Scott Joplin, the King of Ragtime, flat-lined again last Friday night at the Xavier Theatre. For a play about the life of Scott Joplin and his music, A Guest of Honor failed in honoring its lead character.
All the components were there: the music, the guest playwright, an interesting set and costume design, intriguing characters. Despite this, something was missing to link it all together: emotion-the life of Joplin’s music that brought audiences to their feet.
The arts have always been an avenue for expression and emotion. Through the arts, artists record their thoughts on life. Through the arts, people remember how to feel.
Pulses were not racing last Friday, and audience members were certainly not on the edges of their seats. A Guest of Honor lacks that extra something that reminds you you’re alive. It’s present in the script, and the actors said what was written; but it wasn’t delivered.
Ragtime evokes thoughts of old player pianos and smoky bars packed with people having a grand old time. Ragtime was the rave culture of its time. It was what people were listening to in the clubs, not what debutant daughters played in the parlor during high tea. Ragtime was fun; it was full of life.
Ragtime should be the secret star of A Guest of Honor, a theatrical history of Scott Joplin, but it was not. The plot of the play focuses on the family/business life of Joplin while he was living in St. Louis. It recounts the death of his daughter, Bethena Joplin, and his struggle to put his opera, A Guest of Honor, on tour.
Michael Dinwiddie’s original play dealt with the life of Scott Joplin through three characters: Scott the piano player, Scott the Dancer and Scott the Inerlocutor. A cast of three members wasn’t ideal for a university theater department to take on as a production. Dinwiddie was brought in, thanks to the Mellon Foundation, and the College of Arts and Science agreed to rewrite the play for a full cast of both black and white roles.
The rewrite, in terms of the script alone, was successful. A Guest of Honor reveals Dinwiddie’s talent as a playwright even from behind the veil of virgin acting and lack of musical flair. He intertwines humor and history in a fresh new way without leaving out or diminishing the issues of race that Joplin confronted.
Joplin was a composer-a man who simply wanted to share his music with the world. It is impossible then, to successfully produce a play that puts the piano player in the dark corner of the stage.
At first, the dual-piano set, which features a dummy, prop piano for the actors and a screened-in, second grand piano played by Oscar Williams, Jr., looks like a creative set-design solution to incorporate actors who can’t play the piano. And it might have been, except that the surrogate Joplin wasn’t able to project the essence of the Joplin rags and two-steps out into the theater either.
The flatness of the music didn’t end with Scott Joplin. The two classical pieces by Chopin and Faur? also floated about in musical mediocrity.
The life-force behind the story of Scott Joplin is his music. If you let that go flat, the story will die as well for it exists in his music-a fact that the cast and crew of A Guest of Honor proved far too well.
