Course Blog 21 (Jenna)

When reading over the assortment of reviews of the plays we saw in Chicago, I was surprised to note how little performance appeared in the reviews. While many of the reviewers adopted a particular performance style for crafting their reports (Chris Jones and his collection of puns comes to mind), the substantive sections of these articles, particularly those discussing Equivocation, ignored the actual performance. Instead, the Equivocation reviewers mainly provided their readers with glorified plot summaries carefully crafted to include a plethora of laudatory or acerbic adjectives that, as Justin mentioned, may be lifted from context for commercial purpose.

Of the four, Dan Zeff's was the only review to address the production values of the play. Even then, the various designers were granted single sentences of little analytic value, such as, “William Boles has designed a flexible set that creates appropriate environments the play’s several locations.” or “Janice Pytel designed the period costumes.” “Flexible” and “period” contribute little to an understanding of mis en-scene. These assessments are mere afterthoughts in what is largely a description of plot. Even Zeff's analysis of the acting performances are organized around the story of the play. For instance, he writes, “At the Victory Gardens, Marc Grapey is a superb Shakespeare, not the literary deity he would become after his death but an audience-high man suddenly enmeshed in a very stressful situation. He also has to work among the feisty personalities and egos of his cohorts Richard Burbage (Bruce Young), Robert Armin (Matt Kahler), and Richard Sharpe (Arturo Soria), as well as report to the menacing Robert Cecil (Mark Montgomery).” While presented as a review of Grapey's performance, these two sentences fail to mention a single moment of that performance. They describe the actions of Grapey's character rather than his embodiment of that character. Ostensibly, an actor in any production of Equivocation could be “superb” provided he enact the plot and encounter the listed characters.

This devotion to describing Equivocation's plot enforces many of the comments we have made about attention to narrative in our viewing, reviewing, and discussing performance, namely that it has become detrimentally inescapable. If I had not seen Equivocation and had only read these four reviews of the Chicago production, I would have a sufficient understanding of the script, but would be at a loss to envision how that script had been performed.