I never really thought much about the nature of theatre being doing this SummerWorks play. Since then, not surprisingly, I've been thinking about it a lot. Theatre seems to be one of those media that people have a lot of expectations about. More so than film or literature. My impression is that people expect theatre to make a STATEMENT, to uncover (or worse, re-hash) tried and true truths. There seems to be a low tolerance for deviation from the norm as well as a low tolerance for experimentation.
The response to The Meeting has been extraordinary polarized which I find fascinating. Not so much in the main stream press (although I do find NOW's blanket statement "Voiceovers don't work in theatre" simplistic and problematic) but from audience members. We've received feedback that fall into one of two camps: "Funniest piece of the festival" or "AVOID".
Admittedly, the "AVOID!!"'s are hard to take. It's hard to have someone shit on your creativity. But the more difficult thing is that you just want to say "I think you're missing the point!" but there isn't really actually anyone specific to say that to and it tends to come off as sour grapes if you post it on a public discussion board.
But here, in my blog, I am allowed the luxury and the space of thinking and talking it through ...
One of the compelling things about theatre is that it is a live, dynamic medium. As screenwriter Charlie Kaufman says "With theatre you've got accidents that can happen, performances that can change." Every show is a chance to tweak, correct, evolve. Some things don't work. Asking an audience to play bingo in a dark theatre was not the best choice. On the third night, we corrected that by raising the house lights just enough that the audience could see. We actually used this to our advantage -- the raising and lowering of the lights served to bring the audience into the meeting. It becamse a more well-defined theatrical device, actually, than having static lighting. Feedback from the audience indicated that the change accomplished its goal.
Technology .. boon or bane? First night, voice-overs were low volume; definitely hard to hear. And our two female leads sounded more alike to a first-time listener than we realised. Correction? Boost the volume and the base (technology) AND get the actors to adapt during their voiceovers. Again, the correction improved the show. We evolved.
Tonight, we're making a script change. There's a place where the action is slowed for a narratively unnecessary event. So we've rewritten it and we'll see if it works better .. for the actors and the audience. Hopefully it will, but it may not. So we'll learn and we'll continue to evolve.
The dilemma here, of course, is that for 1/2 of our total audience, this change will have no impact. Because they have already seen the show and will not be returning. Hopefully it will improve the experience for the remaining 1/2 of our audience. Ultimately theatre is a give and take; I used to picture this as solely the energy between audience and actors for a given show, but there is a legacy that lives on from one audience to the next. The actors remember; the crew remembers. We use this memory to enhance the experience of the audiences to come.
Reactions to the content and characters in The Meeting has also been polarized. We knew this risk going in. It is a niche play. It's set at an interactive marketing agency. There is marketing and technical jargon (maybe that should have been a warning on the poster). The characters are based on stereotypes that inhabit 99% of all marketing agencies out there. For people who have been one of these stereotypes or worked with them, they ran true.
Pleasantly, the resonance also continued for people who had ever been at any large meeting. Bankers commented to us that they enjoyed the play "The first half I laughed, the second half I considered going back to therapy .. it was almost too real." Production artists said "That's exactly how tech directors talk!" The intention was that the setting and the jargon are devices used to communicate an idea ... that in a meeting we are not who we say we are, or who we pretend to be, and we use these devices to our own end. We manage multiple personas and multiple trains of thought. Fundamentally, we really are listening to our own soundtrack and furthering our own agendas (it wasn't just a clever visual marketing ploy that the characters are listening to individual ipods on the poster).
Also, it is simply a lampooning of an industry that makes a lot of money, thinks very highly of itself, and has (up until the recent Gomery inquiry) had very little accountability for its actions. I am from this marketing world. I adore this world; in it are some of the smartest, funniest and kindest people I know. But at the end of the day, we're creating commercials and ads and websites, ultimately trying to get people to buy stuff. Generally speaking, we're not saving lives (though if we are very lucky we get to create sites like "Kids Help Phone" or other information resources that provide valuable information to people who need it). Marketers need to get a perspective on their value and their purpose and be more conscious of the society they are building.
The Meeting is supposed to be experimental and fun. No one gets raped, no one dies; no major musings on the meaning of life occur; the existential angst is minimal. Minor tranformations of some characters occur. Some definitely don't. Some are simply foils for one-liners and dick jokes. Are there things we'll change? Yes. The script could use some tightening; some character qualities need to be evolved; the voiceovers should be shorter. I'd also rethink the way we use visuals .. there is place for them, but I'm not sure that what we're doing with them is making a solid contribution to the narrative.
The point is, we did it. We poked at a few boundaries, we learned some stuff, we had a great time. I'm grateful for all of you who came out. From my colleagues who said "oh my god, you *knew* about that" to people who just liked the poster to critics who hated it. Thank you for taking the time and the risk.