Changed my Mind

After a spiel lamenting what I saw as a kind of weak-minded hero worship of Shakespeare, Jack Tamburri took me to school with his response:

This is the magic of Marvel Comics.

Bear with me.

A number of writers, many with little actual writing ability, have written the adventures of, say, Thor, over the past 50 years. The characters’ voices, motivations, and histories are remarkably inconsistent as a result.
The pleasure of reading Marvel comics over many years is the imaginative work the reader must do to reconcile those inconsistencies–to fill in the blanks between issues, between panels, between runs of writers. As a reader, I write like half the story, and end up much closer to the characters–more emotionally invested as a result.
This is the pleasure of the principle of perfect intention. Start from the assumption that every word, every comma is vital. Then you must do imaginative work to reconcile inconsistencies and give them reasons to exist “in-continuity”. In Marvel letters pages, this was called the “No-Prize”–a fan would write in with an in-story solution to what is blatantly a coloring error or an editing gaffe (Harry Osborn’s shirt changed color in two panels of the same scene because he’s actually a shape-shifting alien!). Directing (or acting in) Titus Andronicus is a series of No-Prizes.
This is also the thinking behind “ambiguity” or “emotional storytelling” or “dream logic.” Make the audience participate in telling the story. This is an extremely important – nay, vital – part of the power of theater.

Well, this is absolutely fantastic and certainly correct.

I'll still raise two caveats, however. First, an interesting difference with the Marvel comics example is that everyone understands that the "smoothing" creative act belongs to the audience. Makers' "errors" etc. are accepted, willfully, as true, and then worked through by the audience. Amazing.

Secondly, I don't think it's true exactly in the theater that we extend the same kind of license to every author that we extend to Shakespeare, and I think that's really what I was trying to treat. Excepting a text as complete is, I now am certain, a great creative act of reception. Privileging one dead genius is still hero worship.

Ooh lastly, the difference in theater is that this receptive act does not necessarily extend to the audience. In a comic book if a frame has a coloring error or something like that the audience takes it as it may. In theater if a script has a plothole or a complication, ostensibly the production team will smooth this out - before it ever gets to an audience.

All the same, a great response, and a wonderful example of audience activity. Thanks, Jack.

Forbidden Interpretation

                             [...] You should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.

I'm starting to work on my lines for this summer's production of Macbeth at First Folio Theatre directed by Nick Sandys.  I'm playing a couple of small ensemble roles (and fighting!) and I'll be understudying the role of Banquo. The quotation above is from Banquo's first line in the play and already it's thoroughly apparent why Shakespeare is so great.

His audience is looking at men playing women.  While we'd like to pretend as though this must have been alienating, we know how easily theater audiences can overcome conventions in their imagination of a production.  The stage crew that you don't see, for instance, or the two chairs side by side that become a car.  But Banquo's line brilliantly exploits this particular convention.  He is "forbidden from interpreting" that the men playing women are women, but they are, but not quite.  He is saying that he is having difficulty making the required (conventional) interpretive leap.  By what is he forbidden? His eyes.  By what is he compelled?  His reason/imagination.  

Thus onstage magic and theatricality are the same.  Banquo's line invites the audience to doubt what we accept is true on account of the evidence of what we know is true, and yet still to uphold what is clearly not true in order to tell the story.  Fantastic.

Pad Thai and MURDER!...oh, and theater

My sister and I picked up some food after work at The Lieutenant of Inishmore last night.  As I was standing at the counter paying, the owner's eyes darted at my forearms and fingernails pink from mopping up stage blood, and accented with occasional clumps and swashes of deep red.  

Late Night Thai: What happened?

Me: I'm sorry?

LNT: What happened?  Your hands.

Me: Oooh, uh, em, I work at, uh it's uh stage blood.  I work at a theater.  The show, um, lot of fake blood.  It's fake.  Fake blood.

LNT: (laughing and smiling) You not kill somebody?

Me: (hands up, backing away, smiling) I swear, officer, it's corn syrup!

I guess the interesting thing about this is how, in the theater, objects act too.  Some of them are type cast.  That chair is playing a chair.  That clock is playing a clock.  But that corn syrup is playing blood and the corn syrup can't break character.  

I like to think about the magic of the collective will to storytelling that the theater represents for me. What I'm wondering about now, however, is whether the acting that objects do - becoming signifiers sometimes of themselves, sometimes of similar or disparate object - is a product of the breadth of this will to include every aspect or of the focus of this will to disregard obstructing details.  Certainly the result is the same, but the process of this imagination could be exploited further if understood accurately.

Facts and Fictions

Smart.  Last night I saw Red Tape Theatre's Enemy of the People.  If you haven't seen it yet you may want to stop reading now because I want to talk about a really amazing trick that works in part, by surprise.  As in my response to A Red Orchid Theatre's The Unseen, I am constantly astonished by the simplicity of the creation of wonder in the theater.  Because, unlike film, a theater audience is constantly constructing reality from a series of rules that are accepted but utterly transient.  In The Unseen, of course I know that Danny is just standing on a stage, of course I even know that it's Danny.  But I've built him into a cell and I've built him into Wallace. When he disappears during a blackout, and I'm terrified that he's been abducted and is being tortured, I've done that.  Nothing that is true has been transcended, but everything I've made has been used to exploit what is true when the two confront each other.

In some ways the opposite of this miracle is undertaken in a brilliant surprise in James Palmer's direction of Enemy of the People. At the start of the performance the curtain speech requests that every audience member leave the theater completely during the intermission.  Here's what's true: we are in a church gymnasium, we are at a performance by a small theater company in it's second year.  We are willing to believe, in a race of thoughts, that we need to leave so that a significant set change can occur, a little odd, but hey that's storefront theater.

At intermission we casually leave the theater and sort of any-old-how mosey into a little lobby where there are some drinks and plenty of space to sit or stand.  Intermission is unremarkable. Then, one of the actors comes out into the lobby and walks briskly to a group of people, maybe they are friends of his.  A little weird, but...so it goes.  Suddenly it's obvious: the next scene was supposed to be a town hall meeting.  Fact: we are in a meeting room in a small church.  We create: we are at the meeting.  

That's it.  Suddenly we are at a Town Hall meeting.  The provision of drinks, the ample seating, Palmer used the facts of our condition to create a theatrical miracle.  It's the employment of these facts that I want to advocate.  A phone rings: we all know.  A prop is dropped, we all know.  The cohabitation of facts and fictions doesn't "take us out," isn't a "distraction," it's the foundation of theatrical artifice, and oh my god, it's rewarding.

The Tempest

Tonight I saw The Tempest at The Steppenwolf and, in general, I liked it.   Above all there are two things that really struck me about the performance:  one that I really loved and that opened my eyes, one that left me deeply disappointed.  Good news first.

Depth.  It's so simple we never even think about it, but another aspect of the genius of theater is depth -- simple, literal, spatial depth.  Film has no depth in this sense.  Light is insubstantial and it is laid against a screen -- necessarily thin.  Even shadow puppets (another medium of shadows, light, and screens) imply depth, but film is predicated on translucence, and the physical presence of film is only millimeters thick.  The stage and staging of The Tempest, under the direction of Tina Landau, however, insists on depth.  The stage is largely empty and from the house we can see all the way back to the cinderblock wall, every drop, every traveler, and ever set piece is partial -- pipes and short curtains, narrow screens -- so that we are provided units of measurement in space.  In a brilliant scene Ferdinand moves a pile of wooden girders from up right to down left where they remain in a pile for the rest of the show.  And by which we can record movement in the space.  Most moving, perhaps, was the amazing moment in the masque when several booms with large hanging flowers descend over the stage, fixing a beautiful grid upon the scene.

Additionally in group scenes, of which there are many, the Ms. Landau makes engaging use of lines and clumps.  In the scene, for instance, when the King and his cohort first find themselves on the island they form a kind of circle facing in all directions and examining their surroundings.  Then, when confronted by Prospero at the end, they are in almost a straight line as Prosero maneuvers around them.

The terrible moment in the play was the very last one, but it was so bad it's almost infuriating. Of course the reason it is so frustrating is because it came so close to being brilliant.  Here's the final speech of The Tempest, so I never forget it:

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

Amazing: the speech continues to perpetuate the story while not only acknowledging the audience but demanding their activity, and not the "audience participation" of becoming actors or storytellers, but truly participation as an audience -- applauding and completing the story by this collective imagination.  Frank Galati does this speech beautifully.  He begins by removing his coat and his hat, setting them off (on that pile of wood!).  He crosses casually centerstage and glances back at the costume pieces like he might have left Prospero there.  He looks right at us and the lights have changed a little, very clear and simple -- a man raised on a platform.  He says the final words, asking for the applause of the audience "Let your indulgence set me free." There is a miniscule pause (one second max) then a sound cue and a blackout.  

This is perverse and cowardly.  The stakes have been made very clear, if we do not applaud and even more importantly do not send him to Naples all is lost.  He has forsworn his magic: this is the only way.  What should happen, what I was certain would happen, is that he stands there waiting until we applaud.  The blackout and "swoosh" sound cue ends the play before it's over. The end of the play is everyone agreeing to send Prospero home, or -- and Shakespeare, must have understood somehow that this was a possibility -- we decide he should be confined on the island forever.  This production takes the audience out of creative act of the theater and it broke my heart.

My heart is strong enough to remember a good night at the theater, the visuals really are stunning and there are some good performances, if you get a rush ticket you should go, but you should try to applaud before they cut to black.

(Be forewarned: there are vests in this production of a Shakespeare play.  If you are sensitive to such things, you should stay at home.)

Conspiracy and Theatricality

Anne Nicholson Weber reminded me of this great excerpt from her interview with the great Nicholas Hytner in Upstaged.  

Throughout the history of the theatre, theatre artists have wanted to provoke their audience using alienating devices such as masks, boys playing girls, dance, verse dialogue -- devices which quite plainly do not produce a literal image of the world outside. They say, “This isn’t the real world, this is a poetic image of the real world through which we can agree to discover stuff about the real world” -- exactly the same way as if I am a Shakespeare heroine, I have to put on man’s clothes, to be not myself, in order to discover who I am and where I fit in the world. What we’re doing here is conspiring together: let’s make our world not the real world in order to discover what the real world is like.

I don’t think this is a feature of film as a form, but it is of the stage. And over and over again, you see theatre artists pushing this as hard as they can. What flashes in my mind is an example from the play I’m working on at the moment, The Winter’s Tale. I’ve not counted them, but seven or eight times in the last act, in preparation for his final coup when the statue of Hermione comes to life, Shakespeare has someone say, “This is like an old tale”, “This is a mouldy old tale”, “This is like an old tale still”, “If this were shown you on the stage you’d hoot at it.” He keeps insisting, “What I’m showing doesn’t make any sense, it’s not real,” drawing attention to the unreality of it, because he’s written 35 plays by now and he knows that we will believe, and in fact that the more that he tells us that we won’t believe, the bigger the shock and the huger and more resonant the thrill when we do. And at the end of an evening, the more you feel that you’ve achieved something -- that something has been required of your imagination and you’ve given it -- the better you feel.

Always.

It's interesting to me that he uses the terms "alienation" and "conspiracy" in such close proximity and in some sense to refer to the same thing.  What gets alienated in this context is the story, the actors reinforce their relationship with the audience at the expense of their relationship with the narrative.  Fantastic. 

Audience Participation

The new CW is up at The New Colony.  It's on "Audience Participation," let me know what you think.

Presence

It's an excellent trick.  Lights up: two prison cells, one man in each cell sitting alone on his bed.  Lights down.  Lights up: one man lying on his bed, one man standing doing a calculation on a wall.  Lights down.  Lights up: the man in the left cell stands facing out, he looks focused and frightened, the right cell is empty.  Oh my God: what has happened?

This is the opening to The Unseen at A Red Orchid, and I highly recommend it. The production on the whole is powerfully acted and intimately, nimbly staged.  But I can't stop thinking about those opening seconds.

When the audience enters the house the two actors are already on the set, each prisoner in his cell, trying to sleep.  We know they are prison cells because 1) the walls are of big blocks of stone and the stage is split into two small spaces, 2) the beds are thin boards nailed to the walls, 3) the actors are dressed in rags and look gaunt and filthy, 4) we hear an insistent drip and maybe some distant machinery, 5) the only things in the cells with the actors are a bowl, a bucket, and a spoon.   Notice anything missing?  Bars: what may be the preeminent signifier of incarceration is absent, but we don't really mind.  It could be simply because we are sufficiently accustomed to the "Fourth Wall" convention that it doesn't particularly matter what the wall is.  

At any rate, already, some cognitive work has been necessary for the audience--before the play has even really started.  We have worked to create the space suggested, and what is evidently permeable--an empty space--seems like an insurmountable obstacle.  The play then begins with the sequence I just described (or something like it).  It is, in some ways, a cinematic trick.  Lights up and lights down to indicate the passage of time and create distinct tableaus is the theater's best approximation of jump cuts (Stoppard calls them 'Smash Cuts' in Rock 'n' Roll).  But the miracle of this trick in the theater is that, unlike in a film, we have to negotiate the physical presence of the actor.  So when the figure on the right disappears, we 'know' that the character (whose name we don't yet even know) is being interrogated or beaten or something terrible, but we don't know what happened to the actor.  How did he disappear?  In a film nothing could be more pedestrian, but on stage disappearing remains one of the most incredible tricks imaginable.  

Brilliantly then, I think, this production simultaneously evokes and exceeds a cinematic commonplace toward a remarkable theatrical moment.   We have created the bars ourselves, we have imprisoned the actors with the strength of our imaginations to such an extent that what is almost certainly true--that the actor escaped simply by walking out and down the steps--seems impossible, and our hearts freeze.  When the actor reappears just as instantly, and we can see something terrible happened it's the same shock again, but now the play begins and we have no more time to think.