To Be Or Not To Be

On Saturday I attended an open-captioned performance of To Be Or Not To Be at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway at 47th St. The play is based on the 1942 film (same title) directed by Ernst Lubitsch, which I saw a few years ago. It's set in Poland just before the Nazis' invasion in 1939, and then during their occupation. To Be Or Not To Be is about a troupe of actors at the Polski Theatre who get entangled in the middle of a Gestapo investigation and must use their wits and acting chops to survive. (The title comes from the famous line in Hamlet, and there are several reasons for its significance, but I don't have room to write about that here.)

The play stars David Rasche as leading man Josef Tura (I recognized Rasche from the film Delirious), in the role Jack Benny filled back in 1942. The show is running through the 23rd of November, so if you have a chance to go before it ends, you should! I enjoyed how the play closely follows the film's plot. While the movie felt a little long, the play is just the right length and doesn't include any extraneous scenes or characters. All of the actors did a fine job, and it was a real treat to see them perform live on stage.

The film/play is billed as a comedy, but after watching the movie I remember thinking its genre should have been labeled comedy-drama. What comedy was present in the film was basically overshadowed by the dark undertones (the seriousness and suffering associated with the war) most of the time. However, oddly enough, the play managed to strike me as a little less intense and more of a comedy than the movie. I mean that as a compliment, not insult, to the director and the actors in the play. There's less melodrama and, while still serious in the right places, the actors brought a more light-hearted spirit to their roles -- perhaps in part because (in real life) their lives are so removed from the time period in which the play occurs. The original actors, on the other hand, obviously made this film while WWII was still going on.

In both the film and the play, the humor lies in the sheer audacity of the characters' plots (such as impersonating Nazi officers while interacting with Nazis inside their headquarters), not to mention their successes, and in the giant egos of some of the stars. The characters' rambunctious actions are in some ways more humorous in the play compared to the film because of the more light-hearted climate in the play that I mentioned earlier. In the film, it's more evident that a pervasive evil lurks outside their little theatre, and so when the actors outwit Nazis, it's quite unbelievable and funny. But one can never shake off that dark atmosphere in the movie.

On the other hand, the play's mood is less of fighting for their lives and more of seeing how much they can get away with. That outside evil they must contend with is somewhat diminished in the play, and the actors play up the humor inherent to their characters. In doing so, it becomes startlingly evident in the play (more so than in the film) how ludicrous their plots are, and it's more funny as a result. As the play crescendos, it is more and more expected that the actors throw themselves into doing the unthinkable because of what they've gotten away with in prior scenes. In some scenes, judging from the way they sacrifice themselves and act so boldly, it almost as if they don't realize the enormous implications of their actions. But that's the trick of the actor. At the end of the play, they've convinced the audience that their actions are really not that ridiculous after all -- they are actors having embraced their greatest role yet, to fool the Nazis.

The open-captioned show was courtesy of TAP, a part of Theater Development Fund -- the organization that runs the TKTS booth for discounted Broadway and off-Broadway shows in Times Square. It's a nonprofit devoted to improving access to theater for disabled people, including those with hearing and vision problems. They usually provide captioning for a handful of the shows on Broadway during each season, but for only one performance of each particular show. The real-time captioning is visible on a small board that is erected above the stage on one side of the auditorium.
I've been fortunate to attend at least half a dozen or so OC shows through TAP over the past few years, including Mary Poppins, The 39 Steps, Little Mermaid, Light in the Piazza, and HAIR. The captioning typically follows along with the pace of the speech onstage, and while it's not easy, I've gotten used to quickly scanning the captioning board and also watching the action onstage. It is sort of like watching captioned TV, and it makes the theater experience 100 times more enjoyable. Until it becomes a government mandate that all theaters offer this type of captioning -- or captioning in the form of hand-held devices, which you can find at Wicked and Hairspray -- this nonprofit provides the only captioning access to NY theater. You can find out more about the organization here: http://www.tdf.org/TDF_ServicePage.aspx?id=71.