3/24/06 Reactions to "Act a Lady" by Jordan Harrison (Humana)

Before performance: Nice, pretty intimate, contemporay theatre space. Audience seating almost semi-circular around deep but pretty narrow apron with two voms leading steeply down & under audience. Stage is preset with suggested kitchen: small table w/ 3 chairs, old period gas stove, window frame suspended over wall of suggested green leaves. Proscenium frames apron and red drapes close it off. I'm sitting at one edge, 4th row, which gives me good view of audience. Mostly middle-aged to older audience with some younger. Feels like "an evening at the theatre", not at all hip but not really stuffy, either. Real American (but not in the same way as the Mid-America Truck Show or Mary Kay convention, both nearby). Not unpleasant contrast to hip audience last night at Wooster Group.

End of Act 1: I like the play. It raises all sorts of gender-construction/art/theatre/representation questions in very plain language (set in Midwest 1920s). Acting is not great. Standard professional American stage acting, pretty sitcom-y and indicated, no one really present. "Shmacting." Play alternates between naturalistic scenes of small-town folks trying to put together a French 18th Century melodrama (well, in the style of) and finished scenes from the play. I much prefer the period piece, which is wildly heightened and overdone. Seems much more honest than the "realistic" scenes. I wonder what the audence members think of the ideas in the play at this point, or if they're just enjoying the story. Actually, the gender-bending ideas are very safe and tame. But at least they're there.

After end: Well, the weak performances got to me more and more (actually, one actor seemed more able to pull it off than the others), and the writing seemed to weaken, too. Illusion and reality got confused as the characters met their actors (played by female members of the cast), which could be a really interesting idea if the acting and the writing got much better (esp. the acting--the actresses didn't mimic their male counterparts in an interesting way at all. The next-to-last scene got very interest with actors appearing in and out of their female characters. There was an obvious ending as the curtain went up on the play. But then the playwright added one more scene, back in the kitchen, a happy resolution to all the conflicts and reflection upon art and life: godawful. Why??? Really needs to be cut!

In the end, the script had the potential to be interesting but the production was mostly disappointing.