And in the most wretched of productions, usually the text's greatness shines through. In fact, I've seen many a bad production of a classic that ends making the mediocre performers seem even worse because I've sat there imagining what the show would sound like in better hands.
I love playing a game of recasting a bad production playing in from of me, imagining in my head how Vanessa Redgrave or Ian McKellan or Cherry Jones or Morgan Freeman might have delivered a given line or speech I've just watched get butchered in front of me. It's especially fun when I'm watching a revival of show I've seen a better production of in the past and I can just "play the tape of it" in my head while I watch the incompetence floundering around in front of me.
The reverse of that is watching truly great actors take mediocre material (not that DOUBT is that) and through sheer technique and skill and actor tricks, elevate it into something almost brilliant and eminently watchable. I think of seeing Uta Hagen in "Mrs. Klein and "Collected Stories" (not a bad play, but a rather just a slightly above average star vehicle), where her intense commitment to every single moment made for a riveting experience. I watched her take dialogue that would have read flat and uninteresting on the page and create poetry out of it and somehow giving the text layers of meaning nowhere evident in the writing. I remember Frank Langella in "Match" a couple of seasons ago, chewing scenery and pulling everything he had out of his bag of tricks to turn an underwritten piffle of a play into a truly entertaining night of theatre. I even thought "Amy View" was just another routine and undistinguished hackjob from David Hare, except when the extraordinary Judi Dench walked on the stage -- suddenly the stilted dialogue seemed to SING.
DOUBT to me is similar to that. It's a well-wrought, well-made play, the type I've seen several times a year for the last 30 years or so (the so-called "well-made" play, especially drama, is my parents' favorite form of theatre and I saw a few a year from the time I was 4 years old). This form has always been a favorite with institutional theatres around the country for decades and decades. They provide easy to follow plots, solid characters for good actors to explore, typically have a unit set so they're cheap to produce, and are usually not very demanding of older subscriber audience who don't like to be too challenged when they go to the theatre. You get a couple of basic conflicts, maybe a twist or two, and everybody leaves the theatre happy that they have something not too controversial to kickstart the dinner conversation afterwards.
This is not theatre that is trying to change anyone's life or their view of the world, to force them to examine themselves and their lives and undergo a personal catharsis at the end. That's not to say a "great" play necessarily HAS to do that, but when I think back on the older grown men around me with tears streaming down their cheeks at the end of the last revival of DEATH OF A SALESMAN (not a "well-made" play) or ANGELS IN AMERICA (obviously not "well-made"), I realize that theatre CAN still have the power to make on impact on people's lives.
Perhaps, the well-made play can still do that and maybe DOUBT gave some people that experience. It left me merely entertained and grateful for having witnessed such superb acting. But, in the end for me it was like seeing Uta Hagen in "Collected Stories" -- a brilliant performance I'll remember for the rest of my life in a play that was fine, but nothing special.
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
[http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/]
"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
Updated On: 8/14/05 at 08:05 PM
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