Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

First, the answer to the question nobody has asked: why am I not writing about Broadway? For this season and the following two, I am on the Tony nominating committee and I have been told to keep my opinions on this season’s openings to myself until after the Tony Awards.

+++++

I have often written that the job of the playwright is to create opportunities for actors to create compelling behavior onstage. Of course, there are many ideas as to what is compelling behavior. What if I told you that there is a show that centers entirely on the performers trying to accomplish various tasks while walking on four treadmills? That is the essence of Burnout Paradise, the offering of an Australian performance collective called Pony Cam playing at the Astor Place. There are two pressing questions hovering over the show: 1) Will they accomplish the tasks? 2) Will they collectively walk more than a certain number of miles in so doing? The night I saw it, the number was 17.1 miles. If they fall short of the distance goal, the performers are obliged to refund to us in the audience some of the ticket money. They swear that this has happened occasionally in the past. It didn’t happen the night I saw it.

I don’t know if this meets my definition of theater. To me, theater requires some level of metaphor, and there is nothing metaphoric about these people preparing a three-course meal, writing a grant application, or accomplishing the other challenges posted. So maybe it should be listed under the heading of a new kind of sport? What makes the show enjoyable is that audience members are invited to help with these tasks. Many leapt at the opportunity to play in the performance I saw.

The evening is purposely trivial. But, as a follower of Viola Spolin, I’m a great believer in the value of play, and there aren’t very many opportunities in our lives to spend more than an hour playing with a crowd full of strangers. If the world is too much with you, this could be an evening that offers you an antidote.

+++++

Some years ago, in the West End I saw Harold Brighouse’s 1915 play, Hobson’s Choice. The story concerns Maggie, the eldest daughter of the tyrannical owner of a shoe store, and how she defies his bullying. She marries Willie, a shy little mouse of a man who is her father’s best shoemaker, opens a competing store, and, oh yes, marries Willie. I have rarely been so impressed by anything as its first act in which Maggie’s fierce character is introduced, her justifiable grievances are dramatized, and she captures the mouse. Happily, in the subsequent acts, they turn out to be a love match. And, with Maggie’s encouragement, the mouse becomes a man. The play is now in public domain and is available here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6347

Seeing Hobson’s Choice made me want to see more Brighouse. Last season, Jonathan Bank’s invaluable Mint Theater gave us Garside’s Career, a strong piece about idealism corrupted by political maneuvering. This season, the Mint is giving us Zack. I won’t claim it’s the near-masterpiece I think Hobson is, but, like that play, Zack is about how personal lives in that society are very much subject to economic and commercial arrangements. Zack is a gentle and principled young man whose mother and brother are not above using him as a pawn to build their business. He tries to resist them, but only with the interference of a rich relative named Virginia is he rescued. Virginia is not as assertive as Maggie, but she seems to be made of similar stuff. Both women see through the shyness of their young men and sense the value underneath. A late passage in which Virginia shaves off Zack’s scruffy beard to reveal the handsome young man underneath plays as a tender love scene. I was delighted to expand my acquaintance with Brighouse. Yet another reason to be grateful for the Mint.

+++++

A two-character play poses a technical challenge – it tends to have one issue to settle between the two characters. Part of the difficulty of writing a two-hander is keeping that issue from being joined too urgently, too early. You have to come up with nearly 90 minutes of interesting stuff before the final disposition between the two of them can be revealed in the final encounter. Add to this an observation an improv director named Michael Gellman once made: a scene between two characters will either be about them moving towards or away from each other. So, in a two-character play, you tend to have scene after scene in which you have to crank up reasons for characters to keep reversing direction.

And this is the source of the problem I have with Ngozi Anyanwu’s The Monsters at Manhattan Theater Club’s off-Broadway venue. The two characters are half-siblings. Okieriete Onaodow plays Big, the older brother. Aigner Mizzelle plays Lil, his sister. Big is a professional fighter coming to the end of a successful career. Lil, having admired him from a distance for several years, reconnects with him and asks him to train her to fight, too. Between their professions and their relationship, there is a lot to explore. But somehow, though the dialogue is pungent and the two actors are charismatic presences (the physicality of their training and fight sequences is compelling), the switches back and forth between scenes of attraction and scenes of conflict struck me as generated more by the needs of the writer than those of the characters. I was never less than engaged by the performances, but I kept hearing a dramaturgical lever being yanked back and forth.