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.

A Crooked Road

An open mind and a critical mind. Too often in the arts these seem to be mutually exclusive traits. I'm reminding myself constantly that they are not.  Cliché Watch, for instance, is only fun as long as it isn't catty and criticism in general is only meaningful as long as it starts neither with crossed arms and a frown, nor absolute doe-eyed subjectivism. A man who succeeded in his day to be both open and critically minded was the genius of Russian Formalism, Viktor Shklovsky who writes this on the nature of art in Theory of Prose:

Every person who has ever examined art closely, apart from those led astray by a defective theory of rhythm as an organizational tool, understands this question. A crooked, laborious poetic speech, which makes the poet tongue-tied, or a strange, unusual vocabulary, an unusual arrangement of words - what's behind all this?

Why does King Lear fail to recognize Kent? Why do both Kent and Lear fail to recognize Edward? So asked Tolstoi in utter astonishment about the underlying laws of Shakespearean drama. This comes from a man who knew greatly how to see things and how to be surprised by them.

Why does the recognition scene in the plays of Menander, Plautus and Terence take place in the last act, when the spectators have already had a presentiment by then of the blood relationship binding the antagonists, and when the author himself often notifies us of it in advace in the prologue?

Why is it that, in fashioning an Art of Love out of love, Ovid counsels us not to rush into the arms of pleasure?

A crooked road, a road in which the foot fells acutely the stones beneath it, a road that turns back on itself - this is the road of art.

What Shklovsky is getting at in this passage is the essential otherness, the necessary difficulty of art as opposed to what Peter Brook calls "any-old-how," that is, real life. For art to work, you sort of have to know it's art.  A teacher gave me a great example once.  If you're sitting in your apartment and you look across the street into the window there, and you see a man smothering his wife with a pillow, you will not call your friends and say "Hey, you gotta come over, I'm watching this great tragedy."  But if Othello is playing somewhere nearby, you might make that call.

Can we acknowledge these formal demands of art and still be astonished?  Be at once open and critical?  Yes, yes, yes.  Well, my God, let's hope so.  

Also this. (Do ignore the study questions.)

Essence and Aim

Peter Brook describes a Ta'azieh performance in a village in Iran. But I think what he describes is precisely the justification for and highest aim of every revival production, from Grease to Galileo:

...a true phenomenon was occurring, that of 'theatrical representation.' An event from the very distant past was in the process of being 're-presented,' of becoming present; the past was happening here and now, the hero's decision was for now, his anguish was for now and the audience's tears were for this very moment. The past was not being described nor illustrated, time had been abolished. The village was participating directly and totally, here and now in the real death of a real figure who had died some thousand years before. The story had been read to them many times, and described in words, but only the theater form could work this feat of making it part of a living experience. (The Open Door)

A task worth succeeding in, certainly.

The Method, Cont'd

A loyal reader writes:

I’ve returned a number of times to that wonderful clip you posted on your blog. The more I think about it the clearer it seems to me that Sir Ian is completely correct but not entirely complete. By that I mean acting is as simple as joining craft to imagination and then “pretending” to be the character. But there is a critical additional element – freedom. The actor has to give himself the freedom to fully pretend. He can’t think about pretending, he can’t prepare to pretend, he must give himself the freedom to simply completely do so. Indeed this is the essence of all creativity from Jazz, to poetry, to particle physics; the creative act is the ultimate assertion of personal freedom. The creative act, by definition opens new ground, expands frontiers, and in ways large and small redefines the universe. To do so requires freedom. A kind of freedom that comes from within. A clarity and openness the both allows and demands the creative response. It is as simple as “Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian. Action this wizard shall not pass! Cut. Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian” and as complex.

I fear I may come off a little flip about what we call “method acting.” This is sort of on purpose, but people who know me know that my real problem isn’t flippancy but a surplus of sobriety over almost anything. My real opposition stems from my belief that “method acting” as such is a broken system and I suppose my sloppy reasoning thinks what might start with teasing will grow into a substantive rumination toward an alternative. This is not what I’ve seen so far, unfortunately, and I think while a lot of people recognize the limitations of sense memory and American Stanislavskian approaches, few have had the drive to come up with another system. This is the foundation, though not the limit, of my respect for Viewpoints.

I also have a theoretical quibble with “the method,” which is the way in which it emphasizes the actor’s experience (feelings) over the task in hand. Conversely, take a look at Peter Brook’s dissection of the work of acting in The Open Door:

Daily life consists of being “any-old-how”. Let us take three examples. For instance, if one is taking an exam, or when one speaks with an intellectual, one will endeavour not to be “any-old-how” in thought or in speech, but without realizing it, “any-old-how” will be in our body, which will be ignored and limp. However, if we are with someone who is in distress, we will not be “any-old-how” in our feelings, we will certainly be kind and attentive, but our thoughts may be adrift or confused, and the same with our bodies. And in the third case, when one is driving a car, the entire body may well be mobilized, but the head, left to itself, can drift into “any-old-how” thoughts.

For an actor’s intentions to be perfectly clear, with intellectual alertness, true feeling and a balanced and tuned body, the three elements—thought, emotion, body, must be in perfect harmony. Only then can he fulfil the requirement to be more intense within a short space of time than when he is at home.

The method appeals to the totality of this work and the difficulty of it. Too often the alternative to the method is to pretend as though acting isn’t work, that it is easy, and this is part of the fun of Sir Ian’s explanation. But Brook’s discussion, like my loyal reader’s, neither erases acting as work, nor makes it into pure magic.

Unpacking Sighs, cont'd.

Since I posted "Funeral Blues" yesterday I can't stop thinking about another of my favorite Auden poems, "O Tell Me the Truth About Love." Also, probably the most common example of what I was talking about, in fact, is the Broadway Musical.  Isn't that what's great about musicals after all? Everything stops and someone expresses something so strong she just has to belt it out. I think Brook's point still holds, for a serious actor the decision lies in choosing if you suspend your acting work for those three minutes to indulge in what is at its core a sort of silly reiteration of a generic requirement, or if you rather understand your character as a person who really sings to express himself.  For a director the matter hinges upon understanding what the difference is from the house.  I'm not sure yet.  In the meantime here's the poem and a clip from one of my favorite sighs unpacked in a song, from My Fair Lady.

Tell Me the Truth About Love, by W. H. Auden

Some say that love's little boy,
And some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go round,
And some say that's absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn't do.

Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,
Or the ham in the temperance hotel?
Does its odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.

Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It's quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I've found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway-guides.

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first rate imitation
On a saw or Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.

I looked inside the summer-house;
It wasn't ever there:
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton's bracing air.
I don't know what the blackbird sang,
Or what thye tulip said;
But it wasn't in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.

Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its times at the races,
Or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous ror rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love?

Here's the song (jump to about 2:03):

Pericles and Poetry

So I'm currently at work on a (vest-less!) production of Shakespeare's Pericles.  I've divided the production into four episodes and we're performing it serially on Wednesdays until the middle of August.  One of the challenges of the play is its shifting tone--at one moment it's undeniably comic, the next it's profoundly sad or even desperate--and informing this its multiplicity of styles.  The narrator of the play is Gower (a 14th century author) who speaks in highly wrought archaisms, his narrations are punctuated by little mimed scenes that move the action through time and space, the beginning of the play is heavy with rhymed couplets and relentlessly perfect iambs, and the latter half moves briskly through verse and prose sometimes seemingly too lightly for its subject matter.

Peter Brook, in his concise and delightful Evoking and Forgetting Shakespeare speaks of the need to avoid dwelling on authorial concerns in the creation of characters in a Shakespearian production.  He writes of the necessity of believing that one has the precise transcript of a real person's thoughts and words, to believe that this poetry is an accurate depiction of the speech of a remarkable person.  Many authors have a notable style, perhaps the most evident modern example is David Mamet, and necessarily these styles bring to mind certain characteristics. As Mamets men are swift-speaking and ferocious eking out telegraphic retorts, Shakespeare's expound and waver, and take the time to see through their immediate concerns to universal complexities and themes.  It is a grand depiction of humanity but suppose I must agree that  we must shoulder this kind of honesty when doing these plays.  To allow actors to concern themselves with authorial intention and error is to insure a two-dimensional, if functional, portrayal.  Thus the difficulty for us has been in consistently and creatively motivating these dramatic changes in tone as the continued unmediated expression of real persons' state.

My favorite aspect of the challenge of honestly inhabiting poetry is that what we might indicate simply on film as a single glance, a tightened lip, or a wry smile is spelled out broadly and without apology over the course of an entire soliloquy.  Although we are more accustomed to the opposite (searching the text for clues to elaborate backstories and motivations not actually present), it is sometimes helpful for an actor to think about that simple human moment that this wealth of poetry describes--how to distill it to a second--before we dwell in it for minutes  

A more modern example is Auden's famous "Funeral Blues" which I think is perfect in the same way, in that it explicates with powerful precision what I know I could only say in an swallowed sigh:

"Funeral Blues" by W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling in the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

I have wondered if it's the more evident artificiality of the theater that lets us explore these emotions in a "non-naturalistic" way, but what Brook admonishes us to do is insist on the naturalism and exceptionalism of this manner of expression, to be in awe of the characters as characters, precisely not as the creations of a genius working in  art to express his themes.  It is a surprising challenge and I hope we can succeed at it.