical may have committed: an insensitive party theme, stereotypical roles for non-white people, an intense lesbian caricature, a culturally appropriative college student, a non-PC talking mentor, general degradation of lower-class people, a song stereotyping foreigners and questioning sexuality, and corporate-shilling. There’s likely more stuff that I’m not quite remembering.

Some of these original choices (like the general portrayal of Enid Hoopes) I think have always been less than ideal, and some (a party theme being “Jamaican Me Crazy”) are essentially harmless. The problem is that the bigger issues are intrinsic to the story and can’t be removed.

The writers (or producers or whomever decided on these changes) decided to remove most of the non-offensive or hardly problematic lines, leaving holes where there used to be jokes but aren’t anymore, but didn’t do much of anything to the broader problems, making things even stranger (in my opinion).

There’s a moment early in the show where future-villain Prof. Callahan wants to throw off a female-character, and point out how her emotions are a detriment in the law profession. His original line is “You lesbians think you’re so tough” his line in this version is “You women think you’re so tough.” I’ve never thought this moment worked well, Enid’s reaction is strange, the point is poorly made, etc. But I do think the original line is better than the new one. It’s more specific, it plays more to what Enid thinks of herself, and it’s frankly more shocking, and so is more believable as something that would throw her off. Now the moment just sticks out more than it used to.

The show is full of moments like that. It’s like a bad cutting of Shakespeare, leaving artifacts and places where there used to be something and now it’s just filler.

What this tells me is that in the future if I’m going to make a joke that might offend, I shouldn’t go for the weaker version of it: it’ll still offend, but now it might be strong enough to justify itself.