War: What the hell we laughin’ for?
It’s a tricky business this mad-cap comedy about war, death, morality, forgiveness, love, God, Harry and England. From the designer run in the rehearsal hall to dress rehearsals and previews, I saw the cast and crew wrestle with the sometimes opposing forces of the serious and the funny.
Why is war so funny? Is it because it’s such a traumatic event that we feel the need to find humor in it just to stay sane? Are we thumbing our noses at the horror of it because it scares us? Are we just jerks?
HOGAN’S HEROES, MR. ROBERTS, BAA BAA BLACK SHEEP. World War II must have been hilarious. As I kid, I remember thinking what a good time that must have been. There was the occasional ‘very special episode’ but it was all pretty much lighthearted stuff. Vietnam has come across as a much more serious war if you take out Charlie Sheen’s HOT SHOTS (and I’d prefer it if you did.) DEER HUNTER, PLATOON, APOCALYPSE NOW,…geez, pretty heavy stuff all around.
And then there was M*A*S*H. That show could get really serious and then really over the top funny before you knew what hit ya’. HBO’s recent mini-series GENERATION KILL also pulled me from silly to the profound. CATCH 22 mixed the absurd and the heartfelt. So the challenge (and one of our mainstays at Strawdog) is finding the funny in something serious and the serious in the funny. What could be funnier than the plague (RED NOSES), going bankrupt (CHERRY ORCHARD), and the end of human life on earth (RUR)? Last season! That’s what! (But seriously, we had some laughs last season, didn’t we?)
I think the challenge for ST. CRISPIN’S DAY is the same.
Watching the show as it was gelling proved how tricky it is to dance on that line. You’ve got pieces of dialogue and situations that rely on comedy in a very technical way. You also have characters in a life and death battle for survival. You can’t go one direction and not the other or you aren’t telling the whole story. Some audiences may be too affected by a genuinely emotional moment to turn on a dime and laugh at the ensuing antics. Some will be relieved to have the release of a knee-slapping joke to break the tension. Audiences for a comedies are always unpredictable but when you have these hybrid kinds of pieces, they are especially so.
On opening night I could feel the audience struggle with this and eventually realize that it’s okay to laugh and it’s okay to let a moment take you over. On that muddy stage I not only saw stuff I thought was ‘ha-ha funny’ but stuff that was ‘holy frijoles, did they really did do that? funny’. The deeper, more emotional moments weren’t just daytime soap-opera serious, they were heart sinks, heart breaks, eyes mist, can’t pull your eyes away serious.
Some of my favorites are:
Bardolph and Nym doing some “visual translating” for the French girls.
Tom finally making his confession
Pistol finally does ‘it’
When we find out who killed the priest.
And Pistol pleading for his friends’ life does it all at once.
Check it out and you’ll see what I mean.
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