Choir Boy, a love, a dream, aloud

People love Choir Boy, written by Tarell Alvin McCraney and now playing at ACT, in a co-production with the Fifth. People also think something is missing; the plot is thin and some of the characters are not sketched out. I think both people are right. 

It’s okay that not all the paint-by-number spaces are filled in. 

I saw a wonderful clip of an interview with Jimmy Stewart recently. You can find it in a Twitter feed here.

He said, “Creating moments in movies – this I think is the important thing.” He was speaking of the film It’s a Wonderful Life. The moment he refers to is when his character, George Bailey is at a low point, sitting on a bar stool and prays for guidance. Stewart says, starting after about 50 second in, 

“That scene, I remember when I first read the first draft of the script, and that scene, the little prayer affected me … when I read it, of course. When I did it in the movie it did. And it did the same to me right now.” 

That moment hits him every time, as it did the first time. 

For me, the transcendent moment of It’s a Wonderful Life is when George flees back to the bridge from which he had earlier jumped and says, “I want to live again.” The whole story revolves around that axis. It sums up what has come before, what will come after, and who George Bailey really is. 

We all have these moments. Our lives are not structured as stories. We tell stories not to imitate life but to illuminate it. 

A play or a screenplay is supposed to follow a set of rules, I have learned. And that’s not wrong. At the same time, on any given day you or I might be “refusing the call to adventure” while also having a “dark night of the soul” in the midst of a “climax” while multiple B and C plots unfold. Or these things could happen in any order at all, higgledy-piggledy. 

As an aside, there never really seems to be a lot of resolution in life, though. I think that is the real meaning of Fitzgerald’s line about there being “no second acts in American lives.” Nothing ever moves toward resolution. It’s not that no one ever makes a change or has a comeback. It’s that they never stop doing it. It’s just one thing after another. 

In Choir Boy, there is a moment for one of the characters near the end, one of the kinds of moments I’m taking about. When you see it, it’s clear the character has had a major shift. He takes an action and you see he’s not who he was before. It didn’t sum up the whole play for me (I don’t think) the way the moment on the bridge in It’s a Wonderful Life does but it completed the puzzle. 

Afterwards, I thought the script maybe should have showed how he came to take this action. What led to the change. I think this is maybe one of the things people thought should have been made more clear. But it doesn’t diminish the power of the moment one bit. 

There’s a Miles Davis quote I can never find where he says you can play jazz only after you have played your scales a million times. When you learn about writing, they tell you you can break the rules, but only after you have really mastered them. 

I think McCraney got it done. There are powerful moments all throughout Choir Boy that open up the hearts of the characters. The plot runs over, under, around and through them. It worked for me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

American Buffalo in Marysville

Image
If you've taken an acting class, you might have done an Uta Hagen exercise requiring you to perform a two-minute slice of life.  Just you, on stage, silently doing something you might do on an ordinary day.  Maybe you're ironing.  Maybe you're making a sandwich.  The point is for the audience to see you acting naturally.  It's not as easy as it sounds. American Buffalo , now playing at Red Curtain Foundation for the Arts in Marysville starts out with an Uta Hagen exercise, basically.  Scott B. Randall plays Donny Dubrow, the owner of a junk store.  Before the house lights even fade down, Donny comes on stage and begins doing what he might do on any typical morning.  He has his coffee cup in hand.  He straightens up this. He looks at that.  He takes a small trash can out into the alleyway and empties it.  He goes out the front door to get the morning newspaper.  It's engrossing to watch all the things he does and guess or c...
Read more

Merchant of Venice: The Musical

Image
Key plot elements, if you don’t know the show: Antonio, a Venetian merchant, borrows money from Shylock, who is Jewish. The money is to help Antonio’s friend, Bassanio, to woo Portia, a sort of wealthy heiress. Meanwhile, Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, yearns to escape her father and her Jewish identity by marrying Lorenzo, a Christian. When Antonio is unable to pay back the money, Shylock believes he finally has the chance to have the power of the law on his side. It’s an illusion. Shylock loses everything.  My first thought, halfway through Act One was, I want to go out to the lobby at intermission and buy the soundtrack. The music grabbed me from the very first number and never let me go.  This is not Phantom or Rent, though, where you can just do that. It’s a brand new show, and I saw its first public performance. But it had that quality. I wanted to be able to shove the CD into my car’s player and listen on the way home. It's a staged reading. At the same time there are pro...
Read more

The White Snake by ReAct

Image
Last week, I read Theatre of the Unimpressed by Jordan Tannahill. The book rages – artfully – against plays that never ask themselves the question, why does this need to be done in front of a live audience. It’s a happy coincidence, then that the first play I have seen since reading the book was The White Snake , produced by ReAct and now playing at 12th Avenue Arts. The show knows exactly why it needs to be done in front of a live audience. It’s because it goe s back to the roots of theater, people telling stories to one another, to the audience, to me. It’s a beautiful story, simply told. At the top, three actors begin narrating directly to the audience, spooling out playwright Mary Zimmerman’s version of the Chinese legend, dating in written form to the Ming Dynasty. After the context is set, three other actors begin playing the parts of White Snake, Green Snake, and Xu Xian as the narrators and the rest of the ensemble begin playing various other parts, including a monk, a...
Read more