Love Is My Sin

A couple of weeks ago I had the overwhelming privilege to see Love Is My Sin and this is what I wrote the next morning:

If we learn nothing else from the last standing of the great geniuses of the 20^th century stage, let it be the following two items. First, to start always with an empty stage, to build nothing but what’s needed to bolster the work at hand. Second, that “tradition, in the sense we use the word, means ‘frozen’” and that “all form is deadly”.

To see an effortless, elegant institution of these two great insights, one can encounter Brook’s Love is My Sin, the subtle and surprising etude of the master at peace. In under an hour of legato grace, the piece lilts through some twenty or so of Shakespeare’s sonnets performed as a vibrant and active memory play by two frank theatrical domestics Natasha Parry and Michael Pennington.

If you want to make an enormous mistake, you should purchase the little booklet that includes the text of the sonnets and follow along on the page. To do this (as too many at Friday night’s performance) misses most directly the handsome magic of their performance. At once presentational and deeply felt, you can see onstage a century of theatrical training on hand at every word, glance, gesture or breath.

The trouble with performing sonnets is that there are essentially two imperfect options. Either you can chop at them, parse them, and divide them between actors, or you can give them as whole thoughts. The trouble with the first form is that they are more dynamic for being the struggles of a single author; externalizing their arguments makes their conclusions feel forced: either a victory or a loss than an insight or a resolution. The trouble with leaving them all as soliloquies is that their form is so strict and predictable, that barring trance-like repetition, the formulaic back-and-forth of the performers becomes more like the world’s calmest tennis match than a piece of theater.

But Brook is too smart, and the performers are too great for either of these to be significant hurdles. The form of the piece is primarily of the volley option, but the memory structure allows for the performative, rhetorical sense of the sonnets to evoke examples of feelings felt and opinions held, argued for convincingly, re-created honestly, but not necessarily of the present. And then: an ultimate transcendence of accord concludes the work, and liberates, subverts, and ennobles the preceding form. I’m covered with waves goose-bumps just recalling it; I am literally fighting a flood of tears in an Au Bon Pain in La Guardia. Sure, I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, and Good God, that ever the only reason for tears was perfect theater, but Love is My Sin is unequivocally perfect theater, short of breath, long on depth, huge of heart; worthy of tears. I will hold it close.

Today On Stage

Here and here are two songs that aren't exactly cutting edge (I think the TV on the Radio song is about 5 years old) and they're very different, but both address a really important facet of current American life about which I know literally nothing: dance clubs. The Beyoncé track I think is particularly genius for its arhythmic techno glissandos at the very beginning because they economically evoke the din of a dance club. The TV on the Radio track is engaging to me partly for the way its initial moodiness internalizes the speaker's narrative, making it clear that we are very much inside his head rather than witness to a confrontation. I love both of these songs, they evoke a world I know really only through pop music and they seem overwhelmingly current. Importantly, I think these two songs have more to say about "Life In America Today" than a dispiriting portion of plays onstage tonight.

Unlike these tracks - which are abstract, evocative, fantastical - when playmakers set out to speak to today I think they too often resort to Naturalism, the ouroboros of the stage. We think that theater, because it can depict humans and their behavior literally, can achieve a kind of nirvana of perfect unaffectedness, and that that would be good, that only that would hold a mirror to ourselves. This is delightfully untrue. And I have proof.

I had the overwhelming pleasure of seeing three plays this week, all of which engaged in and deliberately diverted from naturalism. First, Backstage Theatre Company's production of Orange Flower Water, directed by Jessica Hutchinson. This show found a great balance between writerly naturalism (even soliloquies, for instance, were always the text of letters to absent characters), naturalistic acting, and a handsome and evocative abstract staging that kept the piece rooted in and honest to its own theatricality.

SEMI-TANGENT: The work of art historian Jas Elsner has interrogated the moment of Naturalism of Greek sculpture ("Classicism"), as opposed to the earlier dominant mode ("Archaism"), as a difference between the direct "gaze" of Archaic statues (here) and the "glance" of the classical style (here). The point is, for some reason, not looking at the beholder, came hand in hand with a new attention to really capturing and recreating the human form in a natural way. That is, the invention of the "fourth wall" is a kind of necessary or at least attendant invention with naturalism. Part of what makes it seem like life is that it doesn't know or doesn't care that we exist!

Hutchinson's staging in the round capitalizes on this glance in the most unpretentious way I've ever seen. Depending on where you sit in an early scene of seduction in the play, you are either treated to the singular journey of a man seducing a woman (whose face and indeed nudity are obscured) or the journey of a woman succumbing to an insistent lover (whose face and intentions are unseen). Fantastic. Moreover, since the set consists wholly of a bed that is rotated and locked into place by actors who sit in chairs onstage when not in scenes, even when we are drawn into naturalistic scenes it is always amongst the frame of a company of actors at work telling us a story. They never look at us or acknowledge us in the room, but they are not hidden to us as actors. So when their struggles are precisely the kind of quotidian, slice of life struggles of a thousand naturalistic plays, the content hits home much harder because they are shared by their presenters.

The second play was Mimesophobia in its Chicago premiere with Theatre Seven, directed by Margot Bordelon. This play by Chicagoan Carlos Murillo is ostentatiously presentational. Replete with two announcers/narrators, footlights, and actors who we are (with one fantastic exception) introduced as "not the real" character they are portraying. Part of the joy of this show which cleverly paints the struggle of depicting death through academia, Hollywood hackery, and its own ingenious theatricality is the fun the actors are having, but part of it is the way we see a complex intellectual concern that is entirely of our moment.

Lastly, this afternoon I saw Young Jean Lee's The Shipment. This breathless phenomenon is structured in three powerful and divergent acts that combine to evoke an unmissable statement about the African-American experience. The show is contemporary, magnetic, and its excellence is partly founded by the audience's ability to believe in and overlook the identity of its performers.

So. Recap. A completely amazing week on the theater front, bolstered by the certainty that life and living are more complicated than literalism demands. We don't need a "Long Day's Journey Into Hydrate" we just need to be cognizant of who directly we're engaging, not just the material, not just the matters, but the audience: why it matters now. There is an abundance of fresh genius for our stages. Enough even to compete with Beyoncé.

That's right, I brought it all home.

Super Smart

Very interesting thoughts about "new" audiences.

(Hat Tip: Thomas Cott)

Sense

Logic and consistency may be two of the most overrated virtues of theater-making. So many hours are spent puzzling over aesthetic coherency and logical progression that it becomes really easy to think that these are inherent virtues of artistic expression, requisite for comprehension by the public. This is not so.

The number two song on the bilboard charts is this. I will say that it is arguably the worst song ever, but, importantly, it makes no sense. This has not slowed its overwhelming success. Certainly music, especially pop music, especially pop dance music presumes a different kind of audience engagement than two hours of theater, but there's still a lesson here.

And while I don't actually want to particularly valorize the kind of Theater of Moments that is popular with a breed of visual directors, productions that are a string of individually conceived bits that may or may not tie loosely together, it's important that they exist as an option. And it's worth remembering that the kind of ruthless tyranny of "logical consistency" is an aesthetic option rather than a moral requirement.

I hope you didn't click on the link.

Resolution, Cont'd

Of course, I don't mean to say that resolution should be abandoned entirely. And Zev is correct in a sense, that what I really seem to be arguing against is bad resolution, but it actually is a bit deeper than that. What I mean to offer is that the necessity to resolve is unnecessary, and I don't believe this is a particularly inflammatory suggestion. Zev's claim "entertainment seems to almost require a destination" is importantly not an intrinsic quality. It's based on historical data, perhaps, and perhaps on expectations, but that's different from aesthetic requirement. Isn't a rock concert entertaining? What's the resolution there? What's the narrative arc? And transporting only really obliquely demands a destination, i.e. not here. Meeting people who don't exist, caring about them, encountering their problems: this is transportive.

Anyway, it's not really that I want to abolish or sneer at resolving in general. The crux of my argument was this part:

...a lot of plays take a long time to get to what the "plot" is going to be. We spend much of the first act meeting the characters only to be presented with the "problem" of the play just before the intermission. The audience activity of the first act is replaced with the passivity of events unfurling in the second act, and this seems a shame.

Well, doesn't it? When a play shifts to get "down to business" all we've learned of it so far changes from sum to background. The work we've done - audience participation in the real sense - becomes a down payment to the furtherance of a narrative we didn't demand. It's not that I don't like narrative, it's that I don't like this shift. I don't like being told to turn off. I don't need to watch a writer pat his own back for tying up all his loose ends. I just don't care. If you want to tell a story, tell a story. If you want to create a world and present problems, do that. If you want to do them both, do them both at once. But if you believe that you HAVE to resolve a story or you haven't made a play, you are wrong. Free yourself.

Abigail's Party, for instance (which you have to do yourself a favour and see), never has this shift, but it does have a narrative. The narrative consists of the accumulation of details throughout the play. There is no abrupt shift from exposition to narration, the play proceeds organically throughout. It also, brilliantly, doesn't have a resolution, it has a conclusion. A person could demand that the play have a third act, but it doesn't need it. The story has been told. The ingredients and the crisis have been presented, what happens next is not in the play.

Calls to Blood, on the other hand, did have an abrupt shift to narrative, but the point of the narrative was to make this tonal shift, and this shift did not serve to disengage but to reengage: what seemed to be a play about x is now a play about y. For this play a person did demand more scenes, but it doesn't really need it. The play doesn't tell the story of what happened next - that's not the play. Are there loose ends? ...Yep.

I know this all has a proscriptive tone, but what I'm arguing for here is more freedom rather than less. Forego the forced march. Enjoy the story you tell, don't feel obliged to resolve your plot for resolutions sake, or, especially, for my sake.

Resolution, Cont'd

Zev rolls his eyes at my previous post:

I think that a lot of the terms you mention theatre being about in the last paragraph imply a resolution, by their very nature. "Entertainment" seems to almost require a resolution--one of the primal points of storytelling seems to be the desire to give a narrative shape to life. Any work of narrative, even documentary, by its nature is shaped. It may not have an ending that perfectly satisfies (not all narratives are "Law & Order"), but it comes to something. To deny that primal desire seems perverse.

And if the purpose of theatre is to transport, doesn't that imply a destination? Most people taken on a trip wouldn't appreciate being kicked off the bus halfway through. If that's a conscious choice, it's one thing (some plays use that kind of dislocation very effectively), but it being negligence seems bizarre.

Now, that's not to deny that a good resolution is very hard to do well. Asking questions that are interesting through plot action is difficult enough. Resolving them in a satisfying way is rare. But simply the fact that resolutions are rarely done well seems like an insufficient reason to chuck them--plays are rarely done well, period.

Wilson Wants It All (and were you reviewing it? I'd love to read your thoughts in more depth.) is a pretty good example of a play where the ideas, the world, the staging, and the acting were all more compelling than the actual plot structure. Indeed, there were some pretty big plot and logic holes. At the time I saw it, they didn't bother me that much, but later thinking brought them out. I would still recommend the show--there's more to theatre than narrative--but that would certainly be a caveat.

So I guess my questions to you are: do you have a problem with resolutions as such, or just with poorly developed plots? And what would the art and the audience gain by not having them?

Resolution

Every book on play-writing ever written contains in some form an exhortation to resolve. Aestheticians ever argue this necessity on the grounds of narrative or emotional completion of the action presented, on the grounds, I suppose, that this is what the audience wants. Moralists (who, madder, more often capture my heart) insist that resolution comprises the civic legitimacy of the theater, that only by seeing horrors or pleasures rehearsed onstage can we be adequately prepared to face them in our own lives.

But: suddenly, recently I've found myself ambivalent about them. When reading plays at home I almost invariably put them down as soon as all the crises are in place. Of course I'll pick them up again and almost always be surprised - a good resolution is never a forced march no matter how inevitable it may seem - but nevertheless this is when my attention flags, when the pleasure turns to work.

Greek tragedy (and maybe Roman tragedy even more so) was based entirely on the struggle (moral, emotional, practical) between arguments over the course of action to take when presented with a problem. The conclusion - it's important to remember - was most often the least dynamic part, because, drawn from shared myths or recent past it was certain the audience knew where the story was going.

Today, of course, this is not at all true, and I understand the desire to tell a story with an ending and to watch a question that builds to an answer. Also, I've snarkily diagnosed the cliché of ambiguity that looms with self-satisfaction over the contemporary theater "of ideas."

So what's the problem? I think part of the reason I might find conclusions to be irritating is actually rooted in a different - almost opposite - problem. Specifically, a lot of plays take a long time to get to what the "plot" is going to be. We spend much of the first act meeting the characters only to be presented with the "problem" of the play just before the intermission. The audience activity of the first act is replaced with the passivity of events unfurling in the second act, and this seems a shame.

In The House's Wilson Wants It All (the first play in a while I've immediately wanted to watch again when the lights came up), for instance, the opening video is fantastic and the initial plot device is darling, the acting (particularly John Henry Roberts and Edgar Miguel Sanchez) is precise and exuberant and there's an eleventh hour speech that offers the most perfectly constructed villainy imaginable in America today, but for me the piece suffers in part from a desire to tie up loose ends and pursue the intricate but uncomplicated web it spins.

Why bother? I don't have any solutions for this, but, if theater is about entertainment, if it's about movement or transportation, if it's about recognizing humanity, if it's almost any definition you can offer, it can handily unburden itself from the need to resolve.