The Plague

Friday night, J. and I went to see a stage adaptation of Camus' The Plague at the Warehouse. J. got some last-minute discounted tickets. The Warehouse, or, more precisely, the Scena Theatre Company that usually performs there, is a local treasure. In DC's cultural climate that stubbornly rejects most art that is in any way unconventional, they can always be counted upon to produce both classics and obscurities by absurdist playwrights like Beckett and Pinter and other modernist fare. The Plague would seem like a natural choice for a company like that, but unfortunately it was a disappointment.

I had never seen a stage adaptation of a novel before, but have always been a bit skeptical. A good novel relies on so much more than just dialogue to make its impact. Scenery, for example -- even if you build a set that reflects a novel's setting, you're still left with the challenge of capturing a great writer's language using physical objects, lighting and sound effects. I had read The Plague many years ago and frankly, didn't remember much of it -- just the general outline of the story. If Scena's adaptation is in any way representative, the book is actually especially ill-suited for the stage, for there is a lot of narration, and not that much dialogue in the grand scheme of things. So the actors were sort of declaiming into the audience most of the time, making speeches almost, instead of talking to each other. This made it feel more like a staged reading than a play. Then, for some reason, the director insisted on having the actors mime out doing things instead of using props, so you had, for example, a secretary character moving her fingers in empty air in front of her accompanied by recorded sound of a typewriter on the sound system. The decision to do this had to have been artistic -- with all the movement and stuff already on the stage, surely they could have come up with a typewriter, a syringe, and a few newspapers and coffee cups -- but it ended up looking tacky to my eye.

The biggest problem, though, was that the overall feel of the work was forced and, for lack of a better word, kind of cheesy. The actors did not sound at all natural in their speech. They were pronouncing grand things into the audience, with great gravitas, or artificial non-chalance, or manufactured slyness, but never the way normal people would talk. I readily admit that acting in a play is not the same as talking like normal people, but therein lies one of the secrets of great stage acting -- you talk like a normal person while at the same time keeping your audience interested in what you're saying and how you're saying it. The folks at Scena fell woefully short of this ideal on Friday. Regen Wilson's Rambert was probably the most convincing.

To give credit where it is due, some of the sets were interesting. There were several large glass cases with casters on the stage, each one big enough to accommodate a person, and the various characters would move them around at certain points, occasionally getting into them. Sounds pretentious when described, I know, and you can read whatever you want into them, but from a purely visual perspective, they made for a good spectacle -- an essential component of even the most intellectual and message-ridden play.