Offscript - Where theaters fear to tread
As 7 Stages turns 25, theaters play it safe
Going to 7 Stages can feel like dropping down the rabbit hole. I vividly remember attending The Decline and Fall of the Rest, a pair of one-act plays by Atlanta’s Jim Grimsley, in spring 1996. On arrival I walked down the hall to the playhouse’s unusually dark Back Stage space, where two women shushed me and led me in near-perfect darkness to a folding chair.
Before I’d even gotten my bearings the play began, with Daniel May and Stuart Culpepper rushing in as a kind of terrified Laurel and Hardy team who begged the audience for food. At one point my notebook slid noisily to the floor and May glared directly at me with shock.
The action culminated with the appearance of a massively pregnant woman, whose condition heralded some kind of impending revelation or apocalypse. Then the actors bowed, the audience clapped, and, oddly, everyone left. But what about the other one-act? I asked the only other person remaining in the theater, and she said, “You mean the first part?” It turned out that Grimsley’s play started earlier than I’d realized, and when I’d shown up, nobody had bothered to tell me that it had been running for more than 20 minutes.
7 Stages is Atlanta’s only theater where you could arrive so late and not realize it, where disorienting events can so easily be mistaken for the show itself. Founders Del Hamilton and Faye Allen avoid calling their heady work “experimental” or “avant-garde,” for fear of spooking timid theater-goers, but the playhouse loves to throw out the rulebook.
As 7 Stages celebrates its 25th anniversary, Atlanta theater seems to have blunted the cutting edge for our protection with plays less likely to go to the strange extremes of previous decades. Theaters like Actor’s Express used to stage more bizarre events like an updated The Bacchae or writers like Caryl Churchill, whose plays frequently defy logic. (7 Stages had planned to stage Churchill’s cloning drama A Number this year, but the script became unavailable.) And even 7 Stages’ most out-there shows of last season, The Chairs and Iphigenia ... A rave-fable, were “easy” compared to such forbiddingly strange older productions like The Owl Answers.
I must admit that I don’t always enjoy or even “get” such avant-garde shows. And at times in its past, 7 Stages seemed to favor difficult or exotic shows for their own sake. (In 2000, the theater promoted Disremember Me as “the first play in English by an Albanian in 50 years.”) Still, while the avant-garde might be a hard sell commercially, it serves several valuable purposes. If most plays parallel the storytelling of movies and television, more experimental work moves closer to the aesthetics of fine arts and engages different kinds of mental muscles. Such shows breed innovation, and innovation is crucial to an art form relegated to the margins.
Changes in the content of today’s plays partly reflects advances in theatrical sophistication. 7 Stages first produced Sam Shepard and David Mamet in Atlanta, playwrights who stand far more in the mainstream today than they did 25 years ago.
7 Stages’ upcoming season opener, Maria Kizito (Sept. 30-Oct. 24), promises to be a quintessential 7 Stages show. Playwright Erik Ehn dramatizes the true story of a 29-year-old Catholic nun complicit in 7,000 deaths during the 1994 Rwandan massacres. Maria Kizito features a third-world setting, heavy themes such as the genocides of the 20th century and an untraditional narrative inspired by the calls to prayer of a church service.
But it pays to show up early. There’s no telling what you might miss.
Play the vote
Plays usually prove far more political than movies, but in Atlanta this election year, it’s the other way around. Hot-button issues infuse popcorn fare like The Day After Tomorrow, while a bonanza of leftist documentaries are touring the country to sway swing voters.
But Atlanta theater has proved surprisingly apolitical. Rare exceptions include “single issue” shows like Slide Glide the Slippery Slope’s treatment of cloning and Shakespeare’s power struggle plays like Macbeth and Coriolanus. The closest to the tub-thumping works of Naomi Wallace or Tony Kushner was Actor’s Express’ production of the 25-year-old gay Holocaust drama Bent. Current events seemed to have slipped off the radar screen.
Theater OUTlanta makes a political statement with Love and Marriage, three nights of readings of plays about gay marriage and family, to benefit Marriage Equality Georgia (a group that advocates equality in civil marriage for Georgia’s gay community). Held Sept. 13, Oct. 4 and 25 at Onstage Atlanta, Love and Marriage features Jeffrey M. Cordell’s Defense of Marriage, about a gay male couple wrestling with commitment, and Cheryl Moch’s Cinderella: The Real True Story, in which Cinderella and a princess fall in love, marry and live happily ever after.
Love and Marriage probably won’t change anyone’s party affiliation, but politicizing the audience gives theatrical troupes a means to connect with their communities. For live theater, getting out the vote can be a sign of life.