Theatre--Playwright's Review/Note

This is a rare treat for everyone who reads this blog: Cody Daigle, whose show Providence was performed last weekend at Cite Des Arts, has agreed to "review" his own show. What we get in the following is a glimpse of what the playwright sees when he watches his own work produced. I welcome all of those involved in local theatre to offer their own insight into the work that they do. It will be clearly marked, so that readers understand that it is not the typical review written by an objective critic.

I've had the privilege of seeing my play, Providence, produced twice –once in New York and once here in Acadiana. The two productions couldn't be more different, and in thinking about these two productions of the same play, I was reminded how much I love (and hate) being a playwright.

Providence asks a lot of the company producing it. It demands a scenic design that will allow the present and the past to merge seamlessly together. It demands actors to shift from one reality to the next in mere moments. It demands direction that keeps the play from becoming too maudlin or downbeat. And it demands a company that can find humor in even the play's bleakest moments.

The Eunice Players Theatre production, which played last weekend at Cite des Arts after a run in Eunice last November, took on the challenges of the play, and in many ways, succeeded in meeting them. Did it conquer everything? Not quite. There were still some pacing glitches (for me, most notable in the play's overlapping sections). There were some transitions that, if quicker, would have made some structural ideas clearer. And some performances missed the mark tonally at times, either going too far for the emotional moment or not going far enough.

Were all those problems solved by the New York production? No. While the New York production had a pace I liked (the NYC production was almost 30 minutes shorter than the production here,) there were tonal oddities and missed moments that weren't what I envisioned when I sat down to write.

But I don't level all the blame on the companies that produced the show. There are still things I want to fix – speeches in Act Two that can use some pruning, jokes that can be refined to work better, moments that can be tweaked to work better and, when I'm ready to really spend some time on it, writing in some new ideas about Marc and Sara's storyline that surfaced while watching the show here at Cite.

Any playwright worth his salt knows that the work is never done. Plays can always be improved and every night an audience experiences your work is an opportunity to learn more about your play and discover ways to make it better.

I think it's terrific that Acadiana audiences were able to see two very different locally-written plays in the matter of a few weeks. It speaks volumes about our cultural community and about the people who work hard to make theatre here.

To value every contribution – not just the ones that make us feel comfortable or make us laugh or make us feel "edgier" -- and honor what is good in it and speak honestly and fairly about what could be improved isn't always an easy thing. But it's how good theatre gets made. It's why I can love every single person who made this production of Providence possible and admire how hard they worked to make the show happen and still be able to say, "Next time, I hope we can do this, instead."


I'm proud of them. And I'm proud of the play. I'm grateful to thepeople who went to see the show.

And I'm eager to get back to work on it.