Continuity, cont'd

The point is: filmic discontinuity is invisible. This is despite/because of its position as the essence of the medium. Making a film seem discontinuous is almost a trick now because we are so quick to fill in the gaps.

On stage, discontinuity is essentially stunning because everything is out in the open. Consider for instance the blackout before the show begins. This is creating discontinuity. The lie it offers is that suddenly, you are no longer in the space you were just in. Fantastic.

Discontinuity within a play (real, black-out discontinuity, not actors running around with cubes discontinuity) works a little bit differently. We have created a world together, and then, in an instant, it is completely destroyed. There is no telling - absolutely no telling - what world we'll be in next. (Although, of course, if the last line of the previous scene is "Hooray, let's all go to the zoo!" we might expect the Zoo.) So theatrical discontinuity strikes me as the best way to present fantasy, delight, and possibility onstage. Especially if there really are changes to the set etc., a real blackout (no glowtape, no kidding around) that rises to reveal a real change will always surprise and delight an audience. Because there aren't any tricks. My friend Dash used to do this magic trick where he puts a condom up his nose and pulls it out of his mouth. People always asked him how he did it. Did he have a second condom in his mouth? Did he hide it up his sleeve? No: he just did it. That's the magic - confronted with remarkable reality, we will invent an impossibly complicated alternative.

I've heard complaints that blackouts break up a show's unity, but never an explanation as to why that's essentially bad. What if that is exactly what they do: break up unity. Imagine a living room drama in which the great secret is finally revealed. Then black. A moment. Then lights up again. Nothing has changed, everything has changed, what happened in between? Right? That's delightful.

We have so many tricks. So many tricks that litter our stages any-old-how. We use ming vases to hold paper flowers 8 times a week all across the country. Will the revolution come from something no one ever thought of over the last 2500 years? Maybe. But we could also try just thinking about all the jewels we're overlooking.

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.

The Miraculous Medium

When the cinema was young, it was, with the peephole and the x-ray, part of a group of new mechanical attractions marvelous simply as technological feats. So at first, it was of little moment what was depicted onscreen, the remarkable thing was really its essential trick: to make a picture move. Any picture would do—the Lumières’ children playing on the lawn, a man on a bicycle, a train pulling into a station. It was the medium itself that was the star, and the material it used was only good inasmuch as it highlighted the possibilities of the medium.

Eventually the novelty wore off, and the enterprising projectionist looked to narrative to capture and hold an audience’s attention. He began by sequencing his random clips in such a way as to tell a vague kind of story, supplying himself a spoken narration. Finally he began looking for complete stories told on film. Because they were constructing narratives by means of actors portraying roles, the cinema found a guide in the theater. This older brother had two millennia worth of material to use and a bevy of willing talents and techniques that quickly were devoured by film.

Film was economical. With a projector, a screen, and a train ticket, a single film could generate profits for years. Movie tickets were then, as now, cheaper than theater and a film could be shown a dozen times a day without the actors keeling over from exhaustion. Furthermore, the cinema was quick to discover its unique abilities—the cross cut, the close-up, temporal (over spatial) continuity—and it became not a mere mechanical attraction, no more a simple sleight of hand, but an art.

As an art it began to distance itself from the theater. The critic André Bazin, for example, argued carefully for preserving the distinction of the two, even and especially when used in conjunction. German Expressionism of the 1920s to this day remains criticized primarily for its theatricality—its use of unnatural sets and makeup. As the cinema rose to the foreground of culture and imagination, the theater lost its seat as the popular art and retreated to itself, to its private harem of enthusiasts and educators.

But today the next phase is beginning, and it is a bone-achingly exciting time because the ground under the theater is shaking. You’ll laugh, but on the buses and subway trains of Chicago there’s an ad for the new stage musical at the Cadillac Palace theater—an adaptation from the film Dirty Dancing. The ads read: The Classic Story Onstage. Onstage. The ad campaign consists of an assertion of a miraculous medium. The theater has become an attraction for its own sake.

What does that mean for us in the theater, we who are so proud of our content? How could it be good news? It will be good news if we can succeed in identifying the attraction, capitalize on it, and then maintain the new audiences it brings as we head into the next inevitable step. Well, what does compose the theatrical attraction? Considering that Dirty Dancing is a musical perhaps it offers song, dance, and a certain kind of spectacle. It would be easy to think that what the theater needs to survive, then, is to dedicate itself solely to musical productions. This isn’t quite right, because the film of Dirty Dancing has music and dance—of a different sort surely, but it’s difficult to believe that the entire reason someone would be willing to pay $40 for a show they could rent for $4 is just to finally hear Baby sing. What the theater offers is the living encounter. And since it really is this simple, inherent aspect of the theater that promises to save it, then it truly can be saved.

The cinema’s inherent attraction was technological and so, like all technologies, this attraction faded. Indeed cinema has become so pervasive in our culture that its miracle is entirely invisible and the medium exists only for its content and its position as a cultural commonplace. The attraction of the theater, however, is not technological and can be experienced afresh at every performance. At any performance the actor could stare you in the eyes and call you out by name, or you in the audience could rise out of your seat and embrace the crying orphan onstage. It is only a communal will to complete a story that keeps these things from happening.

Rather than scoff and gag at the money being spent on the ‘theatricalizations’ of cinema which have so suddenly flooded the marketplace, we need to convert this event attendance into habitual attendance, focus the theatrical experience on the encounter, and scale back inessential features that drive up ticket prices and distract from this essential attraction. Overdressed theater is like a film of a still photograph—it misses the whole point.

This isn’t to say we have nothing to learn from the cinema. We need to try new methods to advertise theater to new audiences. Filmed clips of plays online will never work. Never. We should try ‘trailers,’ bits and scenes performed live at other shows around town. We should emphasize ‘local’ before that grows stale (if its not too late). But most of all we should never think of audiences as nuisances, rabble, or masters, but as partners. I don’t think we need to fear that theater will disappear completely, but if we don’t capitalize on this fresh moment and the attraction evidenced by these new adaptations, the theater will continue to slink unnoticed in the purgatory of ‘high art’ with jazz and contemporary painting as its lonely neighbors. The theater can decide today to be vital: let’s.