I went to see Small Craft Warnings on Thursday, a play by Tennesse Williams. It was one of the best productions I've seen. The action is in a bar in 1967 with eight very discontented people and the novel thing about it is that the audience got to sit in the bar and watch as the play proceeded. It was really a novel experience and it made the play very intense! One couldn't help but be drawn into it.
The take-home message from the play is that everybody's always looking for something they want and need. To paraphrase a line from the play, a heart without having a passionate want/need for something, anything, is bound to become dark and corrupted. Violet, a character in the play who's somewhat mentally unstable, always wants someone to take care of her. The play is so set that during the beginning (before the play) Jim (who went with me) was convinced she was a nutty female. It turned out that she was just acting her part (she even took a quarter from me that she never gave back!! Shows that I am a sucker!). Then there's this arrogant dude in leather jacket who thinks that his penis (which he refers to as "Junior") will take him through life. A sexually-experimenting youngster cycles from Iowa to New Mexico in search of adventure. Another who befriends Violet saying that she's not much, but she's better than nothing. And Leona who has a motherly instinct and wants to be a "faggot mother". The play is, in some sense, about homosexuality, and in the end the bartender, Monk, and Violet both end up being together (thus showing that even the bartender, who claimed she had her bar to keep her content, needed someone). I've neglected a few others, but again what I stress most about the play was the atmosphere rather than the content. It was a drama that you experienced in a Zen-like fashion!
Throughout the play, the actors were all around the bar and not for one moment did they lose their character! It was a very well-acted and well-produced play; amazing that undergraduates can actually produce quality material such as this! (: If you ever get a chance to see this production in this sort of an atmosphere, do so! If you get to see any production in a setting where the the audience is completely involved, then go for that too. I think it makes the play more interesting.