You walk in. You stroll down the aisle. You shuffle past a few
pairs of legs and sit. The curtain in front of you, down, hides
the deceptively flat surface on which the action will soon unfold.
In your hand the ticket you hold makes you wonder who sets the
prices these days. You are happy that the floor is not sticky.
Are you at the movies? Or are you at the theater?
If questions beg, this one would kill for its bone: what are
the similarities and differences between seeing a movie and
watching a play? It seems useful to consider not only what is
superficially indistinct about the two experiences, but also to
muse upon the highly dissimilar nature of film and live theater.
The nuances that make one's visit to a movie house feel eerily
like an evening at a playhouse are few. Both spectacles are like
in duration; the stories may very well be alike in plot or in
message; you leave the space after both shows have ended. Beyond
that, little surprise, the similitudes are not at all as engaging
as the contrarieties.
Most movies are expensive to make and cheap to see. Most plays
are cheap to make and expensive to see. Movies are marketed
shrewdly and grotesquely. Plays are marketed narrowly and
demurely. Movies receive a societal sanction that can only be
described as vulgar, allowing them to run for years. Plays are
often culturally sanctioned and close early. But the contrasts
between the two artistic media extend much further than these
handy parallel constructions convey.
When you see a live theatrical production, you are excited by,
among other things, the possibility of something going wrong: a
dropped line; an exceptionally ungraceful movement; a missed
note; an errant prop; a trip and a plummet into the orchestra. As
for a film, all it can really do is melt. And if something goes
awry during the making of a movie, the director simply calls for
another take. Another take in the theater doesn't come until the
next show. Thus, there is an immediacy in live theater, an
unrelenting demand for accuracy and precision, that everyone
involved is subject to.
As a result of this immediacy (dramatic in every available
sense), you feel as though you are a part of some phenomenon
wholly ephemeral, a player, whether actor or spectator, who is
both creating and witnessing a performance that dissipates the
moment it is given. Each individual interpretation and rendering
of a play, unrecorded (except, perhaps, in the minds of those
present), vanishes. When the house lights come up, the slight
miracle just transpired expires. But take heart--even celluloid
isn't forever.
Movies, for their part, don't vary. Wherever you go, there
they are, unchanged. Whether you pay the full $9.00 in Manhattan
opening night or $1.50 at Mephitic Cinemas six months hence,
you're invariably going to get the same invariable product.
Despite that Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive recently
closed in Kansas City, Chicago, Portland, Juneau, Seattle,
Houston, and Ann Arbor, and that Waiting for Godot is
currently playing on stages all over the country (world?),
theatrical productions never replicate a movie's static final-edited
form. That is, a play, even in bilocation, is never duplicate
anywhere. Casts, crews, directors, spaces, sets, even lines
change from production to production. And within this mutability
of theater lie its beauty and its longevity. It ain't called
"live" for nothing.
So the next time you sit looking at that concealing curtain,
take note of how much difference the flat surface behind it
makes, be it vertical, white, and plain or horizontal, rigged,
and expressive.
