fraggle

!?

Last week I saw this play, "Death's Jest Book," yeah I thought the title was cool too-- that's the main reason I went to see it.. It was performed by people from UC-something who come here to do a play every few years. It was really visually interesting, and Death was a character (grim-reaper style) and there were all these ghosts and there was an evil jester and an evil poet who was supposedly writing this whole thing; and there were all these medieval people who kept dying and getting killed-- but the story was actually really hard to understand; everything the characters said was really dense and drawn out, and evidently there were some humerous parts going on because like 5 people in the theater were laughing every so often. When I noticed they were laughing, i thought "is this a comedy? what just happened that was funny?" and i tried to pay closer attention, and i think i got a few of the jokes, but basically the play is this really complicated thing, with a sort-of morbid humor but one that you have to really have to think about it to get; and i was a little tired and a little sick at the time, and wasn't really doing all the mental stunts to get the jokes. i kind of thought "i really hope this isn't bad that i'm not getting these jokes when i'm supposed to..." perhaps there were a few places when up to ten people in the audience laughed. At the end of the show, the cast came out on stage and shouted that we were the best audience they'd EVER had, and they completely went nuts exclaiming how they'd loved this audience... "hmm", i thought to myself, "ten people in the house laughing at once? 5 usually? the best you've ever had? hmmm..."

so i was talking with the guy who played the evil poet after the show, and he said that usually they perform the play and NObody gets it; and he doesn't see why. I said the play kinda made me want to read it. He said "Oh, don't bother. I tried to read it and I had to put it down half way through; it is SO hard to understand.. We work with an edited version." "Oh, you simplified the play down for this production?" "No, this guy at Princeton rewrote it so that it would be performable." He told me that the author of this play wrote it in the 18-hundreds, and it was called unperformable by critics, and it was never performed during his lifetime and that's why the author committed suicide. "Wow," I said. "Yeah," he replied. "So I guess it really must have been unreadable." I said, causing him to chuckle.

Then I also saw another play this weekend, which was written and directed by this guy who goes to CMC; which was truly strange. It was completelly experimental: it started out with this girl dressed like a conductor (but with no shoes) and who was carrying this tree-branch. She stood with her back to the audience and started conducting using the tree branch, while another girl came out with a piece of paper and started reading "pain, agony, fear, desparation, meloncholy, suffering, cruelty, dispair, depression..." words of that sort, which became more and more drastic words as the conductor became more vigorous in her conducting. And in another part of the play, there were 3 girls on stage, and one asked another of them "can you tell me just what happened?" and the other replies for a long time in Pakistani; and the third girl standing there is translating everything she says into sign language; and this goes on, with the first girl asking the questions in English, and the second girl answering everything in Pakistani, and the third translating in sign, until the Pakistani one is screaming what she's saying... All very strange, but interesting... It kept me interested the whole time: like a very strange dream. No part of it seemed related at all to any other part; it looked like the guy sat down and did a stream-of-consciousness writing stunt to get the script down...

And after I'd seen these two plays I felt very inspired to try writing my own (having seen one interesting but incomprehensible flop, and one interesting and semi-comprehensible success, in my view) [perhaps I'll put what I came up with one my site at some point...] But anyway, being in the Rocky show, which is a show which has such a feeble plot by most standards, but which has such an astoundingly loyal cult following and is so entertaining anyway, it leads me to wonder sometimes: what makes a good play? Some scripts make for such enjoyable shows, and others make for performances which are hard to watch...

What do you think makes a play really good?

'?'