The Bat

 

The cold reading group did The Bat last Saturday, a three-act play from 1920 by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, anthologized in Burns Mantle’s The Best Plays of 1920-21. I was an enthusiastic disliker of this play, saying things like, “I’d be interested in looking at an anthology of the worst plays of 1920-21, just to see what the competition was like.” I didn’t warm to any characters, I didn’t find the disagreeable ones amusing, the set-up was too hard to follow, and the reveal at the end was not worth the work of getting there. No lines stuck with me; I didn’t sing any little Bat-songs when I walked the dog after. (Everybody has an off night.)

 

I realize in retrospect what-all I wasn’t allowing for: the effectiveness of the stage action, which is particularly important in this play, and also the way a play like this would hit people who had not seen hundreds of mystery plots on television, for whom the reveal at the end was much less predictable.

 

Afterward, I thought I wouldn’t think any more Bat-thoughts, but I did. I am not a mystery reader (with Agatha Christie as the lighthouse of my reading world), and so am insulated from this play’s particular charms. However, even for the devotee of mysteries, this kind of short mystery play is headed for self-destruction. The fun of a mystery is to have one’s expectations overturned: people are not what they seem, locked rooms have innumerable points of access, good people have murderous possibilities, and evil can be even worse  (and cleverer) than one can imagine. I think the possibilities for surprise are limited, so that, after a while, one has seen all the major ones, if one reads much, or goes to the theater much, and one is left with the question, “Which trick will get played on me this time?” So, if a play – or a story or a novel – depends solely on the mystery, it will deliver less jolt as people get more experience with locked rooms, secret panels, and smooth-talking strangers. One solution, obvious in P.D. James novels, is to give readers (or viewers) other things to like, besides mystery: characters and human dilemmas to engage with, recurring detectives to follow through their tortured lives. These combine very nicely with mysteries: having people confront murder is a helpful way of seeing who’s on stage, what the real relationships are, what happens to habits and personas under strain. So, this play made me aware of the pressure in the direction of “mystery plus” by being (for me) mostly mystery, not enough plus. 

 

It also made reminded me of all the good work that has been done in television police shows of a bread-and-butter sort (The Mentalist, Hill Street Blues, Bones, Crossing Jordan, Rizzoli and Isles, Monk, Astrid, and many others). It is tempting to say, “Another one of those things.” But the mysteries often work, and, when they don’t, the other story elements carry the show along nicely. We are swimming in pretty good writing, writing that stands up well next to theater pieces, which get more hype. It is hard to appreciate the cultural moment one inhabits; I can imagine people in Shakespeare’s time saying, “I suppose we have to go see this Othello thing; everybody will have an opinion about it at the horse trough tomorrow.” I can also imagine someone in 2050 saying, “What a great time it must have been, when Deadwood and The Wire were available for the first time, and lesser things of quality were showing up EVERY WEEK!”