The Harsh Realities Served with a Pie in the Face

Contributed by Vincent Marano

In college during the plague years that was the Reagan presidency, my friends and I competed in forensic tournaments where students did excerpts of plays for fun and glory. Called either Single-Interpretation of Drama (one person show) or Duo-Interpretation (for a two hander) the goal was to get the gist of the play across in 10 minutes, in the most entertaining way possible.  Most schools would pick one or two edited scenes. Our school pioneered the approach of boiling down the entire work into one scene, beginning with the first line of the play and ending with the last line. The intended effect of editing the drama this way, according to our team captain, was that the character’s should “laugh, laugh, laugh… then they all die.”

Looking at New York plays this and last season; on and off –off Broadway, the stylistic hybrid of low comedy and high tragedy seems to be the norm.  From August: Osage County to Detroit, from MotherF**Ker With a Hat to Clyburne Park, playwrights are jamming as many yuks into the torturous lives of their characters as possible.

Whether it’s borderline absurdist-Gran Guingnol of Martin McDonagh or dystopian giggle-fest of the next Anthony Rapp Fable, playwrights (and their directors) find the funny bone in decapitation and the smile in electroshock therapy. 

While one could argue that this trend just mirrors the general gallows humor that pervades a world in recession (both economic and social). I think that this choice is more one of dramatic expediency. For a play to get noticed it is not enough to be well-crafted, about important ideas, charged with a wealth of human emotion; it has to be brutal and irreverent. Essentially, drama with BO. Our collective tolerance for violence, our collective indulgence of the crude and vulgar, and our collective obsession with art that wallows in “the edgy, the raw, the primordial,” makes the subtle and the cerebral the stuff of the Classics shelf at the Drama Book Shop. 

Burying the Unities for Good: How Agitprop Changed My Life

Contributed by Vincent Marano

In theater, the adjective “life-changing,” is clichéd and often overused. I remember a lot of great performances; Fiona Shaw in Medea, Al Pacino in Salome, Ian McKellan in Amadeus, and great plays: anything by Mac Rogers, August Wilson or Athol Fugard; just fill in your favorite.  While inspirational, very few plays or performances caused me to stand at the end of a pier somewhere and stare in to the void, wondering about the worthiness of my talent and the wisdom of my career choice.

However, there is one play that stands out, that changed my view of theater forever, that made me want to write and direct; Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice. I am sure nothing I saw that Wednesday matinee (I called in sick) was terribly original; the epic structure of this play about murders of Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone of San Francisco by Dan White, the use of reporters, news clips and TV monitors (two three-story banks of monitors to be exact!) to convey exposition and force the audience into the action. The absurd characters like as a nun-drag queen Sister Boom Boom (played by a young Wesley Snipes) representing the conscious of the homophobic world at the beginning of the AIDS crisis.

Never mind about my outrage over the viability of the Twinkie-Defense, the pyrrhic pointlessness of the assassinations, the suicide-as-coda which deepened the human tragedy even further, it was the deft audience engagement that struck me.  Here was a big, complex, hugely entertaining piece that touch me like no other theater experience I had before.  It incited and indicted the audience, it leaven the atrocity with irony and gave minor characters a grace that transcended the real events it portrayed.

I thought it was just a trick at first. That Ms. Mann’s theatrical verisimilitude had succeeded in galvanizing my spirit and sense of righteous in much the same way a few drinks and no day job got me to argue over philosophical ephemera until 4 in the morning.  Yes, it was political theater, but, it was so much more. Execution of Justice cracked open my soul and allowed me a few minutes to peak in and see what was I missing.  Good or ill, I have been searching for it ever since.