But anyway, there’s a huge problem that I have with the play, and while I was watching it I think I stumbled on a way to solve it, and I want some opinions here. The problem that I have is this: Orlando is a complete fucking bonehead.

This is, incidentally, a problem that you see in a lot of romantic comedies – the classic question of, “Yeah, yeah, love at first sight, but what is actually lovable about these people?” In this case, Rosalind is so clever and so well-spoken that there’s just something painful about seeing her end up with Orlando who is a dummy.

Why does she love him? Because she saw him win a wrestling match? Sure, okay, UFC fighters deserve love, too, but seriously. We’re talking about a guy who fell in love with a girl AT FIRST SIGHT, and then doesn’t recognize her again because of how she CHANGED HER CLOTHES.

Fuck this shit, Rosalind. Don’t marry that dude. HE IS A BONEHEAD.

So – and, now, I don’t know how they cut the script this time around, and I don’t have a copy of the script with me, so I can’t be sure that this plan I have will work universally, but whatever.

Here’s the question: what if Orlando wasn’t fooled by the disguise? What if he was just sort of playing along?

This requires the actress playing Rosalind to decide whether or not she knows that he knows, and that’s fine.

And there are a couple dangers with the idea: I think the primary one is that if Rosalind thinks she’s fooling him, but she isn’t, then you run the risk of Orlando being the clever one and Rosalind being the bonehead. I don’t think that’s how it will read, though: Rosalind is still clever and witty in all of her other scenes, and Orlando is still a terrible poet who doesn’t understand the ways of the Forest People. Ironically, the one place where Orlando is clever is the one place were Rosalind gets tripped up: in love.

Depending on how you play this, it gives Rosalind the potential for some interesting character shortcomings. Obviously she’s clever, but if she thinks she’s fooled everyone with her “disguise” and she hasn’t, then she’s not quite as clever as she thinks she is. This is nice, and I think it makes Rosalind a little more personable, but more interesting is the possibility that she kind of knows that she isn’t really fooling Orlando.

This makes the scenes in which she’s pretending to be Ganymede who is pretending to be Rosalind a little more interesting, because it suggests that it’s not Orlando who doesn’t know what being in love is like (as is the pretext of the scene), but it’s actually Rosalind who doesn’t know. Of course, well, she’s very smart, but she’s never been out of the house, never kissed a boy, never had much in the way of dealings with love or anything like that. So she’s concocted this scenario in which Orlando plays along so that she has a safe way of trying out what it means to be in love.

Later, when Orlando is all, “No, but you aren’t REALLY Rosalind,” what’s happening is that he’s recognized that she’s decided that she’s safe in this little roleplay world, and he’s trying to make her actually mean it. He knows that she’s really Rosalind in disguise – the point of his lines is to force her to admit it.

The play then becomes about roleplaying, instead of just using roleplaying as a means to be about “a woman falls in love with a fucking bonehead.” And the theme of exploring a world through PRETEND is now both pronounced and afforded a kind of depth which it didn’t enjoy when everyone just didn’t know what was happening. Because obviously, the thing about pretending is that you never don’t know that you’re pretending: As You Like It becomes a world of imagination and exploration. I think this is more interesting.

Now the other big problem is: Shakespeare didn’t write it that way. And I think no, he probably didn’t. But I also think I don’t really care. So? Shakespeare’s dead, I don’t care about his feelings. And times have changed since he started writing his drag comedies – most notably in the sense that now his drag comedies have already been written. Since we can’t do As You Like It in a world in which As You Like It (or Some Like It Hot or Tootsie) don’t already exist, we have to do it in a world in which the drag comedies DO exist.

It’s actually – this is probably another post, for another time, but anyway – theater is unique (well, unusual) in that it’s an artform that requires reinterpretation against itself. Moby-Dick doesn’t get rewritten to take your first reading into account: it’s still the same book. But your second production of Hamlet is interpreted with an awareness of your first production.

Anyway, anyway, long story short, if Shakespeare was so smart, how come he’s dead?

And what if Orlando wasn’t fooled by Rosalind’s disguise?

Adapting Dick’s seminal novel is guaranteed to be a difficult process, and would have been even if Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner weren’t already a 30-year-old SF classic. Untitled Theater Company #61 took on the ambitious challenge. And mostly, it worked.

I think that “mostly it worked” was actually an edit; the problem with this play is that mostly it DIDN’T work.

Jesus, when am I going to stop with this?  Okay, so, Holland wrote his bit about Paranormal Activity, and he’s right in a lot of important ways.  But I think there’s actually even more to be mined from a discussion of the subject, and since that’s basically all I do (talk about things AT LENGTH), that’s what I’m going to get up to today.

So, Paranormal Activity — and it’s cinema-verite brethren, like the Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity 2, The Fourth Kind, &c &c — is of a kind of style which focuses very heavily on the “documentary” quality as a horror-inducing element.  That is to say, all of these movies are attempting to scare the audience by suggesting that what they’re portraying is “true.”

This is not a new phenomenon; lots of folks have speculated that The Exorcist was so popular and so frightening because it was “based on a true story” (these people are wrong; I may or may not get to that later).  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre insists the events portrayed in it have, or had, or were maybe related to something that had its basis in fact.  So on, and so forth.

The thing about this kind of horror is that can eschew traditional things like character development, mood, theme, even plot, so long as it looks real.  This is the culmination of horror-via-effects:  as long as you can make it really look like a guy is getting pulled through the air by an invisible force, it doesn’t really matter why it’s happening:  the audience will be frightened because, for a moment, they’ll believe that this thing was true.

The documentary style is, interestingly, no “truer” a presentational style than the regular old film camera version; they probably did takes in Paranormal Activity, and the whole thing has been run through color processing and had special effects and everything added.  The shaky camera, grainy quality, and bad angles are all signifiers — not evidence, exactly, but symbolic elements that inform the audience “this thing REALLY HAPPENED.”

The problem with this is:  truth is not actually stranger than fiction.  I’m going to re-assert this, because I know that everyone SAYS truth is stranger than fiction, but come on:  that’s plainly bullshit.  Think for, a moment, about the strangest true thing you’ve ever heard.

Now:  add space vampires.

Voila.  Fiction is stranger than truth.  Every time!  Because:  no matter how strange the truth is, you can always add space vampires and make it stranger.  So, what do we mean when we say, “truth is stranger than fiction”?  Why do we say that?  And why does it lead us to make movies like Paranormal Activity?

It’s because the strange thing about strange truths isn’t that they’re strange, it’s that they’re true. Abraham Lincoln making presidential bodyguards out of the Secret Service right before he’s assassinated isn’t as strange as if he made presidential bodyguards out of a Secret Service of space vampires right before he was assassinated by a space vampire; but the first thing really happened, so we give it more weight insofar as strangeness goes.

The problem with this, and it’s the problem with Naturalism in general (and why Naturalism in the theater just died a boring, unsung old death), is that when you’re trying to portray true things that are strange (or strange things that you want us to think are true), the work is interesting only and exactly as far as the subject matter is interesting.

So, let me clarify:  Naturalism is an art-form in which the artist’s intervention is meant to be as invisible as possible, so that the subject can be as clearly rendered as possible.  Naturalism eschews any and every “artifice”.  And that’s fine, if you’re trying to present something that’s actually true, but it runs up against the wall of:  the story is only as interesting as the subject.

Because you didn’t DO anything to it.  Chekhov is about the limit, here:  he’s still concatenating, editing, creating character and plot in support of theme, and The Three Sisters is almost incomprehensibly boring.  Anything less than that much artifice would be like getting an icepick right into your brain.

Paranormal Activity doesn’t DO anything to the story.  They have created a fake scenario, and have tried to film it in as “real” a way as possible; and, consequently, the movie is literally as interesting as the filmmakers can realistically portray people getting thrown through the air by invisible poltergeists.  Or demons, or whatever the fuck it’s supposed to be.  Who cares?  Did you see that door close?  ZOMG!

This is why all those people who tell you that The Exorcist is scary because it’s based on a true story are wrong — The Exorcist is scary because it’s a scary fucking movie.  Because it avoided the traditional horror plot structure, because it embraced a higher quality of special effects — all things that I’m saying are part of the documentary style.  The difference is, The Exorcist is scary whether or not you really believe it could happen; Paranormal Activity uses the documentary style as fully as possible because it’s ONLY scary if you believe it’s really happening.  All of the effort and energy that might have otherwise created a rarefied ambiance, a thematic horror, is spent insisting adamantly that ALL OF THIS IS REAL, ZOMG, ISN’T IT SCARY?

(Incidentally, this is exactly the reason that Holland keeps having problems with “breaking the suspension of disbelief”; paradoxically, the more realistic you make your film, the easier it is to break that suspension.  Verisimilitude is tyranny.)

It’s also why, ultimately, there’s only going to be one of these things at a time.  I mean, I think it’s funny how different art-forms go through exactly the same evolutionary process.  The theater experimented with naturalism for about fifty years before it gave up.  Now horror movies are trying it.  Why?  Well, for one thing because we finally CAN (same with theater:  suddenly there was enough money to put horses and butcher shops on stage); and for another because we keep forgetting that basically, people are only interested in one of these things at a time.

“Oh my god, look how real it looks” is the same joke, no matter if you’re doing it in Paranormal Activity or Paranormal Activity 2 or The Fourth Kind.

Pertinent to this, I want to make sure we’re clear about this thing, too:  I like horror movies, a lot, and — though people often declare me incapable of human feeling and therefore inexpert when it comes to assessing what are presumably “non-rational” forms — I have been scared silly by horror movies before.  I slept with the lights on for a week after I saw The Ring; I had nightmares after I saw The Exorcist.  I was so scared by the trailers for the original Nightmare on Elm Street that I could never actually bring myself to watch the movie.  This is pursuant to my point, I’ll elaborate a little later on.

Anyway, so.  Tribe of Fools is primarily a physical theater group in this, the Philadelphia area.  They did a production of Dracula that I saw on Thursday (of a week ago), though I held the review out of courtesy; I don’t like to get into the argument about whether or not critics have an obligation to support theater no matter what.  Whatever good or bad I have to say, it won’t affect their ticket sales.

This is what the advertisement for Dracula says:

Brain fever, nightmare, shadows, and madness saturate this dynamic new look at Dracula. By using scientific methods designed to stimulate fear in the human brain, this original adaptation kicks you into the swallowing abyss of terror. Audience members must sign a waiver to participate.

Hmmm.

You can see why I was interested.  Scientific methods for art and aesthetics are always interesting to me.  I asked the guy, Jay Wojnarowski if he could tell me what the research they used for this was, but he told me that if I let my rational mind get involved, then I wouldn’t enjoy it as much.

Hmmmmmm.

I went to opening night, I paid my twenty dollars, signed the waiver, saw the play.  It was not my favorite thing I’ve ever seen.  There were some things that were very good; there were some things that were almost good, but weren’t quite handled properly; there were some things that shouldn’t have been there at all.  All in all, I couldn’t say the show was bad, but I am blinded by my frustration at the knowledge that it wasn’t as good as I know it could have been.

Before I go on, the program advises me to not tell anyone about the specific techniques that were used, so as to heighten the anxiety of future audience members.  I am to advise you, however, if I experience bad dreams because of the play, or if I was afraid to be alone afterwards.  I’ll check back tomorrow to let you know if I get the night terrors.

UPDATE:  Nope.

And, since the show is closed, I don’t have a problem disclosing their secret fear techniques, in part because I believe that their claim to have secret fear techniques is, actually, bullshit.

So, from the beginning, I have a problem because I feel like Tribe of Fools is insulting my intelligence.  I’m all for secrecy, you know, and all for outlandish publicity stunts like Death Waivers, but if you’re going to play with something like that, you have to play it for real.  You can’t ask someone to waive liability if you won’t explain to them what they’re in danger from — a waiver like the one they had me sign would be completely practically meaningless.  That’s even if the very first sentence of the very first clause:  “1. I am fully aware of the dangers posed by the performance” wasn’t contradicted by the second one, “I also understand that there may be additional dangers that I am not aware of.”

Anyone that read the waiver can see that it’s fake.  It is furthermore not helped by the fact that the box office manager asked me if I needed a witness.  Well, no.  I don’t need a witness.  YOU need me to have a witness.  When I see you put the waiver that I just signed in a pile without witnessing it then I KNOW IT IS BULLSHIT.

But again, even if they HAD a real liability waiver, how would they know the show was dangerous?  Did someone die in rehearsals?  Did people have heart attacks during workshop productions?  Is there some SPECIFIC RESEARCH that leads you to believe that people with heart conditions or PTSD should not watch this play?  No, because if there was, you would have said it.  If someone had died watching this play, you’d have put it in the marketing materials.

So, in trying to establish the mood — that this show is so FOR REAL scary that I could die from watching it — you really just expose the fact that you think I’m an idiot.  Moreover, you’re setting the expectations really high.  Unreasonably high, some would say.  It’s going to be very hard to live up to those expectations unless, during the course of the run, you ACTUALLY KILL SOMEONE.  Now that the show has closed, I feel comfortable relating to you that no one was hospitalized during the run.

The waiver, though, is kind of a neat idea; it, along with the way that we were let into the theater (one at a time by the ushers) was an example of ideas that were just implemented kind of badly.  The problem with the usher was that she was a pretty, smiling girl, with a friendly, cheerful voice.  Total mood killer.   All of these are on the right track, though — they’re what I’ve been referring to as “second domain considerations“:  elements of a performance that are not strictly related to the play or the context in which the play is understood, but to the specific context in which it is experienced.

Now, to the play!  The program lists Nick Mazzuca as the playwright, though he doesn’t have a bio; there’s also a credit that says the play was “created by” the whole cast.  So, I don’t know what that means.  Certainly, the script has all the hallmarks of being a collaborative effort — and I say this with, admittedly, a personal bias against collaboratives scripts, formulated on the grounds that I’ve just never seen one that was any good — it’s scattered, unfocused, makes half-hearted attempts at too many different themes, and each moment of the play feels completely isolated from every other moment.

By this I mean:  something is happening onstage, and sure, what’s happening onstage could be cool, but only if the rest of the play is taken into account.  Yes, it’s pretty cool when Jonathon Harker has lit his candle and is stumbling around in the dark while black shapes scuffle around just out of view.  The fifty-seventh time someone lights a candle in the dark, though, it starts to lose some of its punch.  (The guy next to me was chuckling; this is the Horror/Humor Problem at work.  Incidentally, I hope someone was making sure they have a completely full lighter every night, because if it runs out of fuel the show literally just has to stop.)

The whole play seems like a string of neat horror effects or physical bits that actors wanted to work on, without taking into consideration:  plot, character, dialogue, or even theme.  I guess, “being in the dark while things are around you” is a theme.  But there’s not really a discernible plot, and there are no discernible characters, and what this play reveals to me is that not only are those things generally important, but they are vitally important to horror in particular.

Consider:  most horror movies begin with ordinary, benign settings, into which terrifying elements are gradually introduced.  This is because that heightened emotional states are not immediately sympathetic:  they are, in fact, alienating.  We don’t have sympathy for people just because they’re screaming; we have sympathy for people that we LIKE when they start screaming.  Horror especially is about the rational, everyday world crashing up against the unfathomable depths of incomprehensible terror; for that to work, we need a fully-realized, understood, and beloved rational world in the first place.

Now, I’ve said this, and the truth is that I’m lying; it’s not that this production of Dracula WHOLLY dispensed with plot and them.  If it had done that — if Tribe of Fools had jettisoned what remained of the text and just made a thirty-five minute spooky-movement piece (and only charged me ten dollars for it) that would have been all right.  The problem is that it made these half-hearted attempts at plot that were never fully-realized, these rough sketches of characterization that never lead anywhere (Harker and Mina have a brief scuffle in which she reveals that she pays the rent on the house in which they live; why is this?  Where does this come from?  How does it matter?  It doesn’t, it hardly even shows up in the rest of the script).

The structure of the play doesn’t really lend itself to thematic content, really; this Dracula is, as I said, built on these scenes of people being menaced in the dark, intercut with a scrambled tangle of scenes that may or may not be Harker explaining to Mina why he has to go to Transylvania, and may or may not be in his imagination, and may or may not be in her imagination.  The thing is, you can’t develop theme and character while you’re being chased around in the dark by Dracula; that’s a scene about you being chased around in the dark — so the play, which was only seventy-five minutes, only had about THIRTY minutes to develop dozens of these half-formed ideas about what Dracula was about (for some context:  Bram Stoker, when he wanted to consider and address a myriad of ideas about his life and times, wrote a three-hundred page novel).  You also can’t develop theme or character if you can’t make up your mind whose imagination this is in.

The thirty minutes they’ve given over to plot isn’t enough time, and it shows; the play relies pretty heavily on the audience knowing a lot about Dracula; and, fair enough, most everyone knows something about Dracula; but without the actual ordinarity of John and Mina’s life, of her friendship with Lucy, of the gnawing unease that Harker experiences at Castle Dracula, this play is just seventy-five minutes of people being menaced by weird shapes.

Seventy-five minutes is a long time to watch people be menaced by weird shapes — regardless of how weird and menacing they may be.

Because the piece seems to just be people showing off their weirdness, it’s understandable that there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it, at all.  The book Dracula was about a lot of things, and you sure don’t have to make a play about any of them — but you do have to make a play about something.  All we have here are some vague references to Harker “bringing Dracula back” with him (which, I mean, they cut out all the stuff about Harker being a real estate agent and Dracula wanting to buy a house, so who knows what happened there, exactly?) and repeated references to “brain fever.”

Now, this part I think is kind of weird because “brain fever” is a dated term for encephalitis, one of the most common causes of which is syphilis (in fact, odds are the only person you’ve ever heard of who died from “brain fever” was Lord Byron, who TOTALLY had syphilis, because I mean, come on).  So, Harker talking about how Mina has brain fever, and that he gave it to her after bringing it back from Transylvania…well, hahah.  Maybe they did that on purpose?  The idea of Dracula as a communicable sexual disease is kind of awesome, but there was absolutely no sex at all in this play.  No sexual innuendo, no fetishism, no sensuality, no anything.  Even when Mina and Lucy are sleeping together in the same bed, they wear frumpy, full-length nightgowns over top of their dancer blacks.  (That, of course, is presumably a technical issue — cost of nightgowns, the fact that the actresses had to double roles as scary menacing shapes — and so can be forgiven, especially in a Fringe show.)

UPDATE:  I am informed that the syphilis theme was something that was discussed during the creation of the play, and not just an improbable coincidence.

The fact that this play is essentially about syphilis, without REALLY being about syphilis — that is, the idea’s lack of development in the script — is part of what makes me suspicious that any real research was done at all, and I want to take a moment to get back to the marketing that they did for this show, and for the director’s notes, which claimed that this play was going to work out my amygdala.

The amygdala is a part of your brain that governs a lot of things, one of which is fear condition.  It’s plugged into the sympathetic nervous system, which is the part of your nervous system that the adrenal glands are connected to you.  It’s your fight or flight system (and other systems as well, I’ll get to that in a minute).  ”Fear conditioning” is when you have, after a certain conditioning period, associated a fear or alarm state with a particular stimulus and so, when exposed to the stimulus again, immediately slip into the alarm state.  Like if, when you were a kid, you suffered a terrifying attack by a giant rabid St. Bernard and then when you watched Beethoven you had a panic attack.  That’s fear conditioning.

So, it’s an interesting idea that they’re going to try to use fear-conditioned responses on an audience that they don’t have any background for, since how can they know whether or not I’ve ever been conditioned to fear an effeminate Transylvanian count?  But there are certain things — there is, in fact, a whole mess of research on the subject — that we are hardwired to experience as alarm states.  What makes me suspect paucity in terms of research is that none of those things were in evidence here.

Subsonics, for example, are known to stimulate the amygdala and the sympathetic nervous system.  So is UV light.  Strobe effects — not because of the light itself, but because of how it confuses continuity of movement — do the same thing.  All the things that they have in haunted houses, actually, which, hey, it’s almost like Eastern State has been spending years actually figuring out what kinds of things scare people.  That’s also why they use them in nightclubs, incidentally:  because of the wealth of research that shows that sexual arousal is ALSO connected to the sympathetic nervous system.

Why do horror movies have sex in them?  Why did Dracula have sex in it?  It was drenched in sexuality!  Why do people take dates to horror movies?  Why is it that if you talk to a pretty sociology research on a high bridge, you’re more likely to ask her out later on?  It’s because the “horror” and “sex” parts of your complex nervous system share certain pieces in common, and so they’re reciprocal.  All of this research is, of course, widely available, so what was the reasoning behind taking all the sex out of Dracula, again?

I don’t want to seem like a huge dick here, so let me point out that they did do a couple of things exactly right.  Using the absolute blackness of the space, having the Brides (who were all dancers) in half-light climb up on each other in order to break up the human silhouette (silhouette is the first method we use to identify what we’re looking at, so in the dark, if we see something shaped really weirdly, it can spook us).  Some of it was SUPER close to right — using the weird sound effects was a good idea, but it overlooks the fact that too much sound saturates the listening organs, instead of forcing them to reach, and so is subject to diminishing returns.  Also, one person kept clicking; I get that they were trying to make an alien, non-human sound, which is a good idea (see del Toro’s Mimic; just the first half, when it’s good), except it’s clearly a person making a clicking sound with their tongue.

You’ll notice, I’m sure, that I’ve got a very narrow view here of “fear.”  One of the things that rubs me the wrong way with all of the promotional materials is that “fear” isn’t just one thing.  There are at least four different kinds of fear or alarm states evoked by AN ENTIRE TRADITION of cinema and literature:  there’s actual surprise, there’s suspense, there’s disgust, and there’s dread (Boris Karloff referred to the last two as “horror” and “terror”).  Tribe of Fools touches on at most two of these, and really only the “surprise” part — things jumping out of the dark, or not being quite what they seem, &c.

Which, fine, if you want to evoke the same kind of fear that dogs or monkeys have, great.  Just jump out at them and yell.  Throw you suspense by the wayside because remember what suspense is:  it’s an anticipation of the adrenaline alarm state that we experience when something startles us.  What does that mean?  It means that the suspense only lasts until the first surprise; then you have to start over again (remember how so many horror movies have really slow openings?) — Death Waivers and Fear Science marketing are great for building suspense, but that first moment when Harker just starts screaming in the dark burns it all up.

If you want me to ditch my rational mind at the door, great, but then don’t expect any dread — any of the real, eerie, existential fear that is the true goal of good horror.  Dread, the increasingly abstract fear, the one that you leave the theater with, the one that, literally, haunts you — that is something that you make out of rationality.  It’s built on plot, on theme, on characters.  It’s tenuous (and it requires a particularly refined audience; H. P. Lovecraft was one of the world’s best horror writers because he was the world’s best horror reader).

Wojnarowski’s continued assertions, both in the program and to me personally, that the rational mind would obviate the fear that they were causing by stimulating the amygdala flies in the face of the things we actually know about the amygdala:  strong fear stimuli BYPASS neocortical structures in the amygdala, and go directly to the sympathetic nervous system.  That is, fear circumvents rationality:  that is what makes it fear.

To attempt to create horror without first realizing that rationality is the starting point is to undertake the task with a gross misunderstanding of the nature of fear.  It is doomed, not because horror is to great a challenge to achieve onstage, but because there’s nothing there to achieve even if you ARE successful.

[Disclaimer:  Tribe of Fools' production of Dracula was sold out for every performance.  What does that mean in terms of my criticism?  Nothing.  Hammer Films built an entire movie studio on the idea that people would come to see a movie with Dracula in it, no matter what, and "Everyone Shut Up and Let Buying Decide" is a Bullshit Position.]

On the other hand…

On the other hand, awards are nice.  They help encourage people to do good work.  They draw attention to the arts, which is great.  If you put “award-winning” on your posters or on your resume, then maybe you’ll get more interest from whoever’s looking at it — so it can indirectly lead to work or ticket sales.

And it’s pretty important that we recognize and honor good work when we find it, in some way or another.

So, this is the idea.

The Independent Theater Awards (we’ll call them the “Ethel Awards,” because I think it’s funny) is specifically open to theaters with operating budgets under X amount of money, and for shows with less than Y amount of money — I don’t know what these numbers are, but I have a clear category of what kinds of theaters it should include, so I just have to figure out the numbers.  It’s set up the way that it is so that a really high-budget theater can’t put together a show with a really low budget in order to make it eligible, and a theater with a generally mid-level budget can’t dump all of its money into one show.

(I don’t necessarily want to make this an exclusionary system, but obviously it has to be, and the class of theaters that need to be excluded is pretty straightforward:  the Walnut Street, the Wilma, the Arden, Philadelphia Theater Company.  They all do great work, sure, and they also win all the awards — it’d be nice if there was more room for people that don’t have fifty grand to throw at every show.  Probably People’s Light and Theater and Pig Iron, maybe Lantern and Philadelphia Shakespeare Theater aren’t really in the running, either — the goal here is to reward companies that do great work despite limited resources.  I don’t know what the numbers would be exactly; consideration is obviously warranted.)

Anyone that gets paid at least fifty dollars is eligible in the performance, direction, design, or writing categories.  I’m not sure how you’d work out whether or not a production can be eligible for best production; I want to keep cheap indie-theater in a slightly different category from community theater (which is already internally awards-intensive).  Maybe if a certain percentage of cast or crew is paid.  At least 50% is paid at least $50?  Hmm.

I’m envisioning this working in basically a three-tiered system.  You’ve got the nominations, which anybody can do.  As long as a person or show is nominated by at least three people, they get on the long nomination list.  We can announce that right away, actually, so folks can put it out in their publicity materials right off the bat.  “Nominated for an independent theater award!”

Then, at the end of the year, we create the short list — everyone that’s nominated someone gets 100 points for each category.  They go online, tell how many shows they’ve seen this year, and award their points however they like.  Figure there’s an algorithm that actually weights the points such that the more shows you’ve seen, the more your points are worth.  (If you’ve seen five shows, your hundred points are worth a hundred points; if you’ve only seen one show, your hundred points are really only worth about twenty; if you’ve seen ten shows, maybe they’re worth a hundred and fifty, whatever — the point is to prevent someone from just getting all of their friends to come out and see one show, and then give them all their points, right?)

Throw out the top and bottom scores, add everything up; the top five scorers are the shortlist.  Only people who have been paid to do the job in the category in question can vote.  So, if you’ve been paid to be an actor, you can vote in all of the actor categories.  If you’ve been paid to do lighting design, then you can vote for the lighting designer award.  &c.

I guess anyone can vote for best overall production.  Maybe you have to have seen all five nominees?  Interesting, hm.

Anyway, same thing.  You get a hundred points, you can award them however you want.  Add them up, whoever gets the most points wins.  Same rules about weighting apply.

It sounds kind of complicated, but I think it’s not so hard:  you nominate whatever you want.  At the end of the year, you vote for the shortlist.  If you are an actor or a director or whatever, once the shortlist is announced, you vote again.  The rest of the math stuff happens on the system end — you don’t need to calculate how much your points weigh, or anything.  You just say how many shows you saw and award them.

Plainly there are ways to game the system; I think I’m just banking on the fact that, right now, the award itself isn’t really worth the effort it would require to steal one.  In the future, I guess maybe you’d have to set up the means to verify that people were getting paid, that they saw the shows they said they were seeing, &c.  The entire system will probably have to be revamped in three to five years, sure, but in the meantime you could probably get if off the ground right away, with a minimum of effort.

So, you vote, people win, you get a plaque, it’s nice.  You can put it on your resume.  Maybe we have a little party or whatever, you know, it’s rad.  Apparently, it costs between $5,000 and $10,000 for Theater Alliance to give out Barrymore awards; this would NOT be that.  I don’t know what they make those plaques out of, but the Ethel awards will be, like, twenty dollars.  MAYBE.  Maybe not even that.  Maybe I’ll just print up a certificate that you can have framed if you want.  Does anybody ever really ask to see the award, anyway?

Which is okay, as far as it goes, except that it’s just such a weird thing to do.

While the idea at first seems completely counter-intuitive (who would suspect the way to make something less boring is by making it into a literal history lesson?) it does have certain advantages.  It makes sense of the Chorus, which is often a tricky proposition for a director working on Henry V.  It made the part where (I think) the Archbishop of Canterbury explains Henry’s claim to the French throne pretty funny.  In fact, a lot of the “regular” or “boring” stuff was made funny or cute by the concept.

There are places where it falls short, though; generally, when you come to see Henry V you want to hear two things:  ”Once more into the breach,” and the St. Crispin’s day speech, and when you’ve presented Agincourt not as the epic battle that defined one of England’s most beloved kings, but as a couple kids in blazers playing at war with lacrosse sticks and paper airplanes, it kind of robs those speeches of the stakes a little bit.  (By which I mean, “a lot.”)

It’s also a little bit troublesome sorting out just who is whom.  The French, in this play, all wear glasses, and that’s helpful, but the Archbishop of Canterbury definitely doesn’t look like an Archbishop.  The soldiers don’t look like soldiers, the nobles don’t look like nobles, the thugs don’t look like thugs; they all look like kids in blazers.  It’s never a problem to tell what’s happening, exactly, but it’s sometimes a but of a challenge to get what it means, since the costumes are basically devoid of semantic content.

But what’s ultimately strange about the whole approach, and what’s prompted me to write this article, is the treatment of the Chorus itself, and let me reiterate my feelings on it:  it’s just such a weird thing to do with it.

Consider.  Henry V begins with the Chorus — who is not a “choral group” in the way that we usually understand them, but is better understood as a kind of narrator — stepping out onstage and just straight up saying, “Look, this is going to look like some bullshit.”  He speaks directly to the audience, asking them to use their imaginations to fill in the gaps  in Elizabethan scenography; something that was presumably necessary when you were trying to present Agincourt using five guys with sticks and Ned Alleyn in a funny hat.

From the outset, the idea of the play is divorced from its presentation; we’re asked to ignore that these are actors, ignore that there are no sets.  Moreover, we, the audience, are personally asked by the playwright to do this.  And we’re able to, because the Elizabethan sets are empty.  This is States’ scene-to-text-ratio theory:  the more text, the less detailed the scenery, and vice-versa.

To put the Chorus in a context in which he’s been literalized is problematic; he now no longer addresses us, but makes his apologies instead to his students.  The play has, instead of breaking the fourth wall, created a subsidiary reality that includes the broken wall, and establishes a new wall between actors and audience.  The approach is no longer metatheatrical in the sense that it is a play that recognizes that it is a play, but becomes metatheatrical in an entirely different sense, in that it is a play that contains a play.

The idea is further hampered by the fact that literalizing the Chorus forces you to literalize everything else — now that the figure is, instead of an abstract apologia for the nature of theater, an actual character, the entire rest of the play has to be locked into that literal approach in order to explain his existence.

(Well, probably; I suppose you wouldn’t have to do it that way — if the students, while enacting the play, could periodically phase away from their literal setting, though this is challenging to do onstage.)

The literalization of the Chorus subjects the play to the tyranny of verisimilitude, and what is so strange about this idea is that the Chorus exists for precisely the opposite purpose — to free the play from any obligation to present actual reality.  In trying to create a larger context in which the Chorus is something other than a metatheatrical function, you end up trapping yourself in that context:  the stage is not an empty space in which a play that is equal parts presentation behalf of the actors and imagination on behalf of the audience, but an actual, literal classroom.

This literality, rather than being liberating, prevents the audience from apprehending what the play within the play is; the more richly-detailed the subsidiary context — the more realistic, accurate, and complete — then the more difficult it is for us to leave it behind and imagine the battlefield of Agincourt.  No matter how the Chorus exhorts us, we can’t forget that we’re just watching kids playing at Kings and War, because everything about the play draws us back to the fact that we’re in a classroom.

All in all, I can’t say that this was a bad choice.  It was certainly the cutest production of Henry V that I’ve seen.  And, certainly, it’s always productive to try to approach Shakespeare in new ways.  I think, however, that this particular approach sacrifices more than it really offers.

Like, whoah.

It’s my personal opinion that most theater companies suffer by running between five and ten years behind the times, technologically speaking.  This is most noticeable among community theaters (which I’m including as one end of a broad spectrum of different kinds of theater, generally arranged according to how much money they have), because most community theaters are run by…let’s say by folks who’ve grown comfortable with a particular era’s technology and a particular era’s approach to theater, and don’t like to change it.

They also can’t always adapt to new technologies because many of these new technologies are expensive.  And, sometimes, they eschew things like livecasting for philosophical reasons:  an idea that it betrays the nature of theater to broadcast a digital version around the world.  In a way this is right, but in a number of other, important ways, it’s completely wrong.

So, let’s start with what we’re going to be doing.  Livecasting anything is ridiculously easy, and now, cheap.  We get the highest quality audio and video running off of my phone (the Motorola Droid 2.0), which streams the video via Ustream over it’s regular 3G connection.  Ustream hosts the streaming, gives my affiliate an HTML frame to plug into their website, and bam.  That’s it.  I just need to find a place to set up my phone where I can plug it in and it gets a good view.

It’s easy.  It is, in fact, so easy as to be ominous.  Broadcast Network Television — the regular guys that show you the news and Simpsons reruns — has been dangling by a thread for a while now.  The fact that it is now dirt-simple for me, a theater producer whose production and design budget is LESS THEN TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS, to simply broadcast anything I want to on the internet, live, and have potentially thous…well, hund…well, maybe a dozen or so people watch it means that the broadcast television model is basically done.

The transition from broadcast TV to Internet TV was only hindered by three things:  1) cost of equipment, 2) bandwidth, 3) the number of people willing to watch TV on their computers.  The thresholds to make it worthwhile for me have passed; it’s only a matter of time before it becomes worthwhile for everyone, and so good-bye ABC local affiliate WCAU.

This is just what’s going to happen, and I think we’ve all known it’s been on its way for a while; I think my being able to livecast Empress is a small but significant milestone on the process.

But it does lead to the interesting question as to what is especially good about this for a play.  Well, there are a couple benefits.  Most of the numbers that we see on anything below the Major Professional Level (for the sake of argument, here in Philadelphia, we’re going to put the Arden, the Wilma, and the Walnut Street as Major Professional Theaters; I’m not counting the Merriam because they only host tours and I don’t know what their audiences are like) suggest that a substantial portion of the audience is made up of friends and family of the cast and crew.

In a very important way, as a theater producer, I’ve got to accept that whatever else I want to do with my work, I’m also writing it and producing it for my friends.  And my friends are both numerous and often distant.  This, fortunately, creates a useful synergy with Iron Age Theater itself; while our primary focus is on building a local audience (since…yeah, obviously), because of how mobile the population is, because of how rapidly information is passed along through trusted networks, it’s also vitally important that we build a fanbase network that is unhindered by geography.

Since it costs literally nothing to run the livecast, we have to consider:  what do we gain from having an Iron Age fan Los Angeles?  If that single fan has a friend who has a friend in Philadelphia, and as a consequence of the livecast, that friend of a friend ends up buying a ticket for Empress, then:  profit.  No matter how thinly attenuated, it’s worth it.  Even if those networks don’t give us anything THIS time, if we can build the trust network up, make it stronger with every production, it can potentially yield ticket sales two or three or four years down the line.

Finally, this is useful to me as a playwright, also.  Playwrights lament, constantly, that getting a world premiere of your play is only the second most challenging hurdle that we face; the MOST challenging hurdle is getting a SECOND production.  It’s counter-intuitive, I suppose, but if you think about it, it makes sense:  most theaters like things that they’re familiar with, but “a world premiere” is something they can advertise as being new and exciting.  A “not a world premiere, but still pretty new, hey!” is only interesting if its world premiere was highly successful.  A run-of-the-mill world premiere probably isn’t going anywhere.

That’s where the livecast comes in, though; the major problem with convincing an artistic director to look at your play is that hardly any plays ever look good on the page (as we should expect; they are plays).  Setting up the livecast gives theater production teams the opportunity to see the play all around the country, and permits them to be better able to choose whether or not they want to give this particular play a shot.

In the future (this is five years down the line — no one can ever accuse me of short-term planning) I’m thinking that all world premieres ought to be live cast.  I’d like Iron Age or the SOE itself to be a channel on Ustream where, pretty regularly, we’ll have premieres like this — so that, rather than as an unusual, one-time event, the SOE channel becomes a resource for theater companies around the world to find their next production.

Looked at in this light, the livecast is less about making money by offering a de-saturated version of the production to people many miles away, but about using a hyper-saturated form of advertising to garner interest and, thereby (hopefully) ticket sales.

There are some problems with the process.  Or, there may be some problems going forward.  Copyright is one thing; fortunately, since I wrote this play, it’s easy for me to get around that.  Actors contracts can be another; I made sure I explained what we were doing, very clearly, and got everyone’s approval before going forward.  Right now, the livecast doesn’t represent a revenue stream for the theater, so it’s not a huge issue; but if it does start generating revenue, that’s something that actors, writers, directors & al will want to take into consideration when they negotiate their pay.

The other issue is that a video of a play is not a play.  It is less than a play in virtually all conceivable respects.  This is brought up to me whenever I discuss the project.  But, obviously that’s the case; that’s why tickets to the play are $15, but the livestream is free.

Am I worried about losing audience revenue to the livestream?  Not at all.  The livestream detracts from the audience the way that bootleg CDs detract from concert attendance.

So:  thoughts?

But, in defiance of the life lessons I learned from Niccolo Machiavelli, rather than simply declaring an enemy and waging war on it, I think an investigation into the subject is in order.

There’s a lot of readings that happen around the Philadelphia area, and there are a number of reasons for that, which I’ll get to in a minute.  First, let’s be clear about what I’m talking about; technically, a “staged reading” is practically identical to a “script in hand reading” — the actors, after minimal rehearsals, read their lines from the script while attempting to act out some primitive blocking.  The difference between a “staged reading” and a “script in hand reading” is usually just presentation; “script in hands” are generally what you refer to when a company does the reading as part of its process of developing the play, and it’s understood to be halfway through that company’s work on it.  A “staged reading” is usually understood to be the outcome that the company is working towards:  i.e., they’ve picked up the play, worked out their staged reading, performed that reading, and are now done with it.  Good luck, playwright, finding someone else to produce!

For the purposes of this piece here, I’m going to refer to any kind of reading, however more or less staged, that is 1) open to the public, and 2) an outcome (rather than a part of the development process that is coincidentally public) as a “staged reading.”

So, Staged readings:  what is the point of them?

As far as I can tell, there are two basic reasons why you’d want to do a staged reading:  the first is to collect useful and constructive feedback on the development of the script (presumably for a future production); the second is for attention.

With regards to the first category, I HATE staged readings.  I find them trivial and useless, for the following reasons:  firstly, actors who are reading their parts are generally not thinking critically about the work as a whole.  This isn’t their fault; if you’re giving an actor three rehearsals before he’s going to perform, he’s going to work out exactly as much as he needs to understand to make sure his inflections are right and he doesn’t sound like crap when it’s time to go.  That’s okay; that’s what you hired him for.  But if you’re going up with minimal rehearsal, with minimal staging, with minimal direction and design, then your actors are only going to catch the most surface-level problems — proofreading problems.  This word is spelled wrong, did you mean “crime” here, or “criminal”?, is Valeria the same character as Bianca?  It’s good to find those, but ultimately not valuable to the play’s development.

You’d expect this, of course, if you’ve done any serious work with full productions.  In the rehearsals for Empress of the Moon, for example, it was until we were five or six rehearsals in that the major questions in the script started to come out:  questions about through-line, about character transitions, &c.  Much of the script is kind of expressionist, also, and deeply drenched in irony, so there’s a great deal that, as an actor, you won’t understand unless you just do it.  (Just using Empress because it’s near to hand, but there are a couple speeches, spoken quite earnestly, that are undermined by events that are occurring behind the speaker; even when you’ve got someone reading the stage directions, an element like that isn’t going to “read,” and your actors are — again, I think, quite rightly — focusing very specifically on their own character while they work.)

Moreover, actors are conditioned to be trusting; it’s their job to understand their character, and to fit that character into a context that is provided before them.  They must presume the script, usually; even in special circumstances — like developmental readings — actors are used to accepting what the script says and adjusting their character to accommodate it, rather than saying to the playwright that the script needs to change to accommodate them.

This is, obviously, where you’d want a dramaturg; I have my own, personal problems with dramaturgs, in general, that I won’t get into right now.  Suffice it to say, I think that, in Philadelphia anyway, the dramaturgical environment isn’t as robust as it could be; but even if it were, there’s little criticism a dramaturg is going to give you for a staged reading that she couldn’t ALSO give you from just having read the play.

Good critics would help, but there’s two more problems with this:  one is that good critics are sometimes harder to find than you might like.  Two is that playwrights, being deeply insecure sissies, can’t accept professional (as opposed to friendly) criticism without crying like a bunch of babies.  I can only assume that this is why critics are rarely invited to readings; it’s a pain, though, because at least with the critics you can be sure that they have a history of responding critically to theater, which you can’t always say for your audience.

Speaking of:  the audience.  I don’t know why you’d do a staged reading to see how the audience will respond to a piece.  I’ve been to readings before, and listened to talkbacks, and god-damn if there isn’t one person who hates [particular element A] for everyone one person who loves it.  Audiences, even more than actors, dramaturgs, and critics, are almost completely incapable of saying what they thought was good or bad about a play.  And, even when they do know!  They’re entirely useless at explaining why.

I suppose you could use an audience as a rough gauge for how funny jokes are, though this can be misleading:  usually an audience that never laughs indicates that your script isn’t very funny, but audiences DO laugh for a wide variety of extremely stupid reasons.  For instance, if one of your actors invited his friends to see the reading?  They’ll laugh at any dumb thing that guy does, whether or not it’s “really” funny.  This is basic familiarity humor:  people laugh at things they recognize in improbable situations.  But your audience recognizing their friend isn’t the same thing as your audience getting the joke — that doesn’t mean they DIDN’T get the joke, only that you can’t be sure that they DID, which would defeat the entire purpose of getting feedback.

In other words:  public readings are rarely going to provide useful feedback, since everyone that *could* provide useful feedback is either a) there during rehearsals, b) not invited, or c) doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

This brings us to the other reason that you might do a staged reading:  attention.

Charles Laughton did, I think some time in the 50s, a series of readings of George Bernard Shaw; Laughton and his fellow actors wore evening dress, stood behind music stands, and just read the play.  These readings were exceptionally well-attended; though, Shaw was also pretty famous at the time.  Radio was still popular, also and, frankly, Shaw doesn’t really improve that much between the “reading out loud” phase and the “acting out” phase.  This kind of reading is in the second category, the “attention” category — because plainly Shaw wasn’t rewriting his plays after these performances — and it suggests that the “attention” category should be broken down even further.

Shaw doesn’t need the attention (by the fifties, he was, like, a hundred years old and well-past caring about the rest of the world); Charles Laughton, really, didn’t need the attention much either.  Maybe he was just doing this so that people would have access to low-cost, good theater, and that’s a noble goal.  But, however you slice it, it’s Laughton and Shaw who are drawing the audience in.

Now, let’s assume that you’re a playwright; you, obviously, can’t do the same thing that Shaw and Laughton do — at least, you can’t do it and expect the same result.  Who are you?  No one’s going to come to see your staged reading.  How do you plan to drum up interest in this, if people aren’t already interested in something else about the production?  And, the fact is, staged readings are crappy versions of the play; it’d be like a film-maker selling tickets to see his storyboards, or his dailies.

You could do this if you were making a movie about something really interesting, I think (and it does lead to a neat idea for an economic model for funding, but let’s hold off on that), but a plan like that is going to rely on you either doing a movie (or play) about something REALLY interesting, or about you being someone really interesting yourself.

This brings us to PlayPenn.  PlayPenn is a program here in Philadelphia that does this yearly summer session of readings (and at least one symposium; this year was about neurology, very good) of new plays.  Playwrights are given a dramaturg, they presumably work with them for some length of time, then the play is read.  These sessions are also very well-attended, and that’s cool — I don’t want people to get the idea that I’m disparaging PlayPenn, I know they all work really hard and care a lot about theater and all that.

But.  I am interested in what the point of them is.  Let’s look at one of their playwrights this year (and last year):  Michael Hollinger.  Now, I know Michael Hollinger.  I know that he is a great guy, he is a great playwright, you should all see his plays, no question.  But the fact of the matter is, he doesn’t need a developmental workshop at PlayPenn.  He’s an adjunct professor at Villanova, where he’s got access to an entire crop of graduate theater students — if we assume that Villanova trains its dramaturgy students worth a damn (which, what the hell, let’s assume that), then we can conclude that there is essentially a platoon of smart, eager people who would be thrilled beyond belief to say that they’d been able to work on the development of one of Hollinger’s plays.

Seriously, I mean, he’s a regular for serious playwright; they do his plays all over the country.  If you were trying to get a job as a dramaturg, being able to say that you helped develop one of those plays would be the crown jewel of your resume.

Not only that!  Villanova University has an entire theater that they don’t use at all during the Summer.  And, Michael Hollinger probably has a number of theaters that would be willing (nay, excited, even!) to host productions of his newest play.  Even if they couldn’t call it a world premiere, I think he could probably get people interested.  Maybe he’d have to offer a discount or something, I don’t know.

The point is:  is PlayPenn helping Michael Hollinger get attention for his new play?  Or is Michael Hollinger helping PlayPenn get attention for their workshop?  Maybe he’s sharing his reputation with other playwrights that are on the billing, too, I don’t know.  This must be how it works — come for the Michael Hollinger and Bruce Graham, stay for the Nick Wardigo.

All of this is pursuant, of course, to the question of: what happens next?  Hollinger and Graham will probably be able to find people to produce their newly-developed scripts, but the odds for other playwrights aren’t so great.  You’d have to garner a LOT of interest at a reading like this for it to lead to a production (and, of course, critics aren’t really invited, so you won’t get attention outside the actual audience that came to see the play), and I can’t say for sure, but I don’t know that that happens very often.

This is a peril of “attention” — leaving PlayPenn out (I don’t know their success rate) and talking instead about a hypothetical theater company that does more than just developmental workshops:  the primary reason to do a playreading series like this is that it’s cheap.  It costs nothing, you usually don’t even have to pay the playwrights, and its something that you can add right into your schedule.  Based on a content model similar to…well, we’ll call it the Blog Model:  that it’s less important that everything you do be good than it is that you be consistent about it.  Based on a content model like that, theater companies can gain value out of a playreading series even if they don’t charge tickets (which they sometimes do, anyway).  Just having it on the schedule helps you build a consistent audience by reminding them that you exist.

(Also:  you can probably get development grants for that; you’re probably not supposed to use those grants for anything but specifically development, but I think that nonprofit budgets get a little fuzzy on stuff like that.)

The problem is, a theater company building its consistent audience doesn’t necessarily have anything to offer the specific playwrights who submit; the company will have to get a whole new crop of plays next year, anyway, and I don’t think it happens that often (again, around here) that a play goes from staged reading to “in the season” — on account of how most theater companies will lean towards the value in “known” plays than towards the value in “new” plays.  Playwrights are left crossing their fingers and hoping that a producer or artistic director, sitting in the audience for the staged reading, will see the new piece and become so excited about it that she’ll immediately shoehorn it into her next season.

Because after that, what do you do with your play?  Having had staged readings or developmental workshops (except, I guess at Steppenwolf, or something) doesn’t get your play any more credit at the many, many theaters you have to submit your script to.  It’s nice to have a staged reading, I suppose, but it’s rarely more than a blip on the radar of getting your work produced.

So, as a playwright, let me answer my own question:  what is the point of staged readings?  Basically, nothing, unless you’ve got a theater that you really like and you want to help them make some money.  With a budget of about a thousand dollars, and something like twelve rehearsals (interesting fact:  only FIVE rehearsals with the entire cast!), we’ve gotten more out of Empress of the Moon than any staged reading.  The fact of the matter is, if you want to see how a play works, you need to DO IT.  There are no two ways about this; everything that isn’t DOING THE PLAY is just folderol.

Therefore, I am declaring a moratorium on staged readings.  If you actually care about your play, if you actually care about the work, and not just the personal satisfaction of praise and a pat on the head from some strangers, then scrape the money together and DO THE PLAY.

But, I forgot about that and, thinking the actors might like to chew on some material a little more substantial than “How did you learn all those lines?” and “What do you do for your real job?” I posed a question about the Nazi musical number in the middle of the play.  I phrased it fairly tactfully, in a bumbling, uncertain way, because I didn’t want people to feel like I was “attacking” them (this is an issue that needs to be addressed some time in the future), but what the question amounted to was:

“Why do you think it’s a good idea to have a hilarious Nazi musical in the middle of the play?”

Now, as I mentioned before, talk-backs aren’t really for serious discussions; the actors and director mostly revealed that they hadn’t thought about it, and that they really were doing the play because it had been very successful on Broadway.  And, hey, that’s a reason.  That is definitely a reason to do a play.

One of the actors asked, “What better way to mock the horror of the Nazis?”  Which is an interesting question, because it gets right to the heart of the issue:  ”Why is mocking the horror the best thing to do with it?”

Now, I’m under no illusions.  Maybe in the Olde Dayes, Mel Brooks was different, but there’s no question that The Producers musical is in NO WAY a contribution to the artistic landscape.  Mel Brooks is in the business of Mel Brooks, and he’ll make anything into a play on Broadway if he thinks he’ll get a dollar out of it.  So, the reason that there’s a Nazi musical in The Producers is because the movie was about two guys making a Nazi musical, the end, no additional consideration required.

There are some interesting discrepancies, though.  Remember the movie of The Producers?  How, right after the “Springtime for Hitler” number, there’s a shot of the audience sitting there just completely stunned out of their minds — eyes wide, jaws agape, &c.  It’s only after this moment of complete, uncomprehending astonishment that they conclude that the play is the funniest thing they’ve seen in their lives (if I recall the movie correctly, Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder go to the bar after the first act confident that the play is going to bomb).

It’s clear in the movie that the audience concludes that the play is a satire ONLY because they couldn’t possibly believe that someone could make a play like this and mean it.

This is very different from the musical, because there’s no way to effectively simulate that audience response onstage — or, well, there are ways (you could have a projection in the background, for instance) but none of them are very good.  The consequence of this is that, while in the movie the audience is using humor to account for their disbelief, in the play people just think it’s funny.

Which is interesting.  The movie sort of neatly parallels what we can assume were that attitudes of, if not Brooks’ himself, certainly many of his contemporaries regarding the Nazis.  Astonishment — a kind of mind-blowing horror — followed by the natural mechanism of humor.  The sense of overwhelming relief at being free from the danger, laughter as a way of processing danger.  The mind, in order to restore normal function after a terrifying or traumatic event, can denude the power of the memory by making it laughable.  Humor is a shield that we use to protect ourselves from terror (I’ve written more about the Horror/Humor Problem elsewhere).

This does draw attention to the fact, though, that it’s NOT the Olde Dayes.  See, there’s a few key differences between Mel Brooks and most of the people that worked on and were in this show (the one that I saw, I’ll leave the Broadway production out of it):

1)  Mel Brooks is Jewish.

2)  Mel Brooks was born in 1926.

Mel Brooks, and his contemporaries who were watching the movie of The Producers in 1968 had first or second-hand experience of the Second World War, and of the Nazis.  The Holocaust was a just-healed wound forty years ago.

Meaning:  Mel Brooks needed to process the Nazis.  You and I (well, maybe you, I don’t know how old you are) don’t.  For us, there is no direct experience of the horror that needs to be worked on by the humor mechanism.  We talk about how certain people are privileged to make certain jokes because of their experiences, but I’m starting to think that it’s actually a reasonable thing to consider.

There’s something that feels disingenuous to me about my laughing at Nazi jokes, in much the same way that it feels disingenuous for me to participate in St. Patrick’s Day — like I’m laying claim to experiences that aren’t really mine.

All of this begs the question:  if we’re not using humor in The Producers to process actual horror, then what are we using it for?  Which brings me back to that actor’s response (“What better way to mock the horror?”) — and since we haven’t got actual horror, let’s replace it with “Nazis.”  ”What better way to mock the Nazis?”

So, is that a good idea?  Neil Gaiman points out in his novel, Anansi Boys, that good ridicule actually makes the subject itself ridiculous.  It’s a good way of stopping any one thing from getting to serious — and humor has a long history of functioning like this.  Of course, there is something pretty funny about the Nazi musical part of the play (I especially like the bit where the dancing girls come out with zeppelins and Bavarian pretzels on their heads), but it’s a serious question as to how effective and useful a technique this is.

Because it’s probably very effective at mocking Nazi iconography; it’s just not so good at mocking all of the things that actually made the Nazis dangerous.  It doesn’t help us to think anti-Semitism is ridiculous, or Fascism is ridiculous (and here I mean “ridiculous” in the sense that, if someone asked you to become a fascist, you’d say, “No, that’s ridiculous”).  We just start associating Nazi uniforms with dancing girls that have pretzels on their heads, and that would be great if anyone still publicly used Nazi iconography to support their politics.

My worry, ultimately, is that techniques like this actually make the real dangers of the Nazi party insidious; by attacking the iconography, the actual philosophy is able to slip away, unnoticed.  Once we start to think of the Nazis as a joke, and once we’ve started to think of the Nazis as primarily about the uniforms they wore, then we stop worrying about what they thought.  I suppose if you had to boil it down (loathe as I am to boil things down):  most of us haven’t had to experience the Holocaust or the rise of Nazism; shouldn’t we continue to think it’s horrific?