16 Possible Glimpses -- Marina Carr

(previously posted on keestone.livejournal.com)

So.  16 Possible Glimpses.  The first night of actual performances.  Not opening night, but the first preview performance of the world premiere, so there will probably be some changes still.  What do I think? As often happens with Marina Carr's plays, I come out thinking I really need to contemplate it more and wanting to see it another time before I can really say something meaningful.  There's always so much in them.  They're dense, in a good way.  Richly layered and highly symbolic, leaving me with a feeling of depth and power.  It's "a series of dialogues and domestic scenes" rather than a more traditionally written play with a linear plot and unified narrative, so it takes up until nearly the end for the shape of the play to reveal itself.  The first scenes and last scenes link and you come full circle.

16 Possible Glimpses has been 10 years in the works.  Beloved thinks it's the best Marina Carr play he's seen yet.  (I'd probably lean more towards Woman and Scarecrow for its sheer power and poetry. But, I think 16 Possible Glimpses would probably balance very well with Woman and Scarecrow as two sides of facing death.) It's definitely more accessible than some of her other work.  I mean, it's a Marina Carr play without incest and/or suicide.  It's gentler than most of her other plays.  It's beautiful, tender, and full of humour. and it's more clear than ever that she sees death as very much a part of life, not as an ending.  There is a soul-guide character in this play, like the Ghost Fancier in By the Bog of Cats or Scarecrow in Woman and Scarecrow, but Chekhov's Black Monk is even more clearly a friend.    It's very clear that she loves Chekhov, and that she sees him as a great soul.  That would have been obvious even if we hadn't attended a talk before the play in which she totally geeked out about Chekhov in interview.

Technically, it's very interesting.  In the pre-show talk, Carr made it very clear that the title is non-literal.  "Why 16 Possible Glimpses?  I like the number 16, I like the word possible, I like the word glimpses."   There aren't sixteen scenes, there aren't sixteen cast members, it was just a number she liked for the title. She focused a lot on the word "possible" as a reminder that she wasn't writing a literal biography either, but a response to "her" Anton Pavlovich Chekhov  (I like "her" Chekhov").  But the "16" and "Glimpses", I think, come into the technical side of things.  16 is a nice, large number for plurality, and what Carr and director Wayne Jordan have done is give you multiple visual perspectives using cameras projecting different angles of what is happening on stage on the backdrop and occasionally on a scrim in front of the action.  16 may not be literal, but we were definitely literally given multiple possible glimpses.  Sometimes it worked better than others, and some of the cut scenes were a bit distracting, but some of those will probably have been ironed out by the time previews ended.  Sometimes it was stunningly effective dramatically speaking.   On a bit of a tangent, there seem to be two emerging trends at the festival this year: site-specific theatre, and the use video projectors (blah blah blah multimedia experience).  I'm a little resistant to both, not because I think they're a bad thing, but currently they seem to be way too faddish. And like many things that are faddish or overused, they're often used to use them and not because they are the best technique for the desired effect.  And often, the logistics are just not thought out well enough and it distracts from the effect.  Here, though, the use of projected video really did seem integral, and it I think it added layers and depth to the overall experience.