Servant of Two Masters

Play Response

I went up to Seattle last weekend and saw Servant of Two Masters. I was not overly astonished at the performance but at the same time, it was also not a bad performance. It was entertaining and because I knew someone in the show I got to hear about some of the directorial decisions that I was curious about. This is a show I would love to look at the script for, because apparently there is quite a lot of improv throughout the show and I would love to see how the writer took the original script and changed it slightly. At one point, one of the lovers gets in a fight with another man, the lover being played by Deb Fialkow. After the show I asked her how the fight was actually written, because in the show her character was supposed to look extremely unfamiliar with a blade and in a fight. But Deb said that the script called for her character to be very good at a fight and easily handle a blade. Apparently it was a directorial choice to make her character look uneasy, and personally I think it would have been a lot funnier if she had just easily taken down the other man. So for me it was both an interesting insight into both the acting world, but also the writing world. It taught me that a director might not think that my stage directions are the direction (for lack of a better word) he/she wants to take the play in. While lines are usually kept, stage directions are sort of taken with a grain of salt. If they go along with a director’s vision then the stage directions will stay in, but if they don’t, a director can change them to fit his/her vision.

The improv completely caught me off guard with the show. When we walked in, another friend of mine who is currently working with the Seattle Shakespeare Company introduced us (Ella and myself) to two of the actors who were outside doing an improv. The improv was welcoming people to their production of the Merchant of Venice. But I sort of thought something was amiss when she introduced both of us and said her reasoning was so that we could just meet two of the actors. It turned out that those two actors spent the ten minutes or so before the show and the first few minutes of the show walking around the audience and asking people their names and where they were from. Each time they found out a name, one of the actors would announce the person’s name and where he/she was from and the rest of the cast would clap and nod and go back to talking amongst themselves. I thought this was a pretty interesting idea, though again it left me wondering what the script actually said. Eventually they asked both myself and Ella for our names (even though they knew them) and chose our hometowns as places in the play. So one character was from Boulder, Colorado and another was from the Big Island, Hawaii. Every time they said the hometowns of the characters, the actors would stumble and the two men we were introduced to at the beginning, would feed them the location.

The two men sat on the side of the stage for the majority of the production often times feeding the actors lines. The idea behind this production was that they were a group of actors prepared to perform the Merchant of Venice and when they find that the audience came for Servant of Two Masters they try to perform that instead.

The rest of the play was enjoyable, sometimes the acting was purposefully a little over the top and sometimes it wasn’t. A lot of the physical comedy was what made the play enjoyable for me, and I’m not sure exactly how that was written into the script. I know that sometimes a writer will write some specific comedy bits into the play, such as Bill Royce did for One Mad Day! although those were often discarded (at one point a lot of people were doing flips all over the stage). Other playwrights just write “physical comedy bit” or some such thing into the script and allow the director and actors to figure it out. On one hand it seems almost like a cop out, but on the other hand I can totally see doing that.

In any case, the show was enjoyable and parts of it really were funny. There were times that I thought it wasn’t overly great and sometimes a little too “meh” but I’m glad I went and saw it. Overall, if people have time they would probably enjoy the show.