in defense of the flawed production

Theatre people love to speak of productions that “work.” The phrase suggests a well-built machine: every beat lands, every scene turns, every performance belongs to the same world. But some of the most memorable nights I’ve spent in a theatre did not work — not completely. They were uneven, overreaching, occasionally baffling and sometimes downright misguided. Yet they attempted something that a safer production would never have dared. Their failures were not evidence of indifference. They were the bruises left by ambition.

A flawed production can reveal a play in ways a polished one cannot. A director may push a metaphor too far, an actor may make a choice the text cannot support, or a design may announce itself so loudly that the characters must shout to be heard. But even a wrong choice can be illuminating. It shows us where the play bends, where it resists and where it breaks. A production that treats the script too reverently may preserve it, but it may never interrogate it. Sometimes you have to mishandle a play before you discover what it is capable of surviving.

None of this means that every bad production is secretly brave. Laziness is not daring. Confusion is not automatically complexity, and an audience should not have to invent a production’s intentions on its behalf. Artists remain responsible for the choices they make. But criticism should distinguish between work that fails because nobody cared enough and work that fails because somebody cared extravagantly — because the artists pursued an idea past the boundaries of good taste, common sense or their own abilities. The second kind of failure deserves more than dismissal.

It deserves attention.

A flawless production may satisfy us, but a flawed one can haunt us. It can contain a single performance, image or moment so alive that it outlasts everything that went wrong around it. Years later, we may forget the elegant evening that earned unanimous praise and remember the unruly one that divided the room.

Back in 2007 I saw a Vs Theatre production of In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings by Stephen Adly Guirgis. At one moment in the play, the character of Chickie turns to a wannabe prostitute and says, "I'm a crackhead, you know that, right?" I was devastated. The honesty of the admission and the delivery was a gut punch. It's been nearly 20 years and it still ranks as one of my top three "moments" in theatre.

Theatre does not need to be perfect to matter. It needs to risk embarrassment, misunderstanding and failure in pursuit of something it cannot reach by playing safe. Sometimes the cracked production lets in more light.