Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama

ISBN-13: 9781552453131

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Coach House Books

Publication Date: 06-02-2015

Pages: 160

Product Dimensions: 4.80(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.40(d)

Series: Exploded Views

Jordan Tannahill is a playwright, theatre director, and filmmaker. His plays and short films have been presented in theatres, festivals, and galleries across Canada and internationally. He received the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama for his book Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays. In collaboration with William Ellis, Jordan runs the alternative art-space Videofag, out of a defunct barbershop in Toronto's Kensington Market.

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Theatre of the Unimpressed

In Search of Vital Drama

COACH HOUSE BOOKS

Boredom

The Boring Play

The ninety-second person I spoke to in my year-long investigation of English-language theatre was a man – I think his name was Derek – who attended an orgy I organized in Montreal. I was in town doing some teaching and, as you do when you have a hotel room to yourself, I put an ad on Craigslist. Perhaps because it was a Tuesday night, perhaps because of the blizzard raging outside or perhaps because people don't really use Craigslist for anonymous sex anymore, it was a bit of a bust. Derek was the first to arrive, right at the stroke of ten. He was a fairly average-looking white guy in his mid-thirties with a slight paunch and a patchy five-o'clock shadow. As we sat on my couch in our underwear, waiting for others to arrive, we made small talk. We talked about his tattoo regret (he did have some bad ones). He told me he was in IT, and then asked what I did. 'I'm a playwright, mostly,' I said. He said that the last play he'd seen involved a lot of audience participation, something he hated. 'I'm more of a watcher,' he confessed. Which, once the three other guys arrived, turned out to be quite true.

A lacklustre orgy suffers from all of the same problems as boring theatre. People go through the motions, they do what's expected, they make the sounds they're supposed to make, but it's really not as surprising or exhilarating as you hope or imagine it will be. I mean, there are so many people in the room! How can we not be making something great happen here? Obviously sex is not the problem, just like theatre is not the problem. We've got all the ingredients to make something really dynamite, but we're just not getting it right. Most of us are left on the sidelines watching, trying to get off, getting bored, giving up and going home ungratified. Like a bad sex partner, boring theatre doesn't feel present. The actors do not feel truly in the same room as you. You are not affecting the action and the action is not affecting you. The actors might as well be onscreen, and you might as well be watching porn.

'I don't have the attention span for theatre,' says Paul, a tattooed thirty-something with a handlebar moustache sitting next to me one day at Toronto's Bellwoods Barbers. I've mentioned I was a playwright while bantering with my barber, and Paul offered the reflection unprompted. He admits he has never really given theatre 'a fair shake.' I ask him why, and he recalls a production of a George Bernard Shaw play he saw in university (he doesn't remember the title). 'It was a real play with a capital P, you know?' Paul says. 'Big dresses, set pieces. I fell asleep. It was an expensive nap. I'm sure there are plays that are more to my liking, but since then I just haven't had any drive to go. I guess I've been sort of off theatre ever since.'

For many of the people I spoke with over the year, theatre was simply something they'd decided, a long time ago, they were not that into. It was a position I initially found difficult to grasp. 'You mean all theatre?' I asked. How could someone write off an entire art form? When I pried further, I invariably elicited recollections of a defining moment, often in adolescence or young adulthood, in which my interlocutors were exposed to the boring play. And this boring play marked them as non-theatregoers for life. A single play! It seems the boring play can be a formative event. Those two tedious hours frittered away at a kitchen-sink drama set in a prairie farmhouse, or a roommate's commedia dell'arte show at a Fringe Festival, can leave even the most patient of us whispering promises of 'never again.' In many cases, the plays themselves, I was reassured, were not even that terrible: a suitably accomplished university production of a Noel Coward play, a sturdy new Holocaust drama at a regional playhouse, a competent Shakespeare in the Park. Mostly these plays were described in fairly flat, even innocuous, terms: 'a little dry' or 'nothing special.' And yet these productions were still enough for some people to determine that theatre was simply not for them.

Later that same afternoon, feeling a little insecure about my haircut, I take the ferry to the Toronto Islands. An elderly man with a fancy bike strikes up a conversation. I tell him I'm on my way to rehearse a play, a site-specific theatre production taking place in multiple locations across the island. He tells me he's never heard of plays like that. I ask him how often he attends the theatre, and he says, 'Never. I would see more theatre if people weren't yelling at me,' he adds. 'I hate people yelling.' He eventually admits he is referring to a particularly unpleasant drama he saw in the late eighties. He can't remember the theatre or the name of the play. All he can remember is how much he hated the shouting.

Granted, sometimes it can be a more gradual reckoning, as was the case with Mike Davidson, my childhood best friend and a custodian at an Ottawa high school. With his diminutive stature, white-blond hair, alabaster skin, starched shirts and ironed slacks, Mike reminds me of a dapper mouse. And like the young janitorial protagonist in Good Will Hunting, he is something of a savant, though his distaste for school saw him never pursue higher education. Mike and I used to see a lot of plays together in high school, and staged a few ourselves (most memorably one involving a child-eating swamp monster living in the Louisiana bayou). I paid Mike a visit on his night shift. When I arrived, he was mopping the worn wooden stage of the school's auditorium, framed on either side by theatre curtains the colour of urine. 'There's about a half ton of dust in those things,' he said, chuckling. The school's drama department was getting ready for an eighty-minute production of Les Misérables. I noticed a few sad-looking risers and flats, painted to appear like weathered Parisian stone, huddled in the darkened wings. 'When I was a teenager I was really eager to immerse myself in whatever culture the city had to offer,' Mike said, running his mop along the lip of the stage. 'I thought theatre might be my thing and I saw probably a few dozen plays in high school. Professional plays. But they were a series of disappointments. Like these plays had no lifeblood in them or something. So eventually I stopped going.'

The more friends and strangers I asked, the more defining encounters with the boring play I unearthed, and, in many cases, these plays had forever influenced the individual's perception of theatre. It seemed that theatre was held to a different standard than other art forms. It's unlikely we'd dismiss music if we found ourselves at a dull concert one night. Many of us will sit through an underwhelming film and will recover, almost immediately, with our appreciation of cinema resolutely intact, understanding certain films will simply resonate less strongly with us than others. When we walk through a large art gallery, we make decisions for ourselves about which artists, eras, styles or mediums we feel drawn to: we can see the diversity of the form laid out before us. This is how we cultivate a sense of personal taste. The boring play, on the other hand, seems exceedingly more difficult to recover from or forgive.

There are some obvious reasons for this. Music and film can be internationally disseminated far more readily than theatre. Access to the finest work of musicians and filmmakers from around the world is now only ever a few computer key clicks away. With theatre, however, we are mostly limited to experiencing work made by local practitioners, of which only a fraction will be of international calibre. Because of the regional nature of theatre production, we are also more likely to know the artists making the work, and thus more likely to see plays involving friends, the children of friends, colleagues and community groups with which we are affiliated (and also, then, more likely to be attending out of personal obligation). It's ridiculous to judge the medium based on these experiences alone, but many of us do. If we only listened to a couple of college bands in our life – the music our boyfriends or the children of our friends made – we might assume all music was middling.

And to state the obvious about the subjective nature of taste: there's going to be a lot more of something that you dislike than you like. More songs that leave you ambivalent than the ones you turn the radio up for. More books that you pass over at the library than the ones you check out. More paintings you do not hang on your wall than the ones you do. The fact is, most of us do not see very many plays, so the odds are that the few we do take a chance on might not turn our crank.

But what is it that gives uninspired plays such power to permanently ward off audiences? For starters, a major source of discomfort for audiences of boring plays comes from watching actors trapped within them. We may assume they're aware of their unfortunate situation and be compelled to feel sympathy toward them. However, we may also be embarrassed on their behalf or even resent them for their part in inflicting the boring play upon us.

'As an actor you don't always know you're in a boring movie until it's done,' the playwright and performer Emily Pearlman tells me over breakfast in her Ottawa apartment. 'When you're filming a specific scene, you can really commit to doing your job in that moment. But if you're in a boring play, and you've seen the conclusion of it, the third time you have to do it you're like, "Here I am, doing this boring play again." And I'm sure that the audience sees that and takes it on.' It's quite a different experience watching a shitty movie while eating popcorn in your basement – time, distance and the lack of shared physical space nullify any proxy embarrassment. A boring play, on the other hand, is happening in the present tense and actors are stuck inside it like a sinking ship.

There's also something uniquely unpleasant about being held captive, physically, by the boring play. You can't simply put down, pause or skip over a play. Only with great disruption can you walk out of a theatre (and walking out is further complicated if you are there out of obligation). This sense of physical confinement and claustrophobia is a recurring motif when people talk about their experience of the boring play. Emblematic is this answer by Tom Gernholdt, a gregarious, ruddy-faced native of Shreveport, Louisiana, who I found waiting in line for tickets with his wife, Irene, to the London West End production of Matilda: 'There's that moment when you realize you're only ten minutes into an hour-long stinker and you're suddenly aware of the fact that, shit, you're literally trapped in a sea of people – eight people on one side of you, five or six on the other side, blackness all around, you feel like you can't breathe – and you just wanna bust outta there. But you're not going anywhere. That's when I usually just close my eyes and begin formulating my fantasy baseball team.'

But perhaps the primary source of discomfort conjured by the boring play is the very thing that makes theatre so vital and unique: as audiences, we are participants in the event. By feeding the emotional and atmospheric dynamic of a performance, we play an integral role in a play's realization. When an artist takes a risk, we take a risk with them. And when they fail or succeed, we fail or succeed with them.

As Canadian actor and musician Torquil Campbell put it on CBC Radio's Q in May 2014: '[Theatre is] the only art form that lets you be a direct participant, a complicit, active person in the making of it. If you give birth listening to a Carole King record, that Carole King record will be exactly the same the next time you listen to it. If you give birth in a theatre, that matinee is going to come to a stop. You affect what is happening in that space. You are part of building an invisible web of assumed truth, and your physical self can have an effect on that illusion; it can support or crush it. Theatre lets you have agency. When you are there, you are part of what's happening. You can make a piece of art with the people up onstage.'

And in the case of the boring play, we find ourselves assisting in a dud. The dud becomes ours. We have permitted and tacitly condoned, by our paid presence and observation of it, its existence in the world.

How and why do certain plays fall short in their attempts to engage us? Where do boring plays come from and what can we learn from them? If boring plays have the ability to turn people off theatre altogether, they are powerful forces to reckon with, and something we need to understand, as both theatre practitioners and audiences.

To begin to answer these questions, let me to return to Amy. She is actively engaged in culture: she reads, she visits galleries, she enjoys cinema, she keeps abreast of new music. So she hopes, when she does attend a play, that the production is similarly aware of contemporary cultural and aesthetic currents. She hopes the creators will expect that they are dealing with a savvy audience weary of plays that reduce complex socio-political issues to sentimentality and cliché. She hopes, for instance, that she won't be stuck seeing a production of Alfred Uhry's Driving Miss Daisy.

This popular chestnut, written in 1989, is my definition of a boring play. Its plot is simple: a testy Jewish widow from Atlanta befriends her Uncle Tom-like black chauffeur in the turbulent quarter-century that passes between 1948 and 1973. But for anyone with even a fleeting familiarity with the complexities of American racial politics, it's a numbing experience. It underestimates its audience's capacity to think abstractly, profoundly, with nuance. In place of truth and genuine discovery, it offers tired narrative and representational tropes. It's a play in which nothing surprising can occur because its intent is so legible. We begin to feel smarter than the play, divesting emotionally and intellectually until we are completely outside of it, checking our watches, desperately waiting for the curtain to drop.

Sometimes a play can feel misguided and unnecessary simply because it's the wrong fit for a time and place. Dozens of professional companies around the world programmed Driving Miss Daisy in their 2013–2014 season, including Vancouver's Arts Club Theatre. Why? What did this play have to say about Vancouver's very real problems with race and class? Some might argue that it's a timeless story. But for a work to be timeless it must also reflect meaningfully on present circumstance; a work's timelessness is, in fact, activated by its timeliness.

Despite the best efforts of a theatre to suggest otherwise (programming Driving Miss Daisy during Black History Month, for instance), importing historic American race plays hardly encourages thoughtful discourse about Canadian race politics (or, for that matter, Australian, English, German, etc.), and offers little more than rosy-lensed nostalgia. At worst, such plays are socially irresponsible, leaving audiences feeling they have encountered, negotiated and reached some cathartic resolution regarding these politics without actually having to ask hard questions about their own community. And in the incendiary wake of Michael Brown's and Eric Garner's deaths at the hands of white police officers in the summer of 2014, a conventional production of Driving Miss Daisy that in no way subverts the text now seems nothing short of obscene.

There are many other harbingers of the boring play, and often, through repeated exposure, we develop efficient and personalized systems of detection. An adjective that repeatedly came up in my interviews with fellow theatre creators was laziness. 'I think a bad play is a lazy play,' says Maiko Bae Yamamoto of Vancouver's Theatre Replacement. 'Lazy in that it might only offer the bare minimum and neglects to prod deeper or try to push through an initial idea or concept.' Yamamoto, who artistic directs the company with collaborator James Long, has an impossibly youthful, almost elfin appearance that belies her fifteen years as a leading theatrical innovator in Canada. Theatre Replacement has been anything but lazy, creating challenging and inventive performances like The Greatest Cities in the World, in which the company travelled to several small towns in Tennessee named after great cities: London, Paris, Rome, Bogota, Moscow. Through a vast collection of photos, videos and interviews with local residents, the company created a wildly entertaining and heart-rending documentary theatre piece about the things that bind us together as humans, no matter where we call home.

With the endearing stutter of a man whose mind moves twice the speed of his mouth, Toronto-based theatre artist Jacob Zimmer, thirty-nine, describes the precise moment he falls out of love with a play: 'House to half. Stage to half. House out. Stage out. Shuffle shuffle shuffle. Lights up. I'm done! I'm done entirely!' Zimmer is referring to the parochial tradition of slowly dimming the house lights and stage lights to suggest that a play is starting, while the actors sneak onstage in the darkness. 'If you want to use a curtain, use a curtain! Curtains are fucking great!' Zimmer's eyes widen behind his horn-rimmed glasses and he bursts into a reedy laugh. 'But house to black? That to me says: Okay, the playwright can't write an entrance and the director doesn't give a shit about my experience and is just going to let the same-old same-old happen.' Through Small Wooden Shoe, which Zimmer describes as a 'mostly theatre company,' he creates variety shows, podcasts, blogs and plays. He is perhaps best known in Canadian theatre circles for Dedicated to the Revolutions, a cycle of seven plays in which a group of actors playfully explore the societal impact of seven revolutions – Gutenberg, Copemican, Newtonian, Industrial, Darwinian, Nuclear and Information – with the aid of microphones, white boards, tin-can telephones, songs, unrehearsed questions and a jumble of 'things we found around the house.' 'For me, lazy theatre lacks a point of view and lacks specificity,' Zimmer says. 'It's specificity and surprise that lead to entertainment and interest.'

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Excerpted from Theatre of the Unimpressed by Jordan Tannahill. Copyright © 2015 Jordan Tannahill. Excerpted by permission of COACH HOUSE BOOKS.
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