MeyerBros

my reviews of “snakes on a plane”, “a man without a country” by kurt vonnegut jr., and a South Bend Tribune review of “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” as performed at New World Arts.

• exactly what you expect

  Sep 22, 2006 by ericproduct

  snakes on a plane

  ★★★☆☆ what do you say about a movie that is nothing more and nothing less than exactly what it claims in the title? and the title is so clear, if i didn’t want to see snakes on a plane i should have known not to ask the woman at the counter for a ticket to ’snakes on a plane’.

  i did see it. there were snakes. they were on a plane. nothing happened that you didn’t see coming for at least five minutes. most things you saw coming before you went to see the movie. by some standards, that means it was fantastic.

  the snakes did things snakes would never do - the people did things people would never do - and the plane did things planes would never do. lots of people died and Samuel L Jackson got to express his feelings about the fact that there were motherf–king snakes on the motherf–king plane. all in all - everything you could ever want from a movie by that title.

  0.3

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• short and sweet

  Sep 22, 2006 by ericproduct

  a man without a country by kurt vonnegut jr.

  ★★★★★ kurt vonnegut jr. remains my literary hero with his latest book (at the young age of 84) - a short collection of short essays (memoir-style) about life, writing, creativity, humanism, politics, pacifism and many other good things. you should reed it, and can in a single evening. it is also filled with quotes and bits of wisdom from “life is no way to treat an animal” to “if Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being. I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake.”

  i fell in love all over again with his writing rythems. the relaxed-yet-provocative style that makes his work so much fun. i want to write like that. lately i’ve been working at removing the clean edges from my theatre, now it’s time to look at putting some air in my writing - some relaxation.

  0.3

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• reviewing a review

  Sep 22, 2006 by ericproduct

  “Actors, dance acts give depth to ‘Deep Blue Sea’” by Andrew Hughes

  ★★☆☆☆ You can also respond to Hughes and leave your own reviews on the South Bend Tribune Forum.

  Overall a positive review of our performance, I think, except our performance is barely mentioned. Kyle and Michelle are lauded for having fine talents (can’t agree more), and all of us for “making an entertaining show out of a weak script”. He loses me when he says we saved it by adding a humorus delivery and choreography - as though those elements were unfounded in the script itself. The humor is fairly blatant in the text, and the idea of dance comes directly from the subtitle of the play itself. I refuse to take too much credit away from John Patrick Shanley on either count, though I am glad to hear that it worked for Hughes.

  I have heard several people reference other performances of ‘Danny’ that felt more charicatured and less humorous, but I consider that a comment on those performances, not the script itself. You can do two-dimensional Shakespeare as easily as two-dimensional Shanley - And I’ve seen my share of both.

  Besides a few other minor compliments and complaints, Andrew Hughes seems more interested in wishing we had reproduced a 1969 film about a dance marathon (based on a novel by Horace McCoy) than reviewing what we did do - which is a play called ‘Danny and The Deep Blue Sea’ by pulitzer winning playwright John Patrick Shanley.

  His comment on cast sizes, as though larger casts are obviously better, strikes me as especially disconected from any understanding of what we do here at New World or why we do it. There is an implication that play quality is determined by size and scope - really a goal more readily accomplished by film or novels than the stage, but not one I would consider fundamental to quality in any medium. That’s a genre choice. Star Wars might have been better as a docudrama, if you like docudramas more than sci-fi movies, but that’s not really a valid critique of the film as it is. Those are the types of theatrical assumptions that I personally, and as an Artistic Director of this organization, not only shy away from but try to challenge up-front with much of my/our work.

  Complaints about cast size, comparisons with movies, and other seeming ignorance of the field don’t exclude Hughes from a valid opinion on his experience of our performance, but they do make me wish he would do his homework a little better as a critic.

  On a side note: I’d love to hear the actors respond to whether or not they “should have chosen to endure a little pain to preserve the atmosphere of the play”. We must have done something wrong if those slaps aren’t reading right - but I can guarantee the actors are feeling it afterwards. They hit each other (and not as soft as you might think) every time. And Kyle, I promise you, is going to town with that spanking.

  BTW: This play is also not “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf” by Edward Albee: another wonderful script that deals with some similar themes, which we also did not produce. They use dance in the movie adaptation of that one as well. But the cast is small, so I wouldn’t bother yourself with it too much.

  0.3

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 4:20 pm by eric and is filed under books, movies, the arts, writing, theatre, review, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.