plays don’t have to be likable

Some of my favorite evenings in the theatre have left me irritated. Not mildly dissatisfied with the parking or wishing the second act were shorter, but irritated by what the play had made me confront. I didn’t want to have a drink with its characters. I didn’t approve of their decisions. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure I approved of the playwright’s. But days later, I was still arguing with the thing. That seems like a respectable achievement for an evening in a room.

“Did you like it?” is a reasonable question after a show. It is also a surprisingly narrow one. We use like to cover everything from enjoying a joke to recognizing something painful about ourselves. A play can make us laugh, frighten us, repel us, or leave us embarrassed by where our sympathies went. None of those responses fits neatly into a thumbs-up. Yet we often discuss theatre as though its chief obligation were to provide an agreeable experience we can recommend without qualifications.

That expectation can creep into the writing. Give the cruel character a tender moment so we know there is goodness underneath. Make sure the protagonist learns something. Let the ending offer hope. Any of those choices might belong in a particular play. They become troublesome when they are applied as repairs to whatever makes us uncomfortable. Sometimes a tender moment complicates a character. Sometimes it is a little apology the playwright slips into the scene: please don’t think I’m as unpleasant as the person I’ve written.

Consider Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  George and Martha are exhausting company. Their games turn hospitality into combat, and their guests don’t remain innocent spectators for long. The evening’s force depends on our staying with people we might otherwise escape. Or consider A Streetcar Named Desire, which gives us no comfortable place to stand as vulnerability, desire, cruelty, and self-deception collide. These plays hold our attention through the precision of their conflicts. Their characters don’t need to earn our approval before they can claim our interest.

But an unpleasant play does have to earn our attention. Cruelty becomes monotonous when it reveals nothing beyond the writer’s willingness to be cruel. An audience can recognize a provocation that has no dramatic life behind it: another insult, another degradation, another opportunity to demonstrate that people are terrible. After a while, we know. What else happens? What does this person want badly enough to behave this way? What can the other person do about it? Discomfort becomes compelling when someone is pursuing something and the cost keeps changing.

The same is true of ambiguity. A play may leave us uncertain about who was right or what will happen next. That uncertainty can be exhilarating when the competing possibilities have been fully dramatized. It is less interesting when the playwright has simply withheld the scene in which anything would have to be decided. We can leave a theatre with unanswered questions and still feel that the evening has taken us somewhere. We can also leave feeling that we watched two hours of preparation for a confrontation that never arrived.

There is a particular pleasure in a play that trusts us enough to risk our disapproval. It lets a character remain difficult without assigning someone else to explain them. It allows a decision to have consequences without supplying a speech about the lesson learned. It gives us enough to judge and leaves us responsible for the judgment. That can be uncomfortable for the writer, too. Once the play is out in the world, people may find meanings in it that the writer would rather they hadn’t.

I want an evening in the theatre to give me something worth responding to. Delight counts. So do anger, sorrow, astonishment, and the uneasy recognition that I understood a character more readily than I wanted to. A play doesn’t have to be likable to do that. It does have to make its demands on me count. If I’m still turning over a scene three days later, trying to decide why it bothered me, I’m unlikely to complain that the evening wasn’t pleasant enough.