catapult magazine

I’ll be there in a week and a half. What should I see? And where’s your bookstore? I’ll visit!

J

Actually, though we may have a hard time understanding the launguige today, it was closer to the vernacular back then.

Also, if my memory serves me, though he did do plays for the “lower class” i think he primarily catered to the kings and queens of england who loved his plays and he was almost the “royal playwrite”.

Jason,
If you ever get a chance to come to Edmonton, this city has a kick ass theatre scene for some reason. There are a dozen little theatres just in the few blocks around the bookstore where I while away my days. I asked a girl who was buying a play if she was an actor. She said, “Yes. Isn’t everybody around here?” One of North America’s top theatre festivals happens here every August too. OK, enough about this drab, freezing town where it’s -25 in April.

I should say that my wife and I like contemporary theater as well and go to plays at Steppenwolf, the Goodman, the Schubert, lifeline theater, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Bling, and other places. Some of theat work is very thought provoking, but I guess I am also struck by how one of the lasting lagacies of Postmodernism is that most contemporary playwrites either seem to have nothing to say, or not to trust what they do have to say (which amounts to the same thing). “Proof,” for example seems to be a clever and witty play which seems to affirm little. The characters don’t change in any interesting way, and i am left with an empty feeling at the end. In contrast, “Copenhagen” a play about Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, does a nice job of raising some wonderful questions — like is it more moral to work for the allies and perfect the atom bomb, or work for the Germans and delay their developing the atom bomb. Better still “Jesus took the A-train” which considered one man in Riker’s island prison for trying to shoot a cult leader who had stolen his friend from him (he is angry at God) and another prisoner who is a mass murderer and seems to have found God but accepted a kind of cheap grace that doesn’t require him to own up to what he has done. Good stuff. Some language that offends, though.

Please do not edit your last post, BC. “Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Bling” is far too funny to correct. I don’t know if it was a typo or intentional, but man, did I laugh…

Bling, bling!

BBC, you actually played a large role in my artistic development and theatre career by recommending that our repertory theatre group go see the neo-futurists about four years ago. That was a landmark theatre experience for me. So, thanks!

It is interesting how artistic tastes do differ… I saw Copenhagen a year ago and was a little bored by it. I thought it was far too concerned with the BIG QUESTION it was asking, and talk, talk, talk…so many words! I don’t really feel that it is necessarily the playwright or director’s duty to affirm anything, teach the audience anything, enlighten anyone, or to affect political or social change.

My most profound artistic experiences have been plays, films, paintings, etc., in which the artist has allowed me to enjoy myself. I find that I want to be delighted by a work of art, much more than I want it to just provoke thought or ask questions. My favorite pieces affect me in a way I can’t describe, emotionally, spiritually, maybe physically, as well as just intellectually. I love to exit a theatre confused, unsure of what I just experienced — unsure of how to think and talk about it. I like an artist to let me experience something without all the clutter of his or her ideas getting in the way. I don’t want an artist telling me things they think I don’t already know. I’ll get bored. I want a new experience. To me, art is something like hyper-experience. It’s no different than the rest of life…I’m still seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling things, but with art it’s concentrated. Colors, sounds, smells, and ideas are free to bounce off each other, creating new things, new ideas, new truths. I don’t need it to help me understand life. That’s my job. I want it to be life, to let me discover life.

This is hard to write about.

Yah. I like. What about Chekov and Ibsen? Would you call these hyper-experience?

Yeah, I think so. The only Chekov show I’ve seen is “The Three Sisters” and it was killer. It seems like the art of Chekov is that everything looks and sounds like slice of life, everyday things, but really it’s so, so intricately wrought. Distilled. Definitely hyper-experience. I saw a video of “Uncle Vanya” and every other girl at theatre festivals and auditions I’ve been to has done monologues from it. That’s a great one. I’ve read other stuff, but reading it isn’t the same, of course. I don’t think I’ve got what it takes to understand Chekov they way he wanted to be understood since I’m not Russian, but that’s okay…I understand it the way I understand it.

I’m pretty unfamiliar with Ibsen, actually. Saw “Doll’s House” (boring production) and “Peer Gynt” (very untraditional, stimulating, fun, """postmodern""" production) long ago. But that’s about it. I’ll have to read more.

There is certainly a place for Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw, Chekov, Strindberg. They’re wonderful. When they wrote, they were responding to their times and were on the cutting edge of theatre. I’m more interested in what’s going on now. Who’s on the cutting edge now, who the public is responding to, that the world is like. We need theatre for the future.

Maybe we’re addicted to ‘perfected’ aesthetic experiences. The processes for making films and music include editing, mixing, and other post-production. These methods take the most interesting moments (takes) of performance and condense them into a story. We seem to prefer this venue of communication. Its kind of like when I’d rather see the sports highlights than sit through a whole hockey game.

I needed about five months to think about that last post. So now I’m back.

That’s a good point, Space. Maybe perfected aesthetic experiences aren’t always the best. It may be easier and more attractive to watch the highlights, but isn’t the whole hockey game more fulfilling? I don’t have a very high tolerance for boredom, but occasionally I’ll sit through a whole movie because I feel like I have to see it. Most of the time it ends up being a very worthwhile experience. Not during, but afterward. Ever have that? Could it be the case that boring doesn’t equal bad?