Comedy is on my mind today, and I’d like to mention my pleasure at seeing Rx, currently running at ‘Primary Stages.’ I thought a lot about it afterwards – and there was much to chew on. Thank goodness the Times critic, Christopher Isherwood, agreed with me – but ‘actors and critics’ is a subject for another set of thoughts…
What do I like best about this ‘comedy of the workplace’? It did two things for me that I appreciate, and it manages to do them simultaneously. What makes it funny is precisely what makes it meaningful; the inherent paradoxes in the things we choose to do – in this play, actual jobs – versus the things we really want, like love or power. In other words, Kate Fodor, the skilled and insightful playwright, creates characters just like us, only more fun – so we feel with them when they go bananas.
Their situations are awful in precise proportion to their lack of self-awareness – and the playwright exploits their naivete about themselves for the purposes of comedy, but also to make important statements about matters that concern all of us – success in the world vs. primordial guilt. For example, the character of the leading lady has a problem with her sensible job, which has an aspect of animal exploitation attached to it. Whenever this subject comes up, the character is supposed to overreact, becoming instantly upset, sometimes to the point of tears.
The acting is complicated because in playing this ‘comic adjustment’ of ‘overreacting’ the actress, herself, has to avoid ‘overacting.’ By making this abrupt shift from her devotion to the job to her love of animals completely believable, she can tweak her reactions beyond naturalism into absurdity. However, she must convey genuine pain, or the viewer won’t be able to follow her emotional shift. When the acting and the writing are both as good as this, we think and feel simultaneously. We look at our own lives, the needs involved in making a living, but also how far we’re willing to compromise our principles to have a comfortable life. It isn’t just happen in our heads, our hearts also are jolted – and that’s why we go to the theatre and watch movies…
The leading man plays a doctor, who is frenetically pedantic and organized, but as love begins to change him, the actor makes a fairly swift and radical transition; his behavior becomes gentle, thoughtful, loving. In other words, he ends up as his polar opposite, all the while clinging to his right brain point of view– until he loses his way completely. It’s enjoyable because you see someone who is overly scientific trying desperately to apply the same criteria to his new obsession, which fills him with feeling. His bewilderment is delicious!
The most difficult role, a mine field for overacting, is a woman, fanatically involved in her job as the sales manager of the kind of pharmaceutical company we all love to hate. I confess that I have a familial connection to the actress who plays her, and she had been my student during the early years of her acting training. But all the same, I would have been riveted by this particular character and performance. Anyone working in a large organization has come up against this Gorgon – excruciatingly enthusiastic about details that bore everyone else to death, full of praise one second and delivering elephantine put-downs the next. By giving this monster a heart chock full of enthusiasm for her work - and love for the people who slave under her, as long as they maintain a perfect record - we find a weird sort of identification with her awfulness. When things start falling apart, we know her heart is genuinely bursting with woe and all the dreadful things she is doing, even more than ever, to everybody else can’t be helped because, well, we’ve been there ourselves. And she makes us laugh, to boot! Isherwood said in The Times that this actress plays the character with ‘hilarious verve’ - but all that acting wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans if each moment weren’t totally sincere.
As usual, I have run on longer than intended about the comic acting in this amusing and relevant show. If you want to learn about good comic acting and writing, Rx is an excellent model. Next week we’ll continue the discussion of Comedy, in this instance relating it to my student, Paloma, and our mutual discovery of the key to acting the delightfully skittish but oddly pathetic character of Phoebe in As You Like It.
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