While attending the current production of Savannah Disputation, a friend asked a truly perceptive and intriguing question: what is it really about. This was in response to someone else's comment about another play - "of course you know what that was really about." Bringing my thoughts squarely to rest on the playwright's thinking for Savannah Disputation in particular was a happy place to land.
This play examines the disappointments of women, priests as people and as symbols, religion, power, mortality (sort of), the role of constraints and those thing forbidden, relationships generally, the South vaguely, America and it's use and mis-use of religion, how we fight and 'getting along', and likely more to add mess to a well constructed run-on sentence. Evan Smith's new play pushes a whole bunch of buttons.
I suspect a certain flatness to the production comes from a linear construct within the play itself because the writing appears to run through a list of questions rather than creating a carefully constructed dramatic progression. The female actors had to work to portray real people because most of the dialog supported light weight characters going after heavy weight material and getting flattened in the process. Occasionally the character of Mary gets something meaty to set up action for Father Murphy. And Robert Scogin's portrayal of the priest has real depth and pathos, partly the result of stellar acting on top of a character with real issues. He shines with masterful power as he commands Margaret to stop second guessing all of catholicism as a result of an afternoon's chat with a sophist-fundamentalist. And his cynicism is front and center when he tells Mary she may as well remain a catholic because she doesn't believe in anything else and, "then you can go to the same church as Margaret."
I would like to see Smith go back and make a less orderly examination of his questions, shake up the situation comedy. But the production is well done and affords laughter about serious rather than solemn topics that invites continued disputation over time.
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2 comments:
How you find ideas for articles, I am always lack of new ideas for articles. Some tips would be great
First, thanks for such a great topic! I'll write some things here, but this is definitely going to make it to a new post
I have a bunch of habits that make things easier.
* Keep a little book to write down ideas - not very cyborg, but it works.
* In a blog space I find it helpful to have a number of posts going (but not visible) at the same time. When I started this one, I was thinking it would be my writing portfolio. One item was equally important to posts and their quality - my ability to consistently put out a new post. So I started something every week, even if I published it late (ok, I acknowledge it is cheating). Later it turned out that having 3-4 different posts going at once made all of them better (or I dumped the junk).
* Themes are helpful. I need to reorganize this blogspace. I will probably do that in the near future and it will have headings like "food dreams", "Chicago Theatre" and "What is the meaning of culture-is it the same as art?"
* Write headers, just by themselves. The story at the Economist magazine is that they do story headers last and it's the best fun of the week (they have very strange headers and picture heads).
* Try different styles; comic, serious, critical, write a description of something, try an inner voice, be the voice of someone you know (or think you do), be you in a different time/place, do research on a topic and then produce copy. You must care about your subject; it shows when a writer isn't engaged in the topic. If you are serious about writing, set out a time every day and limit that time. Think of the limit as a meal, you do not want to over eat or you'll feel wretched the next day.
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