August Schulenburg's Riding The Bull is a deeply filthy play.

(Mark gets his thesaurus, blows off the dust.)

It's a completely obscene, indecent, dirty, smutty, rude, improper, coarse, bawdy, vulgar, lewd, raw, off-color, ribald, risqué, explicit, blue play.

Oh ... and it's utterly sacrilegious, blasphemous, profane, and heretical, as well.

I think that about covers it.

It's also one of the most sublime works I've read about the religious experience and "Coming to God". It certainly makes for a tricky balance: the audience that can tolerate this raunchy story of a rodeo clown and his overweight paramour is likely resistant to the message, and the audience that would appreciate a sincere story about the redemptive power of belief would surely never make it past the first description of .... well, they wouldn't make it very far. They wouldn't make it past the opening monologue, in fact. It's sure a marketing challenge, but that's exactly what makes it a play worth doing. It's too rare that I'm surprised, and too rare that we don't preach to the choir.

The characters perform a crossing action, as GL's faith is corrupted and killed while Lyza moves in counterpoint from apostate to seeker. She eventually arrives at a pure and true faith far past GL's starting point of spiritual struggle. It's a completely surprising read: I thought I knew we were safely in the land of mocking and then tipping sacred cows, then the play turned underneath me. It's all so honest and heartfelt: all of it. From the filth to the faith, Schulenburg inhabits each moment fully and lets the characters and action speak for themselves.

For all my wonder at the content, it's pretty flawed as a play. There's a tremendous amount of narration, as we get great huge of action that exist only in direct address monologue. There's a great story there, but too much of it gets told, not shown. Riding the Bull may be a great story that never quite translates into a theater piece.

(On a personal note, I still get a thrill when I open up a published script, and see someone I know, or worked with. Rod Gnapp and I worked together when the world was young, and it made me smile to see he was the original GL in the workshop at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. (Of course, it makes me smile more when it's my name. Like this and this. (Self-pimping mode off now ....)))

Next Week: Shining City by Conor McPherson

This may be the last "theme month" for awhile, as I've accumulated a stack of stuff I simply want to get to without corralling them into a group. (By the by ... if anyone has suggestions for how to "read" a musical, I'd love to hear 'em. Read the book, then listen to the soundtrack as I get to each song? I might like to do a month of musicals somewhere along the line here.)

But I could not let March go by without wallowing in Irish playwrights. I spent a semester at Columbia College with the wonderful Cecilie O'Reilly focusing exclusively on acting in Irish plays, and have never lost the excitement for that distinctive Irish voice that she taught her students. As usual, there's some new, some old, some famous, some obscure: and one's not even Irish.

"Irish Eyes". Sláinte!

March 2: Shining City by Conor McPherson
March 9: Dead City by Sheila Callaghan
March 16: Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel
March 23: The Lieutenant of Inishmore by Martin McDonagh
March 30: Women in Arms by Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy

I am a fake, a fraud, a philistine.

Am I really this stupid? A swine before pearls?

I don't want to read extended monologues on Latin and Greek translation. I am sick to death of Oxford and Cambridge and English Public School ... hell, I'm sick of the English upper class of the 19th century in general. Why won't these people shut up, or at least say something real. I can't penetrate this world.

That's what I thought struggling through the first act of Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love. Stoppard has a reputation for writing plays of ideas that leave the average audience behind. It's one of the few criticisms that has stuck to one of our acknowledged Greatest Living Playwrights. I've never agreed: to me his plays have always been brilliantly crafted works that use those twenty dollar words to get an basic human truths. Reading this play, I suddenly felt like I understood what people were complaining about.

It may be simply that I feel more at home with the math and science that mark Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and the underappreciated Hapgood. I'm familiar enough with the ideas there that I can quickly see through them to the themes underneath. But here I'm in a land of poetry and classicists and the Aesthetic movement, swimming in deep pools of Latin and Greek grammar.

Maybe it just doesn't read well. I can sense the subtext underneath, and the second act brings it to the fore in some achingly beautiful passages that strip away the rococo ornamentation of the first ... but I just can't grapple with it. I imagine a well-researched cast that understood the detail in those dense speeches would bring some life and beauty to the text, but I simply can't spend the time researching every reference. It's a truly alien world.

Next Week: Riding The Bull by August Schulenburg

After three straight weeks where playwrights went out of their way to put performance qualities of dialect and emphasis and emotion into the text, the late Harold Pinter's Betrayal is a splash of cold water to the face. It's so spare, so cold, so blank on the page. There is dialog, there is the barest of essential stage actions, and there is the Pinter Pause ... and that's it.

I've acted in Pinter, and directed Pinter. My faulty memory aside, I'm told by my better half that I've even seen this very play at The National on our honeymoon. But I've never felt comfortable with Pinter, always found it difficult to read. I tend to read them in monotone, with very subdued emotion. It's all tension and menace and edge. His looming presence intimidates, as if any inflection other than po-faced seriousness will destroy the delicate equilibrium like playing Beethoven with a kazoo. There is nothing to indicate emotion in the text, no "(with anger)" or "(they laugh)" .... and it seems terribly gauche to add it in.

But then I get to scene four of Betrayal, and the extended discussion of whether boy or girl babies cry more. There's no indication of style or tone, but it's utterly absurd to take this as anything other than two old friends playing and riffing and joking ... isn't it? Surely this scene has life and laughs layered on top of the tension ... right? But there is that temptation to subdue the impulse, and not get in the way of Pinter. I wonder how many productions play that scene as "absurd" or are afraid to treat it with anything other than precision and reverence. In fact, that's the key. If you can layer unscripted emotion and life on top of that scene, why not do it in all the rest? Why not have fun with Pinter, and not let the received wisdom about his style get in the way of doing the job of acting?

When thinking about those famous, calculated pauses in Pinter it seems that he doesn't quite trust his actors. But the blankness of his scripts point another way: that he scores the important beats in his work, but ultimately trusts his actors completely. I need to read Pinter differently.

Do this play.

Maybe it's just the joy of discovery, but this was the most delightful read I've had so far. I don't know who John Kolvenbach is and have never heard of the show. I simply stumbled across it at the Dramatists Play Service website trying to fill this theme month. It's certainly not a Great Play, and I doubt there's $7500 coming Kolvenbach's way (although it did get nominated for the Olivier Award). But is it a Very Good Play, free of the weight of pretension and full of life and energy.

It's an exciting read, in large part because of how Kolvenbach writes the dialog. I will endeavor to save a thousand words by using this picture:

Bracketed words, italicized words, capitalized words, italicized capitalized words ... and that's not even capturing any of the footnotes scattered throughout the text that give a little more color to the line. It's all a bit much at first, and I initially felt like it might be too restricting to the actors. But it eventually fades away, and becomes like a musical score: Once I learned how to read the notation, I could hear the electric crackle of the speech, feel its pace and vibrancy, see the briskness of the movement. It's a fascinating attempt to communicate the play Kolvenbach obviously saw in his head.

As you might expect from the title, Love Song is about love, as a lonely maladjust finally finds someone to be with. It's a very simple play, and I probably shouldn't have been caught off guard by the simple twist. But it's not overly concerned with plot: it's about character and emotion and delicious, delicious language.

Do this play.

(In fact, if anyone from SLAC is reading this: really do this play. At least read it. It's very castable with local actors, the play is in keeping with your style, and Keven Myhre would brilliantly solve a pretty bloody tricky set design.)

Next Week: Betrayal by Harold Pinter

"2002 Pulitzer Prize Winner" It blares out from the bright orange cover of Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/underdog: "This play is important. This play is historic. This play is recognized."

Makes it hard to judge honestly, doesn't it? It sets the tone for the discussion, it becomes the bar by which the play is considered: it is award-worthy, or it isn't. I can either confirm that it is deserving of the recognition, or take it to task. It's hard to come at the play neutrally and see through the golden haze of the award.

There's a whole lot of theme here, a heavy load of concepts and leitmotifs and woven plot threads. Starting from the initial images of three-card monte and a black man who plays Abraham Lincoln in whiteface, two brothers fight over their meager existence, while a criminal past haunts and teases them. Lincoln left the con before he ended up dead, but the cards seduce him back, with the inevitable result. (Did I mention that Lincoln's brother is named Booth? Need any more literary foreshadowing?) In a thrilling end, it hits the something like the same note as The Usual Suspects: the whole thing's a con. Theme and plot come together, and it's electric. There's a heady mix of identity and family and the weight of the past and the greater weight of the present. There's no doubt it's a dense and thorny literary piece, deserving of recognition as such.

But is it a good piece of theater? Do the characters change? Is there any journey? The characters certainly act: there is a crescendo of action, and the status quo is irrevocably altered. But the seeds of that climax don't grow organically out of the events on the stage. It is largely external, unseen actions that impel the bloody conclusion instead of change driven by the action we do see. There's a feeling of inexorable inevitability about it all, like Greek tragedy ... but we're robbed of seeing it trigger onstage. It's almost as if it could have been 90 minutes shorter, because the characters we meet at the beginning are simmering with the same resentments that drive the ending, only missing the spark of the offstage events to set them aflame.

Sometimes it's pedantic and old-fashioned to insist on traditional dramaturgy, but it's a simple fact of the theatre: we've given our time and attention and shouldn't be shortchanged by an experience that tells us that very time and attention was worth nothing because what really matters is unseen. It's a limitation of a two-character, one-set piece: The influence of the outside world (and make no mistake, societal forces drive this play) becomes limited to reportage. I imagine it's a play that you could "act the shit out of" (to use a highly technical term), and wish I had seen the People Productions run in 2007. But literary themes and great acting material aren't all there is to a great play. It's a "good" play - perhaps a "very good" one - but the amount of narrative action means it can't be a "great" one. I realize I'm criticizing a play that I otherwise might have appreciated, sans Pulitzer ... but there you are. It makes me look harder when someone tells me what I should think.

The play's a theatrical three card monte: watch all you want and be dazzled by the flash ... but you will never see what's really going on.

Did you know we're still trying to figure out dinosaur skin? What the texture was, what the colors were? Jurassic Park aside, we really have no idea what they even sounded like. We have guesses based on the fossilized remains, but when you only have petrified organic tissue there's a lot left to the imagination.

Sometimes a script is just that: an artifact, a fossil record of an original production. You can see the impression of the work, the outlines of it in print ... but you'll never know how it breathed, how it sounded, or what its skin looked like. The beautiful script of The National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch is just such an artifact: tantalizing, but maddeningly incomplete.

The National Theater of Scotland has no home. Which is really a beautiful idea for a national theatre: it exists everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It stages site-specific work throughout Scotland, and Black Watch was created for an Officer Training Corps drill hall at the University of Edinburgh. In a style that flashes from naturalism to hallucinatory it tells the story of the legendary Black Watch regiment, and one particular squad's time in Iraq.

In talking about The Guys last week, I talked about "the shock of the real". I wish I knew how to define it better, but Black Watch has it in spades. These soldiers don't necessarily break stereotypes: They are crude practical jokers with an abundance of testosterone and a shortage of self-control. But though Burke's not reinventing the wheel in their characterization, his detailed observation of them leads to characters that feel lived in. They speak with their own voices, and though there's definitely a political point, they are never used as mouthpieces. Flowing through silent physical scenes and surreal stagecraft, it retains the feel of a surreal documentary.

While I'm sure in production the squad takes on a full life, that doesn't appear on the page. In a way, it's part of what makes the play so compelling: these men are not falsely differentiated with character hooks. We don't have "the rookie", "the drunk", "the stamp collector" (or whatever ... you get the point). Burke wisely trusted his acting company to give these men life on the stage, but those subtle pieces of characterization don't appear in the text. And since it is largely a character-driven piece, it requires a lot of work on the reader's part to keep the men distinct. Black Watch doesn't have a full life of its own past the fossil record. It works best as a glimpse of a show that I'll likely never get to see, and definitely has planted an itch that won't get scratched without seeing the full production. With its complexity and specificity, it's a far cry from the facile liberalism of The Guys, and an excellent example of a theatre responding to "The State We're In".

I just want to take a moment to talk about the book itself. Unlike many scripts, this is clearly a record of one specific production. There are introductory pieces from the playwright, director, and artistic director. There are full page color photographs that are explicitly referred to in the stage directions (e.g. 'See Picture 2'). It's a wonderful attempt to capture a theatrical moment in print, and I wish we saw more of this in American play publishing. Yes, scripts can be literature. But before that, they are part of a specific theatre event and it's wonderful to read them as such.

Next Week: Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks

Yes, I know. Seemingly missing the zeitgeist by not having scheduled that post for today. However, I plan to read it today/tomorrow, which is infinitely more rewarding than a scheduled post.