Season Seven: A Learning Curve

We survived King Lear: both The Upstart Crow and me. And we went on to finish our sixth season with three one-acts by John Millington Synge: The Tinker’s Wedding, In the Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea. It was not the best choice we could have made. They’re all wonderful plays and I think we gave each a really strong production, but they didn’t go well together. Tinker’s Wedding is a farce, a wildly funny play.

Shadow is—well—a melodrama, and the earlier farce tended to set the audience up to laugh at the characters in the second play.

Riders to the Sea is a tragedy, a profound and beautiful little play but the two plays that preceded it, so different in tone, did not help its reception by the audience. We had thought that since the same playwright had written all three, that would unite them. But Synge’s range is great; we had three directors and three different casts. It was just not a unified coherent evening.

We didn’t learn; we did it again. The second show of our seventh season was The Oresteia by Æschylus. The Oresteia is not a play; it is three plays, the only extant Greek trilogy we have. Agamemnon is about the Greek commander’s return to Argos after his victory in the Trojan War and his murder by his queen, Clytemnestra. The Libation Bearers is about the murder of Clytemnestra and her lover Ægisthus by her son Orestes. The Eumenides is about the punishment leveled on him by the Furies and their transformation into Eumenides: “All-seeing, Kindly Ones.” We did have a single director and a single cast, but we divided the trilogy, and three of us took one play each and edited it down to less than hour each so we could get all three done in an evening. So there were three voices. And we cut the choral odes drastically. That was a mistake. Two of the plays are named for their choruses. We should have known better. Each of the three plays was done well, I think, but they did not combine into a good, coherent, single production. You will recall, if you have read the first couple of blogs in this series, that The Upstart Crow started with a cutting of four Shakespearean histories into one play about Queen Margaret of Anjou; Vain Flourish of My Fortune. And that didn’t work either.

(Twenty nine years later we got it right: The show we did last spring, The Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre is his version of the same story, of Libation Bearers and Eumenides, in a modern existentialist version. And we didn’t cut anything.)

In between the Synge one-acts and The Oresteia we did Shaw’s The Man of Destiny. It was, as I remember it, an excellent production, and it certainly was a unified, coherent event; it’s a short play, only about an hour long, and that’s the problem. It didn’t really amount to a full evening’s entertainment. Our audience base is a lot larger than just the city and county of Boulder, and there were certainly people who spent more time getting to the theatre and then getting home than they spent at the play.

Here’s what we were missing: We thought we were selling you a ticket to see three plays by Synge or by Æschylus, or one play by Shaw. Actually, we were selling you a ticket to attend a single artistic event whose center was the three plays or one play. But, of course, you cannot have three centers.

  Every good play has a shape, a rhythm. The Greeks named the parts: prologue, strophe, antistrophe, episode; and again strophe, antistrophe, episode, till the conclusion. Almost every good play can be analyzed as exposition, complication, climax, denouement. You can think of these as analogous to movements in a symphony. Small, intimate scenes will alternate with crowd scenes and soliloquies. Shouting and whispering take their turns. Shakespeare was the best of all at this. Look at how often, just as the tensions in a tragedy were reaching a climax, he would introduce a comic—even a farce—scene; not because the plot demanded it, but for the sake of the shape, the rhythm.

The three Synge one-acts are very good plays and I think we did them well. And each has the kind of rhythmic structure a good play needs. But they did not resonate with each other. We kept saying, “Forget what you just saw. It was good but it’s over. Start again.” We invited you to a banquet. We gave you a pot-luck.