On supporting — or not — “daring” playwrights
I’m of two minds about critic Charles McNulty’s piece in today’s LA Times in which he bemoans — but not quite — David Lindsay-Abaire’s upset win of a Pulitzer for “Rabbit Hole.”
McNulty wishes there were more support for cutting-edge theatre. Me, I wish there were more support for good plays, whether they’re cutting edge or not. I also think that Mr. Lindsay-Abaire was, until recently and with this play, somewhat edgy, at least in the eyes of most. Here’s how Wikipedia valiantly summarizes “Fuddy Meers,” a play I greatly enjoyed in a terrific production at the Colony Theatre a couple of years ago:
Fuddy Meers is an American play by David Lindsay-Abaire. It tells the story of an amnesiac, Claire, who awakens each morning as a blank slate on which her husband and teenage son must imprint the facts of her life. One morning Claire is abducted by a limping, lisping man who claims her husband wants to kill her. The audience views the ensuing mayhem through the kaleidoscope of Claire’s world. The play culminates in a cacophony of revelations, proving that everything is not what it appears to be.
Among his influences, Lindsay-Abaire lists playwrights John Guare, Edward Albee, Georges Feydeau, Eugène Ionesco, and George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, 1930s screwball comedy films My Man Godfrey, Twentieth Century, and “anything by Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, the Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello.” Walking a fine line between grave reality and joyous lunacy, the world of his plays is often dark, funny, blithe, enigmatic, hopeful, ironic, and somewhat cockeyed. “My plays tend to be peopled with outsiders in search of clarity.”
I’m willing to bet that that list of influences would lure most of us into the theatre. It just sounds like fun. Quality fun.
“Rabbit Hole,” which concerns a family struggling to recover from the death of a child, is not in the same vein. In addition to his obvious talents, it turns out that Lindsay-Abaire has range. He’s been quoted as saying he doesn’t care how he won the Pulitzer (in a decision that overruled the panel recommendations), he’s just glad he won.
McNulty seemingly wants us to support playwrights because they are daring. I have seen those sorts of plays — lots of them — and their unconventionality often translates into a conventional dullness. I became a playwright because of the lure of theatre of the absurd, but somehow experimentation led to an alternative theatre movement split largely between “language plays” that are ironically devoid of meaning, and camp theatre revolving solely around one meaning. Neither provides the shock of the new.
There are theatres (mostly small ones) doing new plays that shock and entertain; he’s listed a few of them. I hope that if any of those playwrights goes on to write a good, strong play that happens to win a Pulitzer, we don’t condemn it for being too conventional.