Confronting The Past: Notes
On Seeing A Twenty Year Old Play
by John Olive
I once had the honor to meet the great Tennessee Williams.
It was in the early 1980s, not long before his death.
I was working at a theater in Chicago, Wisdom Bridge,
and he came to see their production of A
Streetcar Named Desire (which featured John Malkovich as Mitch). Mr.
Williams was gracious, complimenting everyone in his
unforgettable, honey-rich southern accent. He even laughed
southern style, a deep rumbling chuckle that filled the
small theater. He genuinely enjoyed seeing, no doubt
for the umpteenth time, his 1947 masterwork.
This astonishes me, because I have always found the
experience of sitting through a production of one of
my older plays to be excruciatingly painful. I squirm.
I berate myself. For God's sake, Olive, why didn't you
cut that, rewrite that, make that moment clearer, this
moment less overstated, etc? Certainly, bad productions
are harder to sit through than good ones – and
I've had some stinkers – but even good productions
are difficult.
This isn't at all the case when I'm working on something
new. I love preview performances. You can see actors
making discoveries onstage, feel the play growing, literally
as you watch. You can gauge the audience's reaction and
gain a sense of which scenes work, which are too long,
etc. Opening nights can be marvelous, the culmination
of months, sometimes even years of work. But once a play
is up and running and once I've finished working on it
I dread going to the theater.
Why should this be? All plays have flaws, so why can't
I accept mine and enjoy the fact that a theater has thought
enough of the piece to take it on for production, that
some good actors have lent their energy and talent to
making the thing work? No doubt this is evidence of deep
and abiding character deficiency. Still, there it is.
So I try to avoid going to my plays, pleading the press
of other work, family obligations that prevent me from
traveling, etc. When it can't be avoided I go and I conduct
myself with Williamsesque grace. But I'm miserable.
You can imagine, then, my trepidation when I heard – someone
mentioned it to me in passing – that a prominent
local community theater, Theatre in the Round, had announced
my The Voice of the Prairie for their 06-07 season. I
checked out their website and there it was, February
16-March 11. Prairie was written in 1986. It's one of
my "paycheck plays"; there's been, I would
guess, more than 200 productions. But I hadn't seen it
since it played (briefly) off-Broadway in 1991.
My initial strategy to avoid seeing the play depended
on that trusty standby, my ego: I'm not going to call
them. They will have to call me. Hmph. It seemed a successful
stratagem, too. The time for auditions passed. The time
for the first read-through came and went. February 16,
opening night, approached. No word from TRP. Friends
began asking, "Hey, how's Voice of the Prairie?" to
which I responded, affecting a snooty tone, "Well,
I don't know. They haven't called me."
Then they called me. Less than a week before opening.
Steve Antenucci, TRP's executive director, left a message
on my machine wondering if I would be available to do
an interview with a reporter from MPR. I called him back
(right away) and said I wouldn't be comfortable speaking
to a journalist about the production unless I'd had a
chance to talk to the director. Fifteen minutes later
the director (Lynn Musgrave) called me.
We had a terrific conversation in which I became acutely
aware of the ravages of time. Lynn had been living and
breathing The Voice of
the Prairie for weeks and she
bubbled on about this scene, and that character, and
this transition, and these lines of dialogue, and that
design issue, and I finally had to stop her to say, "I
don't know what you're talking about. At this point you
know more about this play than I do." She invited
me to a rehearsal.
And so one frigid February evening I made my way to
Theatre in the Round on Seven Corners. It was the first
rehearsal
after techs and the company was burned out and exhausted.
Several of them suffered with debilitating colds. They
slowly worked their way through the first act. I noted
that there were a number of potentially strong performances
but it was hard to tell because energy was low and the
atmosphere subdued.
After the work-through Lynn gathered everyone in the
house and I conducted an informal Q&A, answering
questions about the play, what I could remember about
its genesis, the first production with Jimmy Lawless
and Kevin Kling, my take on the characters. The actors
were, as are all the actors I work with these days, polite,
quiet-spoken, respectful, attentive to a fault.
Which, I must say, pisses me off. All in all, being
middle-aged is wonderful. To finally feel grown up, to
know what's
really important – family – gets your feet
planted on solid ground and sees you through the vicissitudes
of the writer's life. But one definite negative of getting
older has been the change in my relationship with actors.
Actors have always been, and continue to be, one of the
great joys of my life. But they no longer treat me as
a collaborator, a fellow artist, an equal. Now I'm more
in the nature of a visiting dignitary. They call me "Mr.
Olive." I clear my throat and the room goes quiet.
You don't invite a visiting dignitary out for beers.
You don't share gossip with him. You don't make friends
with him. I can't pinpoint exactly when this started
but it happens all the time now and I don't like it.
My son Michael, bless him, agreed to accompany me to
opening night. As we sat in the house, watching the (largely
elderly) audience take their seats, I felt the familiar
dread building. What am I doing here? This is going to
be painful. My mouth went dry and I felt a clammy perspiration,
sometimes referred to as flop sweat. Michael, who is
generally oblivious to the nuances of my moods, asked, "Dad,
are you okay?"
"Oh, sure, Doodle, thanks for asking."
The house lights buzzed down. The play began.
It was, on many levels, painful. How many times is
Leon going to say, "Radio is the wave of the future"?
Did I really think "It fell off a truck in Saskatchewan" was
funny? Couldn't I see that the scene when David tells
his first radio story is endless?
But then I became aware of something: I no longer automatically
knew what was coming next. Instead of, Okay, yes, next
is the scene when Frankie locks Davey in the barn, it
was: what happens next? Oh, right, Frankie locks Davey
in the barn. This may seem a minor distinction, but it
changed my experience of the play. For the first time
I was seeing The Voice of the Prairie with a sense of
discovery. And I have to say that I rather liked it.
The story unfolds in surprising ways. The characters
are really endearing. The play has flaws, God knows,
but I can understand why it's popular. I became aware
for similar reasons that the actors were very very good
and that several of them – Rob Frankel, Rachel
Finch, Garry Geiken in particular – were the equal
of any actors I've ever seen in the play. I became aware
of the audience vibe: they liked it. I went back for
one more performance, a few weeks later, followed by
an audience Q&A. This time I didn't dread the experience.
Am I cured now of my neurotic fear of seeing productions
of my old plays? Doubtful. I think there was something
propitious about the timing – I was ready to re-experience
The
Voice of the Prairie. This is the production of the play
that will live in my memory.
I never want to see it again. |
