One ring to rule them all.....

I recently saw a theatrical production that got me thinking, and not in a good way.

(Before I continue, I should state for the record, and for anybody local to the Capital City of the Northern State that I am not referring to any local production.)

I traveled many miles, and paid hard-earned money.  I wish I could describe it to you in terms objective, but I cannot; it made me angry.  It made me very angry.

I enjoy watching live theatre for the same reason I like DOING live theatre; there's that sense of immediacy; there is the idea that no audience is going to react the same way, so you have to work to get where you need to go.  You have to listen and respond to the audience the same way they are listening and responding to you.

You have to be sincere.  You have to be truthful; or, you have to be truthful to whatever truth the play is projecting.  You need to suspend your disbelief so the audience can feel comfortable doing the same.

I also like the idea of working with a group of people for a common goal.  Listening and responding to the people around you.  Being in that moment.  Working together to turn this mass of words placed onto a page by a lonely writer into living, breathing, real people.....even the people that lived long ago, or far into the future.

Honesty.

What I saw was a group of actors who didn't seem to care about working together; although they DID seem to care about getting their laughs; even if they had to go over the top for it.  And that laughter was more in abject embarrassment for the performer than it was actual good humor.  It felt like ninety minutes of a kind of strange roller derby of performers attempting to elbow each other out of the spotlight to take their moments.  And any relating they were doing to each other was based upon some invisible, earlier performance; certainly not the performance I was watching.

This is a special art form, born of the caveman acting out the hunt around the campfire; tempered by the Greek and Roman, fine tuned though several millennium of additions, subtractions, theories, methods and whatnot. 

It's more than a pretty face.

Through all of that performance that will long linger in my memory, I was visited by the voice of one of my first instructors who boiled it down to the only bumper sticker philosophy I could ever truly get behind:

"Love the Art in Yourself; and Not Yourself in the Art."

I shall go now, and do likewise.

Go thou, and do the same.

Thus endeth the messin'.