#1
Posted: 5/14/07 at 5:29pm
Finally caught up with this debacle on Mother's Day. Much has been written about this play's shortcomings, its narrative excesses and dramatic omissions. What disturbed me more than anything is the total lack of craft from this seasoned and successful writer. As drama, it is lazily conceived and executed.
The play as performed feels at best like a weak first draft, and "idea for a play" that hasn't been shaped to employ even the rudimentary nuts and bolts of dramaturgy. Break the rules? It doesn't acknowledge they exist. Or are needed to satisfy an audience's investment. We invest only because of the performers involved, not because the playwright makes a persuasive case that these lives are stage-worthy.
There is no sense of either character even having a subconscious emotional or intellectual need that justifies their glib behavior. Shouldn't this meeting change the course of their lives? Yet they are thrown together without expectation or a sense of mission. They are without goals, other than to see this particular tennis match. And to address mortality -- with even death only a vaguely dreaded endgame, reduce to a cliche.
I remember first hearing of the concept -- and thought "Well, I've never seen that; I bet this will be juicy." But juice is not found on the stage of the Music Box. McNally never bothers to set up let alone develop the potentially rich dramatic premise. Everything feels arbitrarily tossed into the bland expository soup, without attention paid the to relative weight in the story. No revelation feels more important than the last. They tumble out without focus, made even more tedious by mind-numbing interruptions dished out by the three supporting cast members. Pity them all, and us; they may give the stars a break, but we have to continue staring at the stage.
Grandkids, lovers, achievements and failures are duly catalogued, faults semi-examined, but without any sense of a story unfolding that might give them dramatic purpose or justify their reveal. This meeting of old fiend/adversaries is truly just a case of playing catch-up -- a dreadful basis for even approximated dramatic action. There are no stakes, there's no real unfinished business. Because some real history of tennis is sprinkled in haphazardly amid the fictional anecdotes (such as they are), there's an attempt at capturing an unmined milieu. But the revelations about tennis are exhausted within minutes -- at the very top we hear how women used to make no money, and earned no endorsements.
The play's circular structure -- we end just about where we began, with even the final speeches half-baked and unrevealing -- leaves us with no take away but a manipulative benediction -- a premature eulogy -- for a legend and a beloved stage star. That McNally didn't rise to the occasion is just despairing.
Please, Ms. Lansbury -- come back next season in NIGHT MUSIC or anything worthy of you. And Mr. McNally, dig in next time, work harder, take your shows out of town, do them in a regional theater, in a workshop, to test your words before you hide them shamelessly behind the power of an impressive marquee.
The play as performed feels at best like a weak first draft, and "idea for a play" that hasn't been shaped to employ even the rudimentary nuts and bolts of dramaturgy. Break the rules? It doesn't acknowledge they exist. Or are needed to satisfy an audience's investment. We invest only because of the performers involved, not because the playwright makes a persuasive case that these lives are stage-worthy.
There is no sense of either character even having a subconscious emotional or intellectual need that justifies their glib behavior. Shouldn't this meeting change the course of their lives? Yet they are thrown together without expectation or a sense of mission. They are without goals, other than to see this particular tennis match. And to address mortality -- with even death only a vaguely dreaded endgame, reduce to a cliche.
I remember first hearing of the concept -- and thought "Well, I've never seen that; I bet this will be juicy." But juice is not found on the stage of the Music Box. McNally never bothers to set up let alone develop the potentially rich dramatic premise. Everything feels arbitrarily tossed into the bland expository soup, without attention paid the to relative weight in the story. No revelation feels more important than the last. They tumble out without focus, made even more tedious by mind-numbing interruptions dished out by the three supporting cast members. Pity them all, and us; they may give the stars a break, but we have to continue staring at the stage.
Grandkids, lovers, achievements and failures are duly catalogued, faults semi-examined, but without any sense of a story unfolding that might give them dramatic purpose or justify their reveal. This meeting of old fiend/adversaries is truly just a case of playing catch-up -- a dreadful basis for even approximated dramatic action. There are no stakes, there's no real unfinished business. Because some real history of tennis is sprinkled in haphazardly amid the fictional anecdotes (such as they are), there's an attempt at capturing an unmined milieu. But the revelations about tennis are exhausted within minutes -- at the very top we hear how women used to make no money, and earned no endorsements.
The play's circular structure -- we end just about where we began, with even the final speeches half-baked and unrevealing -- leaves us with no take away but a manipulative benediction -- a premature eulogy -- for a legend and a beloved stage star. That McNally didn't rise to the occasion is just despairing.
Please, Ms. Lansbury -- come back next season in NIGHT MUSIC or anything worthy of you. And Mr. McNally, dig in next time, work harder, take your shows out of town, do them in a regional theater, in a workshop, to test your words before you hide them shamelessly behind the power of an impressive marquee.
"I'm a comedian, but in my spare time, things bother me." Garry Shandling
Updated On: 5/14/07 at 05:29 PM
