Our critical vocabulary is lacking. We evaluate performance on axes of accomplished or unaccomplished, passionate or drab, compelling or dull. But some shows defy these standards. The recent slasher musical Meathook is a case in point. The crappy bed-sheet backdrops, the sour notes, the gimmicky plot-it was technically bad by all conventional criteria, but managed to be freaking awesome without resorting to camp or other so-bad-it's-good trickery. It was unapologetically rough.
Smooth theater is everywhere-it is the traditional form that aspires to a polished, cinematic ideal with slick performances and no fuckups. Smoothness is all regional theater knows how to do and it dominates the fringe (they all want to work in the big houses eventually). But roughness stirs here and there, with productions that admit they're in a theater and don't try to seduce us into that glossy suspension of disbelief. Roughness entertains by playing with an audience instead of to it, and the roughest theater doesn't give a damn about chops or professionalism. Postmodern breaking-the-fourth-wall performances were early, crude experiments with roughness, but it's a long road from academic tediousness to genuinely entertaining rough theater. Iron Composer is fun and rough. Death of a Salesman was smooth. Mike Daisey? Smooth. John Kaufmann? Rough.
I saw several performances this weekend, which provided material to sketch the rough/smooth theory:
How I Learned to Drive: fringe theater, smooth. I didn't actually see the show (see capsule review), but it clearly aspired to be solid, old-fashioned theater. They would love to work at the Rep.
Tales of Hoffmann: opera, mixed. Dramatic and spectacular, opera was cinematic before cinema existed, but it has room for roughness-characters occasionally winked at the production, like the comic butler who scolded the conductor from the stage.
Emio Greco | PC: dance, smooth. The audience left shell-shocked, overwhelmed by the dancers' wild, loose bodies and utter disregard for narrative, relationships, and the other niceties that hook an audience.
Spirit Under the Influence: dance, rough. Two movie screens and a solo dancer/actor mimicking and commenting on the footage. She did an impression of Bruce Lee, talked to the audience about her sons, danced with her onscreen self, and cooked grilled cheese. Spirit was rough and excellent.
Rough isn't necessarily better (improv is rough by definition and most improv is awful), nor is the smooth ideal bad-but calculated roughness is unexplored territory that may save theater from its steady decline into television's pale, neglected grandmother. In the battle for new audiences, theater should exploit the qualities movies cannot achieve: an immediate, intimate, and irreproducible experience. An actor breaking character because his scene partner did something funny is rough-the spell is broken, and the audience laughs harder than it would at any scripted joke. ■
