shoop and superior donuts

Superior Donuts is recent Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts' new Broadway play, doomed to be something of a bust as it closes early next month. Critics have been fairly kind, but they all reference TV in their reviews--sitcoms (sometimes a specific sitcom--either Laverne and Shirley, in which Donuts star Michael McKean appeared for many years, or Chico and the Man, with which the play shares something of its setup) or after-school specials (those popular shows that usually came on at 4:00 in the afternoon on a weekday where the characters learned valuable life lessons about hunting, old people, or drugs, for example). And they're exactly right--I've never been witness to a play that so thoroughly evokes the staging, rhythm, goofy supporting characters, and resolutions of a TV situation comedy. Critics who like the play immediately take on a Seinfeldian "Not that there's anything wrong with that" approach to calling the play a sitcom, and I think the play, audience response, its lack of success on Broadway, and (I would imagine) its future healthy life in university and community theatre bear some discussion.

How sitcom-like is the play? The examples would make a long, long list. First, as I've mentioned, there's the set-up--a young African-American man named Franco hustles his way into an assistant position with the grumpy old Vietnam draft evader who runs the titular Chicago donut shop (Cue Jose Feliciano music: "Franco... don't be discouraged... the aging hippie dude, he ain't that hard to understand..."). Then there are the plot complications--the older man is scared to ask the goofy but lovable female cop who has a crush on him out, so Franco gives him some pointers regarding his beard and ponytail: "You know who looks good in pony tails? Girls. And ponies"--a good sitcom joke that Freddie Prinze, Jimmie Walker, or Bea Arthur could knock out of the park to the delight of a laugh track, and that's just what happens in the theatre. Plus there's the two shady hoodlums who are dogging Franco, who has not quite left behind his outside-the-law past, guys you wouldn't take seriously on an episode of Law and Order, but who would fit nicely in a very special episode of, say, Roseanne. The play even looks like a sitcom--I've been in the studio audience for filming a couple of sitcoms here and there, and the functional set, the snow outside the door with the parked car and the parking meter--it's all there, a complete sitcom set. There are at least two examples of the classic "entrance in a goofy costume" gag. Moreover, the sitcom atmosphere pervades the theatre audience as well. Not only do we hear the equivalent of a TV laugh track, but at the points where the heroes suffer (sometimes violent) setbacks, we also get the "Ohhhh" and the gasp-track. There's a moment toward the end where the annoying but lovable Russian neighbor buys the donut shop, which I think is there so Letts can let us know he's read The Cherry Orchard, but the play as a whole is a fascinating example of one form of media totally informing another--the play as sitcom.

In the end, is this necessarily bad or good? The first time I tried grad school, I had a playwriting instructor who actually scored with a fairly major play in the 1950s--Take a Giant Step. He stated, quite flatly, that audiences won't go to the theatre to see sitcoms--meaning that before TV, what we would now consider sitcom rhythms and situations were common elements of many popular Broadway comedies, but now ("now" in this case was the mid-1980s) audiences wouldn't make a special trip to the theatre to see what was pretty common on TV. And in a way, I think he's right--in this case, at least, Superior Donuts might make it to just about 100 performances. Nevertheless, the audience reaction that I witnessed speaks to a very real power that sitcom characters and situations have. We, as an audience, laugh, ohhh and awww, and gasp on cue. And it's not just because the sitcom is well-executed with Great Direction and Actors--in fact, there's a fight scene in Donuts that's downright poorly staged and executed. The power in the form of storytelling that we call "sitcom" is real and has its place, and we might want to re-think the idea that "sitcom" is an automatic putdown when describing a piece. But if sitcoms don't belong on Broadway, what does, exactly? That's a question too big for a blog.