I shouldn’t be feeling ornery as holiday spirit is in the air, but I just read producer Ken Davenport’s newest blog, on theatrical effects, and it’s gotten me a bit riled. Before citing a list of his top five theatrical effects, Ken quotes Spider-Man bookwriter Glen Berger, and, assuming Ken captured the quote accurately, I’ll repeat it:
What really amazes an audience isn’t a big set piece. It’s how you can theatrically overcome narrative solutions. A simple, elegant solution is where the spectacle lies.
I’m riled because 80% of Ken’s list of theatrical effects and stagecraft strikes me as missing the point of theatre. We go to movies for effects, digital or not; we go to theatre for ingenuity, craft and theatricality, which doesn’t require technology. Spectacle is fine, and awe is great, but let me offer my list of some great theatrical effects:
1. Salieri’s transformation early in Amadeus. In the original production, the play began with an aged Salieri wrapped in blankets, clad in a skullcap and very wizened in years. But as his memory takes him back to the earliest days of his nemesis, Mozart, at court, the actor playing Salieri steps out of the chair and the black, peels back the skullcap, relaxes his face and adopts a young man’s voice – transformed into vitality before our eyes, through nothing but a casting off of rags and, oh yes, acting. (I have seen later productions in which the transformation is more gradual, and the magic is lost.)
2. The death of George and Martha’s son in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? [spoiler alert] As we agonize with George and Martha, Nick and Honey through the long, dark night and into the creeping dawn in Virginia Woolf, we are witness to a murder, the murder of a child terrorized by his banshee mother, disappointed by his milquetoast father. At his father’s hands we live through the boy’s death with his clutching mother, only to realize, if we have not already, that the boy never existed, and was the pawn in another of George and Martha’s marital games. Ultimately, our sorrow is at the realization of the depth of the “parents” dysfunction, yet it is, as per Mr. Albee, an exorcism, and perhaps now this couple has a chance at a healthier life together. This effect is achieved simply through the words of Edward Albee, as great a magician as the theatre has produced.
3. One cast, two plays, two theatres, at once. Alan Ayckbourn’s House and Garden, two interlinked plays in which the actors travel back and forth between the simultaneous action in two theatres, is a puzzle that reveals the fortitude of actors, the depth of a playwright’s imagination and the intricacy of the director’s task. I could easily list other Ayckbourn inspirations – the eight-play, 16-ending Intimate Exchanges, performed by a cast of two; Taking Steps, in which the actions in three apartments are played out simultaneously on the same single set – but that’s only because Ayckbourn is the master of the theatrical effect achieved with (and sometimes because of) great economy. Related examples are Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy and Michael Frayn’s Noises Off.
4. The transcendence of Vivian Bearing. Loathe as I am to use another death as an example, the ultimate passing of the central character in Margaret Edson’s Wit manages to show the human spirit leaving this world and ascending into some greater unknown. Its tools? An ever-brightening spotlight, and the human body, exposed to all in its frailty, beauty and imperfection. What is the greatest effect, after all, than life?
I did say that I disagreed with 80% of Ken’s choices, because the frying of actual bacon in David Cromer’s Our Town unquestionably has an impact, imparting an olfactory sense-memory in us all, its effect deepened by the original convention of Our Town being played out with its actions mimed and its scenery intuited. But this isn’t an effect, really, it’s a true action happening before our eyes, made special by the Spartan work that precedes it. This is reality, breaking through the artifice of theatre.
I love a helicopter or pyrotechnics as much as the next guy. But give me two men and a chair (as in Caryl Churchill’s riveting A Number) and I am perhaps at my happiest. A script, perhaps a score, actors, perhaps musicians, a director, maybe a choreographer, and the work of the subtlest of designers. That’s theatre – and theatre itself is theatre’s greatest special effect.
Posted on Monday, December 20th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
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Howard Sherman
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December 20th, 2010 at 2:52 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Howard Sherman. Howard Sherman said: Special effects in theatre: @kendavenport has his list http://ow.ly/3s89y but I have a different set of criteria http://ow.ly/3s8b8 [...]
December 20th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
As someone who studied both film and theatre, works in film production and writes about theatre, I find both your response and Mr Davenport’s to be very interesting takes on the same question. Art (by which I’m referring to performance, writing, film, and fine art) has branched off in so many different ways since the beginning of its recorded history. At its essence, all forms of art are simply effects that are meant to affect. As new elements were added, jobs were created and new artistic collaborations emerged. If Orson Welles didn’t think outside of the box, we would have some of those amazing camera angles in “Citizen Kane” or that one long opening crane shot in “Touch of Evil.” Those effects feel on par with some of what Mr Davenport was talking about in the theatre world. Tiny moments or different views of elements, unessential to the telling of the story or outside of the actors, that open another trap door in the audience’s mind.
Though I agree with your words, “theatre itself is theatre’s greatest special effect,” there are also moments where theatrical effects (like the rain in “Mary Stuart”) have added a subtle nuance to an already multi-layered performance.
December 20th, 2010 at 5:42 pm
[...] Via: American Theatre Wing [...]
December 20th, 2010 at 6:53 pm
I have to admit I love seeing snow onstage. It’s happened twice in the past month and it makes me smile every time.
I also loved the imagination and inventiveness in The 39 Steps and Brief Encounter. Especially in The 39 Steps, I couldn’t believe how much was done with four actors and a few props.
I’m not sure if this would be considered a special effect or just great acting but Michael Shannon’s would-be Broadway producer in Mistakes Were Made spends almost the entire play on the phone with different callers and each and every time he had me believing there was someone on the other end of the line. It was amazing.
December 21st, 2010 at 3:00 pm
[...] And, by chance, Howard Sherman posted yesterday morning at the American Theatre Wing site about why theatres’ greatest effects come from actors and writing, not actual technical special effects. As for last night, a quick search of Twitter will turn up [...]
December 21st, 2010 at 11:54 pm
Very well said. Thank you for explaining something I couldn’t have communicated nearly as well. It seems to me that the more clearly we can understand and articulate the unique value of theatre, the more we can ensure its survival in a time when the power of the in-person experience is appreciated and enjoyed by fewer and fewer.
December 29th, 2010 at 8:04 am
I would add TRAVESTIES and John Wood’s amazing transformation from Henry Carr with a simple sheading of a ratty coat into the brilliantly costumed “Algernon.” It was transforming and took the audiences breath away. Anyone who saw it will not be impressed with anything Spider-Man has to offer.
January 2nd, 2011 at 1:22 pm
Is Broadway is sacrificing the magic of live theater to the ‘special effects of Hollywood’ and the ‘spectacle’ of circus?
By realizing a marketing guru’s vision of known titles, known stars, and increasingly spectacular spectacle, are theaters forfeiting the magic of live theater to the weekly gross? In the same effort, is the imagination of the Broadway audience, like that of movie and circus goers, being stunted by excess.
The move toward special effects and spectacle may be expedient in the short term, but, long range, if Broadway does not leave the mesmerizing attraction of special effects to Hollywood and the fear of real life catastrophe to the Circus, will it follow the circus and movie theaters, into obscurity?
Maybe the message of “Spiderman” is that Broadway should stop dumbing down its product and allow the audience to exercise the rapidly deteriorating imagination.