Love, Love, Love and “abusive laughter”: Editorial interjection #richardarmitage [spoilers]

Continued from here.

As mentioned there, this is solely my comment. It’s here because I think perception of Act Three is decisively affected by we think of act Two and particularly of its ending. Feel free to skip this if all you want is the straight description. When the Act Three description is finished, I’ll link it to the bottom of this post.

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When asked to comment on New York theater audiences in an interview with Broadway World, Richard Armitage was quoted as saying, “They probably laugh in more of an abusive way[.]” Several hours later, he tweeted to correct this statement, noting the interviewer had misunderstood “effusive” as “abusive” (politely blaming the miscommunication on his own mumbling); he had wanted to say that New York audiences were more generous with their laughter than (presumably) British ones. I lack sufficient knowledge to comment on that comparison, and I don’t question his correction of his own remarks, but when I first read the comment as printed, I actually thought, yeah, “abusive laughter” is an interesting idea for understanding what makes this play work (or not).

Love, Love, Love, end of Act Two.

Not least because the script is not obviously funny. When I read it, I recognized it as a potential comedy, but a black, bleak one, or a parody that worked because of its absurdity. Many fans who’ve read the play but have not seen it have expressed that they don’t understand where the laughter comes in, what’s funny about the play, or why people are laughing (one of the purposes for writing the extensive recap — to give people a better idea). Armitage himself made a remark about not realizing it was a comedy right away: “from the inside out, it definitely feels like a domestic drama. I had no concept of how funny the play was until we put it in front of an audience.” (He made a similar comment elsewhere, but I’m not finding it at the moment.)

And audience responses themselves, at least the ones I have observed, were / have been mixed. Although arguably Act One is the funniest section of the play, on occasion, observers have reported low levels of audience response to that portion of the performance. Act Two ends very brutally — as readers have just seen — and on one night when I saw the play, there were fewer than thirty seconds of applause for it. Act Three is chock-full of painful moments as everyone in the play must come to terms with their responsibilities for the past and present — it raises the problem of whether we’re laughing because it hurts too much to cry. If one laughs as this play apparently intends us to, we are often laughing at abuse or abusive situations — or our capacity to laugh at a character whose words might indicate they are truly hurting (most often: Rose, but also Jamie and Kenneth, and depending on how far we are willing to press the point, even Sandra) makes our laughter potentially “abusive.” This isn’t what Armitage wanted to say; indeed, he probably hasn’t thought much about it; but that’s why I didn’t puzzle at all over the designation of laughter as “abusive.”

One of those abusively funny moments, from Act Two.

Both Armitage and Amy Ryan have attributed different levels of laughter to varying audiences (especially by age) and I would never argue with such an obvious assertion. Different people laugh at different things. An audience grows together over the course of an evening, so that the more people who laugh, the more people who eventually end up laughing. Or they don’t: on a dead evening, even audience members who recognize the funny places feel their laughter dampened by their more sober, or more fatigued, fellows. However, beyond the mood or even the age composition of the audience (boomer audiences clearly seem to find Act Three funnier than Xers, by all accounts, and this was also to some extent true for me, but boomers are also capable of finding Act Two horrifying and Xers sometimes have trouble sympathizing with Rose), I think there are also issues with various aspects of the play itself that can make it easier — or harder — to laugh at it, to participate however willingly in “abusive” laughter.

I thought about this quite a bit while I was watching (when is this play funny / when isn’t it? — when does the audience laugh / when doesn’t it? — when do I laugh / when don’t I?), possibly because the first night (11/3) was the weakest performance I witnessed and the second night (11/4) was probably the strongest — so I had a huge contrast to think about right from the start. Here are some possibilities that occurred to me. Moreover, as you will see, I think Act Three is the weakest part of the play — which is a bit of a dramaturgical problem — and matters of whether it’s funny or how it’s funny play important roles in assessing that state of affairs.

In general, the play pokes fun both at the typical problems of each period treated (1960s, 90s, 2010s) and at the typical solutions offered — this is how the play can avoid “taking sides,” as Bartlett intends. In Act One, we’re supposed to laugh both at the (now comfortably past) pricks against which Kenneth and Sandra are kicking, and at the ridiculous ways in which they kick, which simply reformulate a new form of hippie convention avant la lettre. The same goes for Act Two, in which we laugh both at the way that Kenneth and Sandra’s hippie ideals have endangered their family and we are brought to ridicule the way they propose to resolve their troubles. In Act Three, we laugh both at the characters’ situations and at the preposterous ways they want to change them.

Act Two exemplifies the need for the balance between parodied problem and solution more than any other. I mentioned, in discussing it, that audience responses to the jokes varied significantly, from uproarious laughter to straight out gasps of disbelief or anger. The effectiveness of the play as Bartlett intends it relies heavily on the audience finding this act mostly funny (or at least in its general tendency more funny than not). To use a U.S. cultural reference — we need to believe that we’re watching an alternate universe, Bizarro World version of The Brady Bunch, in which we can take no problem too seriously, because if we do, we will cease to laugh. But Kenneth and Sandra are not the Bundys, either — because they cannot embrace their own dysfunction. The proposed resolutions to various issues function as attempts to restore proper order based on the parents’ desires, not abandon it. As spectators, to laugh we have to believe that we are watching a family unit with the typically amusing roles (offended teenager, pesky younger brother, oblivious dad, opinionated mother), but in which all family responses to conflicts (difficult adolescence; marital tension) are presented as zany, high-energy parody that distracts us from their real resolution. Act Two is funny — for instance — both because Sandra and Rose are struggling with a typical mother – daughter conflict and because the standard solution (mum should listen; daughter should calm down) is parodied flamboyantly and with a total lack of self-awareness from both sides, so that the very impossibility of resolution becomes just as funny as the problem was in the first place. The exaggerated escalation of the conflict and the component of parody in the proposed resolution forestall any possible rapprochement between the characters or resolution to the family’s difficulties. Solutions to problems (for example: “if we divorce, everyone will be happier” — an accepted social truth of the 1990s) are presented in a manner so satirical (Sandra’s speech as she doles out slices of birthday cake) that we cannot help but view them as jests, even if the characters themselves maintain they are serious.

In order to maintain the balance necessary to preserve the humor (keeping people laughing, not offering too many chances for us to gasp in more than a sort of nonplussed outrage), the cast must accomplish a number of things. First, the act must go by quickly, so that any processing of the outrageousness of the characters is delayed to the interval. Second, the rhythm of the act must be executed correctly (both Armitage and Ryan have discussed this, the way they can get confused by making the wrong movement, manipulating a prop incorrectly, or slowing anything down too much, disrupting the internal mechanism of the work). The rhythm has to be preserved because of what Armitage last summer called Bartlett’s “dynamic attack” — we can’t be left with too much time to think about why we are laughing or we might develop scruples, particularly in Act Two, where it would be very easy for the audience to take sides with either Kenneth or Rose against Sandra. Third, and for the same reason, all the characters have to remain equally unlikable, particularly when functioning on their axes of conflict (Sandra / Kenneth; Sandra / Rose). Because Sandra has to balance them both out, she is so constantly over the top (self-centered, alcoholic, horrible parent, adulterer), that both Kenneth’s and Rose’s faults must be played very penetratingly, to an extent that doesn’t always seem credible. I think this need for balance explains why the script spends three pages on Kenneth’s infidelity, but devotes relatively less time to Sandra’s affair with Chris, hiding it under Kenneth’s concern with her alcohol consumption — so that reasons to disapprove of Kenneth balance Sandra’s constant status as someone who’s doing something wrong for egotistical reasons. Similarly, the need for balance explains why Rose must be played as such an extreme exemplar of the offended teenager, because we need distraction from Sandra’s simultaneous refusal to pay real attention to her daughter and constant need to compete with her. And crucially, the need for a balance of problem and solution requires that the audience must only suspect, but not know exactly, what Rose does off-stage at the end of Act Two — because if we witnessed it, our capacity to balance both conflict and its parody and find comedy in the ensuing paradox would be seriously challenged.

The end of Act Two is thus both crucial to the effect of the play and highly challenging to execute. It takes a long arc to get there (I found myself asking if the beginning of Act Two couldn’t have been shortened somehow), both to explain the problems and to build up our perception of the characters, and it seems like it might be very easy for our allegiances to become lopsided, sympathizing more with Rose than with anyone else. But if one takes Rose’s side, or takes it too soon, her parents’ dialogue appears so brutal and their attitudes so callous that the play stops being funny. Their excess is only balanced out by hers, and Act Two relies on that counterweight until it’s exploded by Rose’s precipitous action at the end.

So right away there’s a problem if Act Two isn’t perfectly balanced, but I think even if the actors keep everything even and keep us laughing equally at everyone to the end, the ending is hard for the audience to deal with. If we are laughing along — everything seems so constantly ridiculous — then all of a sudden something horrible happens. If it’s not working well — and we are taking sides — we are more aware of the regular signs of an impending trainwreck, but the play still does nothing to prepare us for it. And there’s also no time to recover, as Act Two ends more or less as soon as we discover that Rose has done something disturbing. I found it interesting in talking to fellow fans who saw the play that the ones who had the least problem processing all of it at speed were those who had experienced severe family dysfunction in childhood or adolescence — not because they found Rose’s solution to her problems funny, but because they, of all observers, were most sensitive or alert to the trajectory built into the scene from the point that Kenneth can’t tell Jamie how old Rosie is.

R: “Mum said you were doing a surprise.”
K: “Oh. Well. It’s a cake!”

This means that the response to the end of Act Two can be highly variable, but it always, always involves enough of a proportion of shock that the audience is a bit dazed. On one evening I heard silence, and then hesitant, patchy applause that lasted well less than thirty seconds. Even when the audience is still more caught up in the atmosphere of comedy than giving in to the shock at the end, the response is not enthusiastic. If the first interval exudes at atmosphere of good mood, that is not the case for the second interval at all. The play doesn’t give the audience the expected buildup to an event of such gravity; neither does it offer the audience any breathing room to process what has happened. And given the age of the audience, the interval music (from the 80s) doesn’t reproduce the good feeling of the earlier break as most people are not humming along to the music anymore at this point.

As this is now two thousand words and I don’t want to give away the ending by discussing it now, I’ll conclude by saying that what the viewer takes away from Act Two is crucial to where and how much they will laugh in Act Three (and I don’t think this is solely a matter of the age of the audience, as it’s entirely possible that boomers and not just Xers or millennials will be horrified by Kenneth and Sandra’s parenting). And the level — and location — of laughter in Act Three is even more variable that it is in Act Two and I think there’s at least an argument to be made that the ending of Act Two makes it impossible for the play to resolve adequately in Act Three precisely because we often have no idea about what we are supposed to be laughing, or the opportunities we are given seem completely inappropriate or disproportionate. Bartlett would probably say this effect is his intention, not to sew things up neatly, but I think it’s a more serious question (problem?) for the play than that.

On to Act Three, asap. Continues here.

~ by Servetus on December 3, 2016.