There are certain esoteric advantages to living in a try-out city like Boston. One sees a number of plays that appear so briefly in New York that they disappear before the critic’s first stomp. And then there are others so thoroughly misfit, miswritten and miscast that they are interred decently on Boston Common. Also, of course, there are the bad plays that evoke enough titters and stock responses to carry them along for months. The latter though financially successful are the least interesting and are usually bought up by Hollywood.
Strangely, after one has sat through a sufficient number of complete flops one develops a half-taste for them, a certain cerebral excitement in seeing just how bad a play can manage to be. Boredom goes beyond boredom to become interest, such as one develops in button-collecting or reading the dramas of Gertrude Stein or the prose-poetry of Dwight Eisenhower. My own equivalent of, say a Confederate Navy captain’s tunic button or the Eisenhower double split infinitive, is a play of a few years back called Motel that ran only three nights. Motel was so bad that it had an element of genius about it. One could sense the flavor even when the curtain was only halfway up. I am not sure Motel, like a folksong, even had an author. It was unforgettable, and I am grateful that I am one of
Comments