In acting school we strive to be "truthful," to perform as if we aren't performing, but living through the circumstances our character is experiencing. But we are performing. We are. We're on a stage and there are bright colored lights aimed at us and there are hundreds of people watching and we're pretending to be in a living room but there aren't any walls and if you walk past the couch and through a propped up door to where the bathroom is meant to be you'll bump into a young woman clad all in black waiting to unzip your dress.
It's. Not. Real.
All the shows we've seen so far have accepted and embraced the fact that they are live performances. As an audience member, I have never felt compelled to believe the actors in front of me were anywhere except in the theater, in this moment, with me. Not in a forest or a battlefield or a coffee shop or - heaven forbid - a living room. Fog machines are operated in full view by actors, costume changes happen on stage, actors who aren't involved in the present dialogue lounge upstage and watch.
More than the fact that the performers acknowledge the fact that they are performing, the performances themselves are larger than life. In Berliner Ensemble's production of Schiller's Die Räuber, Franz has a complex response to his father's death. First he examines the body and contemplates what to do next - perhaps a "realistic" response. Next, he lifts his father's body in his arms and animates it like a grotesque doll, puppeting it to sing But I Might Die Tonight by Cat Stevens. At the conclusion of the song, he drags the body to the bed and curls up next to it, wrapping his father's lifeless arms around himself. After a moment, he realizes the arms are locked in rigor mortis around him, and he violently fights to release himself, removing all of his clothing in the process. At this point the body comes back to life, and Franz smothers his father with a pillow. Finally he rolls the again lifeless body into a body bag, and zips it shut. As he is dragging it offstage, the body awakens again. The final solution - he leaves the body offstage and returns with a gasoline can. He spills a line across the space between himself and his father's body and lights a match. We watch the spark travel slowly across the dark stage, closer and closer to the offstage space where the body bag was left. We hold our breath from the edge of our seats, waiting for the explosion. When it comes, it is the houselights bursting on - an explosion of self-awareness as we are thrust into the interval.
This sequence wouldn't pass as "truth" in my acting class, but I have never seen a more truthful representation of loss. The grotesquely playful song sequence speaks to the absurdity and disbelief that accompanies death. Whether or not a person actually curls up in bed with the body of their lost loved one, or whether or not the body would actually come to life, these moments illuminated the bigger Truth underneath the reality of that circumstance. Curling up with the body - the desire to wrap yourself in the person you've lost. Becoming trapped by rigor mortis - the horror at one's inability to escape from the reality of the loss. Nudity - the absolute vulnerability and rawness of losing a parent. Smothering his reanimated father - the violence of trying to free oneself from the inescapable reality of death. Blowing up the body - the impulse to destroy even the memory of the loss.
Of course I am reading this sequence through the thick lens my own personal experience, but isn't that the point? To invite each audience member to have a personal relationship with the work? If I had seen the "realism" version of Franz's reaction to his father's death, I likely would have seen a man experiencing some version of sadness or anger as someone else covered the body. Perhaps that's the real "truth" of what it usually looks like when someone dies, but who cares? The version we saw uncovered a larger Truth and gave us all something more human and more visceral than realism is capable of.
It's. Not. Real.
All the shows we've seen so far have accepted and embraced the fact that they are live performances. As an audience member, I have never felt compelled to believe the actors in front of me were anywhere except in the theater, in this moment, with me. Not in a forest or a battlefield or a coffee shop or - heaven forbid - a living room. Fog machines are operated in full view by actors, costume changes happen on stage, actors who aren't involved in the present dialogue lounge upstage and watch.
More than the fact that the performers acknowledge the fact that they are performing, the performances themselves are larger than life. In Berliner Ensemble's production of Schiller's Die Räuber, Franz has a complex response to his father's death. First he examines the body and contemplates what to do next - perhaps a "realistic" response. Next, he lifts his father's body in his arms and animates it like a grotesque doll, puppeting it to sing But I Might Die Tonight by Cat Stevens. At the conclusion of the song, he drags the body to the bed and curls up next to it, wrapping his father's lifeless arms around himself. After a moment, he realizes the arms are locked in rigor mortis around him, and he violently fights to release himself, removing all of his clothing in the process. At this point the body comes back to life, and Franz smothers his father with a pillow. Finally he rolls the again lifeless body into a body bag, and zips it shut. As he is dragging it offstage, the body awakens again. The final solution - he leaves the body offstage and returns with a gasoline can. He spills a line across the space between himself and his father's body and lights a match. We watch the spark travel slowly across the dark stage, closer and closer to the offstage space where the body bag was left. We hold our breath from the edge of our seats, waiting for the explosion. When it comes, it is the houselights bursting on - an explosion of self-awareness as we are thrust into the interval.
This sequence wouldn't pass as "truth" in my acting class, but I have never seen a more truthful representation of loss. The grotesquely playful song sequence speaks to the absurdity and disbelief that accompanies death. Whether or not a person actually curls up in bed with the body of their lost loved one, or whether or not the body would actually come to life, these moments illuminated the bigger Truth underneath the reality of that circumstance. Curling up with the body - the desire to wrap yourself in the person you've lost. Becoming trapped by rigor mortis - the horror at one's inability to escape from the reality of the loss. Nudity - the absolute vulnerability and rawness of losing a parent. Smothering his reanimated father - the violence of trying to free oneself from the inescapable reality of death. Blowing up the body - the impulse to destroy even the memory of the loss.
Of course I am reading this sequence through the thick lens my own personal experience, but isn't that the point? To invite each audience member to have a personal relationship with the work? If I had seen the "realism" version of Franz's reaction to his father's death, I likely would have seen a man experiencing some version of sadness or anger as someone else covered the body. Perhaps that's the real "truth" of what it usually looks like when someone dies, but who cares? The version we saw uncovered a larger Truth and gave us all something more human and more visceral than realism is capable of.
Denis Diderot has a famous (or at least I am doing all I can to make it famous) essay titled, Paradoxe sur la comédien (The Paradox of the actor). In it he examines the contradiction inherent on the work of an
ReplyDeleteactor — present as character (role) in the play, and actor (actual person) on stage in a theater simultaneously. How is it possible to hold two realities at the same time? Easy. It is the very artifice of the theater that makes it possible. We in fact enjoy the game. Schiller calls it the "play instinct" following after Aristotle and mimesis. And the audience is doing the same balancing act. Diderot also says in this same essay that the actor of sensibility — the actor who relies on emotion alone and not on the artificiality of the situation — will only ever be mediocre. She or he can achieve flashes of brilliance perhaps but can never duplicate the moment, which in the live theatre we are in fact called upon to do. It's a tricky word, TRUTH, when used in the context of the theatre.