Tales from Hollywood

Continuing the Guthrie's celebration of British playwright Christopher Hampton, this evening I saw the second of his three plays being performed this October (had I been more on top of things on my return to Minnesota, it should have been the first).

Tales from Hollywood, Christopher Hampton
Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis

According to assistant director Jon Ferguson, this is Hampton's favorite of his plays, and I did much prefer it to Appomattox. Tales from Hollywood follows Ödön von Horváth, a German-speaking Hungarian author who died in 1938 when a tree branch fell on his head on the Champs-Élysées. The play explores a possible life he might have had if he had lived, primarily using him as a vehicle for introducing the audience to a circle of exile or emigree German writers during World War II: Bertolt  Brecht, Thomas Mann, and his brother Heinrich Mann chief among them. In a cleverly cinematic production, the audience learns of the Hollywood experiences of exiled writers in the 1940s and 1950s.

As this play followed von Horváth's possible career if he had emigrated to Hollywood during WWII, director Ethan McSweeny chose to heighten the filmic feeling by having apparently-period movie cameras filming the scenes of the play as large-scale projections were displayed behind the actors. The deception of the props department was impressive enough that, during the talkback following the performance, one audience member wondered how the actors managed to sync their lines with the projections so well. The staging of the play, including the overarching elements of film and the ensemble's coordination with the many scene changes, were clearly the highlight in this play that was, in most respects, fine.

You know, fine...not amazing, not wonderful, not great, not really good, but fine.

"How was the play?"
"It was fine."

Don't get me wrong, there were several super entertaining moments: the character of Bertolt Brecht was funny and his dialogue was both insightful and appropriate for his character. I found myself wishing more people in the audience were familiar with Brecht's theories so that I wouldn't have been the only one laughing sometimes. Mostly, though, it was fine. Funny, sure. Educational, definitely. And there were several fantastic performances from the actors, most notably Lee Sellars as Ödön, Keir Dullea as Heinrich Mann, and Allison Daugherty as Nelly Mann.

The talkback after the performance was the most informative part. A number of the actors made their Guthrie débuts in this production, so their insights about the differences between working at the Guthrie and on Broadway were fascinating (they were entirely complimentary of the Guthrie, its facilities, its way of running productions, and its staff). One actress complimented playwright Christopher Hampton on his terribly careful research of the time period and the characters and talked about how helpful it was to talk to him during rehearsals about various bits of his research that were left out of the play but were important for the characters.

And I think that's my problem with both of the Christopher Hampton plays I've seen recently. There is so much - perhaps too much - historical information given in the play, and there is obviously more left out, that the audience is hard-pressed just to keep up with the information overload. Casual theatre patrons enjoy the opportunity to get outside of themselves, and both Appomattox and Tales from Hollywood require much of the audience in the way of conscious accumulation of facts. As a more-than-casual theatregoer, I want to be free to enjoy the play while still analyzing the script, set, lighting, sound, costuming, and directorial choices. Christopher Hampton's plays simply do not allow me to do this on one viewing. Honestly I would need to go back at least one more time to feel like I could make a full analysis, and probably more than once.

This simply isn't feasible or desirable for the run-of-the-mill theatregoer, so the play cannot meet its objectives of fulfilling the audience artistically. Treasures of the Twin Cities, another theatre blog I follow (though I didn't read the entry until tonight (until right before writing this sentence, actually - on purpose)), felt the same way (read that link here). This lack of enthusiasm is evident in the audience size for these performances. My season tickets are typically for the final preview performance, the night before the official opening. If I miss my scheduled performance, I usually try to reschedule within two weeks, meaning that I usually end up at a performance with mostly subscribers in an almost full house. Tonight, not only was I not in the theatre with mostly subscribers, I was in a mostly empty theatre. I've never seen this before at the Guthrie.

During the talkback, the actors discussed how Minneapolis is a really great audience for this play because it is an educated crowd that doesn't have the jaded "I-know-everything-about-the-film-industry" attitude of LA or the "LA-is-clearly-beneath-me" attitude of NYC. I found myself thinking that there were several jokes that would play much better in London than they would anywhere in the US. Minneapolis may be a great American audience for this play, but with so many moments the audience didn't fully appreciate and with so many empty seats, it doesn't hit the mark.

Tales from Hollywood is playing at the Guthrie until October 27, 2012. Click here for ticket info.

Next scheduled show: (And now for something completely different) Beauty and the Beast at the Orpheum, Oct. 17.