Thee, Thou, You

Friend of the Blog William McGrath expands on my theory that Ophelia is pregnant.

I talk about the idea that Hamlet has actually come on stage at the beginning of Act III, scene 1, and therefore hears the King set Ophelia to spy on him: "For we have closely sent for Hamlet hither, that he, as 'twere by accident, may here affront Ophelia." That would explain why Hamlet is so cruel to her after his soliloquy.

But McGrath points out that Hamlet doesn't need to have overheard the King. He's a clever guy; he's been to University at Wittenburg. He's on a "thee" and "thou" basis with Ophelia. That's how he addresses her in love letters. And that's how he first addresses her: "Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered." ('Be sure to pray for all the sins we've committed together.')

But she addresses him as "you": "How does your Lordship for this many a day?"

Hamlet immediately can tell something's up. The only reason she would speak so formally to him is if someone's watching.

From then on, he addresses her as "you.": "I humbly thank you. Well, well, well."

Any Frenchman would immediately notice if his girlfriend called him "vous" instead of "tu."

McGrath:

It would be the equivalent of my lover calling me Mr McGrath. She goes all proper on him. He answers all proper, with a "you" and a big WTF on his mind which the audience must see. For Hamlet it's an a-ha moment. No doubt he looks around and spots some tell-tale sign of somebody hiding behind the curtain. He had been willing to marry her before, but now he feels betrayed. He asks, "Are you honest?" knowing she's not, and then tells her to go to hell, as who wouldn't?

Wow, yes, that makes sense.

I love Shakespeare. The plays are practically bulletproof, if you just read them carefully enough.

Zarathustra Said Some Things, No?

I saw my friends Lina Roessler and Brett Watson appear in ZARATHUSTRA SAID SOME THINGS, NO?, at the Théâtre La Chapelle on Friday. Lina's a real find. I met her on NAKED JOSH, where she was up for three totally different parts and nailed each character. (I'm still bummed she didn't get a bigger part.)

The play is a cheery psychodramas about a pair of deeply messed up people trying to find a perfect day to do themselves in. Okay, maybe not that cheery. But unlike so much contemporary theatre, there was a play there. They each wanted something from each other, and they needed something, and those two weren't the same things.

Most contempo plays I see these days, if they're about anything at all, this play was about backstory. It was not that hard to figure out what the secrets were that were going to be revealed, and it is a disease the contemporary theatre seems to have that you are just waiting for the characters to aria their Deep Dark Secret.

I try to keep character arias out of my screenplays because I find them annoying. I'd rather watch the behavior and guess where it's coming from. I especially try to avoid character arias in TV. One of the characters in the show I'm writing now starts off doing something seriously self-destructive. Why does she do it? Was she abused? Or is she just angry at her father setting a bad example? I'll let the audience chew on that for, I dunno, maybe the whole series. Once you reduce the character's pain to "my uncle raped me," the character seems smaller and less interesting somehow.

I liked how throughout THELMA AND LOUISE, it becomes clear that Louise was raped in Texas, and didn't get justice. But she never tells Thelma that.

A lot of the fun of a drama is figuring out what's going on with the characters. Why spoil the audience's fun by telling them outright?

But if you're trying to write an hour and a half of two characters talking to each other in one room, it becomes awful attractive to make it about the backstory. Otherwise, aren't they going to run out of stuff to talk about?

Of course, one can cite a kajillion counter examples of not-so-contemporary theater without backstory arias. WAITING FOR GODOT, for example. SAME TIME, NEXT YEAR. [I think. I haven't seen it.]

I don't think theatre built on a cathartic revelation of backstory is a function of what theatre can and can't do. I think it's a function of what film can do. If you have a romantic comedy story about two people that takes place in a room, you can write it as a play and make hundreds of dollars, or write it as a movie and make tens of thousands of dollars. (Or, if you're very successful, you can make hundreds of thousands from the play and millions from the movie.) I suspect the movies suck up all the ideas that can be movies, leaving situations that are all about character arias.

The movies' effect on theater strikes me as similar to photography's effect on painting. Photography nudged painting to become less representational because what is the point of spending days painting a scene photorealistically when someone can shoot a picture in a few seconds? Plays have to leverage the advantages they have: essentially, the ritual of the actors being in the same space. (And, I suppose, the relative cheapness of a theatre production; but in the age of YouTube, prosumer cameras and FinalCut, theatre is no longer cheaper.)

Operation First Casualty in Action

Operation First Casualty is political theater by returned Iraq War veterans re-enacting some of their daily experiences back in Baghdad: taking sniper fire, rounding up suspected enemy sympathizers, containing a riot. Personally I happen to support the Iraq Veterans Against the War, but as this is not a political blog, I am including the link because it is interesting to see what they are trying to do theatrically, and what their audience's reaction is.

I very rarely see theater that moves me. Every now and then someone puts on Shakespeare and manages to get the actors to understand what they're saying, and that always works. But too often when I psych myself up to see new theater, it lacks the essential magic of theater. It's just a story badly told, often without much of a plot. Since the invention of the recorded moving image, I think, theater needs to justify itself.

I think it does so two ways, both of which have to do with the actors actually being there in the spot. Theater can more convincingly have something take place "nowhere." Arthur Miller's AFTER THE FALL, about his relationship with Marilyn Monroe, takes place in his memory, and in his home during his marriage, and various other places, all of which are the stage. In film you'd have to shoot the actual places, which would have a solidity his memories don't have on stage.

In theater, it also matters where you stage it. In film, it does not much matter where the screen is set up. A screen in Chicoutimi isn't much different from a screen in Westwood. But in theater, staging a patrol taking sniper fire in the streets of New York is not at all the same thing as doing it in a safe theater environment, or in Kansas City. The actors really are there in the flesh, right next to the audience. Nothing is separating them but a convention.

I continue to hope that one day I'll figure out how to put the magic of theater on the page, and then I'll write a play. For the moment, all I can do is watch.