Tonight (it's still tonight because I haven't been to bed yet) was the first night of the playwright's thesis shows. There are two, they're running them in rep. This was to cut down on the amount of work/shows in the season. Instead, they tried to do two shows in half the time with half the people and a pittance of the budget.
Tonight's show was supposed to be the good one. It was directed by Nigerian Richard. I believe I mentioned him here; he taught the directing class I had last year and is an amazing person. The name comes from the fact that he and my undergrad acting teacher could be one and the same person if my undergrad acting teacher had been from Nigeria.
He was outside the theatre before the show (opening night and all that) and asked me where I was hiding. I gave him the brief overview and he said I ought to go down to the elementary school and insist they give me a job. I guess I never realised he paid as much attention to me as he must have.
Anyway, the show. Randy, the guy that wrote it, is an interesting fellow. He wants very much to seem like an edgy dangerous guy, but he's really terribly milquetoast. He does some very nice short pieces, save a tendency to be over-dramatic when it comes to drugs or sex or violence, but this is the first long thing I've seen of his.
I wanted to like it, and there were things about it that were good, but the funny thing is that I could see where Professor Gandalf (the playwrighting prof) had convinced him to make changes. The changes made the play live up to Prof Gandalf's opinion of what a play is, but his definition is very limited, and it didn't help this production in the least. Prof. Gandalf writes linear, sensible, logical plot driven pieces. That's fine if you want to do that, but Randy obviously had something else going on.
Unfortunately, he also got lost halfway through and starting writing a different play. This seems to be the trend with these thesis shows- the two last year were that way, and even Prof Gandalf's play was that way. He started out writing about a question of educational honesty and classroom ethics, and somewhere along the way Lewis Carroll and The Jabberwock dropped in. One or the other is OK, and if you can find a compelling way to make the link, that's OK too, but that's not the case.
Randy had two distinct plays going on, and he could've worked a lot to reconcile them to one another, or he could've gotten rid of the extraneous bits and stuck to the compelling stuff. Problem is that he had maybe forty five minutes of compelling stuff in an almost three hour show.
There's one section that's supposed to be a major reveal for a character. He's supposed to find out that he's a re-incarnation of Kurt Cobain (yeah, whatever, it would take a lot to explain the full text). Problem is, I knew this within the first ten seconds of the play, and so did everyone else with ears. The reveal, however, happens at the top of act two. People laughed, because, well, duh. I guess poor Randy didn't intend this to be funny.
I'm so glad that I'm not there this year. T'was not the place for me. But at the same time, I'm glad I had the one year because it's going to act as a frame of referance later on, I'm sure.
Play number two is tomorrow night. Saturday is the lighted Christmas parade. The Boy is going with me because the committee didn't ask them to enter this year.