The Active Audience

I spent a pleasant afternoon at the MCA on Tuesday with my friend Stephen (Tuesdays are free!).  There was a lot of great stuff there and it's a beautiful space, but because I seem to be developing an obsessive one-track mind, I was particularly drawn to Little Face, a mobile sculpture by Alexander Calder.  The photo I linked to isn't that great, but the important thing is that it is clearly the form of a face composed of recognizable objects.  The mouth is the broken half of a reflector, like the kind found on the back of a bicycle.  This strikes me as really the greatest aesthetic trick of the human brain.  I can altogether at once appreciate the red object hanging by a string as a mouth and a reflector.  It's an important part of my thinking right now that while watching a play we never forget that we're in a theater.  An audience will be as active as you let it be.  A real possibility:  hold a gun onstage and call it an ice cream cone.  

Sure, there may be limits to human imagination, but my real point is that I think in producing plays we far too often confuse what an audience needs or doesn't need to be real.  In Grey Gardens, for instance, a scene begins with a golf ball tossed onstage and a group of golfers following after it.  We understand that we are to believe the golf ball was hit.  The caddy takes the ball from the child who picked it up and "sets up" the next hit.  What he really does is dramatically hold the golf ball then place it down on the ground and then take it away with the same stroke.  Then the golfer stands before where the ball had been placed (where we imagine the ball still is) and swings at nothing, at which point we hear a sound effect through the speakers of a swinging club and a struck ball.  It's strikes me that this is an inelegant moment in the production, precisely because it is unclear on what we need or don't need to see or hear.  Does the trick have an ideal spectator?  Someone that would watch the ball being placed and then look away until the swing only then to see that the ball is gone?  This is foolish and unlikely.  

The truth is, if we don't need to see him actually hit a ball, then we don't need to see the ball be placed anywhere--it is a solution that creates its own problem.  This doesn't mean we need to do away with all props, I don't really mean to incite everyone to theatrical puritanism, but what we should constantly recognize is that we have the freedom to be abstract, the freedom to be bare.  We should always build theater from nothingness, from a bare stage--because that's all we need.  When we start from a picture (moving or mental) we get confused as to what the theatrical experience really demands.

Beauty as a Choice

I've written about my preference for extradiegetic singing in musicals--songs that exist outside the 'reality' of the piece but express something  heightened or special.  These do seem to be the essential trait of musical theater as an independent genre.  As long as characters are singing ostensibly 'known' songs within the context of the narrative--even if these are new songs composed for the play--there is nothing in the musical that we wouldn't expect from theater in general.  But when we accept the added conceit of songs expressing unspoken (unspeakable) emotions or conditions, we enter the realm of The Musical.  

Grey Gardens offers an interesting example of this.  When Ms. Resnik plays Little Edie in the second act she employs two modes of singing.  When Edie is singing diegetically (to Jerry in "The House We Live In", or to the Maysles Brothers/Audience in "The Revolutionary Costume for Today"), she sings employing her thick New England accent.  She brilliantly sacrifices the 'beauty' in the song for the sake of her character.  But, when she sings extradiegetically in "Another Winter in a Summer Town" she sings it beautifully (in fact, really beautifully), and we can presume her voice is now unencumbered by her neuroses or her region and she sings from the soul.  

This is an amazingly effective choice and the kind of choice that shows the potential and the power (if, still, the sentimentality) of musical theater, and the rewards granted by taking the additional leap its genre demands of the audience.  To make beauty and ugliness an aesthetic choice is an uncommon position in this more conventional world, but it pays off for the performance and for the form.

It is convenient, perhaps, that we are to understand her soul's voice as beautiful.  Taking this line of argument to its extreme it would be interesting to hear what Polpot's voice (for instance) would sound like in an extradiegetic context (or how this would be applied to Sondheim's Assassins).   The real case may be that Ms. Resnik is simply singing 'neutrally' (luckily, this means beautifully) when her character is exempt from narrative demands.  Either way, I do think it is important in Musicals to differentiate these separate modes of singing as a means to examine their significance to the character, the narrative, and (of course) the audience.

Grey Gardens

I'm currently working as a spotlight operator for the Northlight Theatre's production of Grey Gardens.  Without saying anything about this particular production (which just seems like bad form), I do think that the script is immoral.  It is, however, selling well and the reviews are very positive, which is nice.  See Sun-Times, particularly.