A Stretch

Last weekend I read a new play, submitted to me by a good writer with whom I'm acquainted. Even before I started reading though, I had to call this writer to clarify: was this really a one-act play? Was it really intended to be performed without intermission? It's 91 pages long!

She told me that in Buffalo, where she's currently enjoying a very well-received world premiere, the producing theatre company had opted to split her "Play in One Act" to allow for a break. I told her I thought that was a good idea and then sat down to read it.

The Buffalo company made the right choice. Preliminarily, I'd feared that this writer, who'd previously worked mostly in print fiction and journalism, might not have had the playwriting instinct to sufficiently feel out the arcs of the play that make an intermission feasible. Fortunately she turns out to be savvier that I gave her credit for, and Buffalo's director found a great place to drop in the break.

The whole thing got me to thinking, though. This play (which I'm quite consciously not naming at the moment as I'm selfishly guarding it so that Halcyon might consider mounting it...it's really good) is running at a buck forty-five...far shorter than a lot of contemporary films, especially the Oscar-y ones. Why does it need an intermission? Cinemas rarely offer intermissions (I think they stopped for five or ten when I went to see Braveheart and Schindler's List). It can't possibly be that live theatre audiences have a shorter attention span than the movie-going crowd. Can't we expect a good, smart viewer to sit tight for the duration of a good, smart play?

I bounced the question off of Tony, who very succinctly listed a lot of great, mechanical sorts of rationales. Movie viewers take their own breaks, he pointed out, getting up and pushing past other folks for that familiar fifty-yard-dash. It's certainly easier to do in a big, dark, anonymous cinema with newly renovated stadium seating than it would be in most of our North Side Storefronts, where one often has to walk on or through the stage just to leave the room.

As I continued to ponder it, though, I decided that fixing the traffic flow for antsy-dancy audience members wouldn't satisfy me. There's another (big) factor to consider.

I think that a good play demands a relationship with the audience that film doesn't ask. We've all heard folks like Francis Hodge and Harold Clurman refer to the audience as "the other actor" or some such. When I participate in a play, I hope, if not expect, that the audience will also participate, cerebrally and emotionally, on a level that they wouldn't if they were home with Netflix and Doritos. Especially as a director, I want to wipe you out. I want you to leave the theatre feeling something equivalent to leaving the gym: satisfied, fulfilled, better for having showed up, but at the same time, like you've exerted something. If the play is good and the production is good, the audience will be working. Unfortunately I've yet to come across the theatre that pays its audience. Thus, you'll need and deserve a stretch somewhere in there.