What
the boilerplate also doesn’t mention is Aimee’s abusive boyfriend Kenneth
(Brian Gleeson), though he puts in an appearance too. As the play progressed, I
was kind of hoping against hope that this fellow—referred to as only
“boyfriend” at first, an offstage presence—wouldn’t be the last character
to show up onstage, because I knew that if he did, the suspense of the play
would be, for me, essentially over, because the domino effect of his presence
would send the rest of the characters on a path that seemed to me inevitable.
Sure enough, he arrives at the midpoint and sure enough, I roughly “saw” the
rest of the story. I casn’t go quite as far as saying schematic, nor can I say this experience is one most of the
audience would share. But it’s where I knew I’d seen this territory covered
before. Just not as elegantly.
For
me, most of Macpherson’s plays are a somewhat leisurely, sometimes brilliant,
verbal reworking of other people’s stories (particularly in the ghost
story/supernatural genre, into which The Night Alive does not
fall); either experimentation with familiar tropes (the ghost stories in The
Weir) or downright paraphrase of something
obscure (Seafarer struck me as highly
inspired—I won’t say
consciously—by an 80s Twilight Zone segment called “Dealer’s Choice” by Donald Todd. I don’t know anything
about Macpherson personally, but if he isn’t at heart a genre fanboy, I’ll eat
my cyber-hat.) What separates this reworking from theft is not dissimilar to
that which keeps charges of plagiarism away from Shakespeare; Macpherson gives
it a newness of treatment, of context, of character profile, of language; he
takes it out of the realm of “mere” pop culture and provides a high-toned
literary sheen, in the best sense of that phrase. And the mental deal I strike
with his work hearkens to an anecdote I once heard about a classical composer
who was asked by one of his students, “Maestro, is it permissible to borrow
from the work of others?” and gave the reply, “Yes, but you must pay back with
interest.”
The
Night Alive takes care of the vigorish…
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