> 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.
I found this to be a telling remark, Cheerskep. Your complaint is that the play does not present things as you expected to find them. How does one go about determining whether the work is defective or that it is so outside the expected parameters that the paradigm one uses to frame and interpret the work fails or leads to a judgment like yours, that it is a failure? Is this a new kind of dramatic presentation, a new paradigm? or just a tendentious sermonizing by declaimers on stage? This reminds me of the criticism of early modern painting styles, which didn't follow the academic rules of depicting scenes. The artists replied to their critics: "Well, that's right. Our pictures do not depend on those criteria." | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
