In a message dated 4/5/10 3:28:09 PM, [email protected] writes:
> Did you see Roberta Smith's article re the play in today's NYT? What do > you think of it? > I did read it, yes. I basically agree with her. I say "basically" because my reaction to the play was not qualified by insider's knowledge and experience the way hers was. Even as I was watching the play I was imagining how different the viewer-response would be in someone more informed than I. I literally thought of you, William. My guess that one way or another your response would be much more intense than mine -- more intense in either approval or disapproval -- I couldn't be sure which. I WAS sure you'd be more engaged, but of course one can become engaged by rage at what's being presented. I certainly agree with Roberta Smith when she says she liked the silent parts far more than the talky ones. It's an awful truth I have to live with as a playwright that silent moments onstage -- especially silent moments that have activity -- can be immensely effective -- and I have little talent for creating them. I get a modicum of comfort from considering that Shakespeare was even more talky than I, but that comfort is immediately blown away by the very thought of comparison to W.S. There is a brilliant moment in RED when the two men are priming a very large canvas together. We see the frame being constructed, the canvas stretched and attached, then being hoisted into place. Then, in what's almost a balletic race being timed by stop-watches, the two men furiously cover the canvas with a homogeneous reddish-brown undercoat. The only sounds are those from the brushing and tapping the paint cans. When they finished and sagged back abruptly, the audience broke into a burst of applause. It was a fine, vivid, theatrically gripping mini-scene. But I felt RED as a play was bad, a narrative failure. It lacked almost all the essential elements of storytelling. It was only ninety minutes, but it seemed twenty minutes too long: an argument followed by a lecture followed by an argument followed by lecture and so-not-so-forth. The characters were vivid but not nearly three dimensional, there was no conflict, no hurdle to be gotten over. Perhaps if one came to it with a passion for Rothko his angry rants about the "dissonance" between the Appollonian and Dionysian impulse would compel, but to me they felt like near-opaque hell-fire sermons by a nasty guy on a pulpit. It was not what I go to theater for.
