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The Guilfordian

The student news site of Guilford College

The Guilfordian

The student news site of Guilford College

The Guilfordian

Guilford plays must become more audience-friendly

“Curse of the Starving Class” is not the best play Guilford has seen over the past four years. That honor, in my opinion, goes to 2006’s epic sci-fi drama “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (“RUR”).But, neither is “Curse” “The Trojan Women,” shown in 2008, which will go down in the annals of Guilford as the most ferociously dismal production in a very long time.

It is with these two extremes in mind that I would like to address the Guilford theatre studies department. Of the plays I’ve seen here, the majority have been excellent. Yet, between those I have found lacking, I have identified a few common factors.

To begin with, Sam Shepard’s “Curse” has several bizarre moments. Junior Natalie Streiter’s “quarters” soliloquy and first-year Elizabeth Wray’s sexualized dancing come to mind. Looking back a few years, the disparities of gender and race between actors and their characters in 2008’s “Cloud Nine” were similarly offbeat. At least those direction choices were obviously meant to challenge the audience’s perception of social norms. “Curse’s” moments are strange, but not quite strange enough to push the play into surrealist territory. Instead, they just come off as weird for the sake of weird.

Secondly, Shepard’s play, according to a box office poster, is meant to evoke “pity and fear” in the audience in the manner of classic Greek tragedies. Yet any of the audience’s pathos for the characters is counteracted by feelings of schadenfreude and the view that the characters are so foolish that they deserve their misfortunes.

And, we have seen what happens when an actual Greek tragedy is brought onto a 21st-century stage. “The Trojan Women” is now popularly remembered as an hour and a half of women screaming. The play’s otherwise poignant message was utterly lost in the audience’s distaste for that much misery for that long without respite.

I understand the need for Guilford theater to include a social message in each of its plays. We are a Quaker school with a tradition of activism, and the theatre studies department is right to use its position as an artistic forum to heighten social awareness in the larger community. However, there are certain limits to the ways in which said messages should be presented.

“It’s hard to say ‘that was so depressing, what a good play,'” said sophomore Rachael Travis, waiting outside “Curse.”

A third key element of a play is its characters.

Much like the characters in the recently produced “Uncle Vanya,” the characters in “Curse” were flat and inaccessible to the audience, and thus un-memorable. This shortcoming is far from the actors’ fault, and lies squarely with the playwrights.

Shepard is quoted on another poster as saying, “I preferred a character that was constantly unidentifiable, shifting through the actor, so that the actor could play almost anything, and the audience was never expected to identify with the characters.”

My European Cinema professor in Paris once told me that it is artistically fatuous for the viewer to expect to relate to the characters. Yet, given the choice between Kieslowski’s “Blue” and Whedon’s “Serenity,” I know which film I enjoyed more.

I am not suggesting that Guilford theater dumb down its plays. Future plays should merely be considered with the audience’s sensibilities in mind. The balance between intellectuality, social gravity, and audience-friendliness was achieved in stellar fashion in “RUR”.

With these tenets in mind, hopefully Guilford theater will be able to rise to new heights as a shining example to the community for years to come.

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