ART AND THE AMATEUR
Earlier this week, a friend and I went to the theater. Over dinner beforehand, we discussed the mixed reviews the play had garnered. For the most part, the objections were to its "talkiness" and "slow spots," and we wondered whether we would be bored.
"I actually prefer talky and slow," I said. I tend to feel assaulted by the rapid-action films and books my teenaged son and his friends are drawn to. I prefer to be led, gently and thoughtfully, into the heart of the conflict. "If a reviewer complains that there isn't enough action, I know it's my kind of piece."
My friend, who is a gifted composer of musical comedies, observed that his own work (which is generally very well received) has sometimes been dismissed by critics as unexciting. "They want to be jolted out of their seats, bowled over by something totally new." My friend's music, while often innovative, draws subtly on his appreciation of classical, jazz, and musical theater traditions. His songs have moved me to tears, guffaws, and blissful trance states, but they have never jolted me out of my seat--for which I'm grateful. But critics--like agents and editors, we speculated--are not free to immerse themselves in the experience. They have a professional obligation to discover new and exciting work and bring it to public notice. They are attuned to the "cutting edge," the knife honed to draw blood, not to the lovingly crafted tea service.
"Maybe they get jaded, too," I said. "They have to see so many plays, read so many manuscripts, that they lose their patience for nuance and detail. They want to jump right to the meat." We speculated about whether this induced ADD might have helped shape an artistic culture that caters to thrill-seekers rather than lovers or conoisseurs.
The play was talky and slow, as promised. Nothing much happened on the surface. Yet an entire world was created, layer upon painstaking layer, that was so rich and believable that when I met some of the actors later, I was initially taken aback that their vocal patterns, body language, and attitudes were different from those of the characters they played. A half-hour could easily have been cut from the dialogue without damaging the plot or the major themes--but the texture and shading that drew me in would have been lost--as would the thoughtful explorations of seemingly innocuous cultural differences that can spark heartbreaking schisms, and of the ways language can both unite and isolate us.
I'm grateful that I don't have to say anything new or clever about this play, and that no one is paying me to assess its position in the canon. I couldn't even say whether it was "successful" or not by any objective standards. And I don't care. For a few hours I inhabited an environment completely different from my own. I experienced the world through the eyes of people I'm unlikely to encounter in real life. I left looking at certain questions of language use differently.
If I had had to approach the play as a professional, would I have missed the beauty, the luxury, of slowness? Would I have advised theatergoers to stay home, or to forgo this experience in favor of something hotter, fresher, faster?
What do you think?
The Chopin Manuscript is an original serialized thriller created exclusively for audio by a stellar list of thriller writers -- for a joint project between Audible.com and ITW - a project that Steve Feldber and I only imagined would ever happen back in June of 2006 when we sat down over tepid coffee during a break at BEA to brainstorm how we could work together.
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