It being the Band Guide issue, I trust you’ll grant the theater reviewer a wide rhetorical berth. My contribution to the event, as critic and friend to the theater circuit, is a meditation on some of the telling differences between the theater and band scenes, in the interest of seeing the one pick up a little of the notorious energy and audience of the other.
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The first and most glaring difference between the band and theater scenes is simply the price of admission. While many younger and/or starving artist types will willingly shell out the cost of a drink for a cover, they find $12 to $30 theater tickets to be prohibitive. The sources of these higher prices are the stock-in-trade of traditional theater — the sets, costumes, props, and residence in a particular venue for the duration of a multiple-show run — and for many theater-goers, these things make the show. But this isn’t the only way to make theater. For people who care less about the trappings than the theatrical basics, a bare-bones, mobile, repertory model of theater has a tremendous appeal. Imagine if clubs could book plays like they book bands!
In some cases, they already can. Naked Shakespeare, with its focus on bringing stripped-down, low-overhead Shakespeare to a variety of venues, has tinkered with their take on this model, and the improv group the Escapists operates similarly. It’s a lot easier for actors to retain and brush off monologues and short scenes than complete productions, and actors involved in multiple simultaneous projects can participate. Wouldn’t it be fun to go out to Geno’s or SPACE every couple months to see a show of short pieces by an Absurdist ensemble, an erotica-of-the-world group, or a troupe that maintains a repertoire of particularly egregious Bushisms?
Cerebration
All the pricey spectacle of high-end theater lends a play context and setting, but more importantly offers its audience a little sensuous relief from what is usually a production’s main currency: A lot of words. Which is a second significant difference between bands and theater. Most plays are governed by a script, generally structured around a sustained narrative. We experience the pleasures of puns and dramatic irony in different ways — and in different lobes — than we do the pleasures of meaty bass-lines. We process theater cerebrally, while bands get a more visceral, gut reaction. The two forms, under most circumstances, satisfy different needs, and, well, damn: by Friday night, sometimes, we just want to go for the gut.
But it needn’t be quite so black-and-white. There’s no decree that holds language bound to strict narrative and theme. The meanings of words can be vague while their assonance and percussion are rich to the ear. They can be used more as riffs or motifs than as signifiers, creating an atmosphere rather than a story. It’s a relief, sometimes, to break from the cerebral at the end of the day, and theater can do it, too. Last spring, Katie McKee’s strange Flo and Glo played with language in this very musical way. Directed by Stephen McLaughlin for the Deviant/goods, Jamalieh Haley and Tavia Lin Gilbert navigated jazzy verbal loops and repetitions as they cleared an Antarctic airstrip of snow, in a surreal experiment in tone and verbal texture. Liberatingly story-free, Flo and Glo got at the more intuitive pressure points that theater could stand to massage every now and then.
