play music
the score in theatre
i am watching a performance of an old play, one that has been around for the good part of nearly two centuries, and I am thinking about music, or should I say, I am thinking about how playwrights, if they are lucky, have a “sound” associated with their work, the way you might think of Beethoven, John Adams, Philip Glass, Terence Blanchard or Max Richter as having specific sonic energies that define their music.
I am thinking about how some playwrights’ music is so clear that people identify them with it: Pinter, Beckett, Wilde, Guirgis, McCraney, Tennessee Williams, to name a few. You can close your eyes and imagine a Pinter play and hear it in your head. You will hear a kind of music that is only Pinter and not someone else. Then there are other playwrights whose music is less clearly defined. Their themes and concerns might be what you think of when you think about their work, but less so, how their plays sound. And that’s okay. Not every playwright has a distinctive sound necessarily. But curiously I think its the ones that do that you tend to remember. A reader, an audience, a performer is drawn to their music. You want to get inside that score, and play the notes!
But when you hear a play where the music is off - where the notes are misplayed, misdirected - its even more of a lesson as to why its key to really learn the score and play its rhythms, cadences, and tonalities, how crucial it is to understand its tempo and sonorities rather than only its “content,” by which many people take to mean what the play means. I would argue that what a play means is how it sounds, how it beats, how it sings, how it undulates, curves, syncopates, flows, interrupts, stresses and unstresses its lines, how its words make sense corporeally but also in your ear/heart/drum, the body aligned with its sound, the flow carrying you completely.
Like poetry. Because plays are.
And when we forget that, we lose half the battle in a world that desires for art to make its meanings plain and thus make everyone experiencing it merely a consumer whose only joy is in knowing what is the take-away from a play.
what if we don’t take anything away from a play but rather take in?
what would we discover then, if we allow ourselves to be open to each play’s sound, and trust that its score will reveal itself over time? what readers, audiences, performers, players could we be in a world where plays are like concerts, where we go to listen to our favorite musicians jam?
when I go to see a Tennessee Williams play or one by Caryl Churchill or Kristoffer Diaz, it’s the sound I am seeking - to hear the players play those lines in all their unique beauty.
this is not a precious endeavour.
this is one of heat.
the ardent sound of a play, its beating heart and mind, its dance of signs, and how its sonic textures and phrasings are as various as the sun and the moon, as Shakespeare is to Shange.