Terra Nova

I first read Terra Nova by Ted Tally in September of last year, during the first week of Senior Theater Festival, and I was bored. Everything seemed to move very slowly. I loved the characters, but the way the play was structured made it drag. Mostly, the scenes between Scott and his wife just felt dull. Even when there were moments of excitement, like when she tells Scott that she WILL have his child, seemed forced and unmotivated. Eventually, I read it again, and began to warm to it's slower pace. Still, it seemed like a very difficult play to stage while keeping an audience interested. The flashbacks and hallucinations do help with the pacing, but again, they seemed like devices and were inorganic changes of scene.

Seeing the play realized my fears about the structure. One problem that I came across were the given circumstances. It's very hard to keep the pacing at a watchable level when every character (with the exception of Katharine and Amundsen) is extremely tired. I commend the actors that were in the production, but a problem that springs out of the script is that since all of the characters are so tired, they move and talk very slowly with little animation in their voices (again, with notable exceptions) which, even with good actors, makes the whole thing drag.

Another issue is the length. Personally, I love watching plays, and having seen full productions ofHamlet, Long Day's Journey into Night, and Angels in America, and I can endure long plays. Even as little as fifteen years ago, it would have been ordinary for audiences to endure 3-hour-plus plays. Now, though, with the advent of the internet and the ease of access to entertainment, 3 hours feels too long for a lot of people. I personally do not have a problem with cutting long plays, classical or contemporary, to make them more streamlined for an audience.

All in all, I thought Terra Nova was a good play with strong characters and compelling scenes, hampered by some structural issues.

Dialogue Excerpts 1

One main tactic the authors use through the characters in the scenes is repetition and avoidance. The prying character—for example, Harper—repeats questions over and over again to the other, while Joe keeps deflecting his answers back to her and changing the subject with questions of his own. This is a great theatrical tactic since the issue is obviously not off the table, a new can of worms has been opened and the characters are even more frustrated, which raises the stakes yet again. This trade off of questions goes on for a while until the initially prying character breaks the tension by asking Now, she could get to the heart of the matter at the very beginning, but that would be uninteresting because it would lack the necessary escalation that the weight of the scene demands; it would fall flat. However, it’s important to leave these questions unanswered (unless it’s at the end of the play) to keep the audience intrigued. You never want to give away too much. Pacing is imperative in this scene. If the characters monologued any more, the quickness of the repartee would deteriorate into an overdramatic preemptive climax. The key is to keep the audience engaged and excited, but always wanting more.

Closer and Angels in America both use split scenes to effectively keep this breakneck pace. Both plays have separate groups of characters that intertwine into a big group. This is a good theatrical device because we see these groups going through similar problems together, allowing the audience to compare and contrast the character’s issues relatively at the same time. Even though the separate groups are going through the same problems, we can see the different methods individual characters use to try to solve their problems. Whether their methods differ or are the same speaks to the mental and emotional capacities of the characters; e.g. a wife whose husband is cheating on her with men reacts much differently than a man whose wife is cheating on her with an old friend.

The Arcadia side we read is one of my favorite moments from that play. It happens essentially during Bernard’s introduction to Hannah—both characters are career academics who are essentially quizzing each other’s factual and emotional intelligence to try and impress the other. Tom Stoppard has famously said that he would never dumb down one of his plays; he prefers to write for an educated audience and won’t limit himself in that way. Clearly, there are parts of this scene and of the whole play that are way over an American audience’s head, like the discussion of the evolution of the English garden to the commentary on chaos theory. However, it’s alright because the more important issue is how the character relates to the audience (Brecht aside). As long as the actors/characters are convinced in what their talking about, the audience will go along. Granted, there needs to be a way in for the audience, so the dialogue needs to stop short of Binary, but I really think it’s a grave mistake to coddle an audience.

Bernard and Hannah are desperately trying to win each other over in this scene, and prove that they are worthy, to work with one another—flexing their intellectual muscles, if you will. They describe a situation or historical event, but leave out some of the key points, to see if the other is sharp enough to fill in the blanks. This is also a good theatrical device; the most captivating scenes in plays are usually when one character is withholding information from another—forcing them to make the connection. Finally, after winning the other over, mutual trust is gained by helping the other out by giving them an interesting and valuable piece of information. For example, when Hannah is talking about her study of the breakdown of the Romantic imagination through landscape and literature, Bernard helps her out by reminding her that Samuel Coleridge, a romantic poet who wrote about landscapes and nature, died in the same year her study ends. This mutual trust forges a bond between the two characters that the audience can pick up on. This ‘give-and-take’ aspect is essential, because it provides helpful exposition under the guise of character development. In short, what I learn from Arcadia along with most of Stoppard’s other works is that sometimes it’s OK to ‘trick’ your audience, but never OK to underestimate their intelligence.

Crafted Plays vs. Written Plays

The Laramie Project and The Vagina Monologues are the best weaved pieces of verbatim theater I have encountered. Having seen both plays and acted in Laramie, it is clear that they are thoughtfully manufactured by people that are not only good writers, but expert interviewers and talented actors as well. Both are carefully dramaturged to enhance the missions they put forth, but that cobbling makes the overall message of each stronger.

In Laramie, the interviewers and authors were able to capture the entire story, and conveyed a meaningful passage of time while using interviews taken after-the-fact. They were fairly quick on the draw, arriving in Laramie shortly after Thanksgiving in 1998, not two months after the incident occurred. One important note is that the interviewers/actors were conscious of their presence and the presence of the media, who ballooned the story to international levels. It is good that they incorporated their own voices to the story, because just by asking questions about it, they influenced the outcome. However, like any discussion about the repercussions of a major news event turned artistic enterprise, they managed to gloss over a lot of the details—it was a surface read of the event. For instance, most don’t know that Shepard’s murder, although completely related to the homophobic tendencies of some of those who reside in Middle America, was really mostly a drug deal that went horribly wrong—McKinney, Henderson, and Shepherd were on meth at the time of the murder.

Although many characters in the play are true to life, as you would expect in verbatim theater, many of them are not—including some of the men and women we were fortunate enough to meet in 2007. Having performed this play in Wyoming as only the fifth production in state history, we were very guarded about what we said about the play, the story, and the ideals it confronts. Some of the characters in the script are completely misrepresented, such as Doc O’Connor. From the play, you get the sense that he is a genial old man who is sort of a godfather or seer in Laramie, which is simply not the case. He is a raging alcoholic who people generally regard with disdain for trying to be such a surface media darling but really looking for national attention. Over the course of our three hours at Doc’s house, he had 6 half-and-half Bacardi-cokes (after a day of drinking at the bar) and proceeded to tell us how he himself was bisexual and a whole host of stories that we questioned the verity of. It’s easy to see how the Tectonic theater company was mesmerized by Doc, but were fooled by his sweet talking. The true story is a much grittier and sadder tale about how a town has been defined by a single event, and disregarded as anything else.

What Laramie teaches me about writing plays is a tough question because they didn’t actually write anything except their own voices. They composed a series of interviews, public statements, and court documents to make a living, breathing play, but it was all event centric. The story already existed, the characters already had their voices, and the interviewers transcribed it. Not that it isn’t a well-made piece of theater—it is, as I mentioned above—but the Tectonic Theater company already had their work cut out for them, instead of making something from scratch. If UPS had a billion dollar endowment, sure we could create a monologue piece by going to the Sudan or Haiti or the southern community where the Jena Six were a few years ago, or go ask men in New York what they think of their penises, but we don’t and we can’t do that—we have to make things up as we go along. Perhaps a better choice would have been reading a fictional series of equally touching monologues like Road Movie by Godfrey Hamilton and Mark Pinkosh, two men who are friends of UPS and are familiar with writing fact based fictional theater works.
I feel similarly about The Vagina Monologues, but less so than Laramie, since Laramie concerned a bleak and tragic sociopoliticallyreligious event as opposed to the more personal celebration of the female body and mind. Still, though, it is verbatim theater composed from actual interviews that was cobbled together for an emotional and entertaining purpose.

Maybe I’m being too pessimistic because of my own difficulties in writing characters and making them watchable and believable. But I do think that these extremely well known and well reviewed plays teach me little about how to write; rather, I think it teaches me how to dramaturg and edit better—both useful skills. Both The Laramie Project and The Vagina Monologues are, again, expertly crafted pieces, I would argue though that they are just that—crafted, instead of wholly created and written independently.