Enjoy The Play!
What to Look for When Watching the Play - Robert and Lorna Cohen
A play should evoke hundreds of individual sensations, which all merge together in the final experience. If you want to talk or write about the play afterwards, however, try to focus your attention specific details. You might even want to take notes during the intermission or during brief scenery changes. (We bring a little pocket notebook and pencil with us whenever going to theatre.)
What should you focus on at these moments? First, take note of any details that arouse your curiosity. Such details may eventually help you to focus on the larger themes of the play or the production. You might be amused, or annoyed, at the oddity of certain costumes, the way the actors move around the stage or speak, or the speed (fast? slow? surrealistic?) with which certain lines and speeches are delivered. Perhaps you are struck by certain stage effects or conversely, at the simplicity and economy of the staging.
Second, try to grasp the fundamental story as it is unfolding, to assess the goals and tactics of the principal characters (and to predict where they will take them), and to isolate the principal issues the playwright is concerned with. How might they be resolved or reconciled? Listen to, or even participate in, conversation in the lobby, both at intermission and as people are leaving the theatre. (We recall couples arguing fiercely with each other as they walked the several blocks from New York’s Orpheum Theatre to the subway after the curtain fell on David Mamet’s Oleanna, a play about male-female and faculty-student relations: was Mamet saying that the female student was right to accuse her the male professor of harassment? Mamet teased the audience by having the professor’s face on half of the program covers, and the student’s face on the other half.)
After you get home (and not too long thereafter, or the experience will lose its freshness), try to come to terms with what impact the play had on you. Part of the “after-enjoyment” of theatre is separating out all of its various elements to see which have made their maximum contributions to your theatrical experience. Here are some questions you might consider:
About the play:
A play should evoke hundreds of individual sensations, which all merge together in the final experience. If you want to talk or write about the play afterwards, however, try to focus your attention specific details. You might even want to take notes during the intermission or during brief scenery changes. (We bring a little pocket notebook and pencil with us whenever going to theatre.)
What should you focus on at these moments? First, take note of any details that arouse your curiosity. Such details may eventually help you to focus on the larger themes of the play or the production. You might be amused, or annoyed, at the oddity of certain costumes, the way the actors move around the stage or speak, or the speed (fast? slow? surrealistic?) with which certain lines and speeches are delivered. Perhaps you are struck by certain stage effects or conversely, at the simplicity and economy of the staging.
Second, try to grasp the fundamental story as it is unfolding, to assess the goals and tactics of the principal characters (and to predict where they will take them), and to isolate the principal issues the playwright is concerned with. How might they be resolved or reconciled? Listen to, or even participate in, conversation in the lobby, both at intermission and as people are leaving the theatre. (We recall couples arguing fiercely with each other as they walked the several blocks from New York’s Orpheum Theatre to the subway after the curtain fell on David Mamet’s Oleanna, a play about male-female and faculty-student relations: was Mamet saying that the female student was right to accuse her the male professor of harassment? Mamet teased the audience by having the professor’s face on half of the program covers, and the student’s face on the other half.)
After you get home (and not too long thereafter, or the experience will lose its freshness), try to come to terms with what impact the play had on you. Part of the “after-enjoyment” of theatre is separating out all of its various elements to see which have made their maximum contributions to your theatrical experience. Here are some questions you might consider:
About the play:
- What is the play really about?
- What characters, if any, did you root for? Which ones did you like? Which ones did you hate? Why?
- Who, in your real life or in public life, do these characters resemble, if anyone? Did the play increase your understanding of (or compassion for, or anger at) such people?
- Did the play get more or less interesting as it went along?
- Did the play address questions pertinent to your life (in terms of your country, culture, religion, age, or social group)?
- Did it make you rethink your values, or wish others would rethink theirs?
- Were there emotionally moving moments in the play? Staggering moments? Or were you simply left out in the cold?
- Were there hilarious moments? Were there dazzlingly written and delivered arguments? Or were you perplexed? Bored? Looking at your watch?
- Was the play too long? Or did you want it to continue? If the former, what parts could have been eliminated or shortened? If the later, how could it have been augmented?
- What was great about the play? What was confusing? What was missing?
- Did the acting seem believable? Did the characters seem like real people? Did you feel for their predicament? Empathize with their feelings? Care what happened to them?
- Did the “in love” characters really seem to be in love? Or were they just faking it?
- Did the “angry” characters thrill you with the intensity of their anger? Or were they just bellowing?
- Was the acting exciting? Did the actors enchant you with any particular performance skills, beauty, emotional power, or rhetorical gifts? There are performers, in both professional and amateur theatre, who can literally take your breath away; did any of these actors do this? Or did the acting seem stilted, mechanical, forced?
- Were the sets and the costumes appropriate for the show? (You don’t need to be a theatre expert to answer this.)
- Did the scenery and costume elements help to make the play either more believable, more theatrically exciting, or both?
- How did the lighting and the sound design contribute to the quality of your experience? Did they propel the action forward and enhance the play’s ideas and emotions? Or did they unnecessarily call attention to themselves?
- Was the house filled or was the attendance sparse?
- Was the applause tepid or thunderous? Was the laughter dutiful or helpless? Was the audience rapt with interest or merely listening politely?
- Did the audience seem to enjoy the play as you did? More than you did? Less?