The final sound cue for “The Perplexed,” Richard Greenberg’s new comedy about two estranged, wealthy families brought together by their children’s impending nuptials, is offstage laughter. Heralding the arrival of long-awaited guests, it’s supposed to be jubilant.
Instead, at the first preview of the show this month at New York City Center, the laugh track rang like a witch’s cackle.
“It felt too sardonic to me,” Lynne Meadow, the longtime artistic director of Manhattan Theater Club who’s helming the production, said afterward.
It took at least seven more tries to finally capture the ideal sound effect. Now it was just a matter of solidifying dozens of other decisions before the play’s official premiere on Tuesday.
Previews are a unique, enduring feature of the theater world: Kicking off a show’s run, they are a period of public performances before opening night, which can last anywhere from several days to, in the notorious case of 2011’s “Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark,” 180-some performances. (More recently, previews for “West Side Story” were extended by two weeks while Isaac Powell, who plays Tony, recovered from a knee injury.) As such, previews are as much a part of a play’s creative process as its closed rehearsals.
While the intimacy of a studio is a safe space for experimentation and development, only once an audience of strangers enters the theater can a director, playwright and actors know for sure what’s landing and what’s falling flat. Changes to dialogue, costumes, lighting cues come daily until the show is “frozen,” when the script and blocking are set. Critics are then invited to previews, and their reviews are traditionally published opening night.
The process can result in a whole character sent packing, an intermission axed or pages of script inserted, only to be chucked out days later. Rehearsals can often be called during previews, which means a cast could go over new lines at a morning practice, only to perform an old script that night.
Nothing so extreme was required for “The Perplexed.” Still, over the course of three weeks and 23 previews, monologues were scrapped, blocking was restaged, 50-cent words were replaced with accessible synonyms and a final bow featuring the actors holding champagne glasses was tried once — then promptly trashed.
“For me, it’s all about figuring out what people are getting,” said Greenberg, whose Tony Award-winning play “Take Me Out” is being revived by Second Stage Theater in April.
“Until you get into rehearsal, you’re talking to yourself,” he explained. In the studio with a director and actors, a playwright has the benefit of clarifying his intentions, but all that changes in previews. “Then you get in front of a bunch of strangers, and you can hear when something is mystifying.”
Greenberg is as versed in the city’s educated, upper-middle class as a sommelier who knows his wine list, its undertones, its hints and everything else that gives nuance. His most recent works, “Our Mother’s Brief Affair” (2016) and the Tony-nominated “The Assembled Parties” (2013), were both directed by Meadow.
“The Perplexed” is a drawing-room play, literally — it is set in a lavish home library of an unseen, Jewish billionaire host, Berland Stahl — and figuratively. Like some characters from Greenberg’s previous works, the members of the wedding party here belong to a privileged, insular world, yet feel adrift amid changing cultural tides. While the countdown to a midnight ceremony ticks on, they hash out drama old and new.
We meet the bride (Tess Frazer) and her parents, City Councilwoman Evy Arlen-Stahl (Margaret Colin) and Joseph Stahl (Frank Wood), who is the billionaire’s disinherited son. Evy goes way back, both in business and pleasure, with the lawyer Ted Resnik (Gregg Edelman), the father of the groom (JD Taylor). Ted’s self-righteous, do-gooder wife is Natalie Hochberg-Resnik (Ilana Levine).
Also in the mix are Evy’s son, Micah (Zane Pais), a medical student who stars in gay adult films on the side; her writer brother (Patrick Breen); a former rabbi from South Carolina (Eric William Morris) dealing with some meshugas of his own; and one working-class character, Berland’s Guyanese aide Patricia Persaud (Anna Itty).
“The Perplexed” is a social-issue casserole, a tumble of ingredients culled from the zeitgeist — porn, feminism, 1 percent-level wealth — that could each warrant its own entree. Instead, they are tossed into a single Pyrex to roast among the other flavors; audiences will decide whether this style is adept or clumsy.
“This is a play that has political references and issues about morality and your politics and your reaction to change,” says Meadow. “But this is not a piece of agitprop.”
In an explosive Act II scene, Evy finds herself alone with Ted for the first time in 20 years. She expresses fear that her son’s extracurricular activities have put her campaign for City Council Speaker in jeopardy. And they needle her sense of irrelevance now that her breed of progressive Jewish female is no longer as revolutionary as it once was.
In the first preview, she explains to Ted, “Pornography, statistics tell us, is used by an overwhelming majority of the adult population, and to consider yourself superior to an enterprise people of your ilk enjoy is the grossest hypocrisy, and to approve of its existence as I, with significant reservations, do, while stipulating that it be the work of other people’s children, is of course, insupportable.”
By the end of the first week of previews, that monologue was gone, leaving an extended tender silence in its place.
“Now it’s an emotional moment,” Colin said. “It’s not the conflict of her politics.”
For all script changes, no matter how minute, Greenberg gets the final say. Even something as seemingly imperceptible as adding “then” to combine two sentences into one warranted a conversation.
“For us, the opinion of the playwright is god,” said Meadow during the February 21 rehearsal. “We don’t run cuts or changes that the playwright doesn’t want to do.”
She received his blessing via text message.
Sometimes, the dialogue change isn’t about the words, but about delivery, as was the case with an exchange between the groom and Patricia, the caregiver. Depending on her reading of a single line, Itty could determine whether Patricia is acquiescent or self-possessed.
“It’s the nuance that makes all the difference in how you perceive a character,” said Meadow. By the ninth preview, Itty was playing the character as keenly aware of the imbalance of power between her and the family.
With such a text-heavy play, Meadow must make sure that each prop, sound cue and stage direction supports what the characters are saying onstage.
While the play requires no costume changes, Colin’s skirt had to show a stain, supposedly from a water main break in Evy’s district, because it is constantly referred to in the dialogue. The combination of dye and water created a subtle ombre effect on her burgundy taffeta skirt rather than a noticeable sartorial disaster. So in the ninth preview, it was replaced with a bright red, full-length wool crepe skirt with a muddied hem befitting an explosion of New York’s finest brown gush.
By the time the production opens, the script will have been updated dozens of times. All the revamping and tweaking during previews was, as ever, time-consuming. But to Greenberg, it’s a necessary part of the process.
“You’re responsible to people’s time, and I think that’s the main responsibility when you’re writing a play,” he said. “You are taking their time from them, so you have to give it back.”
"much" - Google News
March 02, 2020 at 05:00PM
https://ift.tt/2IdlExn
How Much Does a Play Change During Previews? Just Ask ‘The Perplexed’ - The New York Times
"much" - Google News
https://ift.tt/37eLLij
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "How Much Does a Play Change During Previews? Just Ask ‘The Perplexed’ - The New York Times"
Post a Comment