Tynan's Anger

George Hunka had an excellent post up today on the staging of Beckett's television and fiction work to the stage at the Lincoln Center. Hunka rightly notes than in an era with as strong media saturation with distinctly non-theatrical media, integrating things like film and prose into theater is inevitable. This is especially true when that production happens to have a lot of money.

I commented that Beckett one-acts are perfectly suited for viral video. But that got me thinking about what happens to the theater and its audience if plays go to YouTube and the web. On the one hand, some of the core distinctions of the theatrical medium—an organic creation, live audience, using a theatrical space—get lost. At the same time, audience interaction in general does not get lost. It may actually even get bigger.

The web has created unprecedented possibilities for media access, whether or not the business side of the media world has caught up yet. YouTube has already been used as a promotional tool to get people to see shows. But what's stopping a taped, live, organic performance from streaming on the web? What if a free broadcast of a staged production gets orders of magnitude more viewers than a $50 per viewer live staging. What if a web broadcast gets audience comments that, in effect, serve the same purpose as audience feedback slips in the program?

These kind of innovations would no doubt be maddening to theater traditionalists, but they may be essential to moving theater into the Web 2.0 (soon to be 3.0) era. Audiences aren't going away, they're just going to nontradional places. Trying to redefine the theatrical audience is certainly a tricky proposition that could easily fail, but it's time someone at least had the guts to try.

Labels: george hunka, innovation, new media, samuel beckett, theater on the web

So after years of loudly and obnoxiously bashing Harold Pinter to anyone who cared (or to people who didn't) I'm finally starting to see the error of my ways. University Theater here at the U of C did a fantastic rendition of The Homecoming, convincing enough that I'm tempted to see it again on Broadway. My bias towards Pinter largely comes from my father (if you've ever seen The Squid and the Whale, a lot of my opinions come from the same vein as arguing that A Tale of Two Cities is minor Dickens), and the fact that my the first Pinter play I ever saw was his first, The Room, which, while mirroring the chronology of the theater world's introduction to Pinter, is not exactly an easy introduction to a playwright for a 17 year old.

Probably another factor was that I was exposed to David Mamet at roughly the same time as Pinter. While both playwrights tend to use dialog as a weapon, Mamet is much more grounded in reality and easier to digest, and hence I naturally felt the assert Mamet's superiority in the theater of menace. Now, of course, with four years of college in me, I can come up with more sources of comparison. I see the parallels to Beckett, Ionesco, and the Angry Young Man movement. I see more apt American parallels than Mamet, such as Edward Albee and Sam Shepard (Buried Child, in my mind, is Pinter with a Midwestern accent). I can even see parallels with the more comical but still emotionally jarring playwrights like Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. I still think Philip Roth deserves a Nobel Prize more, but I am less inclined to dismiss Pinter's Noble Prize outright. I also now really want to see Sleuth, and am frustrated that I don't have it On Demand in my apartment.

Labels: angry young man, david mamet, edward albee, eugene ionseco, harold pintet, joe orton, philip roth, sam shepard, samuel beckett, sleuth, the homecoming, tom stoppard