Unlosing the Lost Plays

There are great plays that you can never experience fully. Sure, you might see them as movies, or read them as “literature”, but despite what your high school English teacher sold you, plays are not literature, any more than music or sculpture are. You may think you are special and that you can wring every artistic significance from a play by reading it; but you’re not and you can’t. There are aspects of dramatic character that only an actor can convey by speaking out loud, live, in front of you. (Not to get pedantic, but this is why we call it an audience.) Because of this, there are great plays you will never experience—at least not as plays—because of very practical reasons excluding them from the possibility of ever being professionally staged again. 

Stalag 17 by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski* is just such a play. The original 1951 Broadway cast contained 21 men, a size which is simply not financially sustainable in today’s theatre economy. Beyond cast size, a myriad of other reasons doom to the dusty shelf some of the canon’s greatest plays. Once these plays cease to be performed, they are essentially lost to our culture as works of art, though of course they still have value as artifacts.

To the rescue rides Seattle’s Endangered Species Project, dedicated to giving monthly staged readings of plays that seldom get full productions.   As they explain on their website:

In the present economic straights in which regional theatre now finds itself, much of the so called established international repertoire is neglected, for various reasons: there are too many different settings, or the casts are too large, or simply, the publicity requirements of selling a play that is both “old” and unfamiliar to general audiences may seem too daunting.

We feel that while it is an essential duty of theatres to read and develop new work, our group sees a parallel need to celebrate older or otherwise neglected plays….

Through our free, simply staged readings, we hope to lend live voices to plays that are now silent on our bookshelves.

It is the blossoming of projects like ESP that continually renew my faith in Seattle theatre’s progress toward World Class standing.

Next Monday evening, September 19, at 7 pm you can defy the entropy of modern theatre and see a one-time-only reading of Stalag 17 artfully staged by director Leslie Law, with such brilliant casting as Shawn Law as Sefton (an even more natural choice than William Holden) and Richard Ziman as Sergeant Shultz.  (No, this ain’t Hogan’s Heroes’ Sergeant Shultz**, though he obviously inspired the sitcom role.  This German non-com has no compunction about torturing a POW on stage to determine the whereabouts of a missing American pilot.)

Even if you only live another ten years, my best guess is that you’ll have about 12 more chances to see Twelfth Night, six to see American Buffalo, and between five and five hundred opportunities to watch something scripted by Sarah Ruhl; but unless my prodigious predictive power fails me now, you will never, not as long as you live, get another opportunity to hear Stalag 17 performed by such a cast as this.

Don’t miss it.

 

 

*Both authors were prisoners in the actual Stalag 17B in Austria. 

**From Wikipedia’s entry on Hogan’s Heroes:

In his book, My War, Andy Rooney, who was a friend of Don Bevan and Ed Trzcinski—the authors of the original Stalag 17 play—relates that "...someone at CBS apparently ripped off their idea and made a television series called Hogan's Heroes of it. The television program had too many similarities in character and plot to be coincidental, and when Don and Ed sued the network they won a huge award.

Comments

[Louise Penberthy]

8-O

WOW. What a cast.

That whole thing sounds like a wonderful idea. Only way you can see a large-cast show nowadays is if it's Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County," and that was only (!) 13.

[Jeff Steitzer]

Thanks for the lovely Shout Out! Paul.

[Paul Mullin]

You are most welcome, Jeff.

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