Mark your schedules

One reviewer’s wish list for the upcoming year

By Katherine Joyce

As I was planning my pre-holiday schedule, naively believing that I would get everything done, I took it upon myself to schedule the productions of the local theatre companies as well. Okay, their season is already scheduled (has been for a while, with no help at all from me). But while I was kidding myself, I decided that there are some playwrights whose work would be particularly well suited to one or another of the companies. So, as this Christmas has come and gone, I put these on my wish list for next year.

To start, I would love to see Portland Stage Company do a Howard Barker play. Barker is an English playwright, whose plays are full of powerful language and challenging themes explored through beauty, violence, power, and sexuality. His plays are written with outstanding passion, and when performed are truly awesome (in the traditional sense of the word). Barker’s plays are full of imagination and moral speculation. Although his plays can be controversial, they are impossible to ignore.

The complexity of the language, intensity of emotion, and sheer length of many of his plays make them somewhat better suited to professional companies, where the cast can become immersed in the world of the play. The skill with which PSC takes on immense and interesting challenges leads me to believe that they would do justice to a playwright I would call a modern Shakespeare (excuse the blasphemy) — not for his fame, but for his immense linguistic skill and his sheer creative genius.

If Barker turns out to be too risqué for PSC (or even if he doesn’t), Tom Stoppard is my next choice. Stoppard’s plays are full of witty intellectualism, balanced perfectly with inexplicable, unquantifiable, utterly unscientific emotion. His plays are uproariously funny when performed with wit and style such as that possessed by the Portland Stage Company.

From Mad Horse, I would love to see a Judith Thompson play. Thompson is a Canadian playwright who pulls no punches, and has high expectations of her audiences. Her plays are often about cyclical patterns of negative behavior, and deal with everything from rape to homosexuality to parents who don’t want their children to eat sugar while in daycare. Her writing is funny and raw, and focuses on the choices people make (or refuse to make) that detract from their abilities to transform into the people they want to be. As she has said, “To learn to love, one must have a clear and profound understanding of one’s self. I believe this understanding can arise from being forced to make moral choices, ones that have real consequences.” She challenges audiences by presenting them with ambiguous and difficult situations that illustrate people’s tendencies to remain undecided in order to avoid conflict. Her plays deal with the paralyzing consequences of such indecision. As much as she is about getting to know oneself, she is about the next step — transformation. Thompson is a playwright Mad Horse audiences would embrace, and by whom they would be deeply affected.

I was so impressed with University of Southern Maine’s performance of A Good Woman of Setzuan, I would love to see them tackle the work of another difficult playwright — Anton Chekhov. Chekhov, like Brecht, is known for using particular techniques in his storytelling (the techniques are very different, mind you). One such technique is the surprise ending, but the more difficult technique is called a zero ending. A zero ending is when the conflict in the story leads the audience to believe that a dramatic climax is the only conceivable way to ease the tension, but the tension inexplicably eases without the story ever reaching a climax. Both tactics are aimed at creating a disparity between the expected and the actual resolution, thereby creating the aesthetic effect Chekhov desired.

We all learned in grammar school that the climax was an essential part of the storytelling process, so the zero effect can be particularly frustrating for theatre-goers. Chekhov requires a great deal of skill to perform well, and a mediocre performance of his work can be quite painful to watch. After Good Woman, I think that, with the right direction, the USM actors and crew might be able to put a twist on Chekhov that would revitalize his work.

I think a John Patrick Shanley (author of the much-loved movie, Moonstruck) play would be a fantastic choice for Seacoast Repertory Theatre. Shanley’s plays tend to be very moving and funny, with great characters for actors to sink their teeth into. He is passionate and his sense of humor is just twisted enough to satisfy Seacoast’s usual desire to break up their musicals and fast-paced comedies with something off the well-beaten, crowd-pleasing path.

So, what can the public look for from its local theatre companies beyond this year’s season? Maybe some of those crowd pleasers. It’s anyone’s guess. No doubt many of them are still in the process of deciding what is in store for us.

But, as someone who will have to sit through most of them, these are my two-cents worth.

nd crew to create aural and visual effects that are breathtaking enough to make any audience member feel like an eight-year old on Christmas Eve. With this production of A Christmas Carol, Portland Stage Company accomplishes an almost impossible task — it makes an old and oft-told story fresh, exciting, and utterly magical.

Katherine Joyce can be reached at ingliskat@aol.com