Is This Play Any Good? (July Fragment)

Having been an usher at a 320+ seat regional theater for the last two seasons, this is a question I've been asked a lot; "is this play any good?" I mean, our patrons are well meaning. In a city with a lot of potential leisure opportunities they choose to attend the theater. Tickets are $20-40 a piece, sometimes more for a 'hot' ticket. Many of our patrons subscribe or even donate additional money. Don't they have a right to expect that they will enjoy at least a percentage of the productions they see at a theater they support?

"Is this play any good?" they ask me. They cite reviews. And they complain about the last play they saw at (fill in the blank) and enumerate the ways in which it was disappointing. "I didn't understand it", "I was insulted by", "it tried to change my views about... but I just can't believe in that", and "I just want to be entertained". I hear these sentiments over and over. A recent favorite was the woman who walked out of 'Bengal Tiger in Baghdad Zoo'; "this is not a pleasant play", she said.

How to answer them? To be honest there aren't that many pieces of theater that I can wholeheartedly endorse. I sit down to watch a play with the cynical eyes of someone who has trained and studied and worked in the medium for 24 years (wow that feels pretentious to say. But it's true I started studying acting and performing semi-professionally at the age of 8). I don't want to discourage the audience members, and I don't want to patronize them either. Sometimes I fall back on citing reviews or the positive feedback I?ve heard from other patrons. I try to highlight aspects of the production that I think they will or should appreciate. But when it comes down to it, I didn't like 'The Little Dog Laughed'; although I thought Julie White gave a great performance, and I thought thematically that it was a good fit for the KDT, being just a block from a major movie studio and with a lot of audience members who work or have worked in the entertainment industry. I didn't like 'Taking Over', although I think Danny Hoch is a very talented performer. I didn't like 'Lydia', although I respect the time and effort that CTG and the Denver Center Theatre put in to developing the play in a time where a lot of lip service is given to new play development but plays and playwrights languish in staged reading hell.


...end of fragment

Oh, what a busy girl...

I see a lot of theater. Fancy that. In fact, I even hiked to NoHo today to a rehearsal hall that I would've mistaken for a funeral home if I hadn't been told differently, to see what I thought was supposed to be a workshop of a new musical. No dice, but that's a whole story unto itself.

Anyway, scorecard, the last two weeks:

Friday, April 10: 'Forgotten World' by Deborah Asiimwe, directed by Laurie Carlos, at CalArts

Monday, April 13: 'Much Ado About Nothing' directed by Mirjana Jokovic, at CalArts

Wednesday, April 15: Opening Night of 'Lydia' by Octavio Solis, directed by Juliette Carrillo, at the Mark Taper Forum

Friday, April 17: I participated in the MFA2 Critical Studies readings, as the voice of a rabbit, at Skylight Books

Friday Late Night: Irate phone call re: 'Lydia' at the Taper which necessitated the consumption of alcohol

Saturday, April 18: Trip down to the New Playwrights Festival at UCSD. Saw 'Clementine and the Cyber Ducks' by Krista Knight, and 'Obscura' by my pal Jen Barclay.

Sunday, April 19: 'Land of the Tigers' by Matt Almos and the Burglars of Hamm, at Sacred Fools

And, at intermission of "Tigers" I actually tore a page out of my program to write this list. I was afraid I was going to forget something.

This Friday coming I am going to the Opening of 'The Internationalists' at Poor Dog Group, which I am actually looking forward to. It sounds cool, and ambitious. I admire those Poor Dog Boys, and it was sweet of them to invite me personally. Their plan is to tour it to Eastern Europe this summer. I do want to open up a dialogue. If I can make my grand NY plan work, they'd be a great group to collaborate with.