I Like a Slow Show

For a well-written play, pacing is probably the most crucial decision confronting a director. Yet in these 24/7 days of multi-tasking and short attention spans - when fingers are itching to fire off the next text message - you can be certain pacing will be the least of his or her concerns in rehearsal. In fact, if the play doesn't start and end with a full court press on your senses - more like an assault - then after a short introduction, it will get there, pronto. Those of us who look forward to instances in a play where the actor/character discovers something in the moment, well, those days are gone.

Ironically, it is even more pronounced in "one acts" - becoming more common today - where you might think there's time enough to spare. Without an intermission to break stride, the modern play's momentum hurtles towards the finale. Even monologues are delivered at breakneck speed, as if the rapid tempo were needed to convey meaning and character. (I first noticed this with Amy's hysterics in Stephen Sondheim's "Getting Married Today," from Company, later with Yvan's rant in Art by Yasmina Reza, and recently with Lady Davenant's bout of logorrhea in Duffy-Adams' Or,.) Whether the verbal heights these digressions entail are scaled for the fear of losing the audience or diverting it from a lame storyline, you can count on being rushed along.

Even the most well-intentioned production has a subtle, but inherent tendency to speed up. Actors have their lines down pat and it's easy and fun to bat them back and forth, almost on autopilot. As the play moves through its run, the pace will quicken further as minutes are shaved off performances, the action feeling as compressed as the curtain call to Ken Ludwig's Lend Me a Tenor. I used to like to wait until later in the schedule - holding off until the final week, in an effort to see a finely tuned show. But if I do that now, I've got to be ready to fasten my mental seatbelt for the accelerated verbal and visual ride that is to follow. Even when I've read the play!

This is a peculiar phenomenon for an art form where character and plot are described (or alleged) to have some kind of an arc. Is this the trajectory of a space shot? Even the sonata format in music, which these theatrical set pieces (time, space, action) resemble, allow for a larghetto or an andante to give one pause or a reflective interlude. So why the need to perform the work presto or prestissimo? I always suspect there's something being covered up in the performance: either the script's been doctored (or cut) which the quick-time delivery is attempting to gloss over (such as seen with the classics) or the actor has learned the lines in one big gulp, the speed and intensity a substitute for authenticity or an inability to enunciate.

Sam Shepard's Ages of the Moon, this summer at the Contemporary American Theater Festival, was probably the only production in recent times in which the leisurely pace - well-matched with the text - allowed the audience to experience the play meditatively, along with the characters. Memory plays, such as Tennessee Williams and Brian Friel provided, are surely the last of their breed; nowadays, directors and playwrights are not looking back so much (except to plunder from the past) as they are looking ahead to change or "repurpose" it, as the jargon goes, for principally their own needs. And the times are indeed a changing to a world in which there are fewer beats (if any), and more breaks in the discourse. Give me a pregnant pause or even some stage mugging to slow things down.

Directors - if you want to truly engage the audience - try telling them the stories through your actors at a speed and with the proper diction they can understand. Insist on it and you will be heard. That should be the take home message for whatever message you are trying to get across.