Collaborative Interpretation
Posted by Edward Sobel on 5/12/2006
One of the pleasures of moderating post-show discussions with our audiences, as I did this week after a performance of Love Song, is the way in which our audience’s aptitude for engaging in insightful conversation about the play provokes new ideas – even when it is my job to be deeply familiar with the work already.
One member of this discussion was deeply struck by the brother/sister relationship between Joan (Molly Regan) and Beane (Ian Barford), seeing each of them as the savior for the other. Yet another suggested that Joan’s husband Harry (Fran Guinan) was the real hero of the story, pointing out how it is his efforts, first to help Beane and then Joan, that really propel the action of the play. This caused a third to chime in that Molly (Marianne Mayberry), and the power of imagination she represents, was the true catalyst from whom sacrifice is demanded for the betterment of the others.
The conversation was a useful reminder of the way in which any work of art, regardless of authorial intent, is always viewed through a variety of lenses – the choices made by the writer, the decisions made by actors, directors and designers in the production process, and the subjective point-of-view of any given audience member. The act of interpretation demands the collusion, and sometimes collision, of all of these. Each of these three audience members seemed to find their own reading of the play satisfying, but also appeared to gain something from hearing other perspectives. Despite spending much of my day in solitary contemplation of the merits of a given play, it made me think that genuine, full interpretation of any work is a wonderfully collaborative experience.