I love live theatre. I really do. For the last three years I have been acting as Technical Director for New Play Project. This has given me opportunity to read a lot of plays, hundreds probably. Some of them I have really enjoyed, and others I haven’t enjoyed so much. There have only been a very few that I downright disliked. But the interesting thing is that often when these plays were performed and I watched them, I found myself interested and enjoying the play. What is the difference, what causes this?
I have thought about this quite a bit, especially as I have had theatre classes at school where I have been required to read certain plays and as I have thought about how to teach theatre to high school students as I prepare to become a teacher. I have found that I have a difficult time just reading plays sometimes. I am not a very imaginative person, I don’t picture things very well in my mind and so just reading the words on a page it becomes hard for me to really see what is happening in the play. Plays were written to be performed and they are written in a specific way to facilitate that, but that makes it hard to just read a play. I think this is partly why students have such a hard time reading Shakespeare. Aside from the language, Shakespeare’s plays were not meant to be read. In Shakespeare’s day people did not go to ‘see’ a play, they went to ‘hear’ a play. The focus was on the words coming out of the actor’s mouth, as they are spoken.
I also firmly believe in the communal nature of theatre. Theatre is definitely an act of multiple people coming together. With a novel it can just be a union of the author and the reader: two people. But with theatre, you have the playwright, the director, the actors, the tech people, the audience. So many people come together to put on a play, they work together and their multiple ideas developed the play. We have different people’s interpretation of the text, discussing it with each other, compromising and coming together to produce a theatrical piece. But when reading a play you are left to yourself and your own interpretation.
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| The play runs March 28 and April 8, 9, 11 @7:30 PM. 100 N 105 E Provo, UT |
And so, I thoroughly enjoyed the play that I saw this weekend, WWJD. Even though it isn't Shakespeare, I want to talk a bit about it here because it is theatre, and it is live theatre which is so much different than just reading words on a page. The play basically answers the question we've all been asking : What would it be like if Jesus moved in with my roommates and me? Jesus shows up in the beginning of the play to do the dishes that have been ignored for weeks because it was TJ's turn to do them. After washing the dishes he decides to stick around and hang out, eventually skateboarding down the hall, going minigolfing with the group, and then to a bar for drinks and karaoke.
But the interesting thing is Jesus never says a word. He nods and moves his hands about, and other characters translate for him, but he never speaks. Mostly this is because one of the characters, Tom, can neither see nor hear Jesus, and therefore doesn't believe that "The Chief", as his roommates have taken to calling Jesus, is really there. Now, just reading the script would give you a very different idea of this play. Jesus has no lines. A lot of his gestures are written in, but most of what Jesus does when he's on stage was developed by the director and the actor. It was a great show, my review of it is here. But more than just being entertaining and thought-provoking, it is a great example of what live theatre can be, and how a performance can improve even on the text it is based off of.
