Home › Blogs › Megan's blog

San Francisco Theatre Festival = The Best Argument For Puppet Shows Ever

08/11/2010 — Megan

I hit up the SFTF at Yerba Buena this weekend, and that festival is kind of a tough row to hoe. I was happy with how my piece went (SF Theater Pub put on my short "The Best Things in Life Are Money," along with a ten minute play by Ashley Cowan, as a way to promote the upcoming Pint Sized Plays). I now get to cross "have a play performed in a room on the second floor of a shopping mall, near the deserted video arcade" off my bucket list, so that's an obvious win for me... BUT...

Thank goodness we had an indoor space. The outdoor stages are tough, tough, tough.

Having 3 outdoor spaces in close proximity, with varying degrees of microphone-age, means nobody watching can hear a word of the dialogue. As a writer, seeing these outdoor pieces is a curious experience-- it's sort of like watching movie footage that's been mostly destroyed by being stored in a dank basement, but it's also a simple, brutal, kick-in-the-face reminder that writing for theater is about more than just writing things for people to say to each other. I mean, duh, everyone knows that, duh duh duh idiot duh, but when you see it so starkly demonstrated, it does drive home the importance of writing big as well as doing detailed work.

It makes you want to challenge yourself to set up situations that are so rad and strange and compelling that anyone who sees a few minutes of your show from across a windy, foggy park will say to themselves "I don't know what's going on over there, but it's definitely... something... interesting." Like, it makes you think about whether your play would be better if it were about spooky ghosts, or had more people throwing cocktails in each others' faces-- probably it would-- just ask Shakespeare or Noel Coward, who are two of my favorite people ever to write about ghosts and drinking.

The second option for making good inaudible theater, besides being a supergenius of a writer, is just to give up on dialogue and write puppet shows and get someone to make like frickin' AWESOME puppets and then you can be, like, "Booo-yah, my characters are just sitting there reading the newspaper, but doesn't it look AWESOME?" I would've been down for seeing more of that kind of thing on Sunday. But, puppets aren't really a solution for these poor inaudible companies; at best, puppets would be a band-aid on a cancer.

I think next year I am going to show up at the festival with a shopping cart full of megaphones, and hand the megaphones out to doomed actors on their way to the outdoor stages, clapping my hands on their costume-clad shoulders and saying "I don't care how much Linklater vocal training you've had, unless you take this megaphone, nobody is going to hear a word you say once when you get up there. It's not your fault."