Last Tuesday (the 17th), Mer and I took advantage of being educators. Being in education has plenty of perks, but sometimes they are very tangible. We were able to head up to Cleveland to Playhouse Square, where we got to attend a lecture/workshop in the play that was being performed that evening, Ten Chimneys. The Playhouse hosts fed us a very good dinner, talked about the history of American Theater in the twentieth century (a theme important to the play), and, wait for it, gave us free tickets to see the play. It is good to be a teacher (and a tech).

Ten Chimneys is a play that looks at a famous acting couple from the mid-twentieth century. The couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, were a husband-and-wife team who worked on making theater more realistic. They are largely credited with developing a way of having actors speak at the same time (as happens in real life), but in such a way that important information was not lost by the audience. They were wildly successful, and they built a summer home in Wisconsin called Ten Chimneys. The play looks (mostly) at one summer where Lunt and Fontanne were studying Chekhov’s The Seagull, in order to put the play on later in the year.

The pre-show lecture focused on how American theater developed from melodrama (think damsel tied to a train track) to more and more realistic portrayals on stage. The shift started with the introduction of Russian acting troupes to the U.S. in the early 1900s, and developed through the 50s, where the American theater schools of thought split into many different methods. Lunt and Fontanne were important in the development of realism in theater.

As an added bonus to the evening, this was the very first performance in the small, but new, Second Stage theater. The Second Stage theater can be arranged in many ways, but for this performance it was set up in the round. We were all looking down onto a patio at Ten Chimneys. The sight-lines were excellent, with the farthest row being only seven rows back. In fact, the first row of seats was actually sitting in the “grass” on the edge of the patio. It was a very intimate setting.

The acting was very strong. All of the actors had done major work in theater and television, and they nailed their parts. The play was often very funny, with very witty lines. The play is mostly serious drama, and is largely the theater looking at itself (a play about people preparing to do a play). The production was well done.

My one problem with the play was the play itself – it never felt as if it went anywhere. It is not surprising that a play about a famous couple who strove to bring realism to the stage was itself very realistic. Real life does not often have climaxes and tidy wrap-ups, and the play was wildly successful in that. Still, I go to theater in part to get away from real life, so the play left me a bit disappointed. I cannot complain, though – it was all free, and we got a meal out of it as well, and I learned some things about American acting that I had not known.