Friday, March 13, 2009

Chekhov's rebar

Watching the premier of Missing at Factory Theatre last night, I was reminded of the rule of Chekhov's gun: Don't show the audience a rifle if nobody is thinking of firing it. Most of the play's action takes place at the front of the stage which mutates from local diner to farm kitchen to the home of a female cop investigating the case of a missing woman. But near the back there's a huge metal tree, a structure so ugly I figured that it could not possibly be decorative. At a certain point, somebody must climb on it, or it will grow or changes shape or will be inventively lit up. As the characters bickered about this and that--affections and quarrels emerging suddenly from playwright Florence Gibson's ether--I sat quietly waiting for the tree to do something. For someone to at least mention it. Maybe it had something to do with the sugar bush they were talking about. I attributed the branches sticking out of the front of the stage to the sugar bush, so why not the metal tree?

At play's end, the metal tree had played no part in the events and revelations. I went to the afterparty in Factory's lounge and was standing by the door that looked back into the theatre. "I thought the set was cool," said somebody who had been sitting in the front row. "I guess the rebar had something to do with the bypass they were building."

"Rebar?" I said.

"Sticking out of the front of the stage."

"I thought they were branches." But it wasn't till I got home that the other shoe dropped. The metal sculpture wasn't a tree; it referred to the construction of a highway and its accompanying bypass. The thing wasn't a Chokhovian rifle; it was just cryptically ugly.

Mystery solved.

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