June 2004

Alex Suha • Diving in a Marie Antoinette Dress

I was just thinking about why theatre may be more powerful than film. In a film, the product is not just on the screen but at the borders of your vision--the seat you sit in, the movie theatre curtains. It’s the whole environment, and you can’t shake it. But, the film itself doesn’t physically penetrate any of that space.

A theatrical production, on the other hand, is tailored to the space inside a theatre and is thus more related to it and the audience. Film does not go out into the aisles-but theatre may do just that. Perhaps that’s part of the reason theatre is that much more alive. It’s a collaborative effort between the actors and the audience, and it changes each day, undeniably live until its closing night.

That’s why the birth of a theatre piece is a beautiful thing to watch--and a liquid shock to be a part of.

And that’s why the University of Iowa Theatre Department holds the New Play Festival. This past May, I was in a show called Flesh by Andrew Barrett, playing a character called Charles. But, Charles changed a couple times while with me. There’s a sweet and unique freckle to the festival process: re-writes. Charles has been gay, straight, a smoker and non-smoker, brash, stoned, and campy. Lines were cut, relationships changed, scenes added, and characters dropped. But the Marie Antoinette dress stayed.

Most of the changes happened right up to the week before we opened. The writer needs to develop a script and to bring to its feet a show that has never been produced before. Charles and I had three monologues, at the show’s beginning, intermission, and end. All three monologues changed a bunch at least twice, in part and in whole, with some parts put back in again.

But, with each change, you learn more about your character, about how you handle it as an actor, about how the writer and director (who in this case are the same person) react to what you’re doing as an actor. It’s liquid, always changing; it’s shock, always changing. With each performance, you never do it twice the same way. And if you do, you’re doing it wrong.

After over a month of preparation, you go up and strike the show. You get one day out of a week of productions and your show runs twice. That day was a lot like life--there was preparation, maturity, execution, contemplation, destruction. After a vigorous and enduring process, the product is no more and all of a sudden you have an extra 20 hours in your week again.

It ends quick, but it’s a smiling honor to know that you helped bring the play on its feet and into the water.

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