The Big Picture and the Closeup

Both the play and the play-within-the-play preach the same sermon: You may be trying to do something that attains meaning by being witnessed and judged, but in truth no one will ever see you or judge you. As an understudy, you are condemned to eliciting what meaning you can from what one frustrated character in A Chorus Line summed up as “dancing for my own enjoyment.”

The shows discussed here, brave and iconoclastic about sex, or mixing opera and cabaret, or presenting the opposition of plutocracy and philanthropy with theater piece tools, remind us how vital it is that the theater keep on giving us things we haven’t seen before, might not be comfortable watching, things that stun us and surprise us. I would go so far as to say that if theater ever stops giving us edgy work, it will cease to be theater. Here’s to edgy.