Schreiber

Friday evening, I skipped a Dark Crystal screening and a house concert (with some considerable regret in both cases) in favor of driving up to Maine for a production of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters (1746).  But I'm related to the director (because of course I am), and some things are important, especially when said director 's life has been going haywire.  In any case, the show went up at the Freeport Playhouse, a gigungous space by the standards both of the town's size and those of the audiences for the high school and community theater productions (like this one) that it chiefly hosts; but this is what you get when you have L.L. Bean bankrolling you.

Servant is an odd play, in some respects. It's not just that it's rumored to have been written essentially as a vehicle to showcase the talents of the original lead (playing the eponymous main character, Truffaldino.) And it’s not just that eighteenth-century theater tends to be strange (for us) in general. The thing with Servant is that it was written squarely in the tradition of the Commedia dell’Arte, but at a time when every possible change had be rung on the latter, and thus audiences (and playwrights) wanted something new; so it’s much more scripted than the improv.-like style of its predecessors, and heavily influenced by contemporary French theater. Almost like the Commedia’s stock characters acting in a plot by Rousseau (or Shakespeare, but I’ll get back to that.) As such, there’s still a fair amount of improvisation involved; in this case, this included substituting endless L.L. Bean jokes for the endless Venice jokes.

Plot? You actually want to know about the plot? Look, you can pretty much figure that out from the title, other than that Truffaldino displays a Scooby-Doo like desire to eat constantly, and that one of his masters is, in fact, a woman pretending to be her own brother. Pantalone is old, Silvio and Clarice are airheads, the Dottore harangues everyone constantly in semi-literate Latin, Truffaldino is alternately a very clever person doing something colossally stupid and a buffoon accidentally being clever. The fourth wall gets broken repeatedly: I’m not sure whether that’s in the original, or a modern adaptation. (I’d once have assumed the latter, but that was before I found out about the existence of The Knight of the Burning Pestle.) There are endless stupid misunderstandings that could have been cleared up instantly, except that (a) the plot would then collapse, and (b) anyway, no one in this play is smart enough to do that, except for maybe our cross-dressed heroine and her beloved, and they’re under a lot of stress, what with being on the run from the law and all.*

Instead, I’m going to talk about humor.
1) The frankly sophomoric.
“Some people have asked me whether we added in the all the, you know, sex jokes,” the director remarked to me over dinner. “But aside from adding one very subtle line about oral sex [totally in keeping with the show’s tradition of improvisation], nope, it’s all in there…” I can sympathize: it always amazes me when residents of the 21st century assume that past societies had no concept of dirty jokes, but I guess most people didn’t grow up on The Canterbury Tales. Or read Catullus in college. Or ever visit Pompeii. Or sing folk songs. Look, people: lewd humor did NOT originate with the internet. And so, yes, that ENTIRE plot point was probably written primarily to set up the visual pun with the rocks.

This brings me to my second point:
2) Clowning.
As a play in the tradition of the Commedia dell’Arte, a lot of this humor here relies on successful clowning. Props flying around with wild abandon, the ability to do a pratfall successfully, that kind of thing. And the guy playing Truffaldino does it quite well, but somewhere in the second act I realized that, even as I was laughing my face off over jokes that the rest of the audience was a few beats behind me in getting, I wasn’t finding most of the clowning all that great.
And that, I then realized, was because I’m spoiled.
Not by television shows, or any of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, or any of the more obvious sources. Rather, I saw the Flying Karamozov Brothers production of The Comedy of Errors (taped on VHS, off public television) at an impressionable age, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. As I suggested earlier, The Servant of Two Masters is already not unlike a lot of Shakespeare’s comedies (farcical servants, cross-dressing, mix-ups); and the style of clowning in it is also similar to that in the aforesaid production of Comedy of Errors (and probably also in Shakespeare as originally performed, but I’m not an expert on Shakespeare’s comedies.)
And of course, the Flying Karamozov Brothers (and Avner the Eccentric) can out-clown pretty much anybody.
Usually while juggling simultaneously.

Man, I’ve got to see if we still have that VHS tape.

Anyway. The Servant of Two Masters! Not as good as Shakespeare put on as a collaboration between several of the late 20th century’s greatest comic acts: but then, what is? Well worth seeing!

* They, incidentally, are derived from the stock character of the Capitani. This (and various other aspects of the plot) inevitably got me wondering whether some underground 18th c. theater group wrote a Commedia-style play where the male leads wind up hooking up.
I also kind of want to see a re-imaging of this play that takes the fact that both of them are technically on the run from the law--a point that Goldoni brings up but then doesn’t really explore--and refocuses at least some of the plot around that. Servant Noir, I guess.

OK. So, while it's somewhat fresh in my mind, I should write up a quick review of the play I saw on riday night, namely

( LEGBALA IS A RIVER )
"I'd tell you to tell more people to come," the stage manager told the audience at the end of the show, "but our last performance is tomorrow, and we're sold out already." So I will tell you: go see this show when they do it again, in Summer Stock or at Portland Stage or wherever. Badger people to bring it to Boston, to Chicago, to the up-and-coming theater in the suburbs or the new performance space that just opened or the outdoor theater festival. Go see it, when- and wherever it goes up again.
This was an incredible experience.

( Footnotes. )

Went to the Symphony tonight. (Dad's partner has season tickets, but she's in Nicaragua, and I guess Dad didn't feel like going.) The programme was Beethoven-based (the Eroica, specifically); he's not one of my favorite composers, although I can appreciate his genius abstractly. The *interesting* bit was that they'd held a competition for best new composition by a composer under thirty:* the winner was some dude from Hawaii, who'd written a piece called "Becoming Beethoven": very much in the style of the composer, and loosely themed around the story of Beethoven going deaf. This was perhaps most evident at the beginning, where the orchestra was doing a (very melodious, but still very striking) imitation of the effect of tinnitus. The rest of the performance of it was...odd: it was hard to say, in a number of places, whether the composer was DELIBERATELY doing really weird quasi-counterpoint, or whether the orchestra's timing was off.** If it's the latter, well, that sucks, because it was a really great piece that someone was mucking up.
In between Beethoven-inspired and actual Beethoven, we had Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue': another revolutionary piece, but played and heard so often (including in old Delta commercials) that it feels hackneyed. Kinda like the humor in Holy Grail, I suppose, except that I have a permanent passion for Holy Grail, and don't have strong feelings about Gershwin. So I spent that chunk of the concert reflecting that Gershwin really had no successors, that I'm aware of at least: no one who took American popular music and turned it into symphony. And what would a 21st-century equivalent sound like? If I was to imagine it, I'd go for a full-on symphony, whose movements would refer to the different styles of our musically-fragmented age. Start with a movement of hiphop (what with rappers' tendency to sample everything and anything, an original orchestral composition with a strong percussion beat and someone rapping over it could actually work quite well. For full justice, you'd then somehow have to do movements of Country and Dubstep, but somehow make them not suck; or you could say screw it and just do a movement of literally symphonic metal instead. Throw in something folk-rock infused, for all of the bluegrass, actual folk-rock, singer-songwriter stuff, and other related genres; then maybe finish with more rap (or put the metal HERE). Oh, and you'd have to tie the whole business together thematically and musically. It would be difficult but not, I think, impossible. Pity I'm not a composer.
...So I was not, and am not, doing justice to the Portland Symphony: with the possible exception of "Becoming Beethoven" they played everything very well, and the pianist for Rhapsody was just brilliant, and thoroughly deserved his two callbacks' worth of Dixieland.

Afterwards, I went to Bar of Chocolate, for one last hurrah before Lent. This may have been a mistake. (Also, I need to remember that I have now *had* Tokaji, and do not absolutely need to have that particular odd experience again.)
Also for Lent, I'm giving up non-essential internet use. Blogging does not count, though; so hopefully I'll actually be posting MORE for the next few weeks. Here's hoping.

* and buy, do I feel old and useless now.
** Numerous viola jokes came to mind.