Insert flat character here

[jethrien]

My MIL and I saw Spirit Control last night. Ehh. It's about an air traffic controller who has an incident that basically screws up the rest of his life. The first scene is riveting, but it goes downhill rapidly after that. The ending is the kind of pseudo-deep cheap trick that I would expect of playwright who happens to be a very precocious high schooler, or maybe early college.

Actually, much of the entertainment value came from the extremely catty conversations at intermission (basically the entire two rows surrounding us ended up speculating on how bad the ending was going to be, as a group) and on the street afterwards with other members of the audience. Conclusions reached:

- We weren't sure whether the fault lay with the director or the actress, but in lieu of giving the wife an actual character, they opted to insert a cardboard cutout imported from the 50s. The hands-flailing hysterical squealy hissy fit when she believes her husband is having an affair was particularly appalling, and utterly destroyed the sympathy we were supposed to have for her.

- While I understood that she had set him up, it apparently wasn't clear as most of the other viewers got hung up on how a baby monitor would still have a charge five years later. Congrats on destroying your suspension of disbelief.

- Given that the second act makes clear that the first act was set in 1983, it might have been nice to tip us off to this fact in the first act. We spent the first half of the first act convinced it was 2010 and the second half convinced it was 1952.

- If you're going to repeat all the dialogue from the first ten minutes of the play as the last ten minutes, you'd better damn well make sure that the second time through has a different or deeper meaning. Otherwise, your audience will leave saying, my god, I thought that was never going to end.

- The wife's acting was terrible, but her hair was nice. We were distressed to later realize it was a wig. We were even more distressed when looking at the cast photos to discover that the horrendous hair of the son was not a wig.

When your audience leaves, not discussing the nature of fate or madness as you clearly intended, but instead speculating on whether your actors' bad hairdos were real, you have not succeeded. Sorry.

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[firynze.livejournal.com]

WHEE!