DRAMA THINK TWICE . . . WOWING BACK

Playwright Intent, Think Twice Drama, Theatre Art Redux

Drama Hello!  Hurray Theatre!

Have you ever attended a stage play and talked about it for hours afterward? Or wished you could? You traveled while sitting in your theatre seat. You lived to tell the tale. A piece of drama took you someplace emotionally and intellectually that you wouldn’t be able to get to by other means. You were smitten by a work of Theatre Art.

Did you have an “OH YEAH” moment the next day? Somehow that elusive insight or twist you didn’t catch popped into your head and that’s it. You were moved to read up on the play. You wanted to experience it again. You wondered what you might have missed the first time.

Do you like to just flat-out read plays?

THINK TWICE DRAMA is for playgoers and readers who like to ponder. It’s for delving into plays and authors and drama topics that stir us. For “getting,” not just forgetting. For cracking open that theatre history tome. For changing the lens of critical thought, for finding the hidden text, the order in chaos and chaos in order.

Fair Enough. But Who Says So?

I’m like you, a lover of theatre. My name is C S Jones. I’m a script analyst and playwright, an essayist and dramaturg. I love turning plays over and over in my mind. I love finding things out. Sometimes reading plays makes me sleepy, sometimes it makes me want to live forever.

In Tom Stoppard’s ARCADIA, it’s vivifying when Thomasina laments about the plays lost in the burning of the ancient library of Alexandria:

Oh, Septimus! – can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at  least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides – thousands of poems – Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt by the noodle’s ancestors! How can we sleep for grief?

And then illuminating when her tutor Septimus replies:

By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language.

That’s it. The job of THINK TWICE DRAMA is to participate in the march and to pick up what we can and to let fall what will be picked up later.

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

Good Taste in Drama?

Many theatre reviewers do an admirable job of giving their impressions of a performance. With short turn-around times, they compose reviews that are often witty and helpful to their readers.

Some use adjectives like “sweet, sour,” and “bitter.” They might proclaim a work “delicious” because they sample the play as if it were a buffet made up of acting, directing, lighting, set design, sound, music, and story.

A controversial play can send a reviewer back into childhood. Words like “yucky” and “barf” find their way into their assessments. Rarely do these high chair reviewers get beyond the senses. They may know that a play is food for thought, but don’t have the patience or time. They have taste.

Because some plays lack depth, they fit neatly into a tasting critique strategy. Vignettes and skit-like plays succeed with reviewers who loathe complexity. They offer an audience what comes easily to everyone . . . clarity of plot and theme, a single tone, characters with single motivations. . . They foment certainty.

Do Think Twice, Drama 

As receivers of plays conditioned for taste, not thought, we proceed like the feckless ex-lover in Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”

It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe

It don’t matter, anyhow

An’ it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe

If you don’t know by now

When your rooster crows at the break of dawn

Look out your window and I’ll be gone

You’re the reason I’m trav’lin on

Don’t think twice, it’s all right

 Turning Up the Missing Plays, Turning up the Drama

Deeper, more mysterious, plays resonate and defy. Their creators have found their own way. At the same time, they’ve tapped into something ancient. Authors influence each other directly and indirectly. Scene by scene we turn up the missing plays.

Important work asks for more than sitting in the dark. These plays are puzzling, hard to grasp at first, ambiguous. They need input from you the interpreter of the play. Great plays don’t just wow you. They inspire you to wow back.

Here’s to Wowing Back.