100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (13 page)

I was recently having tea with my only architect friend who loves Maurice Maeterlinck, and he mentioned that the word
theatrical
was an insult when applied to an architect’s blueprints. “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he said, “it implies a level of fakery and a neglect of the third dimension. It implies that the work is scenographic, two-dimensional, flat.”

I was reminded of why I like scenic designers who are also architects. It also reminded me why I like site-specific theater. And why I often think of design as subtext.

I remember once seeing my play
Eurydice
staged outdoors at Vassar. The actors were young. They were doing an honorable, virtuous job. And then, one day, it rained. And we could not rehearse outside. So the director, Davis McCallum, had them rehearse inside an old classroom building. He had them improvise blocking in relation to the architecture. Suddenly the performances went from being honorable to being full of genius. Orpheus wrote his letters to Eurydice on a giant chalkboard. When she followed him out of the underworld, she was on a real staircase, and we, the audience, all trooped behind.

Once the language was in the actors’ minds, and their bodies were freed from blocking, and in relationship to real architecture, they became virtuosic. Metaphor suddenly had a more intimate relationship with reality. The actor was real, the staircase was real, the emotion was real, and the language floated on top.

93. Archaeology and erasers

Les Waters, my friend and collaborator, said the other day, “I’m worried.” “Why?” I asked. “Because my daughter said she wants to be an archaeologist.” “Oh?” I said. “Yes,” he said. “Why is that bad?” I asked. “Because,” he said, “it secretly means she wants to be a director.” He said his childhood dream was to be an archaeologist, and that he knew many wonderful directors who likewise fantasized about digging in the dirt as children, hoping to be archaeologists, including Anne Bogart. I asked him what he thought the connection was between archaeology and directing. He said, “I think it’s about finding out the invisible, buried structure of a thing. And if you are me, after you find the structure, you erase it.” I gasped. I understood, newly, why I love it when Les directs my plays.

I remember once in third grade being asked to do a painting. I made a painting. I loved my painting. Then we were told to cover it in black paint so that we could scratch lines into the paint and make a design. I was horrified. I had made something beautiful, and I didn’t want to cover it up.

The directors, designers, actors, and indeed writers I most admire have no problem with erasing their own work. I love directors who direct and say, Don’t look at my directing, or designers who say, Don’t look at my design, or actors who say, Don’t look at my acting. So many directors find the structure of a play and then underline it with a bold marker. But what kind of bravery is required to find the structure of a play and then erase it?

If archaeology is uncovering a deep historical structure that can’t be seen, and directing is uncovering an invisible structure buried in the play, then what is the difference between historical and narrative structure? Between fossils and narrative moments hidden in the sediment? And what of erasure and the unfinished? The compulsion to complete the historical narrative, or the theatrical structure, is deep. But I think of children, who dig in the sand, find a beautiful shell, look at it, see it fully, and then, rather than collect it, put it back.

94. On standard dramatic formatting

Why are stage directions generally in parentheses? If you (the playwright) want them treated as parentheticals, put them in parentheses, but if they are as important to you as the dialogue, as they are to me, do not put them in parentheses, and insist on using your own punctuation, as any novelist or poet would.

Punctuation is philosophy and rhythm in a play. Actors understand this. I think readers do too. And I think many more directors would begin to treat stage directions as visual speech rather than as filigree if they were not always hiding in parentheses.

95. On the Summer Olympics and moving at the same time

While breast-feeding twins, I watched the Summer Olympics, riveted by the opening ceremony in Beijing. The amount of virtuosity and coordination required was proof that the Chinese could effectively decimate most other nations, including ours. And yet in this case, the coordinated movement was used in the service of joy.

My older daughter asked me, “Mom, how can so many people move exactly at the same time?” And I said, “They practice.” She watched, rapt. And I thought, Why is it so moving to see people move or dance at the same time? Thousands of people moving at the same time, in vaguely martial fashion, could mean:
We could kill you if we wanted to
. But instead we are moving our arms and legs at the same time to express joy, friendliness, and grace.

At the theater it is mesmerizing when people dance at the same time, sing at the same time, speak at the same time, or even walk at the same time. We know something has been rehearsed, or coordinated, when people move or speak simultaneously. And rather than being pained by the artificiality of moving or speaking at the same time, we often experience joy from the virtuosity of synchronization, from the always implied memory of a collective rehearsing together. And, I would argue, we experience joy and relief that such a potentially martial activity is being used to make us laugh instead of to make us die.

96. The first day of rehearsal

On the first day of rehearsal for my translation of
Three Sisters
, the director, John Doyle, pulled out a large costume rack, crammed with bustles, top hats, rehearsal skirts, rags, three-piece suits, dilapidated white wedding dresses, and sad sweaters. He instructed the actors to pick out whatever costume they thought their character might wear. The actors were giddy with excitement, suddenly young children, rushing to the costume rack.

Once the actors had changed into their costumes, John said, “Olga, where do you think you might sit?” Olga sat where she thought she might sit. “All right, Olga,” said John, “begin the play.” “What?” asked Alma, the actress playing Olga. “Begin the play,” said John. And so Olga began the play. “Father died a year ago today, on your birthday, Irina…” I was so moved to see the actor begin simply, wearing a costume she’d chosen, and sitting in a spot she’d chosen.

Usually, a first day goes something more like this. The actors arrive. The entire theater staff arrives, occasionally along with some board members. We eat stale donuts and mill around nervously. The artistic director says a few words. The director does a presentation. The designers do a presentation. The playwright says some awkward heartfelt things. It’s something like an ad campaign, but for who? We’re still trying to convince the theater to do our play, but they’re already doing it! We tell the actors how the play will look and sound, proud of our work, but because we’ve done the work already, the actors’ very particular imaginations won’t influence any of our big plans!

Then we sit down nervously, surrounded by a ring of about fifty people (depending on how big the theater is), and we read the play out loud at a table. The pencils are sharp, and the actors do a strange dance of auditioning for each other. The day ends, we are all relieved, and the next day we actually begin rehearsal. What if the first day of rehearsal could contain more joy? More costumes and fewer packets of information? What if it were as secretive and intimate as children building a fort, covering themselves with blankets, sitting in the dark, saying to the outside world: keep out, keep out, for now …

97. On watching
Three Sisters
in the dark

On the final run-through of
Three Sisters
, John Doyle ushered me into a dark rehearsal room. “Here’s a torch,” he said. “A what?” I asked. He handed me a flashlight and ushered me in.

The actors, he explained, had been rehearsing in the dark for the past two weeks. John said it made them self-conscious to rehearse in the light. This might well have been true. For the observer, though, the curious effect of not being able to
see
the actors was not being able to
hear
them. In other words, the senses blurred. As I watched the run-through, it appeared as though the actors were muttering in the dark, because I couldn’t see them. I searched out the lighting designer afterward. “Jane,” I said, “they won’t be in the dark, in Cincinnati, will they?” “Oh no,” she said, “at least not by opening night.”

And I thought, What does it mean that in the theater illumination affects one’s hearing, and sound affects one’s sight? Paula Vogel maintains that theater is an experience of synesthesia, that is to say, the blurring of the senses. One of my favorite directors, Jessica Thebus, from Chicago, has synesthesia. For her, every number has a color. Every month has a color. It strikes me that directors with synesthesia are the proper people to direct plays or compose music. Duke Ellington, Leonard Bernstein, and Franz Liszt all had synesthesia. Ellington once said, “If Harry Carney is playing, D is dark blue burlap. If Johnny Hodges is playing, G becomes light blue satin.” How to make sound visible, how to give sound color?

I remember being in a parking lot with Jessica Thebus in Chicago while she was directing my play at the Goodman Theatre. The parking lot assigned each floor a number and a color. Jessica and I wandered the parking lot and she said, “We can’t be on Four Yellow, clearly, because the number four is intrinsically blue.” And I thought, My play is in very good hands.

98. The audience is not a camera; or, how to protect your audience from death

Walter Benjamin argued years ago in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that actors would begin to act for cameras and not for audiences.

Recently, I was doing a play at a loft in Brooklyn called the Invisible Dog. The designer thought it might be a good idea to transport the whole audience on risers the whole length of the warehouse at a pivotal moment, without telling them we would do so. The effect would be like a camera suddenly creating a long shot. Everyone thought this was a cool idea. (With a sinking feeling, I remembered Anne Bogart once telling me to regard with suspicion any idea that seems cool.)

At any rate, our guerrilla gang went about figuring out how to make a mechanism that would move the entire audience back suddenly on a riser. With some engineering, some favors, and some luck, our small and merry band created a riser that could in fact move the entire audience the length of the loft. We were jubilant in tech. We all sat on the riser, and suddenly we were far away! It was joyful! It was surprising. It was cool.

The next morning I checked my e-mail, and Lucien, the proprietor of the Invisible Dog, had written to me something like: “What a thing you have made! I only hope it doesn’t go through the holes in the floor, eh?” (Yes, his e-mail had a French accent.) “What holes in the floor?” I wrote back. “Come, I will show you today,” he said. Sure enough, there were holes in the floor. You could see all the way from our third-floor loft clear into the second-floor loft. I had visions of the riser moving, and suddenly a crack of wood, and our audience members falling through the floor to their deaths on top of the artists who worked on the second floor, killing them also. I, as the acting artistic director, said, “Guys, I don’t think we can move sixty live bodies and however many tons of machinery over an old floor with holes in it. I don’t think it’s very safe.” “But we did all the calculations,” they said. “But you can see the floor below in little holes in the wood,” I said. “But our blocking and design is based on this concept,” they said. “But people could die,” I said. “No risers.”

No one (with the possible exception of the technical director) was very pleased about the change. We reblocked the entire second act in one night, and I found I much preferred it without the conceptual move. We were no longer proceeding as though the audience were a camera, capable of being pulled back, through automation, to create a long shot.

I think that in the contemporary theater we don’t consciously think of our audience as an inanimate mechanism, but as digital media are more and more in our lives, we more and more imagine the audience as a camera and design as something to be photographed. This gives theater a strange gloss, a strange preening quality as though it were about to be photographed. Whereas its charm is its very human gaze. I derived a few first principles from this experience:

1. The audience is not a camera.

2. Be suspicious of cool ideas.

3. Don’t ever, ever kill your audience.

99. On endings

I do not like to end my plays with the phrase “End of Play,” even though editors often cross out “The End” and substitute the phrase “End of Play.” To me “The End” signifies mythic time and the notion that, oddly, there is no end. “The End,” for me somehow implies its opposite. Its very finality implies a new cycle beginning. Whereas “End of Play” implies the end of some aesthetic object that has a definite and real end because it is, after all, only an object. Why does “End of Play” make me sad, whereas “The End” seems triumphant? Daring, even?

I love how
The Bald Soprano
ends with its own beginning. I once saw a twenty-four-hour version of the play in the New York International Fringe Festival. The play began as soon as it ended, over and over, for a complete twenty-four-hour cycle. The audience could come back and see the play at 4:00 a.m., when the wigs were coming unglued and the irrational was gaining.

There is a natural dread of endings. One wants to feel as though endings contain beginnings, in spite of, or perhaps because of, their finality. But are we becoming inured to the idea of cyclical time now that we rely less and less on clocks and more and more on digital devices that have a linear progression? We no longer see time going in a circle, we see it marching forward ceaselessly, soundlessly … And if we fail to perceive time as cyclical, is time itself becoming less cyclical, insofar as time is partially a matter of perception?