Theater Reviews:

Our Town Quick Review: This classic American play would work better as a *Twilight Zone* episode.

*Dinner with Friends* Quick Review: It’s rare that drama succeeds so well at creating deep and realistic characters who are neither heroic nor flawed, neither good nor evil, and neither right nor wrong.

It’s not every week one can see live productions of two Pulitzer Prize winning plays in Bloomington. On Friday the 13th, I saw Thorton Wilder’s 1938 classic *Our Town*, which was the debut production of the new Cardinal Theater Company. Then, on Thursday the 19th, Donald Margulies’s *Dinner with Friends* from around the year 2000, and was produced by some weird collaboration between the Bloomington Playrights Project (BPP), the Bloomington Area Arts Council (BAAC, a.k.a. “the Waldron”) and Miro Productions. The contrast between the shows was striking to me, in many ways:

**My personal attitude**: Ok, let me be upfront. The contrast between the two experiences started for me before I got to either of them. Right before *Our Town*, I was unable to print a document I needed and upon investigation received frightening warnings that one of my hard drives was about to crash. I had to leave the disk in limbo to get to the theater in time to meet Kynthia and a gang of other informatics students. They were late, so I ended up walking in and out of the cold rain at the theater looking for them. Eventually I gave up and sat by myself for the first act. (Turns out they got there shortly after it started, and I sat with them for acts two and three).

On Thursday, though, I came home from work feeling tired… took a nap, and wondered if I’d go out. Renee called and encouraged me to join her and Jeremy for *Dinner with Friends*, and sealed the deal by offering to pick me up. That felt good, so I definitely started that experience in a much better mood. However, I honestly believe that these non-treatrical differences do not entirely explain the difference in my experiences.

Hoopla: It’s kind of exciting when someone embarks on an obvious labor-of-love and creates a new professional theater company, even in a town that already offers a huge number of theater productions relative to the potential audience size. Perhaps this is why the producers felt ok about renting the 600-seat Buskirk-Chumley Theater, even though most of the plays I go to in town usually seat between 20-200. Anyway, they got away with it, I was amazed at the size of the crowd. The theater was not quite full, but I’d guess there were about 400 people there… huge, for a local play.

*Dinner with Friends* was produced at the Waldron’s main stage, with the bleachers set up with about 100 seats. I’d guess there were about 60-70 people there, which seemed like a good crowd. But, yeah, a fraction of those at *Our Town*, and clearly the weekend shows weren’t that much bigger.

**Direction**: OK, let me offer some advice to all of you theater directors out there, from a complete schmoe: people talk at the same time as each other. They interrupt each other. They overlap their sentences. They have little micro competitions to see who is going to speak next. Or sometimes no one volunteers to speak next.

Watching the first act of *Our Town*, I was struck by how unnatural all of the acting felt. Were these actors (some, if not all, of whom were being paid union wages, which is very much in contrast to most of the community theater productions in town) just bad? Maybe some were, but because this “not talking at the same time” thing is a pet peeve of mine, I started listening to the pacing of the dialogue.

Line…pause…Line…pause…Line…pause…Line…pause…Line…pause…Line…pause…Line

By and large, the pause between each pair of lines was about the same, I’d guess about .5 seconds. To me, this made the whole thing sound like a first reading, rather than a full production. I remember thinking “well, they are saying all the lines in the correct order.”

As if I needed any further confidence on this belief I hold, *Dinner with Friends* presented just about one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of doing it *right*. Granted, part of this is because the play is partially *about* how people talk with each other, especially close friends and lovers. So, the playright certainly deserves a lot of the credit. But the director (Bruce Burgun) obviously gets it. Sometimes a line starts before the last one ends. Sometimes there are not-that-meaningful long pauses. Sometimes there are meaningful pauses. Sometimes people just deliver multiple lines at the same time. Karen (Francesca Sobrer) and Gabe (Richard Perez) do an excellent job of the classic “married couple trying to tell a story together” bit. Gabe was unbelievably convincing yelling to (the prerecorded voices of) his children asking for help with the VCR. Even the prerecorded voices overlapped on another (and you’ll *never* make a group of kids sound realistic if they aren’t talking at the same time as each other). And, the most obvious and most extreme example was Beth and Tom (Danielle Bruce and Lee Parker) simultaneously screaming their cases at each other during a fight. The dialogue in this play was uncommonly convincing to me, and although this certainly was not the only reason, I really think it’s a big part. So, directors, there’s your free tip from a schmoe.

**Acting**: I don’t have any simple tips for actors, except to convince your directors to let you follow my advice above. Having said that, wow, good acting makes a big difference.

Some of the acting in *Our Town* was really good. The “Stage Manager” (Henry Woronicz) wins my “I kept forgetting he was an actor” award, which is bizarre considering that in real life there are no narrators walking around. Emily (Anjanette Armstrong) and George (Alex Shotts), who I consider in retrospect to be the main characters of the play, also gave great performances. And Emily’s father (sorry! I can’t find the actor’s name!) was particularly convincing and enjoyable to watch as well. But… largely, the rest of the cast didn’t do very much for me. Granted, a main point of this play is for them to be presenting a pretty boring life in a pretty boring town. But, it’s also to talk about the beauty in that boredom, right? I think so, and … I could have gone for a little more beauty and a little less boredom.

*Dinner with Friends* felt like an “All Star” game in contrast. Lee Parker as Tom was probably the weakest, but that’s much more a tribute to how good the rest of the cast was, because he still did a very good job. I remembered Danielle Bruce fondly from her fine portrayal of an atheist liberal arts professor in *Accidental Rapture*, but I think she was even better here as the slightly new-agey fine artist, Beth. I’m familiar with Richard Perez as BPP executive director, frequent director of BPP plays, and general man-about-town in the local theater scene. It was great to see him act for a change, and he did a extremely impressive job overcoming his face recognition to become Gabe. But it was Karen who I kept forgetting was an actor and not really the pretty-happily married but mildly closed-minded woman I was watching. In any event, the whole cast was so good that it almost seems pointless to draw comparisons.

**Script**: The message I took away from *Our Town* was something like “people don’t realize how great their lives are, even when those lives seem terribly boring”. I’m not sure that I’m getting its point entirely, but it’s quite clear that it has something to do with the enjoyment of life. The narrator tells us of a quote from a midwestern poet: “You’ve got to have life to love it, and you’ve got to love life to have it”. Ok, that’s nice. I like that, and it’s stayed with me since I saw the play. But, woah, call me part of the MTV generation, but this seemed like a very long way to send that message. At the end of the first act I was struck by how boring the play was. By the end of the play I realized that act one was supposed to be kind of boring, to make us reflect on whether we appreciate how great our lives are, even when they are boring. Ok, I guess. But, I guess I just didn’t feel like the message made up for it. It’s one thing to appreciate the mundane in my own life, but I don’t think I need to pay money to watch other people’s lives be boring.

I’ve since pictured the same general plot being offered as a *Twighlight Zone* episode, maybe five minutes each devoted to acts one and two, and then fifteen minutes for act three. It wouldn’t seem so long, and the message would still be just as thought-provoking… although probably not as much so as the average episode. Instead, later this year, Bloomington will host the world premiere of an operatic version composed by Ned Rorem, whose musical style, in my opinion, is, uh, well suited to the plot.

*Dinner with friends* is also a play about appreciating life. Instead of a straight-forward message “life is great, more great than you’ll realize in your whole life”, though, this play challenges us to consider what brings us joy. The presentation brought to my mind the contrast between Static and Dynamic Quality that Robert M. Pirsig brought to us in his book *Lila*. Gabe and Karen are clearly happy with their life, but they certainly have issues too. Tom and Beth were clearly unhappy in their marriage, although their issues weren’t entirely different from Gabe and Karen’s. Tom and Beth enter new relationships after their divorce, and they seem sincerely happier than they did before. But they clearly gave up much of the same kinds of good things that keep Gabe and Karen happily together. Did Beth and Tom make a mistake by not trying harder to work things out? Are Gabe and Karen really happily staying together, or might they be happier with the excitement of new relationships? The play doesn’t answer these questions. Rather, it presents us with compelling arguments that each of the characters is “right” about what they are doing, even though their attitudes are conflicting. I feel like it’s pretty common for authors to try to avoid letting us know which of their characters they sympathize with the most. However, I think that it’s rare that an author succeeds in this goal as well as Margulies does here. Each character has flaws and strengths. We’re not left with any sense of heroes or villians. And, in the end, the play leaves us reflecting that life just goes on.

There are reasons that so much Western drama is tales of heroic accomplishment or tragic failure. These stories are naturally compelling. But special appreciation is due to a playright who succeeds at telling us a compelling story that doesn’t follow this compelling template. I think the Pulitzer Prize is well-suited to *Dinner with Friends*. If you have a chance to see it, I definitely recommend it, and I can only hope your production is as good as the one that I saw.