| re: Defending Evan Hansen (from today's Broadway Maven Weekly Blast) | |
| Posted by: ryhog 05:50 pm EST 01/30/23 | |
| In reply to: re: Defending Evan Hansen (from today's Broadway Maven Weekly Blast) - Singapore/Fling 04:22 pm EST 01/30/23 | |
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| I get everything you are saying here. I was not not talking about tragedies; it was just that I was not focusing on tragedies qua tragedies. "Western" theatre (which for this discussion let's call Shakespeare and forward) does include tragedies that follow some but rarely all of the "rules" (which is fine by me because by now you probably know I don't think there are any hard and fast rules in the theatre), and I think we can draw another important line at roughly the beginning of the 20th Century because (a) people don't really believe in the supernatural in the same way they did before [and that's an element of Greek tragedy and earlier western plays] and (b) the advent of psychology has given us a different understanding of what a flaw is. But where it sounds like we part company is that you seem to feel a play needs to end up with a morally satisfying result, and I don't. I also don't think that musical theatre today is bound up in "American ideas of morality" because ideas are not static and are evolving in our face. I don't judge a play for ending up at a morally shitty place because not everything in our world has consequences for the bad guy. (If it did, the play I wrote this morning about President Tangface (yes, that's what I think I'll call it) could not be performed since he is not burning in a cauldron in Act V. :-) I hope some of that makes sense. I am writing it while sitting on a runway for (so far) an hour because they cannot find the luggage of someone who did not get on the plane. (Tragic but a farce.) |
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