Actor’s influence

CHARLES McNULTY’S “The Page vs. the Stage” [Dec. 23] hit home. With a new play I wrote and had staged a few months ago, I witnessed how a performance can affect the way in which a play is perceived and received.

My play had a workshop production and on the first night the lead, a very good actor who had to do a modicum of dancing in the part, suffered a diabetic episode 15 minutes into the play and his energy level continually dropped throughout the evening. I sat in the audience squirming and wondering how I could have written something that seemed to drag on forever and seemed so flat. Only after the performance did the actor inform me what happened to him.

The next night he went on stage with no problems and it seemed as if I watched an entirely different play. It was the play I envisioned when I wrote it.

In terms of critics reading plays ahead of time, I believe McNulty’s notion is excellent. My play was chosen by the Heckert Play Competition for inclusion in the Lawrence and Lee Archives in the library of the Ohio State Universities on the basis of the manuscript and became part of the advanced playwright production program at OSU as well.

I’m sure if they had seen that first performance it would never have happened.

Michael Halperin

Sherman Oaks

Halperin teaches screenwriting and broadcasting at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and worked as a staff writer at Universal and executive story consultant at 20th Century Fox Television.

--

I found Charles McNulty’s insights into the critical evaluation of theater to be forthright and genuine. But even though drama constitutes a third of the trilogy in the discipline know as literature -- poetry and the novel complete the literary triumvirate -- its relationship to language is different than that of its sibling components. A novel is written to be read, a poem is typically meant to be read, as well as heard; but, notwithstanding Aristotle’s hoary assertion, a play’s quality is not determined “from reading alone.” Rather, a play is collaboratively created to be an aural experience coupled with visual spectacle.

In short, a play is to be played; a show must be performed in order to be a show. I, for one, rarely read a play before seeing it performed. If it’s not on the stage, a theater critic has no obligation to search elsewhere for a play’s potential or meaning. Theater lives and breathes in the here and now. Theater, in its larger context, is about subtext, being in the moment and presentation.

Ben Miles

Huntington Beach

Miles wrote “Onstage at the Millennial Age: A Critical Glimpse of Los Angeles Area Theater at the Turn of the 21st Century” and writes theater reviews and features for Long Beach Magazine and the News-Enterprise.