Kill the Envious Moon

EXT. CAPULET'S HOUSE -- NIGHT

ROMEO appears from the shadows. JULIET appears on a balcony; backlit, her translucent nightgown reveals the silhouette of perfect breasts.

ROMEO
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east and Juliet is the sun!
Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou her maid art far more fair than she.

Good stuff. When performed midday, outdoors, as it was originally, the given circumstance, day, informs the moment. Evoking night can be more powerful, more purely theatrical, than showing night.

"...for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and begat a temperance that may give it smoothness," says Hamlet.

Same idea.

"...On your imaginary forces work," says Prologue. It's an old saw, this idea of getting the audience to do your work. A play is not an event to be witnessed. A play is the deliberate and artful manipulation of the audience's imagination. When I see a play, I'm paying the performers to move me rather than be moved. If their being moved moves me, so be it. If it doesn't, they're guilty of an odd kind of public masturbation and shame on them.

Film, at its best, preserves for all time a composition of pure emotion. I don't know what Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed are thinking or feeling when they kiss for the first time, but it sure as hell looks like desperation, loss, longing, joy, sorrow, passion, love and a lifetime compressed into a few strokes of genius. I see it in their eyes and feel it in my heart and that's what I'm paying for when I buy a ticket to a movie. That's the experience I'm after. Whatever it is those two are doing, that exact same moment would never work on stage.

The exact same emotional response might be evoked in an audience from the stage, but the getting there and the moment itself would have to be something entirely different and uniquely theatrical; we can't put on a different lens and do a close up.

Magic - illusions, slight of hand, rabbits from hats - doesn't really work on film. We don't buy it. We know the cinematic tricks in our hearts if not in our heads. Magic works when its right before our eyes. That's the test of true theatricality.

Magic is the theatre's kissing cousin.