Die erste Vorstellung - Opening Night (1977)

you have to fight sophistication. sophistication comes to anybody who's been doing his job for a long time. but it's a trap, a kind of death.
cassavetes was a deeply spiritual filmmaker. from shadows to love streams his theme is spiritual growth and renewal - which in his work, to some extent, always involves personal upheaval and disruption. growth is painful because it asks us to leave old definitions of ourselves behind. in cassavetes' view, throughout our lives we build emotional cocoons that shield us from truth. the cocoon can be anything that lets us coast through experience: a job we take our identity from, a comfortable economic status, a marriage - any unexaminated definition of who we are and what our lives mean.
the master narrative of all of cassavetes' film is to force characters to shed their old skins. the events and interactions are battering rams to splinter the emotional and intellectual walls characters immure themselves within. as shadow's lelia, faces' maria forst, a woman under the influence's mabel, love streams' sarah, and opening night's myrtle illustrate, the discovery of who we really are can begin only when our routines are disrupted. we must be forced out of our places of comfort. breakdown is the first step in breaking through to reality. in fact, one might say that the breakdowns many of "cassevetes" characters undergo (especially the female characters) are evidence that there is still hope for them. not to break down, to maintain your old routines at all costs, to hold onto an established definition of yourself with a death grip - as figures like richard, zelmo, cosmo, and robert do - is to be truly damned.
the screenplay descibes the main characters in opening night as "the most exciting, dedicated members of the american theater". they are extremly talented professionals. they are so good that, as the company director manny victor puts it at one point, their scenes "bounce". perhaps they are too professional, too sophisticated, too good. myrtle's narrative function (for them and for herself) is to desynchronize their rhythms, to interrupt the "bounce", to create fights that won't be played "by the numbers" (as another line in the film has it). there is recurring joke that punctuates various on-stage scenes involving how dealing with a misplaced prop can either contribute energy to a scene or destroy it, and myrtle is a prop than won't stay where you want it to be either on-stage off. the question the film asks is whether the result is creativity or confusion.