A Big Picture You Ought Not to Miss
The sprawling anthology—wherein we follow a large number of characters as their lives overlap but rarely intersect directly—has been a constant presence at the movies for years. Although the genre was once an exclusive territory to which Robert Altman seemed to own the only set of keys, since the mid-90s, Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, and Alejandro González Iñárritu have all followed this loose pattern to big success—the producers of 2004’s Crash even got a Best Picture Oscar for their trouble. The anthology is less common in the theatre, where it poses practical problems. Lots of characters means lots of actors. Double or triple-casting would only further muddy the question of who’s who, which is always foremost in the minds of directors asking an audience to remember so many characters who individually have only meager stage time in which to form a lasting impression.
Northern Irish playwright Owen McCafferty’s Scenes from the Big Picture is one of the theatrical anthology’s rare specimens. First staged in 2001, it follows 21 characters over the course of a single day in a fictitious section of Belfast. In this regard, you can add Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing to its list of cinematic influences. Besides the one-day timeframe, the play shares with Lee’s “joint” an omission of one key element its setting would seem to demand: Just as Do the Right Thing is set in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn circa 1989, but makes no mention of the crack epidemic of the time, Scenes from the Big Picture sidesteps entirely Northern Ireland’s “Troubles.” As McCafferty explained after the opening-night performance at Catholic University last week, setting the play in a real Belfast neighborhood would in itself make the play political—though recent events may finally change this, geography in Northern Ireland is ideology. And McCafferty didn’t want to write about these characters’ beliefs. He wanted to write about their lives.
Solas Nua’s ambitious staging of the play solves its logistical challenges with a dollop of invention and a busload of fine actors. Good thing, too, because McCafferty’s characters are the hardest type to play well—average Joes and Janes. There’s the barmaid, who’s involved with the married guy who can’t get his wife pregnant, and can’t tell her he doesn’t want to. There’s the couple who don’t know what’s become of their long-missing son. There’s the elderly shopkeeper, frightened by the increasingly brazen young hoodlums who steal from him for kicks, and his wife, who’s got a secret. There’s the posh drug dealer, who doesn’t know what his girlfriend gets up to when he’s away. There are the two brothers, estranged from one another until the occasion of their father’s funeral reunites them. And of course there are the pair of drunks, always looking out for a way to turn someone’s misfortune to their own advantage.
Somehow you come to care for all of them, and that’s no mean trick. This is the rare instance when it seems inappropriate to single out any one or even any one half-dozen performances, because nearly every role is fully-realized. Moreover, the show feels like the work of a true company, with individual egos subsumed to the greater enterprise. None of these performances are flashy, but all of them ring true.
Director Dez Kennedy makes use of a few low-tech, high-impact devices to keep the energy level high throughout a long evening. Actors toss props to one another during scene changes, a risky but efficient tactic that might be the theatrical equivalent of a movie’s smash-cut. Sets are minimalistic and functional, with no more detail than the scene requires. Whenever two characters speak by phone, they put their phones away after a moment to stand face-to-face. And when they’re not on, the actors sit or stand at the back of the stage, and sometimes in the audience, watching along with us and undercutting the spectator’s sense of remove from the action.
The latter trick works as a neat metaphor for exactly the thing Scenes from the Big Picture seeks to remind us: Though we cling to our delusions of autonomy, events of which we have neither knowledge or control act upon our destinies always. Our lot could be a kiss on the cheek or a bullet to the kneecap. We never know until it happens.
Scenes from the Big Picture is at Catholic University’s Callan Theatre through June 24th. Tickets are available online.