Dark Matter

MFA class of 2015, I'm going to talk about Pool (No Water) AGAIN. This is a delicious play by Mark Ravenhill that follows a friend group through artist jealousy of a former colleague who has made it big and successful by exploiting the death of one of their other friends to AIDS. Here's a link to the NYTimes article about a production in New York in 2012, but it experiences with the audience an event, told through these five friends, about this woman who has made it big. “It’s that quality in her work that sells. The pieces that first began when we lost Ray to the whole AIDS thing. And she used Ray’s blood and bandages and catheter and condoms. Pieces that sold to every major collector in the world.” (Ravenhill) By way of another death in the group (to cancer), this successful friend invites the others to her home in California as a way to reconnect and share with them. 

"ʻYouʼre all wiped out,ʼ she says. ʻYouʼre all exhausted,ʼ she says. ʻPhysically and spiritually and emotion. Please come out to the pool. Please. Please. Come on. Itʼs the least I can do.ʼ" (Ravenhill)

In a quick turn of events, during their first night of camaraderie since before she acquired fame, they all decide to go skinny dipping in her pool. This protagonist character with lack of sober judgment, strips naked, and dives head first into it which (spoiler) has no water. It had been drained by her pool boy earlier that day. They begin to care for her in the hospital while she's in a coma, staying in her home and enjoying her success while she lies unaware in a hospital bed and without thinking, they begin to document the recovery every day through a camera lens, all secretly thinking "this is it, this is our break." It doesn't end up the way that had all planned, however. When she comes out of the coma and sees the images, it is HER body, so it is HER show. They delete the pictures before she is healed and this leads to some really interesting dialogue to wrap up the play. 

The coolest part of this script, though, is that it is written without any distinction between characters. None of them have names or specific words, it's a giant monologue that the artists involved have to take ownership of. The protagonist isn't represented on stage. She isn't a character. She's the dark matter. They give a voice to her through their recollection of the events, but she doesn't speak ever as herself, which lends to a very cynical representation of this woman, who seems like a villain at first, but an audience can't help but identify with because even though she is filtered through the lens of these jaded people, is still a victim of a terrible situation and is a smart business woman. The separation from seeing the event of her diving head first into a pool and hearing the crack (which would NEVER work on stage) Ravenhill has written a beautifully poetic story that lives in an abstracted version that is significantly more believable and relatable in this iteration because we aren't taken out of the play in saying "that didn't look real, I don't believe it". Her character is the focus of the play, but it takes away the obligation to see her as the poor human being who is the victim and really turns the attention to these adults who can say they love someone so much and still do horrible things to one another. It reflects more coming from their voices to have to say the words that they were selfish and wrong to act the way they do because the events they relive on the stage aren't being told from a photo-realistic approach, which is really interesting since their work is centered around photographed images of a healing process in a hospital. This isn't a producer choice, but a playwright's choice, which ultimately I feel is stronger than a producer saying "we don't have the funding, don't try to make this work." It is meant for a stage, so he wrote for the stage. 

Michaeland I had a conversation with his mom yesterday about the second question in this prompt, and if you haven't read Michael's blog yet, here's a link to his response. We discussed the Holocaust and the depiction of it in film and on stage, but ultimately, the events of this magnitude can't be accurately represented on stage because we don't have the cinematic scale, funds, or access that film makers do to really give a voice to the events of the Holocaust on the whole. It won't ever be a successful endeavor at that grand scale because we have to filter it through the lens of certain voices such as a family a la The Diary of Anne Frank or a small group of students in an internment camp such as I Never Saw Another Butterfly. We can't show the horrific events of the showers, or the brutality, the lives of the officers etc. because we don't have the means for it to be done tactfully. There's a layer of disconnect in film that an audience seems to need to see the Holocaust in this way, because you aren't actually in the same room as the people playing the roles of the Jews experiencing such a horrifying event or the actors playing the Nazis carrying out these orders. If we were to fully engage during a live performance, I don't think the actors would leave the theater with much respect. The separation is needed to be able to examine it. Mel Brooks has some real commentary on the audacity of a stage show trying to portray the Holocaust in The Producers. Although his characters are looking for a bomb, there may be some truth to the fact that if we're going to show the history of something that awful, it has to be re-imagined in a way that is so offensive it isn't offensive anymore. It's too big for our world, so we have to isolate it, compartmentalize it, and redefine it to be able to discuss it.

The Disgruntled Actor/For the Women

My friend Bryan can be a real jackass. I say this completely out of love and admiration; he is one of my mentors and was the first director I worked with in my undergraduate experience as an actor, but he's a jackass in his relationships. The last 4 years have been really good to B, he has been the artistic director of The Living Room Theatre in Kansas City, directs usually 5-7 of their productions each year, lived in the theatre space, and has started a playwright series that does readings a few times each year at local bars and restaurants to bring revenue to both the theatre and the community.

 Which brings me to his behavior: Bryan isn't always very good with breakups. Last year, he dated an actress with whom he would be doing one of these readings, and though things didn't end badly, they didn't end very well, and he was the source of a lot of gossip in the circles where they both socialized. They were cast by their mutual friend, the playwright, in this piece for the end of July called For the Women. It was to be read at one of the more popular venues in town and although there was some tension, both agreed to do it. 

The marketing for this particular script was pretty wide-spread on social media, word of mouth and printed advertisements because the playwright, Alli Jordan, is a pretty well known artist in the KC community and Bryan is a relatively well-known actor/director/playwright there, as well. The playwright gave a brief synopsis of the play, but made it very clear to the audience and the actors that they wouldn't read it prior to the first public appearance of the script at the end of July so it generated some hype. They did a few public statements saying that their former relationship wasn't in the way, that as artists the respected each other and were happy to work together, and were looking forward to this project.

As the closing piece to the evening, Bryan, Alli (who would read stage directions), and his co-star had plenty of time to have couple of drinks, relax, and prepare for their slot. They set up on the stage and opened the scripts. Bryan, who is 1. hot tempered when he wants to be and 2. incredibly perceptive, realized very quickly that this play was written about his relationship with his co-star and they were playing themselves, although the playwright had changed their names. She took information she knew from his past relationships and inserted it in the play as well. He felt unsettled, victimized, and slandered by the way she wrote his character and was visibly unraveling during the reading, but held it together until nearly the end of the play when a section of dialogue was verbatim drawn from one of the fights he and his ex-girlfriend/co-star had before splitting up. At this point, he stood, turned the table, had a shouting match with the playwright and his co-star for how poorly he was being treated, how unprofessional it was to put him in that position, how he needed to take a stand for himself, unlike his literary alter-ego, and walked off stage. Both women were stunned, the audience was stunned, and the place was silent and unmovable until Bryan walked back in from outside, up on to the stage, and all three took a bow. 

It turns out, this was written with all three of them involved in the creation process, and they were in on the play from the beginning. The playwright wanted a piece of theatre that examines how rumor, relationships, and behaviors can have an impact on perceptions of people who know you and to encourage the audience to examine their experiences of instances where they may have been part of the problem for someone's reputation or the victim of seemingly harmless but hurtful talk. Luckily, Bryan and his co-star had ended things on good terms and this was more of a ploy to market the play, but much like I set up at the beginning of this post, people have a perception of his behaviors due to an exploitation of privacy, over-sharing of personal details, and meddling. The play was a wild success because it was so unexpected, the actors played their truthful point of view, and it disrupted what this audience came in perceiving how evening would turn out. It became a dialogue between the artists and the observers, who were unknown cast members and gave them all more to work off of. 

This story now brings me to the second part of the prompt: How do we bring theatre into the 21st century? In ways such as this. Our attention span as a generation is so succinct and we're made for instant gratification due to the technology at our fingertips, so given an opportunity to do a piece of theatre in a restaurant/bar/art gallery where you wouldn't typically find theatre opens up worlds of possibilities, accesses patrons who might not feel comfortable in a stuffy theatre, but are totally at ease at a table with a beer in hand, and forces the creative team to be innovative, minimalistic, and ready to use anything that comes their way. It sets up a rapport with the audience that they don't have to be trapped, and because this isn't a traditional theatrical space, they feel comfortable leaving if it isn't their aesthetic, but because of this freedom, most people are more comfortable staying to enjoy the art. The creation of new work, re-imagined work, and collaborating with other venues/locally owned businesses to build relationships and earn revenue on nights/months/seasons where the numbers are low is both smart and exciting, but forces us as patrons to experience something we may not previously have thought to put together. I'll leave you with this ted talk by Amanda Palmer if you feel inclined to watch 14 minutes on the art of asking, which I think is a way our 21st century theatre can go. 

I begin.

In 2012 I was living in Los Angeles and working as a struggling actor (read: waitress and broken miserable soul) who went from doing tons of work in the theatre industry to living in a city where there wasn't much opportunity in the medium I had spent years training in. Because the work I saw on stage was generally ghastly, I stopped seeing local theatre about two months after I re-located to the city. 

Three weeks before I left L.A. to eventually come to LA, I saw a friend in a new production at a small theatre company in North Hollywood. I don't remember the name of the play, the actors, most of the characters or even much of the story itself because on the whole it was horrific, but I do remember this one moment. The last scene of the play had three actors on stage. Two engaged in a dialogue about something trivial and poorly written, but there was an actor downstage right building a house out of cards on the floor. He was in a pair of boxers and spent the entire scene trying to construct a house out of a deck of cards. The struggle, frustration, and panic that he felt as he tried again and again to build the fucking house was so captivating that I almost stopped caring that I paid $15 to see this piece of shit. The honesty of truly doing something, being completely invested in this action, standing onstage in his underwear and pursuing the goal of constructing this paper house, fighting through the frustration of continual defeat was so powerful and simple, so present, so affective for me as an audience member that it truly made the experience worth it. This moment was enough of a glimpse of an honest pursuit of goals where I saw true frustration, shame, anger, embarrassment and failure that was completely juxtaposed by the rest of the event and its presentation of lives worth living for a wasted two hours of my existence. 

Another production that stands out to me as one with elements of Truth was a production at the High School Institute housed at Northwestern University in Evanston. The play, Hotel Cassiopeia, is a Charles Mee play based on the life of artist Joseph Cornell. To accommodate for the number of students involved, several actors played the role of Joseph (both male and female) and all the female roles were played by different women rather than one actor. The production choices, casting, age range of the actors weren't meant to be naturalistic or realistic, and the script, although a derivative of events from Cornell's life and memoirs, was an adaptation with inferences made and not meant to be a documentary-style Truth-telling play. So why do I bring it up?  This again comes back to the acting. Toward the end of the play, there is a monologue that Cornell has to a girl that says: 

JOSEPH
Still,
if I were to say anything to you 
it would be:
do what you love
not what you think you should do
or what you think is all you can do
what you think is possible for you
no
do what you love
and let the rest follow along behind it
or not
or not
because
even if it doesn't follow along behind
you will have done what you've loved
and you know what that is
you know better than anyone what you love
and a life centered around your love
cannot be wrong
cannot finally be disappointing

THE GIRL
Easy for you to say.

JOSEPH
No. No, it isn't.

This exchange broke my heart. It spoke a truth to me as an artist both because the words themselves are so powerful to me as an actor, but also because this young man in the brink of starting his career said them with so much earnest love, compassion and truth. It is a monologue that speaks from a place of understanding struggle, but a 17 year old boy believed in what he loved in that moment, that the simple truth of speaking the words was enough. 

So, question two: Yes, I think there is a difference. Because in my opinion, the truth of the play heavily relies on the truth of the actor in the play. Documentary theatre doesn't work for truth if the actors involved don't come from a place of truth and reality which can only be possible up to a certain point. There can be truths in pieces that are written and there can be truths from the actor, but ultimately I think the truth that we see is different for every individual because we're coming to them with different perspectives/opinions/views as Joe mentioned in response to Spill. Theatre is art, art is subjective, and because of that we can argue for the definition of true without ever determining what that means. 

I end. 

Performative Acts, or The Big Gay Wedding

Here's what occurred to me when this prompt was sent-

1. Panic. 
2. Weddings
3. Don't use weddings, that's unimaginative.
4. *radio silence*

So in honor of following my impulses, I did decide to bring in my experience at two of my dear friends' wedding in April of 2013. You can watch the highlights video here (but it won't work on a mobile device) to see what I'm talking about.

The video will take you through some of the rehearsal, behind the scenes and a few clips of the wedding as it was performed. I could talk about the video as a performative act, but I'm focusing on the actual wedding, so stay with me!

If you watched further than the first 30 seconds, you may notice that this isn't a traditional wedding that most religious institutions honor, but a wedding between two women. These women, my friends Chelsea and Whitney, live in Springfield, Missouri. They have been a couple since 2008 and like many couples in love, decided they wanted to celebrate their union with friends and family. Here's the first issue with the performative act of their wedding, however: In Missouri, same-sex unions aren't recognized by the state. The wedding was in Springfield, they had an ordained minister performing the ceremony, they sign a marriage certificate, I can vouch for both parties saying "I do" and I can guarantee they both meant it, so is this performative act infelicitous? I would vehemently argue that everyone involved with the utterances and actions believed in their words and deeds, and all the elements were in place and had licensed professionals in their proper roles to make everything official, so this event would have been deemed a success with one substitution: Chelsea would have to be a different gender. 

That makes me wonder, though, if because Chelsea seems to identify in some way with a more masculine version of self in her gender role, and chose a dress that is indicative of a tuxedo, she could argue that she was the "groom" in this wedding. If her sense of identity is that she identified, based on Butler's standards, as something other than inherently female, if she queered her gender identity and embraced a "traditional male" identity, would that skew the performative act enough to be arguable grounds for this union between two women to be recognized by the state of Missouri?

I'm not saying that is something that either of these women are actually interested in doing. They are both perfectly happy with their ceremony and use hyphenated last names and call one another wife, so this is all hypothetical. But to examine the ceremony a little more clinically in terms of society's expectations of relationships, I do think there's another case for this performative act going against what is "supposed" to be done.

I invite a disagreement here, but my experience observing the general public and reactions to gay relationships is that more frequently than not, same sex couples are expected to have one person who serves to fill the role of "the Man" and one who fills the role of "the Woman". Masculine/feminine, butch/femme, top/bottom, however we want to classify it, there's a classification that same-sex couples seem expected to fill. This is more of a problem of trying to force a norm of something identifiable onto a relationship that should be able to establish its own norm, but I digress- in Chels and Whitney's wedding, Chelsea took on the role of the groom; she walked down the aisle first and she wore black. But she also wore a dress and makeup, she has long hair, she isn't afraid of heels. She doesn't play the role of "the Man" in her relationship because she is a woman, and that is her sense of identity. Which makes me think that her expression of self changes what is expected of her relationship and shows this performative act in another different way. 

What IS performance?

I glean from Carlson's introduction is that the very act of avoiding a concrete definition of performance gives freedom to the art of exploring it. Because the arts are so subjective in nature and we all see beauty in different forms of expressions and mediums, my personal definition of "performance" is probably going to be very different than someone else's, which brings me to think that the issue of importance here seems to be more that we discuss it and can come at the conversation with a mutual understanding. So, is the definition that it will always evade a true definition?

As our definition of "good theatre" is constantly evolving, why wouldn't the perimeters the define performance also evolve? Does performance mean, in some ways, that we are putting on behaviors rather than investing in living within the world of imagined circumstances? Something that stood out to me from reading the States article, The Phenomenology of Theatre, actually came from a connection to the Fuchs' article, EF's Visit to a Small Planet which I'm sure we've all read- but I started thinking about the idea that each piece of theatre written has its own standards of the World, it functions and experiences differently than we do in our own, and to superimpose our knowledge and definitions on the experiences that occur within that realm doesn't work, because it has its own sense of self. When actors lend themselves to these circumstances and live in the World defined by the play, is that a performance if it is lived truthfully, or is exercising the skill required to live truthfully in the world precisely what makes the act a performance (as referenced page 3 paragraph 2)?

To bring in another section of States' article, I want to discuss how the mimetic theory- or the imitation or expression of something rather than the action of truly doing or experiencing it- is indicative of what we are taught to believe is "good acting", and that if, as actors, we are truly experiencing and doing, an audience is more likely to go on the journey with us than if we're faking it. On some level, it has to always be mimetic in nature, or are we truly going to kill Polonius through the curtain, drown ourselves, and drink poison in a production of Hamlet? This duality, that Schechner labels "restored behavior," points out that we have to have a certain awareness of self while living in the world of the play, but where is the line between performing the action and endowing it with meaning?

I haven't discovered the answers to these questions yet, but as this article has encouraged more questions than it answers, I feel like the definition of performance can't be put into a neat little box and should be something that inspires dialogue rather than offer an easy solution.