Review: LIGHT UP THE SKY Takes the Thespian Caricature Too Far

I'll keep it brief, like ripping off a Band-Aid. I was disappointed with the SBCC Theatre Group's production of Light up the Sky (directed by R. Michael Gros). It seemed like a promising idea: though dated, it's a play about the world of theatre--the production; the actors; the other dramatists; the excitement of opening night. Regrettably, Moss Hart's 1948 farce about a playwright who writes a bad play that doesn't turn out to be so bad after all was left to float in the dramatic space for over two hours with very few grounded moments. It was a production of moths drawn to (admittedly) beautiful lighting, flittering and bouncing without direction in one of the most attractive living room spaces I've ever seen on a stage. Set designer Pat Frank and her team created a set with lavish touches of opulence and precise attention to detail: a glamorous, retro-chic Ritz-Carlton living room in blues and violets--a set with a sumptuous mood that promised a story of personality and depth, lighting up the sky with the triumphs of the theatrical experience. Unfortunately, the play did not live up to the set.

Light up the Sky employs one of my favorite theatrical constructs: the meta-theatrical play-about-a-play. The problem with this concept as presented in SBCC's production is that the events and characterization within Light up the Sky do not mirror (or provide pertinent counterpoint to) The Time is Now, the play-within-the-play. The first act of Light up the Sky features a group of actors, writers, producers, and their various staff preparing for the opening of a new play. The second act shows the same group woefully lamenting their disastrous opening, and suddenly, interestingly, Light up the Sky is a play about a having produced a bad play. However, the third act offers a twist: the reviews are in, and despite some production problems, The Time is Now is lauded as an allegorical gem with the potential for greatness--but Light up the Sky, as the parent production in the meta-theatre hierarchy, doesn't follow suit. Rather than being, in itself, a satirical or allegorical production about the process of creating theatre, Light up the Sky is a one-dimensional play that sits comfortably in surface-level farce and lazy, predictable characterization.

With a cast of veteran actors, there was high level of talent on stage that bore the potential to deliver a witty farce exploring the humorous side of the torturous agony of producing a bad play--as well as the jubilant victory that accompanies a glowing review. Yet Light up the Sky leaned so heavily on absurdity that it lost relatability. Actors (as a cultural group) tend toward the dramatic, anyway--that's why they're able to be actors. But SBCC's production took the "thespian" caricature too far; characters were based on self-indulgent antics rather than grounded, self-aware commentary. What might have been a complex interpretation of the comically emotional process of theatrical production became an embarrassing party of extreme personalities vying for attention.

Not everyone's character in Light up the Sky was mired in shtick: Susie Couch (as Stella Livingston, ingénue Irene Livingston's mother) was appropriately boozy and aggravated, a master of drinking, card-playing, wise-cracking, and forceful ambivalence regarding her daughter's newest theatrical undertaking. Also, Terry Li's performance as Miss Lowell, who is essentially a background player, was crucial to my continued investment in the play. Li's more subtle reactions to the buffoonery onstage were a welcome ground, and Miss Lowell's constant, understated amusement at the flurry of completely irrational activity surrounding her was wry and witty (without the benefit of much dialogue). I suspect Miss Lowell and I both spent most of the evening wondering if everyone was always going to be this unmanageable and if any of their problems were of any ultimate importance--or if we should just roll our eyes into our drinks and clock out at the end of the night.

As for the actual dialogue content of the play, I do believe it's the responsibility of the current generation to read the minutes from the last generation's meeting. So, yes, perhaps I should be more knowledgeable about popular culture of the 30s and 40s. I'm not. However, I do understand how the set-up for a joke works (especially in a schmaltz comedy like this one), so I may not have always gotten the joke--but I always knew I wasn't getting the joke, and it's a dissatisfying feeling to recognize that you're missing the message conveyed by the punch line. Referential humor is difficult to use successfully because the subjects of the jokes have a fleeting period of timeliness before the references become dated, and thus cease to convey pertinent information. But it's not impossible to restructure jokes using comedic material that is either more current, or, in the interest of sticking with the period of the show, more timeless. Light up the Sky should certainly not replace (insert-1940s-celebrity-here) jokes with Kardashian jokes, but there are ways to sidestep the obvious problems that come with a 60-year-old script dependent in some situations on referential humor. Jokes that don't inform characterization or move the plot forward are examples of inefficient, meaningless dialogue that should be avoided. Every word in a play should be purposeful in telling the story.

Light up the Sky could have been a complex, meta-theatre goldmine. I mean, it's a play about a guy who writes a bad play that turns out to be an allegorical masterpiece! Yet the production missed the opportunity to turn two hours of storytelling into two hours of intelligent commentary on the artistic process. Light up the Sky would have been more interesting as a show that functioned on two levels: a fun period farce and a smart satire about a play that's a smart satire. Instead, Light up the Sky is fluffy and pointless; a superficial farce too unrelatable to be mindlessly funny, and not self-aware enough to be satirically comical. Don't misunderstand me: I have no problem with nonsensical farce as long as some aspect of it is grounded enough for me to invest emotionally in the situation. Light up the Sky offered no real purpose other than allowing some of Santa Barbara's staple actors to horse around on stage--it left me wondering why SBCC would choose to produce a dated, single-minded work in such uninspiring fashion.

COMING UP NEXT FOR THE SBCC THEATRE GROUP:

DEAD MAN'S CELL PHONE

by Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Katie Laris

APRIL 17-MAY 2, 2015
PREVIEWS APRIL 15 & 16, 2015
JURKOWITZ THEATRE
Performances Wednesday through Saturday @ 7:30pm, Sunday @ 2PM,
Saturday matinees April 25 & May 2 @ 2PM

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