Success and Failure

The Girl was a star at the soundboard of last night's production of Failure: A Love Story, running something like 30 wireless mikes and a complex recorded musical score like a pro.

So...the show for which she so flawlessly put the sound together?

 

First, it's a very odd little bit of work. Here's what the playwright says about it:

"A magical, musical fable where, in the end, the power of love is far greater than any individual's successes or failures."

That's a pretty roundabout way of describing the plot. Bottom line: it's a Twenties period piece (and there's a LOT of "Twenties" music and other stage business to remind you) in which the main actor shows up after about a quarter hour of exposition and proceeds to meet and fall in love with three sisters, all of whom die in some sort of bizarre way before the lovers do more than steal a kiss or three.

There's a lot more. Music. Dancing. Talking clocks and animals (and the actress who played the snake kicked ass, I have to say). The Chicago River. Johnny Weismuller.

It's one of those sort of "magical realism" things, and there was a lot of fun dialog and clever bits of stagecraft and let's say that it tried hard. 

 

But the construction of the play was fundamentally flawed. 

 

Unless the lead actor is utterly brilliant, the requirement for the character to meet, love, and lose to a series of bizarre deaths three sisters in 145 minutes is just too impossible to make work as genuine drama.

 

If you were playing it for complete farce? 

 

Fine. 

 

But the playwright wanted to make it a Deep Statement about Love, Life and Death and a high school cast just couldn't make that work. 

 

Shit, John Malkovich in his prime probably couldn't have. Maybe. But it'd be a hell of a hard pull. The playwright made it damn deadly difficult.

 

The real problem wasn't that the author made a Deep Statement about Love, Life and Death. The real problem was that the author wanted to be both glib and clever and deep. The progression of meet-love-die was just too scrambled, too hasty, and too inhuman. People don't love, or lose, the way the stage people were written.

 

In particular the sisters' deaths were 1) too repetitious and 2) too quickly succeeded by the next dead sister. Sure, there was some facile discussion about how knowing our death was inevitable didn't make the life that preceded it a failure, about loving while knowing the looming Hand of Fate.

 

But the need to move the plot along to the next bit of clever stage business meant that there was no real reflection, no real thinking or pondering about death and it's inevitable end of love and life, of loss, of grief and grieving.

The lead actor had no time to do any of that, even if he'd been a Broadway-grade star instead of a nice kid in high school; he had to move right along to falling in love with the next doomed sister.

Again...an actor with tremendous skills and a genuinely manic edge might have made that work as a sort of deeply cynical and fatalistic comment on the folly of our pretensions to eternal love and the Meaning of Life. A sort of "live for today" kind of spurning of The Vale of Shadow.

 

Or someone with the gift to portray a deep, unlighted sorrow might have shed some sort of dark light on how we're born owing God a death, and have no hope to defend ourselves when He comes calling to collect, and how that makes our lives a lingering grief, a deferred appointment with sorrow.

I've been in love with live theater for forty years. When it's good - and I've seen some stunningly good theater - it has an immediacy and an impact no film or book or music has.

But when it's not - and for all that this show tried honorably and hard, and the young cast did as well as they could (and my kiddo was a soundboard star!) - it's no more than facile and easily forgotten words on an empty stage.

Kind of too bad, because the cast and crew worked hard and well.

 

Sometimes, though, all of our best efforts and intentions wither in the bud, never to flower.

And that might be a better summary of the play that anything the playwright intended.