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.

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.

What would Brecht think?

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