Lest you think I had these twelve blog posts neatly planned out before I started posting this virtual half-Advent calendar of reasons for going back to the theatre after an 8-year absence, please know that the idea for this one came to me in the bathtub two nights ago, when I suddenly asked out loud, “What if I hate it?” I smiled and a familiar sense of delight came upon me, because I knew that there’s a less than trivial chance I might.
I would say that over the decades I attended shows at Seattle’s big houses before retiring, I was wowed by maybe ten percent of the offerings, then moderately impressed with another thirty, disappointed by twenty percent, and then flat out hated roughly the remaining thirty.
Hell, as much I as I heaped praise on Amy Thone two posts ago, it’s also undeniable that she has appeared in shows which I have absolutely loathed. Back in 2010 I took my friend, the journalist Tom Paulson, to see the Seattle Rep’s production of God of Carnage, featuring Amy and her husband Hans Altwies. Tom seemed genuinely confused and shaken by both how bad it was, and conversely, how much the audience seemed to love it. At one point he turned to me and whispered, "Why are all these people laughing?" Before I could even think of something clever to answer, I blurted out the truth: "Stockholm Syndrome."
Hating bad theatre is a big part of being a playwright. Hell, it’s a big part of being a theatre lover. Because anyone who really loves the artform understands that sitting through a bad play is infinitely more excruciating than sitting through a bad movie or television show. In the theatre, you’re trapped, and what’s worse, you’re trapped with other people (Sartre's definition of Hell). The fact that live group suffering is multiplicative explains in large part why the stakes of live theatre are always so high, even when the mere facts would argue that they are invariably quite low.
So maybe you can help me out here. Why is the fact that there’s a better than negligible chance I might hate A Contemporary Theatre's production of A Christmas Carol such a compelling reason for me wanting to go? Am I a masochist? Or is it that I know, deep down, that if we are capable of throwing gobs of money, love, and attention at a production, and it still turns out to be horrible, then maybe we are right on track back to normal after all?
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