Backwards Theatre Goes

A young woman is forcefully attempting to masturbate a younger man. Strangely uninvolved, he gazes blankly towards us through thick-rimmed glasses. Her movements are coarse, repetitive, factory-assembly-line actions: from his non-reaction she seems to have lost the instruction manual. The audience squirms—straining to see what is happening. The New York Times critic had a good seat but overlooked the rape: “Rose’s blunt attempt to ignite a sexual spark with Avery, as they sit next to each other in the theater’s seats, becomes emblematic of the way all three characters remain tone-deaf to one another’s yearnings, sensitivities, frustrations.”

The Flick, by US playwright Annie Baker, won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The sell-out Red Stitch season in Melbourne, directed by Nadia Tass, received outstanding applause from first-night critics. Kenneth Tynan, perhaps now more remembered for his sex life than his wit, wrote: “Although I always enjoyed praising shows, it was not a pleasure in which I could often indulge without incurring suspicions of bribery or brain damage”. Despite the accolades, and Chekhovian comparisons, The Flick represents a faded idea of theatre. It is a dull play, deliberately “anti-theatrical”. Yet the text will probably be set as required reading on drama courses everywhere.

This performance is at Shebeen, a fashionable bar and eatery in Melbourne’s CBD. Out in the cold are tables and chairs, inside it’s warm and filled with people eating and drinking. The clunky furnishings have a well-worn patina and are city-lane-grot stylish. It’s a cool atmosphere, for kids raised on McDonald’s and with social consciousnesses finely honed enough to take pleasure drinking tequilas and beers for the poor they will never encounter (“100% of the profits go to the developing world”). The menu leans towards fair trade and organic; the cheese platters promise gastronomic delights with “Post-colonial imported French and British soft, blue and cheddar”. Each brand of imported beer, on an extensive list, specifies the group being supported by a purchase and the percentage of the price they will get from your order—a Left fusion of self-indulgence, self-righteousness and painless charity.

Leaving the crowded front room I wander into another packed space of eating and drinking people where we collect tickets and wait for the doors to the small theatre space to open. Smart Melbourne is all around me—plenty of male stubble, Prada, postgrad intensity and Green grandparents. I’m already missing my matinee ladies. Some sharp elbows later, the auditorium turns out to be a long narrow room. On either side of a central aisle, which leads towards the stage, are short neat rows of kitchen chairs. Choose your own seat—mine has an overstuffed cushion that wants to slide me off and from time to time a devious blast of air-con cold hits me on the back of the neck.

Now waiting for something to happen, we stare at the stage, which represents a movie theatre. Rows of red cinema seats face us—they all look more comfortable than mine. From the far wall a projection box with a glass window protrudes into the playing space. Inside it a large single-reel projector is aimed towards the audience. On the blank wall to the left of the box is a poster for Jules et Jim. On the right side are double doors which supposedly open onto the invisible movie house foyer. It’s comfortingly familiar: I spent years of my life sitting in even grottier flea pits.

Time to begin. House lights darken and the onstage projector shoots a beam of light above our heads as film music plays, and plays, and plays. Some of the audience sit still, others twist about to see if something is being projected onto the ceiling or back wall. We all know that this is a three-hour performance and suddenly we know why. This does not seem quite like the evening the theatre publicity has been promising. It was sold as outstanding theatre, but there is just one little thing the publicity didn’t mention: it’s a boring play. This, of course, is not unusual. Tynan again: “The fact, as any critic will confirm, is that most theatrical productions, like most books and most television shows, are extremely dreary.” Theatres generally have been slow to exploit the sales potential of this facet of a play for publicity reasons, and often mislead us. By doing so they fail to attract audiences who delight in dullness and pretension while disappointing audience members who come seeking entertainment. Those of us who notice that a play lacks interest and is dull are cultural outsiders. There are potential audiences out there who really believe that 100 per cent boredom equals High Culture—and tonight I fear I may have innocently wandered into their midst.

Two actors come onstage. Sam (Ben Prendergast) is in his mid-thirties. Bespectacled Avery (Kevin Hofbauer) is twenty. This is the last single-screen, 35-millimetre projector cinema in Massachusetts. Avery is a film buff starting work as a cleaner. The play begins with experienced Sam teaching him the job and the rest of the play takes place here as they clean the auditorium between shows. That means a lot of sweeping. On his first day Avery does not know how to operate an ordinary broom. When he ineptly holds it there are spot fires of stagey, artificial laughter from around me—the sound of sad, sycophantic, “I get the joke” laughter. This is not going to be a happy evening.

This long play has a short text. It’s not the dialogue but the pauses and business of cleaning and working that hold us back. The long periods of sweeping the stage please the critics, as do the dialogue and the humour. The use of a  vacuum cleaner would have deleted one of the players and cut at least two hours and twenty minutes from the playing time.

Avery finds a brown mess on the floor. We learn he has a “shit phobia”—Baker has been praised for her “Chekhovian” writing. He gags at the thought of what it is. Sam looks down, inserts a finger and tastes it. Could be chocolate pudding, he says. Later, they find a shoe and discuss why anyone would leave one behind. It isn’t an interesting shoe. It isn’t an interesting script.

The third member of the cast is the projectionist, Rose (Ngaire Dawn Fair). She is assertive but damaged so now we have two rather hopeless males and a free-spirit female—the forecast looks predictable. Sam likes Rose; she doesn’t notice him. There is film talk, horoscope talk, Facebook chatter and revelations. Thirteen words from a Coward play: “Small talk, a lot of small talk with other thoughts going on behind.” Tonight, a three-hour play with lots of small talk and a college thesis going on behind. Late-nineteenth-century stage naturalism is fashionable again.

I can see the reality of the brooms the actors use; I’m not convinced of the writing’s realism. Avery is a film buff. When he tells us that Pulp Fiction was the last great American film the voice I hear isn’t that of a twenty-year-old talking movies, it’s a college academic lecturing students. When he shines playing the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game—establishing a link between two disparate actors by the casts of films they have appeared in—it sounds like Google. Where his beating heart should be you would find a Word file of the author’s “research”. At one point he gets to do a soliloquy, a contrived bit of back-story placing disguised as a conversation on a mobile phone.

That morning, on a crowded bus, there was a man near me on his phone. As he tried to talk discreetly, but loudly, he shared an intimate and personal conversation with all of us sitting around. He was in his forties, he said, and was now applying, and it didn’t seem very successfully, for a job. Those minutes of unstaged ordinary life had far more intensity than any of the writing in this Pulitzer play.

When Avery asks Sam, “What are you going to do when you grow up?” he replies, “I am grown up.” That is the conversation of twelve-year-olds, not a twenty-year-old to a thirty-five-year-old. Baker has been tempted by patter instead of truth.

In tonight’s performance the American accents wash away as the play proceeds. Language is a missing part of Avery’s theatrical presence. He comes from the Black middle class. His father is a professor of linguistics and semiotics. The production is tone deaf to the differences in language between him and the two working-class characters.

Sam and Avery find a man sleeping in his seat when they come in to clean. The actor, Dion Mills, wears conventional, homeless-implying, dirty clothes and a beanie.

Again, that same morning at a crowded Bourke Street tram stop there was a typical Melbourne crowd scene. Then I noticed an older man walking towards me; short and thin, shabbily dressed, brown-looking, dusty. He could be homeless, or a Fairfax shareholder, or the editor of Overland: I don’t know. He is carrying a tennis racquet. He comes and stands somewhere behind me. I don’t look but I am aware of his presence. He smokes, and dry coughs: he is the sort of old man that you don’t much see about any more. When the tram arrives it is crowded. I find a seat, and he sits beside me. There is a frightening sense of anger and danger which corkscrews around him. I count my stops, and am quick to rise and leave the tram. I am relieved to be away from him: on stage, his performance would have been worth a standing ovation.

I was his audience. I read his costume and his behaviour and he became my fiction. If there had been speech or even dialogue my created story might have quickly been exposed as a fantasy. On the tram-stop stage it was the incongruity of his costume and the tennis racquet that drew my attention. The simple act of walking towards me focused my awareness of him; sitting beside him revealed an urgent and possibly dangerous tension. Most often in a theatre we deal with public service actors who are professional, competent, good at what they do, but they don’t possess that something vital that makes them stand apart—the ones who do possess this quality seem, most simply, “alive” on stage. At the tram stop the tennis racquet alone catapulted a bit player out of the scrum, the smoking and coughing painted the character, but it was the intensity of feeling his presence evoked in me that was inspiring, and threatening, artistry: Richard III with a tennis racquet. For actors the street is, or should be, as it has been for some great players, a school. Tonight, what he unconsciously did, the actors fail to do. The theatre is small and though we are close to them they might just as well be projections on a screen—without close-ups.

Finally, after an hour and a half, we are moving towards the interval. On the down slope the director brakes hard and we are forced to sit in semi-darkness listening to a French song before the lights come up and we are freed. Actually, I enjoyed the song. I used to own a French 45rpm of music from Jules et Jim. It had a hole in the middle the size of a twenty-cent piece and needed a special plastic thing to be inserted in order to play. The singer was Jeanne Moreau and the song was “Le Tourbillon de la vie”, which she sings in the film. Playing it was a subversive action, for Moreau’s presence in the room presented a standard of performance against which what had gone before could be measured.

Unlike the Melbourne reviews, the New York Times’s praise of The Flick’s Off-Broadway premiere was heavily commented on by people who had seen the play and loved it—and hated it. One, very much in favour of the play, wrote:

it also turned out to be mesmerizingly interesting. This is not to deny that in one scene, played in the dark, I did allow myself to close my eyes and slip into a semi-doze, but what I lost in that brief interval was insignificant compared to what I gained from the work as a whole.

The long comment ended with some non-satirical advice: “Just make sure you’re well rested before you see it; otherwise, the temptation to take a nap may be too strong to resist.”

Just outside the theatre doors tonight people are eating and drinking and having lively conversations, no one is taking a nap—they have not come out to be bored. The audience sitting around me in the dark, ready to reward dreariness with applause, probably also watch the same television dramas I watch and experience the same reactions. But when we enter the theatre we have very different expectations. Those who accept being bored as the price for experiencing high culture are vulnerable to confusing the good, the bad, and the pretentious. Theatre suffers from its association with classroom and lecture theatre education. Members of the culture club do not just tolerate boredom in the arts, they encourage it: it reinforces their self-images of intellectual and moral superiority and clearly isolates insiders from the contemptible parochials who are culturally dumb enough to name boredom by its correct name.

Australian theatre could do with a dose of populism. It needs a burning desire, which can’t be counterfeited, to entertain Australians outside the artz stockade. On one hand we are fortunate to see a production of an important (!!) new American play, on the other, the sell-out success which The Flick has been should be seen as a continuing loss of nerve. Another second-rate US import occupying the space an Australian writer should have, and be filling with our life. In the English-speaking theatre world, Australia should be an exporter, not an importer. The strong director-dominated theatre that presently controls theatre practice should be challenged by an indigenous (not in the race industry sense) writer and actors’ theatre.

At interval, I gave The Flick the flick.