Being the Final Grievance (hooray!) Against Tectonic Theater
During this Festivus Season
I was having a conversation a while back with an acquaintance of mine who also studies The Laramie Project. Dr. F, as I'll call her, is this beautiful, crazy, wonderful, innovative rhetoric and composition professor in our department, and she's a theater fanatic on the side. Our chat eventually wandered over to Angels in America, a play which we both love, and she started talking about staging."One thing I've noticed about American theater right now," she told me, "is that most directors don't seem to trust their audiences as much as those abroad." I had to ask for clarification on what she meant. "Well, take the Central Park encounter in Angels," she responded. "When I was studying in London, I saw a production where the two actors in that liaison were on opposite sides of the stage. They just trusted the audience to make the connection about what's going on without having to stage the action with each other or even act it out. It made that moment of sex look as disconnected and lonely as it really was." Having seen the Laramie production of Angels, I could really see her point, where that sexual encounter was enacted on a platform between the actor playing Louis and Jed Schultz.
"Most of the plays I saw in London played fast and loose with the directing, which opened up the stage to all sorts of new possibilities," she continued. "But that meant that they had to lean on the audience to make the connective leap. I really haven't seen a lot of theater here in the States that is willing to trust their audiences quite like that."
Trusting the audience. Although I'm a little on the fence about her judgment of American theater, I've been mulling those words over for quite a while now. What's more, I think I'm starting to see a connection to that idea with some of the aesthetic differences I have with The Laramie Project. As I've been working through my "Airing of Grievances," I've started to notice a few patterns; sure, I have problems with the structure of the play and how the concept relates to Laramie as both a community and place, but there's something else here, too, that has more to do with the structure of the play itself.
I think that maybe 1) these people are incredible, brilliant, and talented writers with a clear interest in dramatic form, and 2) these form-driven dramatists are afraid to trust their audiences too much with the factually ambiguous story of Matt's murder. Perhaps, Tectonic wants to tell a story of cause/effect through Laramie's voices, but the narratives we have don't lend themselves to it, and the only way to get their voices to tell that cause/effect story is to push them that way. This problem of overworking, strangely, has an element of narrative and truth to it, too: Tectonic's willing to let narrative drive most of their play, so long it never gives any doubt about the forensic facts of the murder, of the cause and its effect. A fear about the fragility of forensic truth might be forcing them to heavily edit the narrative truth.
And so, I hereby submit my final charge against Tectonic Theater regarding their production of The Laramie Project and 10 Years Later, which I guess isn't really a bad thing at all:
#4: Trying Too Damn Hard
Maybe this is just a difference of aesthetic taste on my part, and on that note, failure to meet the needs of my literary palate shouldn't really be a grievance per se. Nevertheless, it's a concern I want to discuss.
Okay, so I know I keep wandering back to South Africa's apartheid past and the TRC whether it fits or not, but hey, it's the only analogue to narrative and determining truth I can comfortably speak about. So, here goes...
