AND THEY USED TO STAR IN MOVIES
newsletter: Sept. 2006
Finally, thirty years after I wrote it, I get the chance to see "And They Used To Star in Movies," performed at Bewley's in Dublin.
It's a strange experience when the lights go up on the set - which is a striking impressionistic version of a bar somewhere in a downtown LA hotel some time in the 70s. It's not what I imagined - it's miles better! Then Mickie Mouse enters, sadfaced, beat, like a rodent on skid row….and suddenly everything's not so strange at all, it begins to hum with familiarity, I remember writing Mickie's lines, but it's a charge to hear them uttered by a good actor.
And when the Barman comes in and there's interplay between him and Mickie, it's all beginning to come alive…and then here's Minnie, singing a Marilyn Monroe version of Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf as she vamps - spendidly - toward her old love, her ex, Mickie.
By now it's no longer my play, it's something else - a happening, and my contribution has been overshadowed by these interpreters of what I wrote. I provided a skeleton, and these players give it flesh. The play zooms and takes flight, I'm a spectator, helpless, delighted and, I unashamedly admit, not a critical thought in my mind. I just go with the actors, the music, the energy of it all - an energy I don't remember feeling when I wrote the piece. In fact, I don't think I ever imagined it in performance. These characters were names and voices on paper, and that was it. Now it's zipping along right in front of me, and the audience is laughing - and I'm getting a kick out of what's going on up there, I'm smiling here, there, not because I'm tickled by what I wrote, but because the actors are taking the lines and giving them twists I never considered. And there are strange poignant moments, when Mickie and Minnie remember their sad marriage, and absurdist ones when Mickie accuses her of falling for Bugs Bunny, and harsh ones when Donald Duck enters the scene and chills Mickie with an insight that brings the temperature of the play down to a cold zone of realism, and sly ones when Donald flirts lightly with the Barman, who has no interest -
By the end I was in love with these actors, could have hugged them, I was filled with admiration for the director, and the set-designer, and the person responsible for the background music. I left dreaming of half-finished plays I never went back to, many of them forgotten, none of them ever to be written - but I have this, this shimmering experience to take with me, and I’ll remember the warmth of it for the rest of my life.
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