a review of Vigils or (if I were the playwright)
i saw Goodman Theatre's production of Vigils last Friday night. it was a preview, but from what I gather about Goodman productions, a preview is just as good as the real thing. the show officially opened last night so I thought I would give my review as I saw it...
first off, we were 10 minutes late. after some great Red Snapper at Habana Libre, we missed an el train by seconds and had to wait for 20 minutes to catch the next one. as our train approached, I saw another coming right on its tail. this is bullshit and i think the CTA needs to be more mindful of its passengers. if the trains had come at "regular" intervals, we would not have been late. fuck the CTA.
that said, anyone, like me, who feels that reviews and critics who come late to a show have no right to write about said show should get off my blog and hug a tree. i think under normal circumstances I would not write such a review, but as I watch Noah Haidle's Vigils I cam to the conclusion that I had not missed much. The play surround a woman who has lost her husband to a fire. he being a fireman. she has trapped his soul in a box at the foot of her bed keeping him locked up for her to remember. memories play a big part in this play and to be honest they play an enormous role. scenes are played out repeatedly. moments in the lives of the characters are played out over and over again as neither the woman or the soul of her husband can forget. he can't forget because he is dead and his life is continually being played out before him. she can't forget because she doesn't want to. this is her achilles heal. this is what we are watching her overcome.
the play has a light comic undertone and when dealing with death it seems a bit strange that the characters are saying some of the things they say. in one scene, the woman is awoken in the morning by her alarm. like clockwork she asks her husband to turn it off. he doesn't respond. she asks again. the woman finally comes to the realization and says out loud, "oh, that's right! you're dead." it is funny and gets a laugh. there are lots of laughs in this vein, which I admit, I enjoyed. Madeline said it best when she said that the norm for literature is to play death as morbid. Haidle was playing death comic to get us, and his character, past the pain and into the light (so to speak). I respect that and agree. i enjoyed the humor in Vigils and wouldn't ask the playwright to change his outlook...
what I would ask the playwright to do is to watch his play in the grand theatre. Goodman is not a rinky-dink no budget theatre. it is a bottomless well for the stage and from what I have seen there, they can do pretty much anything they want. I felt this about Vigils...it was over-produced and over-developed. in an intimate blackbox theatre, I believe that Vigils would have gripped me and ripped me apart. in the large (though smaller of the) Goodman theatres, the Owen, I felt like I was watching a small play on a big stage, which kills any chance of me connecting to the story.
If I were the playwright given a chance to write for the Goodman stage, I would have 1) written an entirely different play or 2) re-created my characters larger than life. these characters were simple in their struggle and in their weight. the actors were superb, but I felt they got lost sometimes because the text was so small and the stage so big. I have seen Corburn Goss at Writers' Theatre and in his role there he displayed a great gift. In his role here, he was the closest to being fit for the role in my opinion. The man who played the soul came across as a Dave Attell copy. if he didn't have to scream the whole time I thing his character would have won more of the audience over, or at least would have won me over. The man who played the body was the most lost for me. The fact that he didn't look like the soul was probably explained to the audience in the first ten minutes I missed, but even as a body detatched from his soul I didn't care for much of what he said except when he met his imaginary daughter. the little playing the daughter was brilliant! she stole the show. the woman at the front of story also came across as needing a smaller stage. she did a lot of emoting. i hate emoting. i think her character calls for quiet subtlety which was not available for this actress.
if Haidle is writing plays with fantastic elements, which showed in the design or this production, he needs to write text just as fantastic. for the actor's sake and the audience. this is what I believe.
- jaw
first off, we were 10 minutes late. after some great Red Snapper at Habana Libre, we missed an el train by seconds and had to wait for 20 minutes to catch the next one. as our train approached, I saw another coming right on its tail. this is bullshit and i think the CTA needs to be more mindful of its passengers. if the trains had come at "regular" intervals, we would not have been late. fuck the CTA.
that said, anyone, like me, who feels that reviews and critics who come late to a show have no right to write about said show should get off my blog and hug a tree. i think under normal circumstances I would not write such a review, but as I watch Noah Haidle's Vigils I cam to the conclusion that I had not missed much. The play surround a woman who has lost her husband to a fire. he being a fireman. she has trapped his soul in a box at the foot of her bed keeping him locked up for her to remember. memories play a big part in this play and to be honest they play an enormous role. scenes are played out repeatedly. moments in the lives of the characters are played out over and over again as neither the woman or the soul of her husband can forget. he can't forget because he is dead and his life is continually being played out before him. she can't forget because she doesn't want to. this is her achilles heal. this is what we are watching her overcome.
the play has a light comic undertone and when dealing with death it seems a bit strange that the characters are saying some of the things they say. in one scene, the woman is awoken in the morning by her alarm. like clockwork she asks her husband to turn it off. he doesn't respond. she asks again. the woman finally comes to the realization and says out loud, "oh, that's right! you're dead." it is funny and gets a laugh. there are lots of laughs in this vein, which I admit, I enjoyed. Madeline said it best when she said that the norm for literature is to play death as morbid. Haidle was playing death comic to get us, and his character, past the pain and into the light (so to speak). I respect that and agree. i enjoyed the humor in Vigils and wouldn't ask the playwright to change his outlook...
what I would ask the playwright to do is to watch his play in the grand theatre. Goodman is not a rinky-dink no budget theatre. it is a bottomless well for the stage and from what I have seen there, they can do pretty much anything they want. I felt this about Vigils...it was over-produced and over-developed. in an intimate blackbox theatre, I believe that Vigils would have gripped me and ripped me apart. in the large (though smaller of the) Goodman theatres, the Owen, I felt like I was watching a small play on a big stage, which kills any chance of me connecting to the story.
If I were the playwright given a chance to write for the Goodman stage, I would have 1) written an entirely different play or 2) re-created my characters larger than life. these characters were simple in their struggle and in their weight. the actors were superb, but I felt they got lost sometimes because the text was so small and the stage so big. I have seen Corburn Goss at Writers' Theatre and in his role there he displayed a great gift. In his role here, he was the closest to being fit for the role in my opinion. The man who played the soul came across as a Dave Attell copy. if he didn't have to scream the whole time I thing his character would have won more of the audience over, or at least would have won me over. The man who played the body was the most lost for me. The fact that he didn't look like the soul was probably explained to the audience in the first ten minutes I missed, but even as a body detatched from his soul I didn't care for much of what he said except when he met his imaginary daughter. the little playing the daughter was brilliant! she stole the show. the woman at the front of story also came across as needing a smaller stage. she did a lot of emoting. i hate emoting. i think her character calls for quiet subtlety which was not available for this actress.
if Haidle is writing plays with fantastic elements, which showed in the design or this production, he needs to write text just as fantastic. for the actor's sake and the audience. this is what I believe.
- jaw
posted by Joshua Aaron Weinstein at 9:58 AM
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