Right, so the plays that I went to last weekend:
- They were both automatically awesome because they were done by a professional acting company (called The Acting Company), and Caltech student tickets were $5. Good start.
- Neither of them was what I expected.
I thought Moby Dick, Rehearsed was going to be something of a comedy, because the blurb in the grad student newsletter said it was about an acting troupe who decides to drop King Lear to do Moby Dick instead, and I can’t imagine that not being a little bit funny. And it was. A little bit. But mostly it was a play version of Moby Dick, framed by the story of the acting troupe, which (I think) just served to make it obvious to the audience that we were seeing, in fact, a play and not a strictly accurate accounting of events. The whale, said the director, is “like the storm in Lear…more than just a storm”…because the actors could only offer “less than a whale” given practical constraints on the theater, they actually end up offering “more than a whale” because it has to be imagined by they audience. So that was interesting and all very meta, but what can you expect from Orson Wells? Yeah, he adapted it. I can totally see him making the part of the director/Ahab just for himself, too. It was an Orson Wells role. So anyway, it was good, but very serious.
The Tempest was another story. It was good (for the most part), and not serious (for the most part). The set was very minimal and very modern, and the costumes were utterly ridiculous. Miranda wore pink stockings and boots and a frilly dress with a head scarf, and Prospero spent most of the play in his pj’s and bathrobe. Caliban wore one of those plastic dog cones around his neck with a jumpsuit sort of thing and what looked like a male chastity belt (which it was probably meant to be). All of the lords wore these crazy gold floor-length coats with glittery cravats, except for Ferdinant, who had gold pants and a white/gold hoodie, which I thought was clever. Caliban had his own rock ballad song (made from his freedom song after meeting Stephano), and Ariel was dressed like a bride until she was freed at the end of the play. They seemed to be making a big deal out of Prospero’s forgiveness of his brother at the end of the play, but I don’t really agree that that’s the important part in the Tempest…I think it’s interesting how the forgiveness fails, in some sense, since his brother doesn’t really acknowledge it and Prospero seems to only do it because it’s required by the structure of relationships he’s trying to hold together. I think if you treat the forgiveness as the big moment at the end of the play, it falls a little flat. But you can argue with me =) Oh, and Ferdinand and Miranda were playing Wii when they were discovered by Alonso (instead of chess), which was funny.
The other big news (I guess) is that the only student theater group on campus is actually doing something this year, a weekend of one act plays that happens the first weekend of the third quarter. Auditions are in a couple of weeks (and they cast everyone that shows up, apparently, so no worries), so I have to decide if I want to do that. It’s probably good timing for something like that, but we’ll see. Have to think about it.
