Things You Shouldn't Do When Producing a Show (Part 2)

Courtesy of Berliner Ensemble's production of Nathan the Wise.

Again, I apologize if this falls under the category of blatantly obvious. I still have a long way to go in my theater arts education, and these are honestly things that are new to me/things I would never have otherwise caught prior to this trip.

• If you are not planning on using the entire stage for your show, don't expose the entire stage. Provide space only if it serves a purpose. 

As much as I have a soft spot for very visual and/or technology-heavy sets, I love simple sets where there is basically nothing except maybe a few fundamental pieces of furniture or something symbolic.    The set for Nathan the Wise was very, very simple--an uneven grid with a red cross smacked in the middle, and two small chalk flats on each end of the stage. The thing is that this production had the entire stage space exposed. You could see the scratches, the pipes, the keys, and the doorways that were along the back wall of the stage. I thought having that out there was so cool, and I was excited to see what they were going to do with the space.

So much space, yet none of the actors utilized it. Aside from a really good opening scene in which Nathan's daughter was running around the stage surrounded by lights coming out of the floor that represented fire, everybody was either upstage engaging in dialogue, or pacing between upstage and downstage and then stopping back upstage and engaging in dialogue again.

• Random moving of chairs =/= playing chess (AKA don't assume your audience is stupid and you can get away with doing something when you are not even close to actually doing it)

One of the fundamental principles of computer science is to assume that people are incredibly stupid. That doesn't work in theater. That definitely doesn't work in theater. It felt like they were using that principle though, despite it not working in theater.

Even if you did not know how to play chess, one could tell that Saladin and his sister were not actually playing chess with the chairs. Despite there being a grid, the two of them did not even use it for their game. And they were taking the same chairs and moving them differently than before. The director probably assumed that we wouldn't notice, but...no. I tried so hard to recognize the moves but nope.

This was the farthest thing from reality of doing that I have ever seen. That was less reality of doing than miming, which says something. 

_____

I haven't read Nathan the Wise yet, but from what I know of the plot, there was so much room for them to really make something with what they had available. It just did not seem as though there was much thought put into this. I really wanted to enjoy this production because the story is just touching, but I couldn't. I would even go as far to say that it is right next to Electra in terms of how bad it was. Whereas Electra was trying to do so much, Nathan the Wise was doing so little. In the end, neither production worked out.