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.