Happy Daylight Savings Time Day. I once went a whole day without realizing that the clocks had been set back, and turned up over an hour early for a show at the Shubert Theater. I wandered the empty lobby thinking “Wow, what a bomb. The theater is going to take a bath on this one.” I was knocked back into the proper time zone when an usher rushed past me, busily adjusting his black tie and jacket—like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland only early instead of late.
Here are a few plays concerning time, or the lack thereof:
1. J.B. Priestley’s “Time Plays.” The playwright been greatly affected by the book An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne, which popularized the concept of simultaneous time streams. The most overt, and best-known of the many Time Plays is An Inspector Calls, in which clues to a murder appear before the murder does. The other well-known one is Time and the Conways. Others include Dangerous Corner and I Have Been Here Before.
2. Dear Brutus by J.M. Barrie. He played with concepts of time in Peter Pan, where Wendy grows up but Peter does not, but in Dear Brutus J.M. Barrie uses an enchanted woodland area behind a manor house to rewind and reset the lives of nearly a dozen different people. There was an exquisite production of the play, directed by Gregory Boyd, at Westport Country Playhouse in 2005.
3. Time Stands Still by Donald Margulies. Time does not actually stand still in this relationship drama involving a photojournalist newly returned to Brooklyn after being injured on assignment in Iraq. I mention it because many of Donald Margulies play with the concept of time, and it often does stand still in a way so that a moment can be crystallized, analyzed and thought about deeply. His 9/11-themed one-act “Last Tuesday,” which had its premiere at the Long Wharf in 2003, had a particularly profound time-stopping moment when choirboys burst into song on a dreamlike Metro-North commuter ride.
4. I came across a video of an intriguing time-themed puppetry piece staged earlier this year by a new company, Collapsing Horse, at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. Monster/Clock: A Play on Time concerns “Toby, a castigated monster and apprentice watchmaker.”
5. It’s a Wonderful Life. All about the bank deadlines, and inescapable this time of year. For that matter, A Christmas Carol is all about turning back the clock, with Scrooge zipping into the past and future and even commenting on the efficiency of the spirits working their magic in a single night.
6. Rip Van Winkle. Joseph Jefferson’s adaptation of Washington Irving’s short story, in which Jefferson also starred, was one of the most successful theater productions of the 19th century, with Jefferson himself playing the character for tens of thousands of performances over a period of 40 years. His son took over the role in the 20th century, and recordings and films were made of both Jeffersons as Rip. (Joseph Jefferson, of course, is the guy for whom the prestigious Joseph Jefferson Awards for outstanding Chicago theater are named.) Here’s a two-minute bit of a scene in which the celebrated napper reunites with his family.
7. Time and Again. The 2001 musical version of the film version of the Jack Finney novel about being about a century late for a very important date.
8. Forever Plaid. The apotheosis of the one-final-concert type of show. The musical Buddy extends Buddy Holly’s Clear Lake concert, the night of his death, into a whole, but Forever Plaid does it one better by letting a deceased fictional group perform their final gig posthumously.
9. Molnar’s Liliom and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel. How important is it that time stands still in Heaven, or Purgatory for that matter? You can freeze in age at the time you are apparently most handsome and upstanding, when planning a visit to your now-teenaged daughter.
10. Theater done in real time. These were all the rage in the 1980s. I once saw a show at the experimental theater Mobius in Boston which was set in a kitchen. A cast member put a chicken in the oven, then left the room. As an audience, we had to decide whether to hang around and wait for the hours it would take for the chicken to be cooked, not knowing when exactly the dialogue portion of the play would resume.
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