Posted: 9/9/23 at 11:18am
I am the first to say: I won't talk you out of your rave, so don't talk me out of my reservations. Mentioned because this play seems to provoke a certain amount of "You just don't understand Baker, particularly her silence." I do understand both the Baker oeuvre and her reliance on pauses. I'm a fan of silence in the theater, particularly when so much direction seems presentational, characters cheating down and out performatively (which I thought overcooked Goodnight, Oscar, at least its first hour, and robbed the final 30 minutes -- the genuinely performative section of the play, the Paar Show - of its contrasting rewards; the whole play felt like a TV show to me, thanks to that push in the direction...)
But silence - to be golden - must arrive between textual content that illuminates, engages, electrifies, unsettles. Silence for silence sake can be a deadly drag on momentum, whether a structural framework has a suspense line or not (and this play decidedly does, once the male character appears and introduces Eros as a component of both pain and healing.) Silence without substance can feel like a sandwich without a filling: two pieces of toast.
This play is ambitious and thoughtful but to me still under realized, pauses and silence fully endorsed for their ability to weight human experience and their depiction in the theater.
