over the weekend i saw a live performance of salvage vangard theater’s (SVT) intergalactic nemesis, a live-action (?) sci-fi radio play. i’m wary of this phenomenon of radio drama performed as live theater (as i reported earlier). as someone who did crew for SVT, i can appreciate the lack of stage effects. those damn things never measured up to even the lamest CGI. but as a fan of radio drama, i find it irksome to have to look at real people while getting my drama. closing my eyes, makes the experience immensely more entertaining.
the intergalactic nemesis is genuinely fun, which i think is what makes it SVT’s most successful production. jessica reisman, the science fiction contributor for the script (jason neulander being the script’s meddler) commented on the production’s general accessibility, although in more disparaging terms.
i on the other hand am certain that the biggest problem facing austin theater is the sad attempts at profundity. for instance, i worked on SVT’s temp odyssey, which marred a perfectly entertaining story about chicken-choking with random and largely inaccurate lectures about black holes (the playwright implied that stars increased their mass as they collapsed).
but it was while working on motherbone, an opera with music by graham reynolds, the guy who made the soundtrack for a scanner darkly, where i developed my theory that local theater is actually NEGATIVELY ENTERTAINING. think of it this way. on motherbone there was a cast of about twenty, an orchestra of fifteen, a librettist, a crew of ten, and almost a score of various volunteers coming in and out of the production. some of these people worked for months on the production, not to mention the director of the theater company who works fulltime year round. meanwhile the opera only runs for a month. each show packs in only slightly more audience than cast and crew.
if you add it all up, the sum total of entertainment manhours subtracted by the work put into the production is ACTUALLY NEGATIVE.
this sort of thing happens in local theater all the time. the only thing for it is to stop funding of local theater entirely and invest that money in a more time-effective form of entertainment.
you know.
like blogging.
