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The
artistic risk of the new play By ROBERT BETHUNE ARE
new plays actually risky? I talked about the
audience risk of new plays last month. Now I’d like to tackle the
artistic risks. The argument goes that a brand new play that’s
never been done before is artistically risky because nobody knows how
to do that play, since it’s never been done before. Let’s think about that argument for a moment. What does
it say about how theater artists do their business? Doesn’t it say
that theater artists can’t do a good job on a particular play unless
they’ve seen someone else do it first? And isn’t that a pretty
hideous thing to say? And wouldn’t it be even more hideous if it
were true? Consider another common practice among theater directors. There’s
a school of thought that says the first thing you should do with a script
is black out all the stage directions. The reasoning is that if you don’t
have the stage directions in front of you, you won’t be unduly influenced
by the playwright’s concept of what should happen in a scene. You’ll
be better able to see the material fresh, and possibly in an original
way that brings new insight into the work and makes you able to do a better
job with it. If that’s the case — and I do think that this practice can
be carried too far — would it make the slightest difference whether
the play is new or old? Of course not. You would still want to tackle
the play fresh, quite literally as if you’d never seen it before.
Well, how convenient the new play is! You are absolutely guaranteed to
have never seen it before! You have the perfect situation, according to
your own idea of how you would like to proceed. The fact is that in a very important sense, there is no such
thing as an old play. Every play, no matter how long it has existed in
script form, is not a fully realized work of art until it is performed.
The essence of theater is the moment in which the living presence of the
actor meets the living presence of the audience in word and action. Each
moment in which that happens only happens once. A given group of performers
encountering a given group of audience members in a particular space,
at a particular time in the history of the world, performing a particular
play — that only happens once in the entire history of the universe
(unless some of the wackier theories about time are true.) Every play, no matter how many times it has been performed
— from zero to infinity — is brand new at the time the performance
occurs. Theater artists who forget that fact do so at their peril. Given
that fact, new play? Old play? What difference does it make? The same
process must be gone through; the same perils successfully avoided, the
same opportunities successfully exploited. The degree to which producing
theater is risky doesn’t depend on the type of material; it depends
on the skill with which the material is done. That’s what enables
us to do good work, provide an audience with a good experience, and thereby
do our jobs. So if a great new play comes across your desk, and your company
has the skills required to deal with the specific idiosyncrasies of doing
previously unproduced work, your risk will be the same as it would be
in any other theatrical endeavor of comparable magnitude. So go for it! |
