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.