Apr 29, 2009

Road trip to pond hoppers

One (or two) of the most inventive traveling theatre companies in the world are coming to SpolettoUSA in Charleston, SC next month.

Image of Kneehigh BarnsCharleston Photograph

A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to see a production adaptation of Cymbeline by the Cornwall-based company, Kneehigh, and loved it! They make exciting original theatre, take it everywhere and keep their own unique repertory of shows alive... At Spoletto, Kneehigh will be performing Don John, a production some friends of mine saw (and liked) in the UK last year.

Another UK-based traveling company is hoipolloi, which garnered my unoffical best mission statement kudos. I haven't seen their work, but I love their website.

Both companies will be in Charleston in late May. That's a shorter trip than hopping the Atlantic!

Apr 26, 2009

Get off of my cloud

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

- Oscar Wilde, in a letter



I'm in the temporarily enviable position of having directed a show of which I'm proud and of having two contradictory (and totally different) reviews published about it. The positive review is in the local big broadsheet. As usual, it's more descriptive than judgmental, but also (as usual) it's relatively short and is a bit thin on context. The mostly negative review -- from the alternative weekly -- describes very little of the actual production, is much longer and positively dense with opinions, even in its characterization of the playwright and the playbill notes. The positive review feels personal and fleet-footed, the mostly negative one feels authoritative and deliberate. Take a gander for yourself here and here. Personally, I'm glad that the response to A Number isn't uniform: it may mean that something is going on in the room that defies categorization. Some people have been bemused, for sure, but a number of folks are coming more than once to experience the show again.

But why am I breaking the artist's code of silence and talking about the reviews?! No! No! No! Don't Do It! Don't worry, I'm not going to "review the reviews". However, this is a particular moment in the theatre evolution of Asheville, North Carolina.

A friend's popular local blog has encouraged review-writing for over two years in order to deepen the conversation about theatre around here. His project began with the observation that the local broadsheet reviews everything roughly the same way: community theatre, college theatre and professional theatre all get the same breezy and largely positive treatment. Some would say the writing lacks real local context; others might point out that local theatre needs all the good publicity it can get, and the writers are sincere enthusiasts.

The alternative weekly (which up until now has rarely published reviews) recently dedicated several staff members to write regularly about theatre. Its reviews are likely to be meatier, but only time will tell if they develop real critical sophistication, or if the paper will publish other non-review articles about theatre. It looks like they will also co-opt my friend's idea by providing an online forum for open discussion. Some kind of critical mass is being reached in Asheville as a "theatre town." It seems like a good time to weigh in on the subject of theatre reviews.

It is a strange feature of contemporary life that we relate to pop culture as something to experience, and to high culture as something to be understood, as though "the Arts" require a hypertrophic intellect in order to be appropriately appreciated, while to enjoy pop culture one only needs one's senses, willingness and personal interest. Why to we feel the need to know high art, but easily live pop art? What's the difference anyway? In the case of high art, it's all about a ubiquitous culture of interpretation. Not every theatre critic falls into the quicksand of interpretive myopia, but many do, and we are all their unwitting victims.

I've been reading a bit of Susan Sontag lately, and her insights still apply. Sontag writes that since the advent of criticism (or theory, i.e., in Plato and Aristotle), artistic activity in the West has been subject to obsessive interpretation. Furthermore, Sontag claims that applying interpretive rules to art displaces and depletes the artistic experience. In the case of canonical literature, this displacement of art with critical meaning happens when the moral agenda of the interpreters changes, but the political need for the text still persists. How much Freud or Marx can you see in Richard III? Even if we approach literature more "traditionally," we are encouraged to read it always for Meaning: as allegory, metaphor, political message, etc.

All of us have been conditioned to approach the so-called "high" arts from in an interpretive mode. It's a kind of educationally moral imperative applied to Cultural products. That old analytical mandate, to distinguish between "form and content," encourages abstract mental activity that distances us from the sensuous and immediate experiences available to us in the here and now.

According to this tradition, a work of art has little value in itself, in its own original and unified reality. The implication is that Meaning is is everything, but that Meaning lies somewhere "beyond" art, and it is only recoverable through astute interpretation. The result is that much criticism of art reflects the critic's views instead of evoking the realty of the art itself. We forget, don't we, that Plato and Aristotle were moral philosophers. They had an agenda: judging moral usefulness. These days, I would replace "moral usefulness" with political utility -- even if it is only employed on the level of professional activity. Is it any wonder that so many people shy away from "the arts"? They've been told they need qualifications to appreciate the arts (as evidenced by critics' and teachers' demonstrated erudition); they also are told by critics how they should expect to feel or think (as evidenced by critics' statements of opinion as fact).

In a recent post, I compared attending a play to being at a sporting event. Fortunately for fans and atheletes, sports writers are largely enthusiasts. Consider this excerpt from the NY Times on a recent baseball game:
There were nine relievers eligible for the Yankees on Saturday, so many that the bench in the right-field bullpen was too small to fit them all. They spilled over the side, watching starter A. J. Burnett bungle a big early lead and surely knowing that the game, again, would come down to them.

The Boston Red Sox torched the Yankees’ pitching on Saturday at Fenway Park, battering Burnett for eight runs and bruising the bullpen for eight more in a 16-11 victory. The Yankees scored the first six runs of the game, but Burnett lost that lead and the bullpen lost another.

“It’s unacceptable,” Burnett said. “To have the stuff I had out there today and the offense that we had out there today, the bullpen should have never even been in that game.”

According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the six-run deficit was the largest the Red Sox have overcome in a victory over the Yankees since May 16, 1968. Saturday’s game took 4 hours 21 minutes to complete, the same duration as Friday night’s thriller. Both teams can use the extra rest before Sunday night’s series finale.

The effectiveness of this writing stems from its intention to evoke, but not explain, an engaging narrative, while leaving the reader's experience in his or her own imaginative hands, so to speak. If I had seen this game, I could use the occasion of reading the article to relive my experience. If I missed the game, I can invent an experience, and stimulate my interest in future games.

Now imagine that the above description had been written by a typically interpretive theatre critic, who also confuses conventions of form with his own interpreted content (which is pretty common). It might go something like this:
The recent episode of the continuing saga of the Yankees' fall from grace was performed yesterday in an needlessly long re-telling of an old story. The outcome was predictable, but the trick to getting to the heart of material as cliched as this is to keep the action moving and streamlined. Unfortunately, the producers at Yankee Stadium presented a confused interpretation that should have evoked more dramatic angst than the attenuated sentimentality I encountered yesterday.
There were nine relievers eligible for the Yankees on Saturday, so many that the bench in the right-field bullpen was too small to fit them all. But crowding so many players on a undersized bench is a ham-fisted way of expressing a pathos already all too evident in the melodramatic plot. Spilled over the side of the bench, the relievers expressed, en masse, the desperate anxiety of fallen heroes with realistic ferver as they watched starter A. J. Burnett unrealistically bungle a big early lead. But if their gestures and movement had been more restrained, I might have felt more connected to Burnett's essentially Beckettian dilemna.

The Boston Red Sox played it straight in their depiction of a recently arisen, Phoenix-like team, torching the Yankees’ pitching on Saturday at Fenway Park, battering Burnett for eight runs and bruising the bullpen for eight more in a 16-11 victory. But the majority of the action focused on the Yankees, most of whom have been re-cast at this late point in the series. The Yankees scored the first six runs of the game, but in back-to-back redundant episodes, Burnett lost that lead and the bullpen lost another. Unfortunately, the middle of the action -- while the fans waited interminably for the Sox to bring more presence to the proceedings -- left me cold by the time of the inevitable turning point.

“It’s unacceptable,” Burnett declares plaintively half way through the game. “To have the stuff I had out there today and the offense that we had out there today, the bullpen should have never even been in that game.” But Burnett’s dialogue here gilds the lily of of overweening pride. If Burnett had bungled his lead with more depth, displaying a more nuanced and complex understanding of the game’s underlying theme of the impermanence of glory, the following moments of bullpen activity might have seemed less anti-climactic, in spite of the earnest if amateur efforts of the bullpen. It didn’t help matters that the stadium’s lighting was uniformly bright throughout.

The six-run deficit was the largest the Red Sox have overcome in a victory over the Yankees since May 16, 1968 -- the one statistically suspenseful feature of the game. But baseball now seems more culturally relevant in its backstory, before faux-irony was so trendy, and when depicting underdogs with conviction added mythic substance to an otherwise hopeless cause. Saturday’s game took 4 hours 21 minutes to complete, but if they had cut two hours off the game’s episodic meanderings, at least its insubstantial content would have been bearable as popular entertainment. Both teams can use the extra rest before Sunday night’s series finale. So can I.
Ha, ha, ha. But wait, you say, a baseball game is not a fiction, it's real, it doesn't need interpreting. I would counter with: so is art; art is real. Even in the theatre; even a film. Really. It's real, right here, right now. There is no over the rainbow over the rainbow. Or if there is, it is you and your experience. Or maybe the charged space between us.

In the case of theatre reviews, too many journalists feel obligated to explain their understanding of the script and then compare that understanding with their inferred interpretation of what was presumably intended by the artists--and then judge the "effectiveness" of the inferred interpretation. Plays are viewed as problems, not opportunities.

Many critics perpetuate this state of affairs, presumably because they seek to augment their interpretive prestige. This is probably unconscious, but to make matters worse, a great deal of interpretive criticism doesn't even supply its content cogently. Rather, the effect of such writing is often circular. The critic defines an interpretive premise to support his opined "evidence." This usually involves treating a theatrical performance as itself a form of interpretation, rather than having its own being beyond any interpretation. Or even more arrogantly (and commonly), the critic will interpret the predicted response of audience members by asserting his own opinions as fact, while only minimally describing the art or illuminating any context. Sometimes it is really you, the humble audience member, that is being interpreted: you are being interpreted, literally, as irrelevant. How does that feel? This kind of snobbery reduces criticism to base marketing for the critic's ego assertions. The effect is solipsistic, and positions the reader yet another step removed from the art itself.

Mostly, run-of-the-mill critics simply confuse artistic creations with their own analyses--as if they occupy the same space, one being equivalent to the other: the critique replaces the art through a kind of critical hegemony. Susan Sontag wrote, "Interpretation is the intellect's defense against art." As a theatre teacher, I have witnessed many times the way in which creativity is unleashed when a student stops judging. Audiences listen vitally and creatively, too, when similarly unencumbered. After all, audience members are part of the creative experience in the theatre: their listening gives substance to the silences. When I'm at work during previews of a show (and still rehearsing in between), it is the participation of the whole audience that helps me to feel a show's vitality.

Sontag wrote Against Interpretation over forty years ago. The end of this post ends with Sontag's assertions for what critical writing should do.
"Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. Now it is not. What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture.

Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art."

- Susan Sontag, from Against Interpretation

Apr 24, 2009

Fiscal inspiration, but not here







I came across the following:

Forgan called for both public and private funders to maintain their levels of investment in the arts, and for artists to see themselves not as victims of the recession but as a key part of its solution.

She said: “The arts council has three over-arching aims as we plan for the coming years - great art for everyone will be our mission in life. We will continue to support innovation and creative courage. And we will focus on recovery.

“Of course we understand that the national debt has to be tackled, but a few million off the arts budget is going to make no appreciable difference to that task. On the other hand it could undermine years of creative and financial investment. The arts council will do all it can to keep that investment in place. We cannot protect artists from the realities of recession, but we can be as imaginative, open and useful as possible in our efforts to get us all through this with minimal damage to the creative life of this country.”

Forgan added: “The real challenge for the arts sector is not to ask ‘what is the government going to do to help us?’ but ‘what can we do to help the country weather and recover from this downturn?’

“Showing that we can make a real contribution in even the most difficult of times will be the best case we can make for continued public investment in the arts through – and just as importantly – beyond the recession.”

I'd like to be encouraged by this quotation, particularly the bits about "innovation and creative courage" and "minimal damage to the creative life of this country" during the recession. But Liz Forgan -- who made the above statements -- is the chair of the Arts Council England.

Just imagine a U.S. government official saying "great art for everyone will be our mission in life." Kinda funny, huh? Has anyone heard any similarly committed and inspiring language from anyone at the National Endowment For The Arts? We all know that private individual giving is down these days. Probably corporate giving is down, too, and besides, most corporate giving for the arts became a form of marketing quid-pro-quo some time ago. It's also unlikely that state governments are able to do much to help right now.

The article from The Stage also cites some numbers. Despite a significant cutback, the ACE's main program, called "Grants For The Arts Budget," will grant £54 million next year; that's about $80 million. $80M for England, not the whole UK. England has about 51 million inhabitants, the US has 300 million. The budget of the National Endowment for the Arts is about $144 million. We have six times the population and less than twice the amount of national arts spending. If "A great nation deserves great art" as the NEA likes to trumpet, perhaps this "great nation" isn't so great as far as arts funding is concerned (but we knew that). The NEA would need an annual budget of around $500 million to be minimally competitive. In other words, just some disgraced CEO's income last year.

Imagine what we could have: thousands of free tickets for young people, more stable lives for artists, increased local tax revenues, more vital city centers and a more informed and outgoing populace overall.

The Royal Shakespeare Company regularly performs in the U.S, and internationally. Besides being a vital activity, such touring promotes tourism to the UK. They even have an American website to encourage U.S. donations. The RSC now employs a permanent company of actors for stretches of up to three years. Last summer, the RSC's artistic director, Michael Boyd, was scouting out a permanent performing space in New York City.

But could American theatres handle a real increase in arts funding? Would we spend on artists and audiences, or on buildings and managers? Can we envision productions with longer life-spans that would attract audiences and be worth showing to the rest of the world? Currently, no mainstream American theatre maintains a permanent company that would be worth the travel expense. Do any have the vision? Surely, none has the money. Great art deserves a great nation.

Apr 21, 2009

Momentary Press Whore

Click here.

Music and education on my mind


The New York Pops (the symphony orchestra that plays music from the Great American Songbook at Carnegie Hall) is hosting their Annual Gala on Monday, April 27th. Proceeds from the 26th Birthday Gala support The New York Pops and its education programs and free Summermusic concerts throughout New York City.

Broadway star, Idina Menzel will be among those performing, and the new musical director of the New York Pops, Steven Reineke, will be conducting.

I mention this event because music and education has been on my mind today. At lunch I was discussing with college students the broad changes in education that have taken place since the 80s (when I was in high school! gulp! am I that old??). I wistfully recalled how we took music and art education for granted, how my piano teacher onve explained how subdividing a beat was something taught in elementary school. Over time those early lessons progressed to instrumental playing, choral singing and musical theatre. Since then, so much has changed in schools: less music and art, less recess, more homework, more stress. My peer Harold just got nominated for a Pulitzer in Music. Obviously, something was okay about our more carefree art-filled schooldays...

I majored in music in college, and the result was that I learned more about artistic form and funtion that I might otherwise have studying theatre alone. But would I had my school system been different? We can easily forget how far back the early influence goes.

Since then, non-profits arts organizations have -- at least partly -- come to the rescue by sending professional artists to the schools or inviting students to the theatre or concert hall, often for free. For many arts organizations, such efforts are a bit beyond their scope: even when the NEA provides seed money for such efforts (as it did with my touring production of Midsummer in Western North Carolina a couple years ago), the woefully underfunded agency doesn't always provide continuing support (and sometimes for bizzare bureaucratic reasons).

Coincidentally, it came to my attention today that one organization that does ALOT for education is the New York Pops orchestra. Since serendipity is sometimes everything, I'm sharing info about the above-mentioned Annual Gala concert and fundraiser and what NYPops do for kids. Here's some info I found:

"The NYPops' Free Education programs are called Kids in the Balcony and Salute to Music. The Kids in the Balcony program offers NYC children free tickets for all New York Pops concerts at Carnegie Hall (through their schools, community centers or clubs) including the annual Birthday Gala where more than 830 children fill the Carnegie Hall balcony.

Other school programs are Musical Mentors, Create a Symphony, and RHYTHM, RHYME, AND RAP.

The New York Pops Education Programs serve thousands of children every year. Since the inception of the first education programs in 1990, more than 18,500 children have been touched by the magic of music. The New York Pops Education Programs both build audiences and train musicians for the future. Working with the New York City Public Schools and youth organizations, The New York Pops provides children with free music lessons, free admission to rehearsals and concerts, and free classroom programs designed to spark the creative potential within every child."

So, if you are in the NYC area and want more info, click on one of the links above...

Or go to the GALA (and see below for a 20% discount code!!!):

New York Pops “26th Birthday Gala”
Date: Monday, April 27, 2009

Time / Place: 7:00 PM at Carnegie Hall
Prices: Tickets available from $55 - $85
(get a 20% discount by entering the code PLAY7861, see link below)

Broadway star, Idina Menzel will be among those performing and the new musical director of the New York Pops, Steven Reineke, will be conducting.

For more information on the event and to attend the Black Tie Dinner / Dance to follow at The Pierre: www.nypops.org/html/annual_gala.php

The Online Auction launches Monday, April 20 on CharityBuzz.com:
www.charitybuzz.com/area.do?id=915

To purchase tickets: http://www.carnegiehall.org/article/box_office/events/evt_11841.html?selecteddate=04272009 (get a 20% discount by entering the code PLAY7861)

Apr 20, 2009

Finalist Schminalist Not A Minimimalist


I work with the NYC-based new music ensemble Sequitur. Sequitur's artistic director, Harold Meltzer (and one of my oldest and best friends), was today named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the music category. For those of you in the Asheville area with sonic memories, I used a portion of Harold's harpsichord concerto, Virginal, in the 2005 NC Stage production of Yazmina Resa's play, Art.

>>> You can listen to excerpts of Harold's music on his website here.


2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music

MUSIC: “Double Sextet,” by Steve Reich
Premiered March 26, 2008 in Richmond, Va.
A major work that displays an ability to channel an initial burst of energy into a large-scale musical event, built with masterful control and consistently intriguing to the ear.

Finalists Also nominated as finalists in this category were: “7 Etudes for Solo Piano,” by Don Byron, premiered on March 15, 2008 at Hallwall’s Contemporary Art Center, Buffalo, N.Y., a deft set of studies that display rhythmic inventiveness and irresistible energy, charm and wit;

and “Brion,” by Harold Meltzer, premiered on April 23, 2008 at Merkin Hall, New York City, a sonic portrait of a cemetery in northern Italy painted with the touch of a watercolorist and marked by an episodic structure and vivid playfulness that offer a graceful, sensual and contemplative experience.

Apr 19, 2009

New world order is musical theatre!

What can I say? Something's going on... this is not the only example of performance happening anywhere, everywhere...

Apr 18, 2009

Intimate Theatre


Actors Graham Smith and Charles Flynn-McIver in A Number by Caryl Churchill at NC Stage in Asheville, NC

This is about as simple as it gets. (Click on pic for a larger version.)

Apr 16, 2009

Depth and light


The beginning of the final scene of our production of Caryl Churchill's A Number has been stunningly lit by designer Sarah Elliot. A cool, sculpted atmosphere slowly resolves into a warm halo with the clarity of bright sunlight.

Today, we re-worked the penultimate scene of the play. We're already in previews, and the play is in better shape at this point in the process than any I've worked on. We have more time to tweek, solidify and deepen what we already feel good about before we "open" Saturday night. Yesterday, we added specificity and grounding to the beginning of each scene, but today, we went a bit deeper into the play's climax.

Preview rehearsals can be a significantly artistic part of the process when the script is as good as this one is: in its final moments, A Number evokes the same spirit of release, human contact and fated irony one might experience in a successful Greek tragedy. Seeing the play performed iwith an audience helps to reveal the underlying architecture of the whole.

In a contemporary form that is more taut than that of an ancient tragedy, A Number plots an equally epic journey in just over an hour. There are five scenes in a sequence, but after each one, a progressively longer period of fictional time elapses before the next, while significant offstage events "occur," just as they might in an ancient Greek tragedy. The most significant of these events takes place before Scene Four. But unlike an ancient tragedy, Churchill's play includes no explanatory messenger to describe the epiphantic offstage horrors that, when told, beat a direct path to the play's final scene of recognition and release.

Instead, in A Number, the effect of the unseen, offstage action must be understood by the audience through the being of the actors in the penultimate scene, and the way in which their relationship has been radically shifted by what has occurred offstage. In our production, that scene has been clear and strong -- certainly performance-ready -- but it had been missing the full dimension of the play's invisible "tragic wheel." In the classics, one explicitly feels the turning of the tragic wheel, and that is part of those plays' special appeal. In this contemporary play, the tragic wheel doesn't turn so much as produce a soul-shock by implication -- it is a shock that the characters (i.e., the actors) must live through as though after-the-fact. It's a more private experience that the audience should recognize rather than have explained to them, and it's a challenge to act. I noted in rehearsal, "This is a bit beyond playing the right objective, isn't it?"

Today's wonderful rehearsal moment involved taking the full measure of A Number's tragic value when we discovered that the fourth scene should be played as though the equivalent of the classic messenger scene had already been played... It's interesting how a process like this works with sophisticated colleagues late in the process. For about forty-five minutes we discussed the issue and briefly experimented by approaching short sections of the scene in new ways, shaking off the cobwebs of our previous way of playing. Eventually, through more discussion and sharing of stories, we evoked in the room the experience that we wanted to happen in the scene: a specific, inimitable conversation about deeply shared strife. By a certain age, we've nearly all had conversations like this with lovers or family members: they are very intimate, sometimes confusing and richly emotional -- the world isn't the same for us afterward, and we don't tell other people about them very much.

Perhaps because our culture now is so overtly public, and so obsessively informative, we are left to bear the real emotional substance of our personal tragedies in private. It's not heros or kings we really need to evoke a public emotional intimacy, but specifically imagined characters acted with focused presence in a smaller room...

We worked on the the first third or so of the newly interpreted scene carefully; then the remainder of the scene "played itself," with new staging happening naturally. I was struck by the way that today's meeting felt like an interpretive session, rather than a preview rehearsal to do polish work (as we had done the previous afternoon).

Later, we talked about what happened during this evening's preview performance. The actors were expectant about the changed scene and their anticipation rattled their hold on the first part of the play a bit: it was moderately less clean, less sure and unintentionally riskier. The audience listened better, I think, but seemed restless. I worried that I had derailed the smoothly running train we had previously created. But in the end, the final scene (which we hadn't rehearsed) filled the room much more fully and richly than it had the previous night and the audience experienced a more connected, shared presence.

It has always been the case, I think, that under-girding the plot-line of great stories is a dramatic structure that we all implicitly understand. It is not a formal shape in an analytical sense, but an experience of life's common motions and rhythms. This is what I meant above about feeling the motion--or wheel--of the tragedy: it is the experience of a deep apprehension of change, a kind of prescience about the power of unpredictable forces, like the rumble of an avalanche before it strikes, before the dust settles and we see the world anew. We feel this deep dramatic motion in a way that transcends any specific story--this shared feeling can evoke so many of the other bonds that relate us to each other.

In A Number, Churchill provides the blueprint for evoking our collective understanding in a kind of dramaturgical shorthand mastered over years of writing for the stage. As theatre-makers, it is our job to invite the audience to bear present witness to the underlying bonds that connect us. Our invitation comes in the form of the crafting and playing of the story, built with real presence and experience, so that the audience may "accept" by giving themselves permission to be with those thematic aspects of the play that are not make-believe, that really can and do happen for all of us when we are in the same room and feel life move us inexorably (and sometimes painfully) into the light.

More blogging on the show is here. Ticket info is here.

Apr 8, 2009

Being here: court-side at A Number


Sometimes those of us who work in the theatre forget how being at live theate can feel for some folks in the audience, especially if it's new to them. It's worth remembering that there are always (we hope) people considering coming to the theatre for the first time, or encountering a new kind of show or new way of doing a show. For such newbies, the message we can send is that coming to live theatre can be a great adventure: stimulating and always unique. Sometimes people just haven't had the chance to discover how fun coming to the theatre can be, and especially so at a well-done "serious" drama: there is nothing quite like living the suspense and going through the emotional ups and downs of an expertly played thriller right alongside the actors in the same room.

An "insider's view" can be even more of an eye-opening thrill: we are trying to "open up" the creative process as we rehearse Caryl Churchill's play, A Number at NC Stage by inviting a relative neophyte to come along for the ride, and write about her experience for a wider audience. You can read Elizabeth Dacy's blog posts on rehearsals here. Dacy is a creative writing and theatre student at Warren Wilson College witnessing professional-level theatre-making first hand. I find her observations both fresh and direct.

We're in North Carolina, and the Tar Heels have just clinched the NCAA title. A Number has nothing to do with basketball, but I think there's an analogy to be made between the intense one-on-one of the play's scenes, and the experience of being at a game. For those folks who've never seen a play "in the round" before, I've been drafting audience-friendly playbill notes about designing the set for A Number:
Were you jazzed to see Tyler Hasborough work his magic for the Tar Heels in the recent NCAA National Championship? Did you take in the game on a big flat-screen TV? What would you have given to have really been there, court-side?

When set designer Don Baker and I began to think about A Number, we wondered how the scenery might help you to best feel the way in which the play creates a sense of shifting perceptions. We also wanted to enhance the feeling that the play relates to the real world and our changing understanding of community. We thought about displaying live-feed video of the actors and the audience on big flat-screen TVs. One of my students suggested making the scenery out of mirrors. But the play is compelling in its own right, and doesn’t need scenery that might distract from the actors’ performances. Playwright Caryl Churchill writes very little about the setting: only “it’s where Salter lives,” and nothing more. We were stumped.

Unlike many theaters, NC Stage is usually arranged to have seating on three sides, in a way called a “thrust” stage. When three or more actors are on a thrust stage, it’s easy to make sure that at least some actors’ faces can always be seen by someone in the audience. It is harder, though, to watch just two actors on a thrust, especially if you’d like them to sit still and really talk to one another--and still see both their faces! Taking this into account, Don and I realized that we’d have to think in a new way about the design: less pictorially and more environmentally.

The result is a simple set with the audience placed all around the action. With audience on all sides, the actors are free to move naturally anywhere on the stage, while still remaining powerfully connected to one another. At all times, one of the actors will be faced away from some seats, but the effect will be democratic rather than exclusionary. Like a basketball game, the action is exciting to watch in three dimensions. As the actors change their positions throughout, you will see the play from series of shifting angles rather than from a fixed point of view. We hope that by sitting in a circle, you will feel that you are part of a community, literally sharing the event with the actors and each other.

An added benefit of the seating arrangement is that actors’ performances feel more immediate. At rehearsals, Charlie and Graham have been inspired to practice the play at the top of their game, knowing you will experience the play’s magic from every angle, and creating a vibrant energy by sitting arena-style. Even if you couldn’t make it to Michigan for the Tar Heels’ victory game, I’d like to welcome you to “court-side” seats for our production of A Number.
For an even more expansive take on the analogy of sports to theatre, check out this blog post.

A Number performs at NC Stage from April 15 through May 3. Tickets are available online here.

Apr 6, 2009

The space for A Number


Elizabeth Dacy, our blogger who is reporting on the NC Stage production of Caryl Churchill's A Number, asked me to write about my decision to stage the play "in the round." So, here goes.

As I've noted, on the page, Churchill's text is not like that of many other plays, though it is reminiscent of Beckett and Pinter. However, as we've discovered in rehearsal, the playing of A Number is more flexible, deceptively natural and more emotionally accessible compared to its dramaturgical ancestors.

Churchill's goal, I think, is to evoke subtext (i.e., the unsaid emotional life of the play) as quickly and powerfully as possible. Through shared, incomplete, and searching utterances, she opens up the play's subterranean landscape by involving the actors and the audience in an intense process of listening and empathy.

At the heart of Churchill's mission is an understanding of the difference between knowing something and feeling it, and on a deeper level, the very feeling of being. One of the many themes of the play -- perhaps its main one -- is an exploration of the paradigm shift in our thinking about identity that may be taking place because of the emergence of new technologies. In the case of A Number, that technology is cloning. When I write "paradigm shift" I mean a change in the fundamental ways we relate to the world and to one another regarding the question of our identity, and what it is like to feel like who we are. But it is cold to write about it in this way; it is only analytical. Churchill gets at the emotional and existential core of the matter. A simpler way of stating some of her themes might be as questions: who are we? and how much of who we are comes from others? from our family? our genes? our experience? What is the nature of love if I don't know who I am--or don't know who you are to me? These aren't questions for the mind so much as they are probings of the heart.

Every theatre space is different, but there are only a few basic models: audience facing the actors in one direction, often as if through a frame (proscenium), audience on two or three sides (thrust or partial arena), or audience encircling the actors, who enact the play "in(side) the round." There are, of course, modified variations of these models, and other types of less traditional theatrical experiences, including shows at which the audience intermingles with the performers, or moves from place to place, etc. In each case, spatial organization can have a determinative effect on an audience's experience. Different spaces produce strikingly different experiences.

For some of us who work in theatre, the standard proscenium model has become outmoded by the ubiquity of screen narrative. If one mode of experiencing an enacted drama is to look at it through a frame from one direction, then cinema has perfected this model. It is as though people in one room are looking at people in another through a hole in the wall (my thanks for the analogy goes to Michael Boyd of the RSC, who has been transforming theatre spaces there). But in the case of film, the "other room" is a complete world encased in an impenetrable surface that masks its unreachable time and distance. This cannot happen in the theatre, where the "world of the play" must be largely imagined, even if the style is realistic, and where everything that happens happens at a perceivable distance in the present moment. People attending a film internalize a dizzying array of images. By and large, people at a film do not relate to one another; rather, they relate to the fullness of their own visual and aural experience. At the movies we escape the auditorium (and one another) into the world of the film, which is to say, almost entirely into ourselves. But we do not always find ourselves there.

So, one goal for the living theatre might be to heighten the reality of the theatrical experience rather than the virtual reality of the imagined fiction. In fact, it is possible to achieve both at once, the real and the imaginary. This possibility is what can make live theatre unique, and uniquely stimulating. At its best, live theatre stimulates our imagination and our apprehension of present reality. We come to understand that our imaginative powers are real, and so are those of our neighbors. We feel a connection with the actors and with each other. These ties connect our internal representation of the play with the current experience of our real senses and that of those around us. We can be in the real world of the theatre and in the "world of the play" simultaneously. To be in attendance when theatre works in this way feels like the audience is making the play, participating in its invention; this experience is exciting and humanizing.

If we sit in a traditional auditorium, all facing in one direction, to some extent we can deny reality. We can easily ignore the other people in the audience. We can deny the reality of the actors if they--as characters--tastefully blend into a scenic background. Given our frequent immersion in the cinematic experience, this kind of denial during live theatre is probably much more common than it was a hundred years ago, maybe even just thirty years ago. Indeed, I have been at performances where some audience members do not quite understand that the actors can see and hear them, too, and that an audience's attention and participation matter, shaping the event differently from performance to performance. Add to this our cultural preoccupation with consumer-oriented products and our own "virtual experiences" online, and a theatrical event can easily seem like a poor man's version of a movie, but one that is more overtly verbal or visceral. This is hard for some to take; others of us can't get enough of it.

For a moment, think about how absurd it would be to position spectators at a sporting event on just one side of the court or field. The players might become self-conscious and start to "perform." Worse still, they might just ignore the fans, taking no energy from them whatsoever. This would strike us as silly, because a basketball game, say, doesn't represent reality, it is reality. It is a basketball game, and if we are there, we are a part of it. In the same sense, a theatrical event is a representation--the rules of representation are the rules of the game--but also it is itself, just what it is, really happening now. And because theatre happens in real space, spatial relationships help to shape our experience of a theatrical event, just as they do at a basketball game. This is why a represented fiction on stage can seem like present reality, whereas a film--by comparison--is a record, however evocative it may be of its "otherness."

Shakespeare's theatres (e.g., the Globe) were "nearly-in-the-round" and his audiences listened differently than we do. Without a scenic frame to create visual representations, the mandate for creativity fell on what was spoken--on verbal representations (so to speak). The space made the poetry "happen."

In the proscenium theatre, a complex physical style has evolved to make sense of what would otherwise be unnatural behavior: imagine living your life as though it needed to be seen from one vantage point and you'll get a feel for what it's like to be an actor on a proscenium stage. Though stylized, proscenium theatre can make visual metaphors come to life more directly than in any other arrangement. But the actors' awareness is at least subtly altered. A particular kind of self-consciousness always emerges, as does a kinesthetic relationship to a two-dimensional surface "out there": the so-called "fourth wall." This imagined boundary has its advantages and its limitations. "Breaking" the fourth wall can be meaningful. Using it artfully to create a special kind of public privacy can be powerful, drawing the audience in from across the divide. But ignoring the fourth wall completely can be deadly, creating a kind of casualness of no importance. We're over here, you're over there, so what?

But mostly the fourth wall isn't "used" much in the professional theatre anymore. We've changed our practice, but not our buildings.

The "fourth wall" becomes much less relevant or manipulable in the round: if it exists at all, it can be seen clear through. Or it's less concrete: one can't open a curtain behind one's back. It is more like a bubble, and it would be hard to re-create once burst.

In the round, audience members do not all share the same point of view, and so less can be indicated or explained by the staging to everyone at once. The actors must focus on building more intuitive performances with one another: performances the audiences can feel as well as see and hear. Actors working in the round have a distinct opportunity to let go of proscenium conventions and work toward powerfully rooted performances.

If a theatre-in-the-round is small, the audience becomes more aware of the authenticity of the actors' physical impulses, and committed actors must heighten their own awareness in three dimensions. They must really connect to what the are saying and doing, since "showing" can have only a partial effect. In this way, staging a play in the middle of a room--and being sensitive to the implications--can help make an audience's experience more palpable. There is no "over there" in the round--because just a bit further "over there" are more people just like you, more audience, whose "over there" is your "over here." You are really here. Just like she is really there.

Perhaps it's more helpful to think of a play as a forum rather than a fiction. In this regard, the job of theatre artists--to engage directly with the underlying substance of a play, rather than trying to impress or fool you--becomes even more apparent. Attending a play staged in the round helps to put us in touch with this reality: the reality of one another and of the purpose for which we perform the play. In the round the background--or scenery of the action, if you will--is literally other people; for others, the setting is you.

NC Stage's theatre is small, intimate. Usually it is configured as a modified thrust, with audience on three sides, but the majority of the audience usually sits in the center, tilting the bias toward a proscenium model. In order to put audience all around the action for A Number, we have created a fourth audience section on what is usually the stage, pulled seats from the back of the main section to populate our new seating area, and built a new, smaller stage on top of the old one (see the picture above). The effect is that of even greater intimacy. When you sit in this configuration, the relatively close distance between you and an actor may be the same as that between the actor and the audience member sitting across from you. In addition to your visual and aural perceptions, your physical perceptiveness is put into play. When the living question is "what makes you you?" "or what is the nature of love?" as it is in Churchill's play, then where you sit, both literally and figuratively, matters greatly. A Number's questions cannot be apprehended in solitude, or at an imaginary distance.

Apr 1, 2009

A play is like a child...

"A play is like a child. It begins as an infant and grows to reach maturity. A play travels across a vast range of stages of life. Exploring different directions it can go, stretching and growing until it discovers itself. The director is its parent fostering its abilities and guiding its path. Actors are what give it life. They grow along with it. A play is an entity, a life-force. You can understand it and it in return can understand you. Whether you are the audience, the director, the actors, or the stage crew, you are all a part of this life." -- E. Dacy, Warren Wilson Student
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