Theatre Thursday :: a play-by-play of Staffordshire University’s Drama, Performance, & Theatre Arts department’s list of 100 plays to read before you die

Obscure?  A bit, but it was the only “plays to read before you die” list I could find, so I’m going to run with it.  It can be found here.

Here, italics represent ones I’ve read, bolded italicized are ones I’ve liked, underlined italicized are ones I’ve read for school, *asterisked* ones are ones I’ve seen the film of and **double asterisked** ones are ones I’ve seen staged.  And I’m fully prepared for my showing here to be woefully inadequate.

Amadeus* by Peter Shaffer
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
The Crucible** by Arthur Miller
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
A Streetcar Named Desire* by Tennessee Williams (I really must explain this: I didn’t actually like the play that much.  I mean, I recognized it as really good, but I didn’t enjoy it a whole lot.  Until a few of my friends and I, when reading it for English, gathered in someone’s living room one weekend afternoon and read the second half aloud in terrible Southern accents.  That, I enjoyed.)
Our Town** by Thornton Wilder
The Cherry Orchard** by Anton Chekhov
The Importance of Being Earnest* by Oscar Wilde (I haven’t actually read it or anything, but I’ve seen the film version half a dozen times and I enjoy the hell out of it?)
Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind (HELL YES.  And sometimes you put the possessive /’s/ on to distinguish from the musical or just because it does [my copy does].  I love the original play to pieces and bits and I still have parts of the Moritat committed to memory and I wrote my AP English essay on this play [because I could quote directly off the top of my head and it made sense, not that I remember the prompt, but it worked] and got a 5, so YES.)
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
The following Shakespeare: Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Twelfth Night, Hamlet*, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet*, A Midsummer Night’s Dream* **
Everyman (I read this for/at work, so that’s basically like doing so for school)
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
18 out of 100 read.  21 out of 100 somehow witnessed.

I think I see the problem.  A lot of the plays I’ve read for fun (and there are plenty of them) were written more recently than 1998, and that’s when the most recent play on the list is from.

–your fangirl heroine.

Theatre Thursday :: 5 of my favorite plays and musicals and if they’d work as films.

5. Speech & Debate by Stephen Karam
I have a great, great love for this play.  My heroine of life Susan Blackwell was in it, and the kids actually felt like kids I might know.  I mean, really.  Diwata (played by Sarah Steele) was like… 85% me.  The play was set in my town, they attended a high school I did summer theatre camps and choir recitals in, they used real copies of the local newspaper on stage, they even put on the same play (Once Upon a Mattress) that I did my junior year of high school.  Karam unconsciously stalked my life.  It’s a brilliant play, I saw it during its run in New York (front row, baby, and eternally grateful) and I’m still in love.  But could it be a movie?  Well, it’s a four person cast.  It’d have to be a weird independent film.  (Besides, Hollywood would be suffering from Glee syndrome and try to make it more mass-marketable.)  But if it was a weird independent film, maybe with Karam consulting, it could be done well, perhaps.

4. Spring Awakening by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater, adapted from the play by Frank Wedekind
Spring is without a doubt, no questions asked, my favorite musical.  It maybe didn’t change my life, but it was a huge part of it, and to some extent it’s responsible for many of the great things in my life, including some of my greatest friendships.  But honestly?  I feel like it would be near impossible to translate to film.  Said friends of mine and I once tried to contrive of a way to do this; it was much too difficult.  Voiceovers were utilized in excess and a lot of the songs would just have to take place in a subreality.  Not unlike how they did Sucker Punch, actually, though that was obviously not in our minds at the time.  While this works for a story like Sucker Punch, where the subrealities are all ass-kickery and dancing in leotards, I think it would just feel slavish doing Spring as a film that way.  I mean, Sucker Punch had, what, four subreality scenes?  Spring would have to have one for all nineteen songs (or however many of them stuck around – and most of them would have to, I think; when I try to think of which are expendable, the only things I can think of are “There Once Was a Pirate” and Phoebe’s “Mama Who Bore Me/Touch Me (reprise),” and both of those were cut from the stage production).  It would be very hard to do in a way that would feel still genuine and not just like someone filmed the stage play.  And really, casting would be impossible: on stage, you can get away with twenty-six year old Phoebe Strole playing a fourteen year old, but in film?  It would be like… well, most high school movies and TV shows, where the high schoolers are very obviously at least twenty-four.  And that wouldn’t feel right.  But you couldn’t have actual fourteen year olds in it, either, as per the sex and everything.  Just… how about no.

3. How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel
One of my friends and I once had to theoretically adapt this into a musical for a class (well, we had to make a musical; we chose it as our source material, because we were paired off due to our mutual morbidity and dark artistic inclinations, and we intended for the score, were it real, to have been written or at least styled as if it was written by Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione, oh yeah).  As a stage musical?  Yes, it would have been awesome.  As a movie?  Hell no.  It’s much, much too non-linear and dissociated.  I looked it up, and apparently there was a TV movie in 2001, but as imdb doesn’t even have cast or crew details listed on the page, it can’t have been very good.  I just… don’t see it working.  At all.

2. Next to Normal by Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt
We all know I love this one, too.  (It’s probably favsies after Spring and Rent, and yes, I know I’m an outrageous musical theatre modernist.)  But… well, the theme of tonight seems to be it just wouldn’t translate.  For one, the story just isn’t something that would go over.  It’d have to be another of those indie films, and even then, it could be problematic: those ambiguous endings don’t sit well with people, especially somewhat unhappy ambiguous endings.  There are too many songs.  I mean, Rent did okay translating, but they had to change a lot of the songs to dialogue, and it worked for them somewhat, but I just can’t see the Next to Normal songs adapting into straight talking well.  It’s too small of a cast for a musical film.  They’d try to glam up the electroshock sequence (again, I’m just seeing Sucker Punch, and while it’s perfect for what it is, it’s not perfect for Next to Normal).  They’d probably cast people who were all wrong just to make it more accessible.  It just… no.

1. August: Osage County (in development?) by Tracy Letts
I honestly don’t know.  Plays set only in one location that can’t be set in another location worry me for film adaptations.  But it’s got a huge-ass cast, and that helps.  They’ve apparently slated it for a movie in 2013, and that’s something to look forward to; I’ve never actually seen it staged, just read it, but I’m still wary.  I hope for the best, though.

–your fangirl heroine.

Things in Print Thursday :: why I like fiction better than poetry

“Poetry is the black hole of literature,” one of my professors says often.  I couldn’t agree more.  While I’m fairly sure she means it as a compliment, I view it as one of those two-sided comments, one that is both good and bad.  And this?  This is because I’m a terrible English major and really never read poetry in my spare time and rarely enjoy reading it, ever.  This isn’t just because I haven’t read any since high school and I’m out of practice, this is just because I sort of have a weird thing of enjoying plots and characters and function over form.

Poetry can have all of those things!  you’re arguing.  Well, yes, but particularly modern poetry tends to sacrifice meaning for looking avant-garde on the page.  I can’t stand that.  It’s taking the joy of reading out, it’s making you focus too much on trivialities.

Songs are potry! you argue.  But songs, good songs anyway, are good poetry.  Nobody writes songs where there’s three and a half measures between one lyric, seven measures between another, just to be hip.  And some poetry, particularly older poetry, does read like a song.  An esoteric, tediously romantic song, sometimes, but still.

I think I’m also biased against poetry because I’ve got too many bad memories of high school creative writing class.  My teacher always used to tease me about the fact that I was incapable of writing poetry about myself that wasn’t about myself as a child.  This?  This is because I remembered all too well my awful self-indulgent poetry phase of thirteen years, where I wrote angsty rhyming verses about nothing and thought I was sooooo deep.  Maybe when I’m an adult I’ll be able to write poetry, but I haven’t lived long enough, I haven’t livedenough period, to have something worthy of writing verse about in my past.  And sure, not all poetry has to be about yourself.  But in high school creative writing class, it is, and that’s just tainted me.

I honestly think the last poem I read was the Moritat found in the prologue to the original play of Spring’s Awakening.  I don’t know if it counts.  But I still have a bit of it memorized after four years, so that’s got to.  I was about to write out the bit I’ve still got committed to memory, but then I remembered it’s sort of crude.  (I refuse to believe that that’s why I remember it.  I may have a dirty mind, but not that dirty of one.  More likely, it’s because my friend and I used to chant it at each other while doing history homework and giggle.  Mature, we were.)

And then there’s the matter of my being, despite excessively fantastical, hardly romantic, in the romance sense or the literary sense.  (Closer to the literary, but.)  I’m just… too cynical to swallow love poems most days.  I accept that this is my own failing and not poetry’s itself.  I’m not sure what it says about me that I’d rather read about the gory killing of a zombie or something than someone’s epic tale of romance, but that fact stands.  There’s just so little quirky romance in poetry, and quirky romance is the only sort I can handle.

I don’t know.  I’m not anti-poetry full stop.  But I’m definitely just… sigh.  Skeptical.

–your fangirl heroine.