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The Good Woman of Szechuan
Jan. 4th, 2009 05:06 pmApropos of absolutely nothing:
When I was a kid, I lived with my family just outside Blacksburg, Virginia. My father worked at Virginia Tech, first as a professor of mechanical engineering and then as director of campus safety. As with any major state university, faculty families had access to a variety of University resources, including a six million volume library where we had borrowing privileges, the right to use the University's indoor pool, and more to the point of this story, access to the University's cultural offerings such as music, theater, and (if we wanted, which I don't think we did) art exhibits.
For some reason I've never understood, I was the only one of the four kids in our family who had the slightest interest in going to see plays and musical performances. If my sister Julie were to ever read this I'd imagine that she'd say that I'm not strictly correct, that she went to a few shows, but unless I've totally lost my marbles it was generally just me and Mom seeing plays and chamber music and the like.
Some of the things went and saw were quite good, despite their at-times amateurish casts. I'm 100% sure that some of the plays we saw had professional casts and I know that a lot of the musical performances we saw were absolutely first-rate, performed by faculty members who were highly respected in their fields. But we also had our share of productions put on by undergraduates and graduate students, with all that entails.
Some performances were... not so good. (I pray to heaven that no one from Virginia Tech's Department of Theater Arts reads this. Two of the professors emeritus and former heads of the department are the fathers of high school classmates of mine. They'd GET ME somehow.)
The play that stands out in my memory above all others was a performance of Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Szechuan. Mom and I went to see it together and I'll tell you right off, I didn't know Brecht from a hole in the ground. I was probably around 12 or 13 at the time and wasn't enlightened enough to know how much I'd come to appreciate works such as The Threepenny Opera.
All I knew was, it was a play and in my view, the person I envisioned myself as being Liked Plays. (I think a lot of people who say they like X, Y, or Z don't really like 'em; they just say they do because people often espouse likes and dislikes and world-views in keeping with the person they want to be, not the person they actually are.)
Memory one of The Good Woman of Szechuan: it was long. Everything seems long to a 12- or 13-year-old, but this really seemed long. It didn't help that the script was heavy-handed and kept beating us over the head with repetition. I don't know if the director and producer adapted Brecht's original script or stuck straight to the original book, but nonetheless, there were times I honestly felt that I'd gladly chew my own leg off if that was what it took to get out of there.
Memory two: it was bad. I recall members of the audience groaning around me with each repeated chorus from The Song of the Eighth Elephant (don't ask). When you've got adults cradling their heads in their hands all around you, it's a lot harder to take seriously your mom's admonition to keep quiet and pay attention.
But memory three is the one that really stands out: I fell asleep.
The play was so stultifyingly awful that I just couldn't stay awake. Call it a form of mental self-defense if you like. Mom eventually nudged me and woke me up. Apparently I'd had my head back, snoring loudly, mouth wide open. You might ask why she didn't wake me up sooner, right?
Everyone else around us was asleep too. It was only when my snoring reached epic, rumbling proportions that Mom decided the time had come to rouse me.
Maybe some folks down front were awake. Maybe friends and family of the cast were awake. But back in the middle of the theater where we were, it was as though the wicked witch from Sleeping Beauty had gotten a bit out of control with her spell.
To this day, I've never seen another play to top it. I'm sure you can mount a production of The Good Woman of Szechuan that would keep the audience entertained. But, like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, you're going to have to forgive me if I express a tiny bit of skepticism where the existence of such a beast is concerned.
When I was a kid, I lived with my family just outside Blacksburg, Virginia. My father worked at Virginia Tech, first as a professor of mechanical engineering and then as director of campus safety. As with any major state university, faculty families had access to a variety of University resources, including a six million volume library where we had borrowing privileges, the right to use the University's indoor pool, and more to the point of this story, access to the University's cultural offerings such as music, theater, and (if we wanted, which I don't think we did) art exhibits.
For some reason I've never understood, I was the only one of the four kids in our family who had the slightest interest in going to see plays and musical performances. If my sister Julie were to ever read this I'd imagine that she'd say that I'm not strictly correct, that she went to a few shows, but unless I've totally lost my marbles it was generally just me and Mom seeing plays and chamber music and the like.
Some of the things went and saw were quite good, despite their at-times amateurish casts. I'm 100% sure that some of the plays we saw had professional casts and I know that a lot of the musical performances we saw were absolutely first-rate, performed by faculty members who were highly respected in their fields. But we also had our share of productions put on by undergraduates and graduate students, with all that entails.
Some performances were... not so good. (I pray to heaven that no one from Virginia Tech's Department of Theater Arts reads this. Two of the professors emeritus and former heads of the department are the fathers of high school classmates of mine. They'd GET ME somehow.)
The play that stands out in my memory above all others was a performance of Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Szechuan. Mom and I went to see it together and I'll tell you right off, I didn't know Brecht from a hole in the ground. I was probably around 12 or 13 at the time and wasn't enlightened enough to know how much I'd come to appreciate works such as The Threepenny Opera.
All I knew was, it was a play and in my view, the person I envisioned myself as being Liked Plays. (I think a lot of people who say they like X, Y, or Z don't really like 'em; they just say they do because people often espouse likes and dislikes and world-views in keeping with the person they want to be, not the person they actually are.)
Memory one of The Good Woman of Szechuan: it was long. Everything seems long to a 12- or 13-year-old, but this really seemed long. It didn't help that the script was heavy-handed and kept beating us over the head with repetition. I don't know if the director and producer adapted Brecht's original script or stuck straight to the original book, but nonetheless, there were times I honestly felt that I'd gladly chew my own leg off if that was what it took to get out of there.
Memory two: it was bad. I recall members of the audience groaning around me with each repeated chorus from The Song of the Eighth Elephant (don't ask). When you've got adults cradling their heads in their hands all around you, it's a lot harder to take seriously your mom's admonition to keep quiet and pay attention.
But memory three is the one that really stands out: I fell asleep.
The play was so stultifyingly awful that I just couldn't stay awake. Call it a form of mental self-defense if you like. Mom eventually nudged me and woke me up. Apparently I'd had my head back, snoring loudly, mouth wide open. You might ask why she didn't wake me up sooner, right?
Everyone else around us was asleep too. It was only when my snoring reached epic, rumbling proportions that Mom decided the time had come to rouse me.
Maybe some folks down front were awake. Maybe friends and family of the cast were awake. But back in the middle of the theater where we were, it was as though the wicked witch from Sleeping Beauty had gotten a bit out of control with her spell.
To this day, I've never seen another play to top it. I'm sure you can mount a production of The Good Woman of Szechuan that would keep the audience entertained. But, like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, you're going to have to forgive me if I express a tiny bit of skepticism where the existence of such a beast is concerned.
