When plays come to our area, the discussions among fellow theatre-lovers vary from subject matter to ticket prices to parking garages. One thing we rarely discuss anymore? The titles of the plays. After all, most seasons don’t present anything much worth discussing. “The Motherf----r With the Hat” and “The Sty of the Blind Pig,” both at TheaterWorks at City Arts on Pearl” (the former late last year, the latter currently showing) might be exceptions. And in terms of title length, West Hartford’s Playhouse on Park will put on “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” later this month.
But that's about it.
Every once in a while, though, titles do become topics of conversation all by themselves, particularly in New York where many new plays debut. It’s only a matter of time before one title or another will be discussed here among the Connecticut theatre crowd.
In 1970, Paul Zindel’s “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” came to Broadway, and Clive Barnes, then writing for the New York Times, used such words as “discouraging” and “stupid” in his review. “It has, I must admit, one of the most discouraging titles devised by man,” Barnes began, “… yet curiously enough you realize at the end of the play that the title is valid—valid but stupid.” Jerry Talmer of the New York Post, who considered the play a powerful and beautiful story, said it had a terrible title “which is far less terrible once you’ve seen the play.” And Lee Silver at the Daily News concurred, adding that “the title seems zany, weird or even superficial—until you experience the play. Then it becomes poignant and hopeful.”
The play, with its 15-syllable tongue-busting title, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and also took home the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as best new play of the year.
Many long-titled plays, and an equally long list of their very short-titled siblings, have enjoyed success on Broadway, Off Broadway and at regional theatres across the country, including many here in the Hartford region.
In actuality, there may be no correlation at all between long and short titles and successful runs—though long titles have indeed given some critics something extra to criticize from time to time. But do they really need the extra ammunition?
Many playwrights and critics agree that a brief title takes as much thought and imagination as a marathon one. But the paths playwrights tread in search of perfect titles are filled with numerous motives, including wit, poetry, simplicity and bluntness, and the results can be unexpected. It was bluntness that seems to have been the motive behind Peter Weiss’s choice in 1964, when he broke every long-title record with “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade”—a 26-word, 44-syllable monster of a title. Mollie Panter-Downes, writing in New York Magazine, called the production “a long, abstract and difficult debate” about liberty and dictatorship that was nonetheless “a dazzling theatrical experience.” (She was also among the first to report that the title was condensed to “Marat/Sade” by arguing Londoners, “to save breath.”) When “Marat/Sade” crossed the Atlantic it won the New York Drama Critics’ Award for best foreign play of the 1965-66 season.
“Marat/Sade” was by no means the first of the long-titled breed, but its length does give it a special place in theatre history. Just three years before Weiss completed it, Time magazine’s reviewer warned audiences that “The marquees of Broadway may soon have to poke the New Jersey Palisades, for a new American playwright is about to arrive, and his considerable ability is exceeded only by the length of his titles.” If Kopit’s “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad” poked the Palisades, Weiss’s must have scaled the Delaware Water Gap.
A long title can grab critical attention without critical success, no matter who writes the play. Certainly, “Matrimonium: Overruled Passion, Poison and Petrifaction” is not one of George Bernard Shaw’s best-known efforts. William Saroyan’s 1975 farce, “Rebirth Celebration of the Human Race at Artie Zabala’s Broadway Theatre,” wasn’t well received, either.
“Rebirth Celebration” was about a struggling Off-Broadway theatre proprietor who needed a good production to keep his theatre alive. Saroyan poked fun at the state of New York theatre in the mid-1970s and audiences apparently took it personally. Even a shorter title might not have helped.
But a shorter title may have helped William Gibson’s 1975 Christmas comedy, “Butterfingers Angel, Mary and Joseph, Herod the Nut and the Slaughter of 12 Hit Carols in a Pear Tree.” Gibson, author of “The Miracle Worker” and “Two for the Seesaw,” was perhaps trying to capture some of the inventive lunacy of a contemporary production with a much shorter title, “Godspell,” but he may have frightened some people away with its unforgiving title. (The play was full of inventive lunacy: it takes place in Nazareth and Bethlehem in 1 B.C. and the characters talk about such things as diapers and vitamins, and when Joseph asks Mary when she’s expecting the child she says, “I think around Christmas.”)
In the case of a 1980 drama, a long title brought playwright Edward Allan Baker a comparison to one of the greatest American writers—although it was a somewhat dubious comparison. In his favorable review of Baker’s “What’s So Beautiful About a Sunset Over Prairie Avenue?,” New Yorker critic Brendan Gill said, “Surely (the title) hints at some not very deeply buried death wish on Mr. Baker’s part in regard to our commercial theatre. How can so many words possibly be made to fit on a Broadway marquee? Let me abandon this point with the gentle suggestion to Mr. Baker that if ‘Main Street’ was good enough for Sinclair Lewis, ‘Prairie Avenue’ might well be good enough for him.”
No one really knows whether devising the perfect title takes creative energy, sheer inspiration, or just dumb luck. Whatever it is, usually the playwright’s first or second idea wins out in the end. If that happens to have a dozen or more syllables, sophisticated audiences (and even critics) usually prove they can bear with it. Fortunately, though, first ideas generally do produce much shorter titles. That’s why when TheaterWorks in Hartford presents a Tony Award-winning play this coming March, instead of something called “How the Biggest Commission in Modern Art Became an Artist’s Biggest Headache,” we’ll be watching a play called, simply, “Red.”
Feel free to subscribe to my column and also to share my articles and reviews on Facebook and Twitter. The show must go on—and with your continued support, it always will.
Comments