Dan's Webpage: Because everyone loves a farce: Insufficiently old-school

So I attended the fourth installment of the MAPH Roundtable Reading Series this Friday, after skipping the last one because the play they were reading was written by David Mamet, a.k.a. the director of Spartan. This was only the second time I've gone: I also skipped the first week after deciding that the play (something about a baby that may or may not exist) sounded excessively postmodern.

Yes I know I'm out of touch. So most of the plays I like were written over 300 years ago. Is that a crime?

Not that I'm a very convincing partisan for Restoration Comedy when I can't remember any of the playwrights. That was a bit embarrassing. Next time I'll just be that guy who chatters on about Shakespeare.

As usual, I wasn't planning to go this week, but by the end of social hour I'd convinced myself. This week's play — David Auburn's "Skyscraper" — sounded decent enough, the host was providing drinks and appetizers, and I had nothing better to do. Their dubious taste aside, students who sit around drinking wine and reading a play on a Friday night sound like my kind of people.

The play was pretty good — much better than Bruce Norris' "The Infidel," which we read last time I went — but ultimately I just can't bring myself to care. I enjoy the evening's literary theme, the intellectual bent of the conversation (just like watching a movie at Adam's: there's always a discussion afterwards), and the free snacks don't hurt. There were even Cheez-Its.

I'd just rather spend an evening watching a movie than playing at high culture. You'd have to be a real snob these days not to admit that movies can do everything plays can do, and they often do it better.

In fact, since Hollywood (and to a lesser extent television) have so consistently co-opted willing dramatists (Auburn's Proof is in theaters now) I submit to you that Joseph Epstein's thoughts on poets apply equally well to modern playwrights:

I happen to think that we haven't had a major poet writing in English since perhaps the death of W.H. Auden or, to lower the bar a little, Philip Larkin. But new names are put forth nevertheless — high among them in recent years has been that of Seamus Heaney — because, after all, what kind of a time could we be living in if we didn't have a major poet? And besides there are all those prizes that, year after year, must be given out, even if so many of the recipients don't seem quite worthy of them.

This also applies (especially) to retired playwright Harold Pinter, who I'll dismiss without having seen any of his work. If his talents as a playwright don't transfer over to screenwriting then he's of no use to me.

Of course, I'm not likely to stop going to the roundtable sessions, which after all are my only regular interaction with other students outside of Jimmy's and class &mdash I just wish the subject matter was a bit more to my liking. With the time allotted, modern short one- or two-act plays are the best objects for our attention, but they're also the least enjoyable part of the whole evening.

Ok. I'm a lurker at Graham's site, and have been pretty consistently impressed by the quality of your engagement with him (and others), Dan.

But this was dispiriting.

Pinter made quite a living--and quite a few damn good films--as a screenwriter. And even the best of these (say, "The Comfort of Strangers") pales in comparison to his astonishing and challenging work on stage.

The play about the baby -- was it "The Play About the Baby"? Are you just dismissing Edward Albee out of hand, too?

Here's something: I love film. But "Angels in America," while an outstanding bit of filmmaking, cannot, just can NOT do what Kushner's play did. It's not snobbery; it's attention to how texts work. There is a distinction in genres that plays out substantively, thematically, and (yes) entertainingly -- theater has real bodies in real time, so when there are scenes occurring simultaneously on stage, there is a tension (and collaboration) between actions that film (with its cross-cutting) cannot accomplish. When an angel descends over a body on stage, we see the wires, while film makes it "real." There's something about theatricality that great playwrights explore

(That said, no play can ever get the dizzying scale of "Lawrence of Arabia," the full-blown visual pyrotechnics of "Lola Rennt". It's not either/or--or collapsing into sameness. They're different media; what can each medium do particularly well?)

I obviously care more about this than about rehashing debates about conservative vs. liberal. Sorry to jump right in, unannounced and uninvited, but... I mean it's Albee! He's fantastically funny and invigorating....

You DO read my site! I was just discussing with a fellow Piper about the professors who lurk on my blog and never comment.

Nice to see you finally found something to comment on!

Besides being the obvious "The Play about the Baby," there's also "Buried Child", "Agnes of God" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Relatively common thing, plays about real or imagined babies.

This is the problem theater has: seeing or reading a play has come to be identified as something high-class and snobbish, and most people would just rather see a movie because they're cheaper. Besides, no one goes to see a play just to see a play; there's an inherent intellectualism behind it. "I'm going to see this play, I'm going to LEARN something, I'm going to be intelligent." Films will be on this same level when graduate students start meeting every Friday night to read screenplays and drink wine.

"Angels" is a good example. See the play sometime then watch the TELEVISION EVENT. Decide for yourself, then.

I'm willing to concede that I was deliberately trying to provoke comment by dismissing Albee and Pinter so casually. While I've read my fair share of plays, and seen a half dozen or so on stage, I haven't seen/read anything by either of them. So that was unfair.

But lest I gain a reputation for backing down, I've heard this theatricality argument before and I've never been fond of it.

Cross-cutting is an old technique but not a necessary one: the fact that it's such a popular method of showing simultaneous action even in independent films might be evidence that we're getting something there which film audiences think has more utility than the tension/collaboration they could get from stage-style action shown with a wide shot.

Your second and in my eyes more important point about theatre seems to be a variation on Brecht's Verfremdungseffect or (going further back) the "distance" that many Romantics thought necessary for artistic appreciation. There's no doubt in my mind that theatre these days doesn't try to make events "real" in the same way as most movies (though long before movies they might have strove for verisimilitude).

But it seems to me that many movies do the same thing: don't the storybook narration of Rushmore, the postmodern fluidity of Adaptation, and even the self-conscious product-placement of Josie and the Pussycats function in the same way as the wires on your angel, drawing us out of the illusion and reminding us that this is art?

First, hi Josh--I missed out on catching up with you before Japan--sorry. But I hope it's going gangbusters. Be careful with the blowfish.

Second, Dan--
I'll grant you that films (like "Rushmore" and "Adaptation") can estrange the viewer from simple immediacy; I'll go further and grant you that "Josie et al.," or "Jurassic Park" (a pop version of product-placement sell-your-cake-and-mock-it-too I'm more familiar with) rely on viewers trained in (or suspect of) the tricks of immediacy. Fictions & prose play this game, too, from Tristram Shandy to Colson Whitehead.

Still, even certain shared meta- or artifice/formal games will work differently in Lawrence Sterne's & Vonnegut's novels, Kaufman/Jonze's & Anderson's films, and Brecht's & Kushner's plays. I'm all for playing against genre, of seeing genre as something which audiences and critics deploy (rather than something 'inside' the work, controlling how audiences might read). But I still think there's some utility in trying to name, describe, and evaluate how the different technologies for narration from page to stage to screen do have bearing on how we read.

Josh makes a good suggestion--read and view "Angels." On the other hand, your point--how films might appropriate the tricks of the trade from theater, and vice versa--is worth examining further, too. I don't think you have Lars Von Trier without Brecht, and maybe the former's work supplants--for current impact--the theatrical precedents. (But even as I say this, I think: are theater and film at war? Why either/or? Why not enjoy the enhanced, expanded pleasurable possibilities of two distinct, divergent media?)

And I still would push back on your pushing back about the generic/media distinctions between cross-cutting or simultaneity on stage, and the same on film or on the page. When two disparate sets of actions are occurring on stage, they comment on each other in strange useful ways because they're 'framed' together--they're both physically on stage. Yes, our eyes may move back and forth, trying to decide which action to focus/center on--and in that way films work just the same. But the bodies are there, there is a physical and spatial disjunction-yet-relation which film can't capture. In film, the relatively rare device of the splitscreen, aside from Mike Figgis' attempts to play with this formal device (hmmm... which does seem a challenge to my claim), tends to collapse the 'separate' spheres so that it's just one scene, really. (Most versions I can think of are phone conversations, right? The separate spheres are in explicit dialogue, and so spatial distance is undercut.) Or, when cross-cutting back and forth, film maintain 'separate' spheres--"Angels" illustrates this precisely in a scene where one member of a relationship sneaks out for an illicit rendezvous with an anonymous guy in a park, while the other member of the relationship is on a hospital bed being examined for symptoms of AIDS by his nurse. On stage, the simultaneity of bodies, especially the ordeals each set of bodies is undergoing, is very very different than the film, where we go to the different locations for each shot.

And, before I head back to grade a paper and bathe my kid (or vice versa), some other 'avant-garde' contemporary playwrights worth a look-see: Suzan-Lori Parks, David Henry Hwang, Kushner & Kushner & Kushner again, Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill, Martin McDonagh, and, yeah, Albee & Pinter.

It's going great Mike, thanks. I'm sorry too; wanted to meet up with you, but I only had about 3 weeks to prepare and I ended up running around all over the place.

Here Dashing Dan. Something temporary.

http://aftertimes.blogspot.com/

Names names names! This reminds me of the time I bet a friend of mine that he couldn't name five contemporary poets.

Literati points for referencing Laurence Sterne and Colson Whitehead in the same sentence. I'll admit I'd never heard of Whitehead — a bit of a shock since I try to keep up to date on the up-and-comings.

Noble Joshua's suggestion of "Angels" sounds right up my alley (I'm working my way through back issues of Hellblazer at the moment) and I'll check out the TV event if I can find it. That said, I still disagree with his wry point about reading screenplays on Fridays.

We don't need to read screenplays when we can "just" watch the movie, a key advantage film has over theatre, and while there are a lot more people involved between the movie and the original script, if you've got enough theory/liquor in you and a good highbrow/middlebrow movie to chew on, there's still plenty of room for different interpretations.

Returning to your last comment reynolds, I agree that the presence of real people all on the stage together, etc., does give theater a different feel, but I think film can approximate those experiences for the audience (that it often doesn't is usually incidental) in all but a few cases. There's value in what plays do that films simply cannot, of course, and in their much cheaper production values, but given the chance I'd still wave my magic wand and turn every good play into a good movie, because I think the tradeoff would be worth it.

You say that film and theatre are different media, and ask what each can do well, but for me, theatre is more like the ancestor from which film evolved. Fetishizing the differences between the two mediums is probably the only way to justify theatre's continued survival (no bones about its popularity) — and people can like theater, I've got few problems with people who have different tastes, but this seems to go beyond that.

So many people, even people who hate theater, seem to think theater is culturally "higher" than movies, and I'm sitting here wondering, "c'mon, really, what have you done for me lately?" Maybe once I run through some of these names I'll change my tune.