100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (6 page)

34. Being in a pure state vs. playing an action

Sometimes theater makers scoff at an actor who can be “in a state” but who cannot “perform an action.” I, however, enjoy an actor who can be in a pure state of emotion, with no need of an action to justify the state. It’s a kind of ecstasy, a state of being, unqualified, unexplained. Anne Bogart and Ariane Mnouchkine speak of “
l’état
”—the necessity for the actor to begin
in a state
at the beginning of the play, a state that then transforms. Joyce Piven and the high-octane
commedia
actors who started in Chicago as the New Criminals use four extreme states of emotion that transform speedily, one into the other—happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. In that form of
commedia
, the actor needs to be “stated,” or in one of these four states, at all times.

But if one is primarily playing subtext, being in a pure state is more challenging. If one is saying one thing and feeling another thing, one is playing a sense of inner contradiction, or tension, or even of subterfuge, which makes a single pure state impossible. Why do we want to watch people playing a sense of inner tension for two hours on stage when there is already enough tension in everyday life?

Is it possible that the rise of the nineteenth-century director (who replaced the actor-manager) corresponded to the rise of subtext because it gave the director an important job, to help the actor find the hidden secret in the text, rather than have the actor merge with the language?

I remember when Maria Dizzia was playing the title role in my play
Eurydice
, she said in a moment of fear during previews, “There are no pillars to hide behind.” “Yes!” I said. I think she meant quite literally that there were no pillars in the set, but also there were no pillars in the language. She was in a pure state, and she was terrified. And beautiful in her terror.

35. Speech acts and the imagination

This morning my five-year-old said, “Let’s go to the evil tower.” “Okay,” I said. She stood up and said, “Here we are at the evil tower.” “Okay,” I said. By speaking the place, she made it so. Five-year-olds understand perfectly this convention, as did Shakespeare. Here we are at the palace. Here we are in the dark, dark woods. By speaking it, we make it so.

In life there are few speech acts. “I do” is one, when we get married. By saying “I do,” we make it so. In the world of imaginary things, speech acts are everywhere. One declares the imaginary world into being.

Method acting has the opposite philosophical stance. Saying one thing, the actor assumes that the real truth is buried or hidden underneath the language. Rather than having language bring to life the invisible world, in naturalism the visual lie is attempted scenically, and language is a cover for the invisible world of feelings.

What is easily understood by a five-year-old—that language invents worlds—is assumed by producers to be intellectually ungraspable by an audience of well-educated grown-ups, who, it is thought, need to see spigots and so forth to represent kitchens, because holding up a mirror to nature—or the sink—is thought to be transcendent.

36. Everyone is famous in a parade

I love watching my children watching parades. They seem to love the simple act of some people walking down a street while other people stand still and watch. I think it must be the most basic, simple form of theater. Very little storytelling, and a distinction between the watcher and the watched. No one in the parade is a famous actor, but they are all famous in the moment because they happen to be moving and the other people happen to be standing still.

37. Conflict is drama?

It has always been curious to me that the first rule of improvisation is that you have to agree and the first rule of playwriting is that your characters have to disagree, and I thought why is that. Is it because many bodies improvising need a certain amount of agreement to stay afloat, whereas a solitary playwright needs the texture of dissonance to approximate the group mind?

I think there has never been a more misunderstood phrase than
drama is conflict, conflict is drama
. Instead of thinking of conflict, I like to think of dialectic, a need for opposites that undermine each other. Or, I think about the need for contrast in painting. Paintings don’t need large family fights and mudslinging, but they do need contrasts of color and shade. Of course, watching people insulting other people is entertaining, as are arm wrestling, bearbaiting, and the like. But I’m not sure that it’s necessary to the
drama
, for drama is also a spectacle, a thing of interest, a thing happening, an event eventing, which is not necessarily a thing fighting. Though fighting can certainly
be
dramatic, it is not a necessary precondition
to
the dramatic.

What if we borrowed from improvisation a proliferation of assent? A form of storytelling that used surprise as a tool rather than bickering.

38. The language of clear steps

When did the language of clear steps become an overriding aesthetic vocabulary for the jugglers, puppet masters, flying machinists, divas, clowns, minstrels, burlesque dancers, bohemians, that is to say, theater artists who are meant to channel the inexplicable? The following phrase is often heard in rehearsal rooms: “I want to make sure that the psychological steps the character is taking on the journey are absolutely clear.” But did clear steps ever make for a good story? (See
Hamlet
.) Characters take a step and then a back step and then a leap and then a strange bedeviled jump, and then they fall over. Clear steps seem more appropriate for a manual on how to put together furniture from another country.

Forgive me, I don’t drink all that much, but whatever happened to the Dionysian? (See Nietzsche’s
Birth of Tragedy
.) Our theater is now almost entirely made up of Apollos. Whatever happened to the irrational—to the notion that brilliant practitioners of an art form have pipelines to the irrational, are accused of being madmen by Plato, are almost banished from the city? They do not need to justify every intuition, as though they were being audited. They do not need their pencils to be terribly sharp. If you are one of those people who played school in the summertime (raise your hands, I was one of them), perhaps it would be good to learn a theatrical skill like sword fighting before coming into the theater and inflicting the role of schoolmarm on what used to be the life of the passionate vagabond.

Words like
liminal
and
unpack
should go in essays about theater and get banished from rehearsal rooms. Where are the jugglers? The fire-eaters? Do we all need a master’s degree to put up a play? Whatever happened to the garage, to the basement? Someone, send in the clowns. And free us from pedigree. Actors used to be akin to prostitutes in the public mind. Now we are akin to professors.

I do not exempt myself. I went to a university, more than one, I played school in the summertime, and I cannot juggle, Hula-Hoop with flames, belly dance, or even sing in tune. But were I to choose a course of study for future playwrights (and future citizens), it would include juggling.

39. The death of the ensemble

The director and teacher Joyce Piven once asked me, “What can you accomplish without an ensemble?” Then she smiled derisively. “You can put up a
show
,” she said. “And that’s about it.”

Why do we think it’s a good idea for everyone to meet each other on the first day of rehearsal and then learn lines for three weeks and do blocking and put up a show? Where did all the ensembles go, and has there ever been a major writer who emerged from a theater culture not associated with an acting ensemble that evolved a style over time? Shakespeare had the King’s Men, Chekhov had the Moscow Art Theatre, and we (if we are lucky) have three weeks of rehearsal with an Equity cast pulled from a large group of talented people who happen not to be in a pilot. What to do? Is it enough to work with the same people over time when an artistic director allows you to, when schedules allow, and when the material seems like a good enough fit? Or must we make new ensembles to evolve new ways of making theater for the present moment?

40. The decline of big families and the decline of cast sizes

Did the rise of birth control and smaller families correspond to the diminishment of cast size, and if so, what then? On stage, a small family becomes a symbol of neurosis, whereas a big family becomes a microcosm of the world.

Death of a Salesman
has fourteen characters in it. Modern family dramas have four to six characters in them. Arthur Miller was able to write about the relationship of the family to the larger world, whereas modern playwrights are constricted by cast size or their own imaginations and tend to write about smaller families as though there were no world outside the living room.

41. Color-blind casting; or, why are there so many white people on stage?

If you are a white playwright and you tell a casting agent that you need a young woman named Mary and ethnicity is irrelevant, chances are you will see thirty white women, two black women, and one Asian woman at auditions, and through some strange, indefinable process, a white woman gets cast, more often than not.

Chuck Mee once told me that he eventually began to specify the ethnicities of his characters through the choice of their names. If you tell a casting agent that you need a woman in her forties named Aditi, chances are you will see Indian women in auditions, and you will end up casting an Indian woman. I believe this has to do with our underlying unspoken faith in mimesis. If the name of a character suggests a nonwhite person, usually a nonwhite person will be found for the role. But even if the philosophy of the playwright is that his or her plays should be cast without regard to race, somehow the structure of theater (or our country) intervenes, and whether from subtle, unconscious racial or mimetic biases, our stages are fairly whitewashed.

I am not interested in writing plays that are specifically about white people. And yet to cast nonwhite people, you often have to specify that a character is a particular race, and then suddenly you have a play about race. Is naturalism, which purports to hold a mirror up to nature, actually just a mirror held up to upper-middle-class Scandinavians?

I remember when the director John Doyle held auditions for my translation of
Three Sisters
, actors would often come in with something I might call “Chekhov voice,” a strange accent that is not quite English and not quite American and vaguely upper-class. This unidentifiable accent (which is certainly not Russian) created an odd acting barrier between the actor and the language. John would say, “Where are you from?” And the actor would say, “Detroit.” John would say, “Could you do the speech the way you normally talk, the way you talked before you went to acting school?” And then the speech would be liberated from Chekhov voice, and we could hear the language of the play again without getting a brain fog of corsets and samovars.

If Chekhov voice is seen as desirable in acting programs, and if Chekhov voice is an upper-class whitewashing of race, ethnicity, regionalism, and class difference, then what are acting programs erasing? And is the deeply held belief in naturalism in this country an impediment to diversity on stage, in addition to this country’s subtle or not-so-subtle racism?

42.
Eurydice
in Germany

The last time I saw a play of mine in another language, it was
Eurydice
, in German. Forget that in German it was pronounced “you’readyke.” Forget that they began the play with a prologue by Heiner Müller while people danced in bathing suits. Forget that the father had a very long beard down to the ground that he used as a dancing partner. Forget, for the moment, that there were four flying stones rather than three still stones and that they cut all of Orpheus’s monologues and replaced them with German versions of American rock-and-roll songs. Oh, and forget, if you will, that everyone was wearing clown makeup.

The woman playing Eurydice was divine. And I could understand every word she spoke, even though she was speaking German, a language I don’t speak. I always knew where she was in the punctuation. And this experience made me wonder: is there an emotional melody or rhythm underlying a play that is beyond translation? And if a very good actor can act this rhythm, then does emotion follow rhythm, and no externally imposed style can intervene? And the experience made me long for meter. Deprived of meter, without the intrinsic rhythm of the Greeks or the Elizabethans, are playwrights now like seamstresses working without needle and thread?

Virginia Woolf once wrote to Vita Sackville-West, “Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm.” We often obsess in a rehearsal room about what the
style
of the play is. Is it possible that merely by being attentive to the rhythm of the language, even in translation, the actor can attend to the style of the piece, without worrying about stylized gestures?

43. Eating what we see

Recently, I was with my five-year-old daughter at the theater. She whispered and pointed to the stage. “Are those real people?” she asked me. “They’re actors,” I said.

“But are they real people?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. I realized that she must have asked this because of the profusion of digital images that she sees. She didn’t wonder if the
characters
were real; she wondered if the
actors
were real. This is perhaps why the new generation will find theater exceedingly exciting (or else exceedingly dull)—a place where the word still conjures images of the invisible world but the people are real.

In the medieval age stained glass was one of the few daily images offered up for reflection and meditation, and now we see God knows how many visual images a day; I think by one recent estimate the eye had to process three thousand visual images a day (and think of Times Square, the horror).