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Tonight K. and I saw the penultimate play of the Shotgun Players season, Harry Thaw Hates Everybody, and I'm happy to say that it was a grand success.
The play is based on the murder of Stanford White by Harry Thaw, and their relations with the young Evelyn Nesbit. I of course was interested in the play because of its historical basis, and that was carried off well, offering lots of background on the situation, and really putting everyone into the milieu.
However what I really loved was the way the play was organized. It was told as a story, narrated and presented by the four major characters in the drama (the fourth being Evelyn's mother). Each of the characters got one act, which allowed them to present their viewpoint in the continuing narrative of the story. Each of those acts was also told in a unique manner: Stanford's Act I was Vaudeville, the mother's Act II was newspaper headlines, Thaw's Act III was a court-room drama, and Evelyn's Act IV was either cabaret or burlesque (I'm not sure of the difference). This type of structure could be overdone, but it turned out well here, with each of the Acts being very unique.
The changing viewpoints also worked, because it helped to show, as the play emerged, that everyone was a villain in the piece. Everyone was a selfish manipulator, but they were all believable characters who you could sympathize with as well. (Except perhaps for Thaw, who was just a wee bit scary.) So, it wasn't dark and grim at all. In fact, it was often quite funny.
I was also surprised that Evenlyn's viewpoint included a pretty full-throated statement of what she'd done (manipulating her husband to murder her ex-lover) as a type of early feminism. Her actions were ultimately just as despicable as everyone else's, but I had to wonder how many options a woman had at the time if she truly wanted to be her own free woman.
As seems required in this sort of play-as-play, it went off the tracks in the third act, when Thaw decided to do his own thing (the aforementioned court drama) rather than what he'd "scripted". Pretty much the same thing happened in Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness, one of the many other meta plays that Shotgun has produced lately, but where that play had problems, this one worked almost all the way through.
Overall, innovative and enjoyable. Oh, and it was a musical to a certain extent to, and it had some fun music and dance, largely drawn from the period.
The play is based on the murder of Stanford White by Harry Thaw, and their relations with the young Evelyn Nesbit. I of course was interested in the play because of its historical basis, and that was carried off well, offering lots of background on the situation, and really putting everyone into the milieu.
However what I really loved was the way the play was organized. It was told as a story, narrated and presented by the four major characters in the drama (the fourth being Evelyn's mother). Each of the characters got one act, which allowed them to present their viewpoint in the continuing narrative of the story. Each of those acts was also told in a unique manner: Stanford's Act I was Vaudeville, the mother's Act II was newspaper headlines, Thaw's Act III was a court-room drama, and Evelyn's Act IV was either cabaret or burlesque (I'm not sure of the difference). This type of structure could be overdone, but it turned out well here, with each of the Acts being very unique.
The changing viewpoints also worked, because it helped to show, as the play emerged, that everyone was a villain in the piece. Everyone was a selfish manipulator, but they were all believable characters who you could sympathize with as well. (Except perhaps for Thaw, who was just a wee bit scary.) So, it wasn't dark and grim at all. In fact, it was often quite funny.
I was also surprised that Evenlyn's viewpoint included a pretty full-throated statement of what she'd done (manipulating her husband to murder her ex-lover) as a type of early feminism. Her actions were ultimately just as despicable as everyone else's, but I had to wonder how many options a woman had at the time if she truly wanted to be her own free woman.
As seems required in this sort of play-as-play, it went off the tracks in the third act, when Thaw decided to do his own thing (the aforementioned court drama) rather than what he'd "scripted". Pretty much the same thing happened in Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness, one of the many other meta plays that Shotgun has produced lately, but where that play had problems, this one worked almost all the way through.
Overall, innovative and enjoyable. Oh, and it was a musical to a certain extent to, and it had some fun music and dance, largely drawn from the period.