Theater Week

I saw "A Beautiful View" at the Under The Radar Festival -- a little too obsessed with Silence and The Nature of Conversation for my taste. Plus both characters spoke with the name annoying lilt? at the end of each phrase? as if their words were punctuated? with extraneous question marks? It's annoying even in print -- it's much worse when you listen to it for over an hour. The story and characters didn't really grab me either, although some individual scenes were well done. The best was when you see the characters mauled by a bear -- it's done entirely through sound and light effects, particularly a short stunning display of 4 or 5 red lights at the top of the stage accompanied by a fierce growl.

Yesterday, I saw "The Great Divorce" at the Salvation Army theater. It was well done. I mostly delighted in the text, which is very familiar to me. But the acting was well done, and staging was also very creative and effective. At the "talk-back" session afterward, someone asked about turning it into a movie. Some things could probably be done more effectively on film -- in fact, the most powerful scene of the play would work even better on film. But other things I think would be very difficult to do on film, such as the waterfall that is also a water giant. A film-maker would probably do that with CGI, and it could be very well done, but the more realistic the waterfall, the more fake it will look. The waterfall/water giant on stage worked precisely beccause the audience already has to suspend its disbelief to see the waterfall (a long blue cloth draping down from a height over several actors who bounce and gurgle and laugh under the sheet). It's already a bunch of people under a sheet, so then to see that it's one giant human form animating the waterfall is quite believable. To me, it is a tremendously Christian work -- you really can't miss the themes -- and it had an inordinate effect on my theology. But the actors of the Magis Theatre Company are apparently from a number of different faith backgrounds, and they were careful to talk about "spirituality" during the talk-back rather than religion. One actress, who said she is Catholic, reported that her friends and relatives variously thought the play was "Christian", "Hindu", or "Buddhist."