Comedy? Tragedy?

About an hour ago I came back from seeing a French translation of Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" with the school. Though a little nervous at first about whether or not I'd be able to understand what was going on (hence a swift wikipedia search), I was reassured upon being told that it was a tragedy. Because, thankfully (for me, in this case), 17th-century tragedies tend not to be draw on the subtlest of emotions.

Lovers grasp each other!

Enemies wave daggers!

Characters not to be trusted tiptoe!

etc.

And, of course, at the end everyone dies. EVERYONE.

I loved the first two hours. But with about forty-five minutes left in the three-hour production, you could feel the audience stirring a little bit. Attention was not undivided, to say the least. The play was bypassing tragic and entering well into the realm of the ridiculous as only tragedies can. With about an hour to go the body count began to grow exponentially. And, furthermore, the deaths became increasingly as complicated as those planned by James Bond villains...while the period of pre-death staggering time grew longer and longer. Watching with dismay the characters yet to be brutally offed, you couldn't help but feel a glimmer of hope that Webster had perhaps written a sudden and tragic collapse of an enormous set piece to speed things along a bit...but no. One by one by one by one by one by one by one each character was poisoned/stabbed/strangled, staggered, and then soliloquized -- and yes, in that order. What was at first sad was swiftly becoming unbearable -- but not, perhaps, in the way Webster intended. More in an eyeing-the-emergency-exit kind of way.

And then something fascinating happened.

What first caught my attention was what I originally thought to be the overzealous use of a blood capsule (as though the death of a half-naked man by multiple stab wounds needed MORE embellishment). But, as the actor staggered and soliloquized, I realized...it was going on too long. The actor's indignant cry (mid-stab) of "OW, that hurts" was the second clue. (NO, this isn't what it sounds like, no one was actually hurt.) And suddenly, the chortles issuing from the students in the back rows (both the result of the extravagant deaths and the absurd amount of nudity in this production) grew louder...but the tables had turned. This was no longer laugh-at. In the final thirty minutes of the play, the actors and the director turned the tragedy on its head -- and they played into the over-the-topness, pushing it at first into comedy, and simultaneously, a breakdown of the very theatrical process it had mostly adhered to up until this point (with a few modern-touch exceptions). Mid-staggering, the new fleet of dying characters pulled out the fake-blood sacks tucked under their costumes and let the contents spout forward with gusto. Some crumpled to the ground -- others simply folded over. Without changing a word, the production had taken the tragedy - which, until those last 30 minutes it had been, more or less -- and had turned it (THE WHOLE THING!) into a play ABOUT tragedies, and the absurdity therein.

People always talk about the fine line between comedy and tragedy. And that's a link that comes through in more ways than one. In Endgame, Beckett wrote that "nothing is funnier than unhappiness." But even given the fact that Beckett wrote in part to undo the very notion of characterhood (and as such the line might be read as some sort of strange manipulation of the "characters," to dehumanize them), there's something universal in this. Take Mel Brooks,, for example: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die."

I haven't thought much about this, but in the brief time I've spent thinking I have thought INTENSELY about this. Not to be a bore -- because, of course, Mel Brooks is being a little facetiously self-indulgent here. But the question of scale that he lays out also holds true. The play started as the cut finger -- small, affecting. Loss, separation. But as soon as that sewer top opened up, the audience was thrown, the gestures too grand to move us and, therefore, managing only to amuse us at their failure to do so -- until, in making the physical staged deaths as grandiose as the very number of deaths (and then breaking down the theatricality altogether by exposing the seams, via the blood capsules) everything changed. As the actors exposed the creaky machinery that tragedies can be, we were with them, NOT raising our eyebrows at them...and instead of being a play about something, the play became a play about plays.

There were ups and downs to the production. There were things I was interested in, things I thought were poorly done, and things that I quite enjoyed. There were times when I had no idea whether I was supposed to be laughing or feeling the characters' pain. But in the end, the play stuck with me, and I think it will for a while -- not because it was "good" or "bad" or anything in particular, but because, at the moment when the audience started to turn its back on it, it circled around to align itself with our new frustration.

But is that too much of a compromise? Is that an easy-out on the creative team's part -- to play into the absurdity of an undeniably over-the-top play, instead of creating a world in which the absurdity reads as logical?