The Stare

When you have a handlebar mustache, you quickly come to accept a certain amount of staring. This could be unsettling, I imagine, but it can't be surprising. I have in fact, found it a great boost in confidence to be able to attribute any sideways glance, any uneasy interaction to the presence of an absurd hirsute appendage on my upper lip.

But always I end up cutting it. And then, that confidence is gone and the unsettling power of the stranger's stare is redoubled with my armor gone. I wonder if my fly is down, or my hair is crazy, or why my plain face would merit even a sideways glance.

Onstage, we are over-easy with staring. In real life the slightest glance is powerful and strange. You can feel it without knowing it. People don't stare at each other in an unmarked way. A flirting couple on the street will look in each others' eyes for mere seconds in ten minutes of conversation. Onstage this whole scene would easily be done without the actors ever breaking their gaze.

There are a few reasons why we might indulge in this eye-contact so frequently. First, actors look at each other like skydivers or trapeze artists look at each other: there's a lot on the line and they need to know their partner is on the same page. Second, I wonder if there's something in replicating the gaze that the actors' are feeling from the audience. Perhaps in a room where fifty people are staring at you, it feels less strange to stare at someone else, and directing your focus in this over-concentrated way helps distract you from the stares you are receiving. Lastly, and most likely, we have been intending to exploit the power of the stare as a means to heighten the action onstage, but, by overdoing it, it's become a genre-marker rather than a site for increased meaning. Let's reclaim the power of looking onstage by using it less and using it purposefully.

The Strangest Mechanic in Ireland

During the last nine months of working various stage crew positions at the Northlight Theatre, I've been exposed to a lot of different ideas about logistical aesthetics, for lack of a better term.  The most customary "negative" clothes - clothes that indicate aesthetic irrelevance - are just simple black pants, shoes, and long-sleeved shirt.  The origin of this must be blending in when the lights are out, and so being more or less actually invisible, but the custom has grown so familiar that we can accept the invisibility of the crew even in bright light.  I imagine there could be relatively little outcry, for example, even if in the middle of a period piece someone in black with a wireless headset walked onstage and set a letter on a desk.  

Alternatively, sometimes the decision is made that the crew would "stand out less" if they were dressed to match the setting of the play.  To that end, in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for instance, the crew was all dressed in Victorian British outfits and I think there is an evident logic behind this.

In The Lieutenant of Inishmore, however, the crew has a lot of blood to clean up and so we've all been issued black coveralls that we wear to keep from getting our bodies or clothes drenched in stage blood.  The problem this presents is that only at one point during the play is there a crew person seen onstage (this happens to be me) and this person's task is to enter and strike a woman's bike.  I bring this up because unlike blending in with period costume or acknowledging a customary, if clichéd, practice of black pants and shirt, it is unclear if what I'm wearing reads as attention negative clothing or if it, in fact, draws attention.  If several of us entered at once or if we consistently were visible carrying out logistical business we would quickly recede into negative space.  But with only one entrance, what is an audience to think?  There does, after all, seem to be a strange mechanic with a handlebar mustache walking along an Irish country road stealing women's bicycles.

My friends who have seen the play assure me that it is not at all distracting, but I like that it has drawn my attention again to the aesthetics of logistics in the theater, an area too much overlooked and that I think may be expressed in a few cliché watch columns I have brewing. More to come.