True-life dialogue
Last night I went with three other playwrights to see what I thought was a pretty dull play, David Hare’s “The Blue Room.” Whenever you find that you’re more involved with the lights and the sound and the music and watching the set changes (all of them admittedly pretty interesting in this production), then you know that the play isn’t working. I kept debating whether it was the script, the actors, or the direction, and landed finally on the script. Sex has never been so uninteresting, and every line sounded written, not spoken.
Afterward, the four of us went out for a drink. I sat there, determined not to be the first to dig into the play. Maybe because I was so drained by seeing it. The experience was so enervating it had me wondering again whether the balance in quality between theatre and television had permanently shifted. When television is producing shows like “Breaking Bad” and “The Wire,” and you can carefully select what you want to see and when you want to see it with your DVR, and nine out of ten plays are a disappointment and every experience is a crapshoot and it all costs more, the argument for getting off your couch becomes harder. And no, you cannot imagine what it feels like to say this here.
One thing the theatre will always have over television is this: drinks afterward. We had some fun at the expense of the show — I offered my usual analysis of why a play in question was 90 minutes with no intermission: “So no one can leave early” — and somehow we got on the subject of drink and drugs. And then we got the quote of the night, something far better than anything in the play, something that I’ll be putting in a play of mine unless the playwright who said it beats me to it:
“I smoked weed. I didn’t like it. It made me feel like part of the wallpaper. Drinking is better. Alcohol is like me, plus.”
It’s so perfect a bit of dialogue that it sounds written. If only anything approaching that level had been in the actual play that night.