In a recent episode of Glee, Rachel (Lea Michele) is saying goodbye to the
mother (Idina Menzel) who put her up for adoption. Rachel wants to sing with
her mother before they part, so she hands Menzel the sheet music to Lady Gaga’s
“Poker Face”. Then, from out of nowhere, the music director for the glee club
appears. When Rachel hands him sheet music as he sits down to accompany
them, she says something along the lines of, “That’s Brad. He’s around a
lot.”
It’s a very good joke, a wink at the audience. Every fan of Glee knows that the conceit that allows the characters to sing to each other (they are all members of a glee club) is very thin. The professionalism of the singers and the size of the production numbers performed fall WELL outside anything possible in high school. But nobody really cares. I know I don’t.
Glee could, of course, be a show about a real high school glee club, where average singers belt out their hearts to a clunky accompanying piano. But who would watch it? Give me fantastically talented singers, lavish production values, and just enough of a framing reality to let me forget how impossible it all is, and I’m happy. Very happy.
This got me to thinking
about how much justification works of art need to be effective. Not just in
framing devices, but in whole characters.
I’ll use myself as an example. My first full-length play, Bruno Hauptmann Kissed My Forehead, was produced at the Abingdon Theatre. There is a character in it who is a full-on, no-holds-barred plot device. Without him the story could not function. On his own, however, he has no real life. He is a device, an author’s pawn. He has no journey to live through.
So before we went into rehearsal, in all my ignorance, I gave him one.
I wrote a whole scene, with an impassioned monologue about how he came to be sitting in that room. And it was good. The actor liked it. I liked it. The director liked it. There was only one problem, which became very clear as we worked through the play.
Nobody cared.
When I say nobody, I mean nobody. I was bored to tears watching the scene, and I wrote it. It wasn’t the actor’s fault. It was the scene.
Simply put, this character had basically nothing to do with the story of the play. No amount of back story or fancy turns of phrase was going to change that. So this big scene I wrote was just wasting everyone’s time. Indeed, as the rehearsal process went on, I found myself editing out pieces of it, bit by bit, until the scene was totally gone. He was back as a plot device. And the play, in all it’s flawed glory, was the better for it.
I was struck by something similar in a recent production I saw of Crimes of the Heart (which featured my supertalented wife, Blair Sams). Crimes is a very good play about the reuniting of three sisters in a southern town. The scenes between the sisters are electric, and dominate the play. But there are also two male characters, who serve as romantic interests for the sisters. The scenes that feature them are very well-written. The characters are very strong and well defined. In the production I saw, the actors who portrayed them were terrific.
And I still didn’t care.
The play is about the sisters. Anything that takes me away from them irritated me. Could the play survive without them? I wonder.
Maybe we should all have
the courage of our convictions, like Glee. Glee knows what it
is. It doesn’t waste anyone’s time justifying itself for what it is not
(namely, realistic). It’s all the better for it.
Maybe there’s a lesson in there for all of us.
