Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04 by The Fourth Dimension is Death (v1.1)

Author:The Fourth Dimension is Death (v1.1) [Death, The Fourth Dimension is]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Miami has no legitimate theater area as such, but merely has a few stages scattered here and there along the coast, ranging from Burt Reynolds’ dinner theater up north of Fort Lauderdale down to the Coconut Grove Playhouse. New theatrical enterprises tend to nestle in somewhere near one of the established places, and that’s where Julie Kaplan’s employment had now taken her; to a small new theater in Coconut Grove, doing a revival of a Sam Shepard play. In a bare set supposed to be a motel room somewhere in the farthest boondocks of the empty American west, Julie Kaplan’s small face and heavy helmet of hair seemed more appropriate than in ordinary life; as though she’d been outfitted for this part from birth.

It had taken three calls to reach her from Zack’s ski lodge before I’d flown east, the number she’d originally given me when we were both in New York having been superseded by a second which in its turn had been replaced by the third. When I’d finally tracked her down, she’d agreed to meet with me, and I’d said I would see the show, then talk to her afterward, and that’s what happened. I got lost briefly on the way down, Coconut Grove somehow being half jungle and half city, with entire blocks where you can’t see the sky for all the overhanging trees and vines. But I made it just before curtain time, and took a seat in the small half-empty theater as the lights went down.

Someone connected with the production, of course, would have called the place half full. Optimism is necessary in the theater, more so than in most places. Having been the most popular form of storytelling from Euripides to Gillette, it is now a minority sport, superseded by movies and television, which not only share the theater’s basic attraction for the illiterate but also provide a fake reality the theater can’t match. It’s easier to pretend you’re watching two people alone in a motel in the American southwest if they aren’t actually in the same room with you. Every theatrical performance today, therefore, is an act of bravery; that’s really relying on the kindness of strangers.

This production, in the shadow of the well- established Coconut Grove Playhouse, was a fairly standard example of mediocre regional theater today; technically competent, methodical and accurate, but rarely involving. Only once or twice did those people stop occupying space in the same room with us, the audience, and take up residence instead in that bleak motel room two thousand miles away.

I often wonder what the people who attend such performances hope to get out of them. Culture? A change of pace from Rocky XX and Perry Mason number nine hundred and two? A chance to become involved in a story that hasn’t been artificially pumped up with unmotivated and irrelevant scenes of violence? Whatever it is, such audiences tend to seem quietly satisfied no matter what they get, laughing too little along the way, applauding too much at the end, retreating to their cars afterward without much fuss.

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