Theater Report: Bound

So. It went well.

The house was around thirty, and by my reckoning, almost a third of that were not family or friends but honest ticket-buyers. Not that the family and friends didn’t buy tickets, but you know what I mean. Everybody seemed to like it. There were only three coughs, and two of those were my Best Reader, poor thing, who has a dreadful cold, so I’m not counting those. Well, and I just did count them, but I’m not counting them. There was very little program rustling, considering that the house lights were on, what with it being a church, which isn’t really set up to have the house lights down and the stage lights up. And they don’t call it a stage.

There was applause at the end, and at the end of the first half, before the intermission. And everybody came back after the intermission, except my Perfect Non-Reader, who really isn’t prepared at seven-and-a-half to sit quietly through a grown-up theatrical event. And I got a bunch of compliments from people I don’t know, who could presumably have nodded and left if they were in a bad mood from having hated the thing. What I’m saying is, it went well.

There are some problems still in the script. I have three or four different places where I describe Eliezar’s job, and each of them is four sentences or more, which is just a waste of time. There are other places to cut, most of them (I think) just individual lines or line-and-line that could be tightened up. My Personal Dramaturge came up with the turn of phrase I had been looking for to replace one of the shits, and I actually like it better, I think, than the shit phrase, so when I put the profanity back in to the play for the next draft, I’ll change it.

The big problem is III,i; it’s the first scene after the intermission, and when I wrote it, I deliberately slowed things down, to sort of start up again and begin the arc of the second half. The main thing I learned from sitting through the thing three times is that I slowed it down far too much. The scene is interminable. It’s not that it’s terribly long, just that all time comes to a halt while it’s going on, and if you listen, you can hear the audience aging. My plan is to throw the whole scene out and write a new one, and I have an idea or two for what will go into it. I will have to go back and look at what plot points I put in the scene that I will need, and then decide if I want them in the new III,i or if I want to put them somewhere else.

There were things that worked, and some that worked better than I thought they would. The way that Isaac remains in the background of the attention in the first half and then comes center, as it were, in the second half works, I think. Abraham’s long monologue worked. Eliezar’s comic character worked, and actually there were a lot more laughs than I expected throughout; I had forgotten, over the year, that the people might laugh at the jokey lines that I put in just to break up the tension. Or that people would laugh because we were breaking up the tension, which is even better. I’ll have to look at what specific bits got lines, and what’s around them, but I think the laughs and the lack of coughing between them tell me that the play works as a play.

Of course, the laughs happened because the actors sold the lines that got the laughs. The cast were really good—we had only two rehearsals, and at the first rehearsal I was pleased but still anxious about them putting it over, and at the second I was very pleased but still frustrated, and at the show itself I was pleased and pleased. The audience makes a difference, of course, but they also actually, you know, rehearsed during the rehearsals and got better, even with only two of them. Which, since as I say, they started out pretty good, means that I couldn’t be happier with the result.

When I started angling for a reading, the thing that I wanted was to hear somebody else read the characters, to know whether they existed in the lines, or just in my head. That is, whether an actor could take the script and make a good and interesting character from it, and (what I was most worried about) characters that sound different from each other. That turns out not to be a problem. True, my Eliezar played the part almost exactly as I would have done it, in terms of the line readings. But Ishmael got a wonderful interpretation, very physical and impulsive and mercurial, mixing hostility and practicality and a sort of blue-collar earthiness that I would never have even attempted, and it worked beautifully. Isaac played up the nervousness of the character by rattling through the long speeches as if he were being chased, crossing up his rhythms and seeming off-balance all the time. In the first act particularly, he had a kind of puppyish eagerness to please covering a sly intelligence; he managed to wrongfoot Ishmael while apparently placating him. And Abraham… Abraham was utterly different than I had imagined him, utterly different, and wonderful. The actor has a wonderful voice, and he was gentle and sweet, a lovable man, with the requisite steel underneath, but a persuasive man brimming with energy rather than the weary and ruthless man I wrote. And it worked. The ending, instead of an exhausted, matter-of-fact practical mask, he was a shattered, ecstatic visionary, and it worked.

I can’t remember who it was, but shortly after finishing the first draft of this play, I read some theater professional or other saying that if you want a play to be performed again and again, for decades, what you need is one great big juicy role that a successful actor in his prime will want to play. Ensemble stuff is popular, from time to time, but the people who might want to revive it are less likely to have the clout. But if you write a Hedda or a Higgins or a Hickey, there will be some actor who wants to play the part and will raise the money and push to have it happen. I thought well, crap, I’ve just written an ensemble piece, haven’t I? and decided that the next play would have a real showpiece role. But listening to Abraham last night, I thought to myself, maybe I did write a part like that, after all. Not that I think that Bound will necessarily be staged at all, much less become part of the repertory, but that it may actually be that kind of a role, a role that an older actor would want, not only to show off that he can still remember his lines, but to put his own stamp on the monologue, on the final scene, on whatever I can come up with for the new III,i.

And even if I’m wrong, it felt good to think that, for a few minutes.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.