History Plays Need Football’s Two-Minute Drill
In football, there is nothing as exciting as the two-minute drill. It is a 120-second plan that each team uses to try to score a touchdown or kick a field goal at the end of the game when time is running out. The two-minute drill, full of fast passes, surprise formations and unbridled fury, offers football followers a lot of football because the team knows it has to score and time is limited. Teams, watching the clock tick as they play, appreciate it. Fans love it.
History plays need an on-stage two-minute drill. The problem many of them have, whether about 1930s New York, Shakespeare’s England or Selma, Alabama in the 1960s, is that the audience is never given the full backdrop to the story on the stage. The history play is about a person or an event from the past. It opens, unfolds and ends, but the background of most stories is as gauzy as a surgeon’s band aid.
What playwrights need to do, with the assistance of their director and actors, is set aside a two-minute period at the start of the play and use that time to have one or more characters set up the story for the audience within the script’s dialogue.
Example: Our story takes place in the early part of the eighteenth century in England and is about a young, charismatic duke in trouble with an old and conservative king. At the start of the play, in standard dialogue, one or more characters could tell the audience what the historical and political situation is in England at the time, what the king is like and why the duke is in trouble. Is this unusual? Is the king good or bad? What do the people think of the king? How did the king’s family come to power? How did the duke’s problems start? The play then proceeds with an audience that has had the history explained. It would not be a narration, but easily woven dialogue as part of the plot.
This two-minute drill would help a play. There have been a number of recent history plays in New York that needed one. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which closed in a few months despite fine reviews, was one of them. The musical was a loud tirade against Andrew Jackson as the president who oppressed Native Americans. Well, he did other things, too. Positive things. Someone should have explained the good things that he did and noted, historically, that his actions against the Native Americans were just one part of his life. That would have permitted the audience to see Jackson in a more honest light. In Lombardi, we learn a great deal about Green Bay Packer coach Vince Lombardi, but are not told exactly why his football teams were so good. We do not learn much about how the Packers succeeded in a league where other teams were also filled with skilled players and good coaches. There is no historical backdrop that explains why Lombardi, and not anyone else, became such a football icon. It was not just his blustery spirit and supreme confidence. The two-minute drill would have done that.
I saw A Free Man of Color at the Lincoln Center in New York City in the fall. It was a play about New Orleans from 1800 to 1806 or so. It was a tight story about an African American man about town in a turbulent city. Playwright John Guare did fine research, but did not describe the full history of the city. We learned nothing about the Creole people there, the city’s suddenly booming river trade and the slavery problems. That would have helped the playwright to tell the story better.
In Gob’s Kitchen, an imaginative play about Andy Warhol’s movies, we learn little about the iconic 1960s artist. Some people remember Warhol, but others do not. Two minutes of dialogue that explained Warhol and his work would have helped the play. In Diary of a Madman, set in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1830, there is no mention of the oppressive rule of Tsar Nicholas I and why the people hated him.
Movies about history do not have that problem because film offers a vast landscape of information, whether in voiceovers, printed plot summaries or dialogue (who can forget those two-paragraph scrolls that explained everything in the 1940s black and white history films?). Even movie theme songs help to tell an historical story. Theaters, however, are limited to actors on stage and what they say. They need to give us two minutes more to explain history. Why? Well, because people love history.
Now, to be fair, many theaters do offer an historical summary of events in the play in stories printed in the program. The Metropolitan Opera is good at this. How many theatergoers read the program before the see the play, though? Many arrive thirty seconds before the play begins and do not read the program until they go home—if at all. These plays, too, would benefit from the two-minute drill.
Too many playwrights and directors think the public knows a great deal about history. Americans do not. They know a little bit, but are thirsty for more. That’s why they go to history plays. The extra two minutes is about one percent of the dialogue in the play, that’s all. I wish more playwrights would incorporate it into the beginnings of their stories. I would not mind losing one song from Evita to gain a two minute backdrop on the colorful history and fiery politics in Argentina when she and her husband Juan Peron rose to power.
So here’s to the two-minute drill, and the theatrical touchdowns it will bring.
Bruce Chadwick can be reached at bchadwick@njcu.edu