Over the past year or so, I've found myself at numerous festivals of short plays all over town. This is what happens when you live in New York long enough and you happen to work in the theatre. Your friends end up popping up here and there and everywhere. And so you go, and go, and go. Of course, it's generally hit or miss, but if we want to call ourselves a community, I think the least we owe each other is to show up to support new work.
Lately, I've been wondering why I find so many of the new plays I see—not just the short ones—so fundamentally unsatisfying. Am I just a jaded jerk? (Well, if I am, would one of you please just tell me and put an end to my flailing?)
Seriously though, I think I may have figured out what's up. I think the
Hollywood addiction to "high concept" stories has slowly infected the new writing being produced on the stages of American theatres and the result is that our theatre is dying a slow death by asphyxiation.
First of all, it may be helpful for me to define my terms. By "high concept" I mean those stories that are easily summed up into a two-sentence promo. "High concept" generally means there will be some unusual take on a ubiquitous storyline. For example: "A former Mosad agent fulfills his life dream of becoming a hairdresser" or "A group of heads of state have to dress as women in order to save the world" etc. etc. "High concept" is Hollywood shorthand for two characteristics:
1. easily summarized
2. provocative or unusual—offering up some new take on an old formula
Personally, I don't much care for this sort of thing anywhere—in movies or television either. In fact, I'd argue that if we were to assemble a list of the movies from the past 25 years with the longest shelf lives, few, if any, would be "High Concept" stories.
The problem with this for playwrights is that, perhaps like no other form of storytelling, the play lives or dies by the authenticity of its characters. If the dialogue coming out of the character's mouths rings false, the play fails. And one of the surest ways for a playwright to get in the way of letting his/her character's authentic voices emerge is by a rigorous adherence to a "high concept" in the birth of a new play.
What we get as a result of this is people populating our stages who don't sound like real human beings. Instead, they sound more like caricatures, like the stuff that generally populates 30 sec. TV commercials. Simple cardboard cut-outs, quickly and easily understood, often adorably quirky, but totally unreal.
The greatest plays all have moments when the audience is surprised by something a character says or does, often to such a degree that one suspects that in the writing, the playwright may also have been caught off guard. This kind of discovery is not possible when the world of the play is built upon the shaky foundation of a blurb.
So I hereby make a clarion call to my fellow playwrights (and by extension to the Artistic Directors of our theatres): Stop producing new work that is easily summed up in a sexy blurb! It may make the sale of subscriptions a tiny bit more arduous but I'm convinced that over the long haul, the audiences will reward us. Just you wait and see.
I can see it now: Ambitious upstart theatre company fires publicist and takes the radical approach of presenting the plays they believe in. Through word of mouth, audiences start to come in droves and a new era of American Theatre is born!
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
