The Other End of the Spectrum

While driving through the streets of LA last week on our way to Legally Blonde, I was reminded of another show I saw in the area, nearly a year ago. It was a play, and about as far from my Legally Blonde experience as you can get.

First, a bit of background info: When I was in London in 2007, I took a course on British Theater, and one of the plays we read was Crave, by Sarah Kane. Skip forward one year, we’re all back at our school in Malibu, and one of my fellow Londoners discovered that Crave was playing in a small theater in LA. Although reading the play utterly confused me, I thought it’d be interesting to see performed. All in all, six of us decided to go.

Despite instructions from our GPS system - or perhaps because of them - we ended up completely lost trying to find the theater. Turns out the address we had written down was slightly incorrect, and we had to call someone back on campus to get online and get us the right one. Then when we were finally going the right way, we hit traffic. Perfect.

Our group was in two cars, and the car I wasn’t in arrived at the theater first. Upon hearing we were still on our way, the theater waited for us to arrive before they started. I think my car finally arrived around 20 minutes late, by which point they’d decided to start without us, but just barely; we only missed a minute or two.

As we took our seats, it was quickly clear why they’d been so kind to wait for us: Our group of 6 made up two-thirds of the audience. Although it looked like the theater could hold up to 25 (five rows of five seats each), the only other people there were an older couple, and a young man (who we later found out was a friend of one of the actresses).

Turns out, seeing Crave on stage helped in no way with my understanding of the material. It didn’t help that they used the simplest staging possible - each character sat on a box, looking straight at the audience the whole time. (For comparison, my professor in London said the best production he’s seen involved the four characters packing up an apartment and moving out the boxes.) At times I actually felt like laughing at the absurdness of it all, but I held it in; even though I was in the back row, I was pretty sure the actors could see me just fine. But despite my thoughts on the source material itself, I had to admit the actors were very talented.

When I look back on that night, I don’t think specifically of the performance itself, but rather the overall experience. After becoming accustomed to seeing the big-budget hits on the West End, it was a reminder that there’s still more out there. Often I’m guilty paying attention only to the shows with big theaters and lots of awards, but there’s still a lot of quality theater beyond that if you look a little deeper.