Last night Dave and I went to see Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at the Lorraine Hansberry Theater. Somehow I have never seen or read it before. I liked the acting, I liked the production, I was interested all the way through, and yet somehow I never felt much of an emotional connection with the play. I’m not sure why. Some of it may have been that I was having difficulty catching a lot of the dialogue, possibly because of my being deaf in one ear and possibly because some of it seemed to be in a strong dialect I’m not used to. Some of it may have been that I know just about nothing about the black culture of the period — the 1910s. There are, for example, many references late in the play to the Joe Turner of the title, and unless I missed something (certainly a possibility) it was never really explained who he was or how it was that he was still allowed to enslave people decades after the end of slavery, and it may be that this is something in American history just about everyone but me knows about. Some of it may have just been that I was very tired after several long days of work in a row. For whatever combination of reasons, I had trouble following parts of the play.

And that was frustrating because the play is colorful, the characters are interesting and lively, the acting was good, but somehow I just never connected with the spiritual journey at the heart of the piece. I think I understood it intellectually but it didn’t touch me emotionally. I felt I was watching it happen as a detached observer rather than taking the journey vicariously along with Herald Loomis.

I can give dramaturgical reasons for why that might be, I’m just not sure whether the fault lies in the construction of the play or with my own limitations in concentrating last night, or just my limitations in general. I mean, this is not exactly a play that has lacked for acclaim, and the audience around me certainly appeared to be completely caught up in it.

Still, it occurred to me while thinking about it today that, in terms of usual dramatic structure, the real protagonist is Herald Loomis — the emotional breakthrough at the climax of the play is his, and it is the direction of his life far more than any other that is going to be forever changed by it.

Structurally, that ought to make him the central character. Yet he’s not treated as the central character. Far more prominence is given in the first half or two thirds of the play to Seth Holly, who owns the boardinghouse, his wife Bertha, and Bynum Walker, a boarder who practices some kind of voodoo that I didn’t understand very well but who enables Herald to make his breakthrough. (It was Bynum, by the way, whose lines I had the most trouble catching, which is a shame since he seems to me to the most interesting character in the play. I did notice with some annoyance that some of his longer scenes were blocked so that he was turned three quarters away from the audience, so that I was looking at the back of his head while trying to make out what he was saying. Frustrating.)

These three are truly wonderful and distinctive characters and they completely engaged my interest, and then there are several lighter subplots working themselves out among the other boarders and capturing my interest as well, and then into this vivid, lively world Herald Loomis enters looking for all the world like the cardboard villain of a melodrama, and we learn very little about him for a very long time. The play is more than half over before he does much more than pace gloomily and glower at people; only in the last five minutes or so of the first act do we start to see him from the inside and begin to understand his suffering in his heart. And as a result, when events reach their climax near the end of the second act, we don’t — well, at least I didn’t — feel that I’ve spent enough time getting to know him so that I can follow along with him in his spiritual breakthrough.

By the usual principles of dramatic construction, this is weak. A play is structured around conflicts, the most important of those conflicts is the one that is resolved at the climax of the play, and the character whose conflict it is, is the protagonist. The playwright’s job is to create empathy (note: not the same as sympathy) in the audience for the protagonist, so that the listeners identify with the protagonist’s situation and share vicariously in his or her transformation at the climax. August Wilson, though, spent more than half the play leading us — and very skillfully, too — to identify with just about everybody but Herald Loomis. He starts only very late in the play to change course and put more emphasis on Loomis, and for whatever reason, it didn’t work for me last night.

But I hate to say it’s because of the construction, because the play has clearly worked for so many people and because I know very well that sometimes an unorthodox dramatic structure is precisely what is needed to create a powerful play.

So maybe it’s because I wasn’t hearing very well and missed some important points, or maybe I was just too tired to concentrate enough. I’m not sure.

Sunday afternoon was the final performance of Farm Boys, except that it wasn’t because it’s been extended a week. It was the second trip for Dave and me, and the third for Terry, and we’re all even thinking of seeing it one more time.

This time around, I knew better what to pay attention to in the characterizations, and I found the piece really compelling — I think I was tearing up all the way through the second act. Part of what I was responding to this time was that John’s feelings about the homophobic midwestern farming town he grew up in reminded me of my own feelings about growing up in Orange County and my own experiences in visiting the place as an adult and being vividly reminded all over again of the pain that I left the place precisely to get away from. The homophobic culture I was too young to escape from and too young to know how to endure, the terrible habits of feeling helplessness and terror and hatred that I fell into in response and which I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to break. The pain of having to confront the conflicted, angry, fearful, and all in all not very admirable young man I used to be, and figure out how to forgive myself for who I once was.

In the play, the young John responded to his environment with rebelliousness and even physical violence, while in my own life I responded in the opposite direction by turning inward and withdrawing from the world around me. I used to have a certain envy for those who could openly rebel like that, but from where I sit now, in my late 40s, it doesn’t seem like as much of a difference as it used to. In both cases we did a lot of conscious harm to others and conscious harm to ourselves. When you’ve been hurt so often and so deeply by others, it’s a tough thing to forgive yourself for having made the conscious choice to hurt someone too, whether it was physical or emotional hurt, and whether it was yourself or someone else you hurt — and more likely than not, it was plenty of both.

I continue to think the play is somewhat underwritten, and that more could be done to emphasize the especially important moments and themes. It’s a rich play with a lot of subtleties, but the main points could be made to stand out a little more strongly. This seemed true of John, in particular — he’s the central character, and yet we don’t spend much time learning what’s making him tick. Granted, he’s a loner and tends to be uncommunicative, but we still want to find our way into his head so we can understand and empathize better with his difficult journey.

John’s having to face up to his own adolescent act of violence, for example, seems like an important moment to me now, but it’s mentioned almost in passing and the moment goes by quickly, and the first time around I didn’t pay much attention to it. Seeing it a second time, now it seems crucial, and I’d have liked to have stayed with that issue just a little longer and seen it developed a little more. The moment when John admits that he had the wrong take on the older man’s character (why am I blanking on his name all of a sudden?), and must confront the fact that he deeply hurt both his lover and himself with his recklessness and naivete, that likewise seems to me now like a moment that it would have been good to stay with a little longer.

In the many years I spent in writing workshops, I came to find that this sort of thing is a common problem with talented but inexperienced playwrights — in playwriting, less is generally more, and someone with talent will have figured out the power of understatement, of saying the minimum necessary to get the point across, letting the audience infer the larger picture from as few deft strokes as can be gotten away with. But at the same time, because you’re writing for a diverse group of people in your audience, and because their attention is also being drawn by the visual elements, writing on stage has to be bolder and more emphatic than writing on the page to make the same effect. Yet on the page is where one writes, and where one reads over what one has written. It takes a lot of actual experience seeing what you’ve written read before an audience, a lot of writing something that you think is going to have a certain effect and then seeing it performed without its making that effect, and rewriting it and seeing what happens then, maybe many times until you figure out how to get it right — it takes a lot of that before you develop a good sense for how big is just big enough.

It seems to me to be sort of like learning to paint murals — you have to do your painting up close, there’s no other way to do it, but you can’t accurately see what the effect is of what you’ve painted except by backing up quite a ways, so it takes some practice just to learn the right degree of exaggeration to put into your painting up close to create an unexaggerated effect from further away. Just in that way, something that sounds like exactly the right degree of nuance and subtlely when you read it out loud in your study will often be far too subtle to make its impression on the audience when spoken on a stage.

This is not to say that a play shouldn’t have enough richness and enough layers that you see more in it with a second or third viewing — it certainly should. A play’s staying power is all about being rich enough to reward seeing several times. But a play also needs to make a good first impression or few people will give it a second look, so you want a play’s main themes and basic structure to be strong and clear enough that an audience will perceive them even on a first seeing.

Last Thursday Dave and I went to see Thrillpeddler’s latest show, The Hypnodrome’s Night of Erotic Appetizers, subtitled “A Grand Guignol Shockfest”. The shocks were not abundant, and it’s not the best stuff we’ve seen from them, but it was fun all the same.

The program started, curiously, with a performance of Cobra, an essentially aleatory piece of music by John Zorn, a composer I’d never heard of before (though Dave of course had), that was probably terribly avant-garde 50 or 60 years ago. The conductor stood behind a table full of face-down cards, and the musicians improvised and interacted with each other in various ways that seemed to be determined by which card was turned up at any particular time. At various times the musicians seemed to be communicating with the conductor by hand signal as to what card he should turn up next — holding out two fingers to indicate the second card, and so on — though as far as I could see they didn’t know where the cards were and had no particular goal in any of this, so it was essentially random selection. The piece had some amusing moments but it was shapeless and didn’t go anywhere and after a while it just ended.

Next on the program was an interesting talk on the decadence of Weimar Germany by Mel Gordon, author of some terrific books on Grand Guignol and Weimar Germany that I’ve enjoyed a lot. He’s a likeable speaker, too, knowledgeable without being insufferably academic about it, down to earth and good-humored and with an agreeable sense of humor, dry but not cynical — he clearly has a sincere human enthusiasm and affection for his subject.

As he talked, I was struck at how little some of what he was describing about Weimar Berlin differed from life in the United States today, and not just in the big cities, either. For example, he talked about a huge restaurant in Berlin that had some eight or so areas devoted to the foods of different countries (like the food court at any mall today), each with its own live entertainment (not all that unlike the music piped into every restaurant to set the atmosphere). An artificial river flowed through the restaurant (like the Blue Bayou restaurant at Disneyland), and every hour there would be a short artificial thunderstorm (like the restaurant at the Peppermill casino in Reno where we eat sometimes when we’re visiting Dave’s mother, or for that matter, like the produce section at most any Safeway).

He also talked about the craze for nudist camps, and showed a short black-and-white exploitation film from the 1930s about one. A hoot, though not very erotic or scandalous when you already live in the San Francisco Bay Area and have several beaches readily available when you feel in the mood to get naked in the sun and open air.

Mr. Gordon then talked a bit about modern dancer Anita Berber, who seems to have been on a quest to soak up as much drugs and alcohol as she could, and then not too surprisingly died in her late 20s. We were served a variety of aphrodisiacs made from recipes from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Sexology Museum (the herbal drink was tasty but I could have skipped the plate of aphrodesiac hors d’oeuvres, which were heavy on the stomach and neither interesting nor effective enough to be worth the sampling). Bijou O’Keefe then performed an interpretation of one of Anita Berber’s dances, Morphine.

The final piece on the program was the one true piece of Grand Guignol, a one-acter called Orgy at the Lighthouse. Dave and I saw Thrillpeddlers do it once before. In some ways it was done better this time, too, though it’s one of Thrillpeddlers’ weaker pieces in any case. Four young people have a drunken party, including sex, when one of the two young men is supposed to be on duty at the lighthouse, and when a storm rolls in suddenly, grisly things happen as a result. So it’s fun and creepy and titillating, and has a fair number of shocks along with all the exposed flesh and stage blood. But even for a sordid melodrama, it isn’t really all that well or imaginitively constructed a piece and it doesn’t build up a lot of suspense. We’ve seen other Grand Guignol pieces at Thrillpeddlers that were more genuinely unsettling.

So all in all, a pleasant and interesting but not extraordinary evening.

Dave and I saw Hedda Gabler at the American Conservatory Theater last Friday. It’s a wonderful production when the set gets out of the way of the actors — which is most of the time, fortunately. The set, representing the Tesmans’ living room, is simple and attractive, but unfortunately it is framed in a lot of exposed steel scaffolding, and now and then an actor or three will climb the steel stairs and cross the stage high on the catwalk pretending to be hurrying down the street or having a drink at Commissioner Brack’s party or something. The point of the scaffolding was obscure to me, as it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the look of the rest of the set or with the mood or themes of the play. And interpolating bits of unnecessary action that make use of the scaffolding only serves to call attention to it. Which is of course the point; once you’ve made the directorial decision to have all of this extraneous stuff on stage, you have to use it for something to try to justify its existence and integrate it into the rest of the production. It didn’t work for me.

However, all the real action takes place in the Tesmans’ living room, where it should, and so it’s easy enough most of the time to ignore the rest of the set. And the performances are excellent. René Augesen is terrific and striking, maybe the most striking Hedda I’ve seen. She makes very vivid in her manner and actions Hedda’s desperate, petulant, resentful boredom, the urge that keeps coming over her to do something, anything, however destructive to herself or others it might be, just to break the monotony. You really don’t want to see this woman playing with guns. Also wonderful: Jack Willis as Commissioner Brack. Dave and I both thought he was a standout as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Ben in The Little Foxes and he stood out again in this.

Tonight: “The Hypnodrome’s Night of Erotic Appetizers” at Thrillpeddlers. For some reason this isn’t mentioned anywhere I can find on their website but they advertised on craigslist. Go figure.

Saturday night, Dave and Terry and I saw Farm Boys at the New Conservatory Theater, and then Sunday night Dave and I saw The Birthday Party at the Aurora.

Farm Boys is an affecting play despite what I think are some weaknesses in the writing. A gay man inherits a midwestern farm from an older man with whom he had a love affair many years ago — the older man’s first. The younger man moved out of the Midwest, though, years ago and is uneasy about the idea of moving back and taking over the place. And he’s clearly troubled by his memories of his relationship with the older man — some of which we see acted out as flashbacks.

I especially liked Brian Levy as the ghost/flashback of the older man and Scarlett Hepworth as his ex-wife — very warm and loving portrayals of their characters. I thought the writing of the play was not everything it could be, though — I felt that a fair amount of the dialogue was just a bit too formal to sound completely natural, and in the second act I really wanted to see more of the relationship between the two men — what happened after they became lovers and before they separated. I think I’d have come away with a more vivid sense of what the relationship meant to them in their memories if I’d had seen more of what it was at the time, and I came away wishing that more time in the second act could have spent with the flashbacks, which seem to me to be the emotional core of the story.

For all that, it’s a very moving play, and I might try to go see it one more time before it closes weekend after next.

The Birthday Party is not a play I’m wild about, and the Aurora’s production didn’t make me a convert. I think I understand and appreciate what Pinter is doing technically in his plays, I just never seem to be able to care much that he’s doing it. I can see that there are some interesting ideas in the play, but they seem few and thin to me, nowhere near substantial enough to sustain my attention for three acts. But the whole cast is terrific and it was a good evening. Dave and I mostly went because we’re fans of James Carpenter and Julian Lopez-Morillas, who — lucky us — are in the two most important roles and doing a compelling job of it. But whole ensemble is excellent. Phoebe Moyer is wonderful and funny as the landlady whose name I’m forgetting, the one who keeps asking if the corn flakes are nice.

I’ve enjoyed James Carpenter’s work for some 15 years or more now, but he’s always seemed to me to be the sort of actor who is really good as long as he stays within a fairly limited range of what he can do very well — now between this and last season’s The Master Builder, I’m not so sure about that any more. Both that performance and this one had a breadth and depth of feeling to them that I don’t remember seeing before. I won’t mind, though, if he gets more upcoming opportunities to display it in Ibsen than Pinter.

Dave says that The Birthday Party has exactly the same structure as a typical episode of The Goon Show. I don’t know enough about The Goon Show to repeat his explanation, but I pass it along here in case it’s an enlightening insight for anyone. And it does occur to me that I’d probably like The Birthday Party much better if it had been a short one-act.

Dave and I went back to see The Circle at ACT a second time before it closes again this weekend. I don’t know whether it’s because we had better seats this time, or if the cast really has sharpened their characterizations that much since previews, and most likely it’s some of both, but the play seemed much more nuanced and detailed and livelier to us both than it had first time around. And we had enjoyed it tremendously that time. But last night’s performance was really terrific. Maybe not My Top Ten Theater Experiences of All Time terrific, but a real joy all the way through.

This time I actually read some of the program essay about Somerset Maugham during one of the intermissions. It quotes a passage from his autobiography, The Summing Up, that really got to me:

I think what has chiefly struck me in human beings is their lack of consistency. I have never seen people all of a piece. It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and for all that yield a plausible harmony. … The censure that has from time to time been passed on me is due perhaps to the fact that I have not expressly condemned what is bad in the characters of my invention and praised what is good. It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me, and even when they do I have learnt at last generally to excuse them. It is meet not to expect too much of others.

I think this gets at one of the reasons I’ve been so fond of this play since I first encountered it a couple of decades ago, though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it back then. There isn’t one really admirable character in this play, nor any really despicable character either. When you get down to it, everyone in the play is pretty shallow (possibly excepting Anna Shenstone and the butler, I suppose, as they’re such small roles we never learn anything about them), and at some point or other every one of them behaves like a pigheaded idiot or worse. All the younger people — Arnold, Elizabeth, Teddie — are very naive and, in their various ways, foolishly idealistic. And yet, although the older people — Clive, Kitty, Porteous — know much more of life, they haven’t become so very much wiser for it either. Yet the play takes a fond, affectionate, and forgiving attitude toward them all, and invites us to like these people and enjoy their company and laugh at their foibles, even as they’re making terrible mistakes and causing each other grief.

Something I’ve felt right from the start, back in my first playwriting courses in college, is that genuine comedy — not just a silly farce based on conventions and stereotypes, but something that deals with real truths about the human condition and invites us to laugh at them — is, at its best, a profounder thing than tragedy. The subject matter of comedy and tragedy is not all that far apart, both modes of theater look at the sorrows and injustices of the human condition, but tragedy invites us to be angry about them, to judge them harshly, while comedy is the mode of forgiveness and invites us to be compassionate and tolerant.

Something else I’ve been noticing since college: Unlike the theater, in real life there are no serious roles, just comic parts. In our heads, we are all the long-suffering heroes of our own romantic melodramas, but in fact we’re all characters in a vast Chekhov comedy, creating our own and each other’s despair, unable to break out of our self-destructive routines even though we know they make us miserable and the train to Moscow is ready to go and right there. None of us is really the star of anything; we’re all somebody’s wacky next-door neighbor.

Back to The Circle. I’ve known this play for 20 years now at least, and at this performance I noticed a symmetry between Clive and Porteous that I’d never noticed before (or don’t remember noticing). In act one, Clive seems by far the more likeable, good-humored and cheerful and debonair, while Porteous is an insufferable monster, constantly carping and fault-finding and pitying himself. But as the play progresses, they sort of trade places in our estimation: We observe that Clive’s good humor comes from a profound misanthropy and cynicism and ill-willed delight in the heartaches of others; while Porteous, for all his bitterness and pride, is capable of bursts of compassion when something shakes him up. Disappointment and disillusionment have deeply shaped both men, but where this has made Porteous exaggerate his own woes, it’s made Clive take pleasure in the woes of others. Neither is particularly admirable, but Porteous, I think, is the one whose faults we ultimately find easier to forgive.

Or at least so it seemed to me in this production.

The story must have been Maugham’s way of dealing, in a form that would be accepted by general audiences, with the issue of being a closeted homosexual in a straight marriage. Here’s the situation in The Circle: After three years of marriage to Arnold, Elizabeth met Teddie, and on meeting him she knew that she loved him and that she was never going to be able to truly love her husband. She also knows that if she leaves her husband to live with Teddie, she will endure the lifelong scorn of society and be shunned forever by all her friends — the sad example of Kitty and Porteous shows her what she can look forward to. Yet she still yearns for real love. Not hard at all to see this as a parallel to the dilemma of a man who has tried unsuccessfully to make a straight marriage work, who has come to realize he is gay, who knows he can never really love his wife as she should be loved, and yet who knows that to leave his marriage and live with someone he truly loves will make him an outcast to most of society. Not hard to imagine Maugham brooding on this sort of situation and finding in it a lot of things he would like to write about, and finding a way to tell such a story in which the lovers are a man and a woman, but the sacrifice and social disapproval are similar.

Stuart Bousel — who wrote and directed Troijka last year which I enjoyed — actually liked Legally Blonde, the musical that is playing right now at the Golden Gate Theater. Now, okay, I haven’t seen it, so maybe I shouldn’t venture an opinion just in case I decide to go see it and realize that it’s totally brilliant and thus will be unable to pretend that I’ve been an advocate of the show right from the start. But it sounds like a one-joke idea for a musical to me, and the two songs on the SHN website sound like one-joke songs to my ear, and I had already made up my mind not to see it. Now I’m warily curious.

But maybe I’m just too old for this kind of stuff: Mr. Bousel writes:

It also is one of those rare birds in modern musical theater: something geared to appeal to my age group, and for that I’m actually pretty grateful. It’s getting harder and harder to find fun, entertaining, smart new musicals for the Gen X and Y crowd.

Believe me, it’s pretty hard to find good new musicals for the Gen W crowd, too. But in another blog entry, he wrote that the music for Spring Awakening didn’t sound like “musical music”, and I sort of had that feeling about the two songs from Legally Blonde. It’s attractive, pleasant pop music but it doesn’t convey specific emotion to my ears. But maybe I’m too old and listen to too little of this kind of music to hear nuances in it, I don’t know. It often takes me several listenings before I get a piece of music. First time I saw a Kurt Weill musical, all the songs sounded exactly the same to me; now I wonder what was I thinking? Bruckner still sounds that way to me, every movement of every symphony sounds like every other, yet Dave is a major Bruckner fan and insists that if I listened more, I would get it.

Mr. Bousel adds:

THE WILD PARTY is grand, of course, but it’s more of the arty pursuasion, like PARADE, and feels like it belongs to an older tradition of serious operetta.

Ouch. You say that like it’s a bad thing. I’d drop everything and buy orchestra seats for a good new serious operetta.

My vibes about Legally Blonde have been that it’s going to be yet another story in which the writers spend three quarters of their time relentlessly mocking their characters for being stereotypical and shallow (and whose fault exactly is that, anyway?) and then expect us to feel genuine emotion for them when they get into some kind of crisis and tug on our heartstrings. There are so many movies and plays that try to work that way, they never work on me like they mean to and leave me feeling irritated rather than moved, and Legally Blonde has been looking to me like another one of them.

Dave and I saw a preview performance of Somerset Maugham’s The Circle at American Conservatory Theater last Friday. It’s a favorite play of mine, though one that I’ve only seen one production of before this one; however, that production was a memorable one, with Geraldine Page as Kitty in a tiny off-Broadway theater (back when I was living in New York City in the late 1980s). Dave had never seen or read the play before, but he loved the production on Friday, too, so we’re going to go back and see it again later in the run.

We went without knowing who was going to be in it, but we were pleasantly surprised that Ken Ruta is playing Lord Porteous, and the likeable young man playing Teddy is Craig W. Marker, who we saw four or five months ago playing Figaro in a wonderful and hilarious production of The Marriage of Figaro (which we had also liked enough to go back and see a second time). Lady Kitty is a very funny and touching Kathleen Widdoes, whose only real failing is that she is forced to complete with Geraldine Page in my memory, or at least with the idealization of Geraldine Page that is what’s left of my memory after 20 years or so.

I’m a little annoyed by the ACT advertisements and PR material, though, which keep referring to The Circle as a “satire”. The play pokes some fun at the upper classes here and there, certainly, but to see the play as predominantly a satire seems to me to be missing the point in a very big way.

Dave and I went back to see the final performance of Ice Glen last night. We were both very glad to have gone back, as the play and the performances seemed both richer and funnier on a second seeing.

With The Bear fresher in my mind from a rereading a few days ago, I thought the parallels were very clear, particularly in the long argument between the poet Sarah Harding and the editor Peter Woodburn near the end of the first act. In each case, the play is about a reclusive widow living in the country (well, in Ice Glen there are two reclusive women, one a widow and one divorced; looking at the two plays side by side, it’s a bit as though Popova in The Bear had been cut in two to create Sarah and Dulce in Ice Glen, and the one servant in The Bear becomes three in Ice Glen) and a brusque man who comes on a matter of pure business. As they argue, the widow’s increasing anger moves her to come out of her shell of mourning and assert her independence, and the man discovers he has a capacity for feelings he didn’t know he had. In the last few minutes of the play, the two realize their affection for each other.

As I wrote before, some papers that the widow finds hidden in her late husband’s dresser drawer — love letters in The Bear, poems in Ice Glen — are significant in both plays, and of course there’s the bear in Ice Glen, who we never see but who is practically a seventh character in the play, and who may or may not be a real bear.

Actually, after seeing the play a second time, I think it’s made clear that there is a real bear, and there is also a metaphorical bear in Sarah’s poems, but Sarah herself seems to get them mixed up in her mind.

I don’t want to push the parallels too far, because The Bear is nevertheless still just a fifteen-minute farce, though a wonderful one, and Ice Glen is a full-length and very rich comedy with a lot of different levels and layers. But the former must have been in the writer’s mind as the latter was written, and it’s fun to look at the parallel structures, to see what Joan Ackermann used from The Bear to provide some of the skeleton for her play.

The acting, as I said, seemed even sharper to both of us last night than it had before, and I don’t know whether the actors’ energy was higher because it was the last performance or because our better knowledge of the play let us catch nuances we didn’t notice the first time. The long dinner scene at the end of the first act, with Dulce (Lauren Grace, who was Hilda in last season’s The Master Builder that we liked so much) trying to attract Peter (a very handsome and likeable actor we hadn’t seen before named Marvin Greene), and Peter trying to be polite but really wanting to get through to Sarah (Zehra Berkman, who we also hadn’t seen before and who gave a beautiful performance, making the poet’s warmth and fury, self-doubt and pride, all seem perfectly understandable parts of the same character) — the dinner scene was a thorough joy, a beautifully constructed scene and beautifully acted, and if we still lived in an era of encores I might have shouted for them to do the whole thing again.

And the second act scene in which Dulce at last breaks out of her shell and asserts herself by telling off Peter (who by this point well deserves it) was a real highlight, and again both more powerful and funnier than I had remembered it being a week ago. Whether that was the actors or me, I couldn’t say. Probably some of both.

Later: Dave discovered that the Ice Glen of the play is a real place.

The discussion about The Seagull has got me thinking again about the differences between 19th- and 20th-century theater. I don’t really believe in the timelessness of art, and Chekhov’s plays, like any works of art, will change in the feelings and thoughts that it evokes in its audiences over time, because the audiences themselves change over time.

This is unavoidable because art itself depends on making use of the audience’s unconscious expectations, symbolic meanings, conventions, shared attitudes and experiences, and so on. The artist’s use of those things, both skillfully and intuitively, to evoke thoughts and feelings in the audience is the very thing that gives art its power.

One major reason, I think, that Chekhov can seem puzzling to a modern American audience is that we no longer have the same expectations of the theater and the same history of shared theatrical experiences and attitudes and references that Chekhov’s audience did. I think this is also an obstacle to our really understanding Ibsen and Shaw and even David Belasco and all sorts of playwrights from around that period. The theater was going through enormous changes, and all these playwrights were writing very much in reaction to the older theater. Shaw, for example, loved to start a play with a clichéd situation of the popular theater of the time, and then turn it on its head and say, you’ve seen this in the theater a hundred times but now I’m going to show you how it is in real life. And a lot of the comedy stems from the counterpoint, the differences, between the familiar expectations of the audience and what actually happens this time.

It’s the same thing that happens in, say, Into the Woods, where a lot of the fun comes from the way our knowledge and expectations derived from the familiar fairy tales comes into conflict with what we see really happening. We’re set up to expect this, and then that happens. If we’d never heard of, say, Little Red Riding Hood before, a lot of the fun of her part in the musical would be lost.

But in the case of these late 19th-century/early 20th-century playwrights like Chekhov and Ibsen and Shaw, the theater they were rebelling against has been thoroughly dead for so long that the audience doesn’t come in with the same expectations. They see that happen, and all they think is, Look, that happened. They weren’t expecting this to happen in the first place, and half the point of that is invisible to them.

Here’s one important way in which I think Chekhov overturned the unspoken conventions of the theater of his time: The popular melodrama of the 19th century was about characters who did things to get what they want. Characters were straightforward: Each character had a goal and each character acted so as to try to get what he or she wanted. If the hero wanted to marry the heroine, he put on his best behavior as he wooed her; if the villain wanted to break up the engagement and force her to marry him instead, he forged the hero’s signature on a love letter to another woman and purchased the mortgage to her father’s farm so that he could threaten to foreclose. The interest came from watching the conflicts among these cross purposes work themselves out; if any one character were free to pursue his or her goals without the interference of the other characters, he or she would surely achieve them.

Chekhov, though, wrote about characters who are constantly shooting themselves in the foot, who do have goals but either those goals are unrealistic and unachievable or else the characters will not act in ways that would bring those goals closer. Chekhov’s characters suffer, but he shows us that nearly all of them have created their own suffering. They have created their own ruts, but he makes it plain to us that each of them could escape his or her rut simply by stepping out of it and walking away. None of them ever does.

To audiences accustomed to a theater in which characters behaved sensibly in order to achieve their stated goals, this must have seemed baffling. But Chekhov was, I think, saying, People aren’t like that in real life! This is how they are: They shoot themselves in the foot and they refuse to change even when change would plainly alleviate their miseries!

Nowadays, though, the idea that people can be neurotically unable to break out of recurring and self-defeating patterns of behavior is commonplace, and we have every expectation of seeing it represented in the theater. And I think people go to something like The Seagull and of course they know, they’ve been told that the play is a great classic and that it was revolutionary and so on, but they only know that intellectually, they don’t feel what it was about the play that caused such strong reactions at the time.

Which may be a shame, or maybe it isn’t. It seems inevitable to me, in any case. Society changes from one place to another and from one time to another. Somebody in the discussion last night used the word “evolved”, but that has a connotation of progress that I’m not sure I agree with. I don’t think modern theatrical taste is better than the taste of 19th-century audiences; I think it’s just different, and if the “progress” in theater had run in the opposite direction, I’m pretty sure that we would have no trouble believing that our taste for good strong melodrama was superior to the taste for psychological truth.

It is just the opposite in, say, painting, isn’t it? 150 years ago, the paintings that got the most praise from critics and academics were naturalistic; today they are abstract, and the critics and academics will remind you at every opportunity how superior it is to appreciate a painting for its own sake, as an arrangement of fields of color, than as a reflection of reality. While 150 years ago, the plays that got the most praise from critics and academics were unrealistic — abstract, you might say — and were praised for their skillful construction, and actors for their larger-than-life qualities; nobody even dreamed of going to the theater for a dose of lifelike psychological truth. And nowadays what we value in theater and in acting is naturalism, and it’s accepted as a commonplace and obvious truth that this is artistically and even morally superior than the popular farces and melodramas of 150 years ago.

I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the theater of the last 150 years, or that I’d rather trade away Ibsen and Shaw and Chekhov to get back those farces and melodramas. I’m just saying I think a lot of what gets touted as progress in theater is really just change.