Theatre of the Unimpressed:
In Search of Vital Dramaby Jordan TannahillCoach House Books, 2015Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill won the Governor General's Literary Award for Drama for his Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays, and he's something of a genuine phenomenon in the Toronto arts-and-theater scene. Passionate manifestos from such people are almost unfailingly tedious and flailing (David Shields leaps to mind here, but he's got lots of company), so when Tannahill asks, in his new book Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama, “How and why do certain plays falls short in their attempts to engage us? Where do boring plays come from and what can we learn from them?” - well, readers can reasonably expect the worst possible combination of preening and blundering.Amazingly, nothing like that happens. After a few ungallant throat-clearings about the tedium of Driving Miss Daisy (to paraphrase The Simpsons, it's true – but he shouldn't say it), Tannahill instead engages in a searching and genuinely heartfelt inquiry into the nature of not only bad theater but theater in general. His extensive personal background in the theatrical world shows itself constantly in a deep sympathy for the poor players strutting and fretting on stage in a dog of a show:
But what is it that gives uninspired plays such power to permanently ward off audiences? For starters, a major source of discomfort for audiences of boring plays comes from watching actors trapped within them … It's quite a different experience from watching a shitty movie while eating popcorn in your basement – time, distance and the lack of shared physical space nullify any proxy embarrassment. A boring play, on the other hand, is happening in the present tense and actors are stuck inside it like a sinking ship.
But he's equally concerned with the actual process by which the lively, spontaneous, jagged works of live theater, which as he puts it “is rooted in an emphatic desire to commune with others,” get softened and smoothed and sanded down, often, ironically, by the very processes intended to improve them:
After years of workshops and feedback and rewrites and letdowns, what begins as a play can quickly feel like the furthest thing from play. It becomes drudgery, a vortex of artistic self-doubt. The pleasing imperfections and incongruities in our narratives and characters are recast as problems to be fixed. But they can't be fixed, not without destroying the very essence we fell in love with in the first place. And so sometimes we kill a play. We kill characters, we kill subplots, we kill lines, and scenes and jokes and images and ideas, until there isn't a drop of blood or ounce of breath left.
“Plays sit outside our daily routines,” Tannahill writes. “They require more of us. And, in their best moments, they provide us with even more in return.” Which might sound a trifle pat, but what else can even a hugely talented young writer and performer really say? The problem of boring plays – and the disastrously isolating effect they have on the whole endeavor of theater (in the course of his book, Tannahill talks with many people who dread going to a new play specifically because they're afraid they'll be bored stiff and forced to slink away at intermission) – has been well-known for centuries, and it's no slight on Tannahill to say he's unlikely to think up a magic solution if Richard Brinsley Sheridan couldn't.Ultimately, “Old Sherry” opted for the only real remedy for boring theater available to him, and Tannahill knows that remedy because he uses it himself: don't you yourself write boring plays.
