The Lunatic – Response from 2020 Panel
One of the first things that I really came to enjoy is the way the writer moves the reader through the story. There’s a very unique quality to the action description that makes the most of the medium. It can eschew a lot of traditional writing conventions, and instead focuses on telling the story in the most entertaining way possible. If that means clipped, half-sentences with a bit of editorializing thrown in, so be it. I personally was a big fan. There’s not only distinction in the story itself, but in the way it’s being told. While the writing certainly still fits into the “screenplay as movie blueprint” mold by using concise, visual language – the writer’s own particular voice is always present in the pages. This is especially true in just communicating mundane details. Early on I was struck by the phrase,“He is poured into tight jeans and a Star Trek T-shirt,” when first describing Bill. It’s an innocuous little phrase, but shows effort in word choice and imagery beyond just giving an emotion-neutral description. Because the writer treats the script like a piece of entertainment itself, not just the outline for entertainment – the action is written to evoke all the senses, give interesting perspectives, impart the mood of the scene. In short, the moment-to-moment read is a lot of fun while still lying within screenwriting conventions.
I really enjoyed how much detail the writer packs into this script. Everything from character description to specific dialogue quirks feels very idiosyncratic. This is a script that finds its individuality in the minutia of the world building and character details and less in large scale, off-the-wall concepts. While not every character has the same amount of depth to them as Di, they all stay memorable with distinctive voices and personalities that jump off the page. They all serve the plot exceptionally well, but rarely feel like they exist only to further the narrative. Their inclusion always shows some level of effort from the writer to make them relevant to the narrative and individuals in their presentation.
Solid action description, formatting, and structure form the bedrock for the story to build from. Great characters and a unique concept then give the script distinction. There are also deeper themes for audiences looking for substance to chew on in between the big set pieces. This is a script that seeks to entertain, but also has something to say. The message isn’t hidden or going for something particularly profound, but this is a human story with betrayal, love, loss, and scientific ethics all wrapped in. There’s plenty to think about and digest past the last page. All in all a fun and fresh read.
“Pseudo-Chum” by Lawrence Riordan, Around the Town Chicago
Highly Recommended ****
As an undergraduate, I considered writing an essay on The Categorical Imperative and the immorality of art. Sean and Carolyn Benjamin’s play “Pseudo-Chum” makes me awfully glad I didn’t. Despite their high technical skill, both as playwrights and directors, this play never really manages to meaningfully explore whether playwrights are businessman or activists, whether the two are mutually exclusive, and whether it is morally okay that artists use human suffering to make a profit, leaving us to wonder if these questions are even seriously being considered at all. Fortunately, the play doesn’t need to do consider them. It succeeds independently of such questions, particularly on the level of dialogue and satire from excellent writing, and on the level of production as meta-theatre from the superlative direction and acting.
The stately, tall, and classically glamorous Carolyn Benjamin gives what is perhaps the most highly credible performance in the play: counterintuitively, as a professional, but sensationalist, mainstream literary- journalist. Her character may be a caricature, but she shows us with comic genius that it is a very real one with whom we are all familiar. She aggressively interviews her subject, the famous author (Sean Benjamin) of a pretentious and burdensome play, ostensibly written as protest against shark-culling, that four other actors direct, rehearse, and act out in front of us. Sean Benjamin’s portrayal as the author is likewise highly comical and satirical, almost camp, but he crucially injects an urgency and pathos into the delivery of his lines which raises this play above the level of simple, funny, farce.
The actors playing the four characters directing and acting out the play within the play have a more difficult task. The author-character complains that his play is about actors who would not even be talented enough to play themselves. Thus, the four actors have to play mediocre actors in the play-within-the-play and play mediocre actors well. By and large, they succeeded at a pretty impossible task. Amy Berkovec, Beth Kander, and Aaron Lawson give us a sense of actors living in constant fear under the tyrannical director and star of the author’s play (Alison Connelly) who likewise is very convincing as a director, more competent than the actors she is struggling to work with, but not nearly talented enough to justify her Orson Well’s complex.
Speaking of Orson Welles Complexes’, one might notice the considerable repetition of Carolyn and Sean Benjamin names as writers, actors, directors and technical designers in the program (or in this review). This is one of those rare circumstances where the writers’ constant presence in the production add to, rather than diminishes the play. Firstly, the Benjamins show considerable humility, not ego, in being able to laugh at themselves and , in doing so, they give us permission to laugh with them. Secondly, the conceit of the play that writing is really shark culling, and the artists are immoral because they make use of people’s pain come across as so sophomoric (perhaps it is supposed to?) that the play was only going to succeed at the level of satire and meta-theater, which it does spectacularly, largely because the writer of the play we are watching is playing the writer of the play we are watching, being rehearsed and performed. (Perhaps this is hyper-meta-theater?) Ultimately, this is one of the funniest modern plays I have seen produced, with great acting and razor sharp dialogue, and though it could have used an intermission, I was laughing the whole time and often thinking, even if I wasn’t sure whether I was thinking about what the authors intended.
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