Tuesday, August 20, 2013

The Chicago Reader Recommends O'Brien & O'Brian

The Chicago Reader does the city's most thorough reviewing of live theater, so I'm very pleased to get a "Recommended".

Suzanne Scanlon writes:

"Even if the ending of this rom-com feels inevitable, the maneuvering to get us there is good fun: it's easy to find charm in a script that can move lightly from odd lovers to sapphic liaisons to EPA lawsuits involving beavers."

She also praises the actors, praise which I think is well deserved. I suspect my script wouldn't seem to move lightly if it were played clumsily.

A script, when poorly acted,
might as well be redacted.

8 comments:

  1. Charlie7:11 PM

    I could swear somebody said, "Inevitability is the holy grail of fiction," but Google returns zero results.

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  2. Well, somehow you're ideally supposed to hit "surprising inevitability".

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  3. Charlie1:08 PM

    That seems in line with what I recall of "Poetics"...heckuva trick.

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    1. Yeah, no kidding, some kind of golden mean goal, and probably somewhat dependent on your individual audience member's ability to see through the foreshadowing.

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  4. Charlie6:17 PM

    Right...I would also think narrative tricks age just like comic tricks do. And so you have to surprise in a surprising way, even.

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  5. Yes, I'm sure narrative tricks also age. And critics, who consume a lot of narrative, are more likely to see where a story is going than the average theater-goer. As a matter of fact, at intermission I asked a friend how the play would end - would the young couple get together - and she got it wrong - she predicted the opposite ending.

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  6. Charlie7:01 PM

    Especially when critics don't have to report until after the show!

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