Discussion+of+The+Regard+of+Flight+-+Adelman

3. Watch the following recording of a live performance by a group of well-known NY actors, then identify and discuss the genre of the work citing specific moments when the genre is revealed through dialogue, story, and performance techniques and staging.

From the very beginning of the production, it is apparent that this play is going to be a comedy. The actor plays a comical role as he struggles to get out of bed, and the audience laughs with him as he tries to wake himself up. The lighting makes it seem like it is a quiet early morning and that we are indeed inside of a home. However, once he is out of his bed, the curtain falls behind him, the lights flash on bright, and the actor seems surprised that he is on a theater. The actor then immediately runs away. At this point, it is apparent that this is going to be some sort of realist play. This is made even more apparent when after the main actor does the leaning routine, the piano player explains the mechanisms of the trick. He tells the audience that he is basically just killing dead time while the actor gets out of his lead boots. It now makes sense: this show is going to be a commentary about the theater, although what kind of commentary is not yet known.

When the actor comes back into view trying to find his shoe, the audience first encounters the critic. This man asks the actor a set of questions while he is on stage. My first impression was that this was going to be a critique about the critics, about how they have ruined and changed plays, through the scene of a critic literally stopping the play to ask a question. But this was only part of what the production was trying to reiterate. In one of the shortly ensuing scenes, the pianist again speaks to the audience about the proscenium arch and talks about the different ways that it can be utilized. The placement of this character outside of the stage next to the audience makes him feel like an outside observer like the audience, while his constant interaction with the actor makes him seem also like part of the production. The fact that there is a podium from which he can directly address is the audience is another fresh idea that makes this play seem out of the ordinary. This seemed to make the point that this was a critique of the overall theater culture.

Other ways that this production demonstrated a departure from ordinary theater was how the pianist constantly announced what was to come. This made the audience feel as if they were backstage with a headset on, running the production. Later in the play, it is even explained how the scene with both men running through the audience was to make them feel more included and involved in the play.. There are also moments when the critic tries to make the actor do new tricks: he asks him to do a hat trick; he puts the trampoline next to the stage, etc. This seems to be indicting the actor for trying to do something new, something against theater norms. This would be a major theme throughout the play: similarity and repetition, two ways to suggest to the audience that everything is the same.

One major theme in the play was a constant feeling of déjà vu. The actor gets out of bed twice; he dances across stage multiple times; there is something that is always grabbing at his leg; an alarm clock sounds in random scenes, etc. At first, it seems that this repetition may be mostly for comedic relief; however, I believe that it was serving as a metaphor for the homogeneity of the theater business. The actor even says at one point in the play that the "recurrent image and lack of narrative structure show the decline of the role of the playwright in contemporary theater." As he keeps pointing out, this is the New Theater, one that is trying to break from the shackles that the business has imposed on itself. However, this attempt begins to look bleak as the critic takes the stage. One of his first major scenes after coming onstage is to ask the actor about what his work is trying to represent. Upon further prodding, it is apparent that the actor does not mean for there to be a certain theme. He eventually gives in and tells the critic that one of his ideas was correct. This reveals how the industry strives to put meaning on everything, even if it is not there.

The most impressive and daunting symbolism comes at the very end. The end of the play contains the most blatant criticism of what the actors believe is the theater culture. The first image they use is that of the box. The critic-turned-director keeps trying force the actor to stay “inside the box.” He opens it, asks the actor a question about the production, and when he doesn’t give a sufficient answer, he closes the box. There is even a point when the actor proclaims that he doesn’t want to go back in the box. Then later once outside the box the actor tries to escape by taking the box out of the theater. He then gets caught and runs from the new director, who at one point announces that the financing people are in the back of the theater, alluding to the fact that the actor better behave or risk losing investments, again referring to the hardship of trying to work outside of the box.

A few scenes later, we again see a dimly lit stage and the actor waking up out of bed, a full circle it seems like. Out of nowhere the director comes, throws the actor out of bed as the lights are put on and the director dictates what the actor must do. The most brilliant of the imagery at the end is when the pianist brings out his puppet, which had been alluded to in the scenes before. The ventriloquism at the end serves as a metaphor of the relationship with the director who embodies the current culture of controlling and overpowering the actor. This ties back to the actor’s claims earlier in the play to have no director and just the actor, which in the eyes of the director, would be a puppet without a puppeteer. The play ends with the actor stabbing the director back into the box with a pencil and then finally freeing himself to create the New Theater, which presumably was what the audience just experienced. The circularity of the play thus serves to emphasize how we have been watching the struggle to develop this particular theater all along.