Mid-conversation, the lights go down and Simone Weil appears, or at least her hastily-garbed doppelganger, a pacing scourge. Her challenges carom off the walls with a lacerating ferocity.
She strides off, boots echoing into the silence …
DL: Thank you guys for coming.
Applause …
… and we’re done. Salut.
We see Simone Weil’s vision of torture, the prisoners awaiting torture and certain death in the street …
DL: it’s a fairly classical torture scene -
CW: I’ll say!
[sympathy for knees is raised as a locus of both suffering and politics]
DL: Blasted is the other big hit of last year, along with Black Watch.
W11: how is political theatre different from political theatre?
DL: more importantly, how is the situation of being in a theatre political, period?
[précis of Blasted by Señor Krupp ...]
DL: Blasted considers the audience as a mass, as a body – and it considers that classic off-stage dramaturgy isn’t enough. it’s a different – more adversarial – take on the audience
SS: I liked it, but it didn’t fuck me up. I spent more time thinking about what a cool thing it was to be pulled off onstage than on the larger political impact
K: (to DL) why do you get frustrated with that response? why isn’t that a reasonable response to violence?
DL: I have huge questions about – on one hand I think it’s sophomoric, but on the other, Kane had real political aims
W3: I had read it before, and it did fuck me up royally – both seeing it and having it in my head afterwards. maybe it’s just being sensitized by Tarantino movies, but seeing it on stage does make it much more vivid – it seems like we’re going through it as a culture
MD: I thought it was a tremendous production. and though it did make the audience aware of their bodies, I don’t think it’s the only play to do that – other plays don’t reduce people to eyeballs. there’s something that happens in a live space that’s fundamentally different from watching a film
DL: okay, but if you’re shattered by that play, is that what we want?
MD: who’s that “we?” sarah kane?
DL: but in a play like Blasted there’s a difference stance toward the audience. is there a difference with regard to that experience than another, less aggressive, less adversarial sort of play? There are a lot of different approaches – a Brechtian one where you want people to think critically, there’s a Blasted one where you leave people shell-shocked – many others – it says a lot about how you think of those people.
W12: now that there’s so much media available to people, it’s not enough to just put it out there. there’s a duty to make sure that people see it beyond a limited audience. people should do what they expect their audience to do. also, who knows what an audience has been through?
DL: but that’s the Weil thing again – who of us are going to fight in Spain?
W1: what are your responsibilities in showing graphic events on stage, such as rape – especially when there’s a chance there are rape victims in the audience? but also, I don’t know if you can put the burden of audience interest on the artists – that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
DL: do you have to be an activist or do you have to perform and write?
W7: how often do shows paper the house? it’s very hard to get anyone to come to the theatre, especially political theatre.
M7: it might be that the job of communicating is less of an issue now – it’s not enough to isolate a cause, because the laundry list of causes seems virtually endless …
PL: but what does theatre do well? for some of these questions theatre isn’t the right vehicle. it’s fantastic for conveying an in-body experience, but not for everything else -
And David wants to turn the conversation to Blasted … but CW has slipped off to the bathroom, so we’ll wait …
[sidebar on commodity culture/corporate culture ...
corporate sponsorship, profit, non-profit, audience size, cultural cachet, art vs. theatre
it’s actually Totally Interesting, but it takes off at the exact time when I choose to refresh the page and drink my beer … and I fall horribly behind, and it seems impossible to catch up … so there.
DL: this raises the specter of Mike taking his HTFA monologue to TCG – taking it to the council of elders … can you tell us how it went?
MD:the experience of performing it in the room – for these artistic directors and executives – was actually really hopeful. the reaction was really warm – and it seemed like these people were able to respond in a way as individuals in a way that they couldn’t as institutional representatives
JH: what is it – what issue – is going to be enough to get these people charged up to do something after seeing a show? what isn’t happening elsewhere in their lives, or on their stages? what’s the theatrical topic that would get people moving?
CW: I feel like the HIV/AIDS crisis worked really well through theatre – that there was a wealthy class in the city who really responded
JH: Angels in America is another example. it seems like the theatre that gets people active is often the less sophisticated, but AiA is a case where there’s a specific sophisticated audience being reached
EK: it’s local – it’s really speaking to a local constituency
DL: so we here tonight are speaking to a local community about local concerns, right? can we go farther with James’ question?
[CW describes The Civilians ...]
MAD: but there’s also a difference between the way the movement works in Black Watch and the way music works in The Civilians – that the latter tends to undermine the political/social effects, where the former tends to highlight them in a more Brechtian manner
[discussion of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson]
DL: is it really a political play?
W10: it’s set in the White House, and there’s a lot dealing with native Americans – I bring it up because were talking about dumb emo music theatre, because it’s really speaking to an audience of young girls, who love it
M5: there is this basic need to entertain as well – it’s a baseline we ignore at our peril, it’s why people come, it’s why people show up
DL: how do politics and entertainment go together? no one’s brought up any kind of pied piper idea of using theatre to seduce people.
M5: will ferrell’s piece on boradway -
DL: which is really turning the heads of … everyone who already hated Bush anyway
M5: but there were a lot of people who voted for him – he was popular for a very long time – and not just the one show, there was a lot of anti-bush buffoonery througout the administration
DL tells the story of Babylon Is Everywhere – a right-wing script where spectacle trumped justice … if this thing tonight was advertised as a talk on the 3rd floor of NYTW there would be two people showing up, one with about 40 plastic bags …
W: there are different circumstances, and different levels of courage. how much are any of us willing to put ourselves on the line as audiences of performers?
DL: that’s the Simone Weil question.
G: so often you’re giving the message to people who already have the message
DL: is it a question of guts? what would an artistic director need to do?
MAD: part of it is the bravery of telling your own story and the stories of others – when you perceive yourself to be a victim of injustice, and how that ignites your bravery, and when you’re in the position of empathy with other people, and how that gets framed – plays like Norml Heart, it did happen, though it’s hard when it doesn’t seem like it’s your own story being told – it makes me think of NYTW and Rachel Corrie …
[précis of the My Name Is Rachel Corrie incident ...]
DL: which leads to the 7 Jewish Children thing – where so much context has piled around it to reduce any volatile reaction …
MAD: but that can also makes people feel cared for, so they feel more willing to participate
M1: if it’s not insoluable, I don’t want to see it – too much political theatre dumbs things down and actually lets the political value out of the room
DL: Coming back to the question of what can provoke action or engagement … how close to home does the material need to be? Let’s try something a little more local.
[Violetta as the bond trader ...]
DL: You know … let’s being it Even Closer …
[Violetta as literary manger ...]
DL: Let’s bring it EVEN CLOSER … does anyone want a beer?
[confused silence]
DL: I’m not acting! And we don’t have styrofoam beer – who wants one?
[beer is distributed]
DL: what about the recent trend – at least at ps122 – of handing out beer. “Beer is the only thing that makes it bearable …” but if we are conceding that theatre’s audience is so small that its effect is small, are we also conceding that the mechanisms of theatre are too complicated?
MD: I have a problem with the whole design of these scenes. these scenes start with a woman who’s been raped, and then you’re using the same frame to show these next scenes makes them seem impossibly more petty and I don’t agree with that strategy at all.
DL: I think it’ s more about the strategy of documentary theatre
MD: but I think decision to stage them the same way skews things
DL: what about this kind of theatre where the actual making of the play that presents social injustice is founded on social injustice
MD: there’s a huge difference between theatre as an art form and actual institutions – political theatre can still happen, even if a given institution might be problematic
CW: but what institutions are dedicated to fighting injustice?
DL: but they do present these works, like nickled and dimed -
W9: what is your mission statement and what did you do – on SW’s 100 anniversary – to get funding for this?
DL: yeah, but compromise gets me hot
W9: well, why is that okay for you instead of these institutions?
DL: but if ps122 or I are acting in bad faith that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about the instutitions
MD: these institutions also chose to sell out their core beliefs and adopt a corporate model
W9: as long as you admit your own complicity
JH: admitting it is the first step
PL: in this conversation we keep talking about the political as if it were change, as if it were revolution – but it seems like it’s more commonly characterized as recognition, which is a different exchange, with different results
M3: sometimes preaching to the choir is necessary – to be reminded that the struggle is worth it, to sustain engagement and action
MD: there’s also political theatre of the stastus quo – works that are about keeping things as they are, that you’ll be moved, but not too much, and you’ll stay a subscriber and go home happy
M4: I don’t believe the Illinois Gov was changed by the exonerated so much as he detected in it the evidence of a social curve, a momentum that allowed him to make a statement or a public stand – precisely because it’s being backed up in public.
At the table, and brown-bagging it like a champ.
As we re-settle ourselves into the booth, Eddie Argos speaks for us all:
“I can’t stand the sound/of the Velvet Underground!
I can’t stand that sound/Second time around!
Once is enough!”
DL: I do want to do one more scene before we break – a different kind of scene, which shows a different perspective, that of the perpetrators planning the coup. We’ve talked a lot about empathy with regard to these other scenes, using that – and character psychology – as an entry point. This scene turns that impulse somewhat on its head, simply because what we bring to it – ideas about these men, or men like them – is very different …
[Jeff and Jon stride the Bell Tower for the Very Last Time!]
DL: it’s not a scene that needs updating or recostuming … but still, there’s injustice all around us. We no longer yell at the stage, or yell when we leave … but Jaffier, he’s something of a perfect audience member … he hears about these atrocities, and he steps up to do something. Which makes me wonder – when we’re in a theatre – if we’re doing enough?
Which is a good place for an intermission.
We see the first Violetta scene, a post-Bosnia imagination of the Sack of Venice …
DL: Does that feel less hectoring? Is there more room? Does the information change? Relative to the 2nd courtesan scene, where some people thought things felt forced, does this strike you in a different way?
[The Exonerated, its post-perf collections for legal aid, the idea that somehow the show itself isn't "enough", the desire for authenticity, etc.]
CW: I would say that isn’t about trust, so much as a statement of gravity
EK: but aren’t we elevating it somehow, that the impersonation of “real people” is being held to be more serious than “normal theatre”
MD: well, there’s also a difference between a video, made of pixels, and a theatre piece, which is people in a room
DL: There is a tension between empathy and facts – does the desire to be moved trump the possibility of political action?
W7: it’s also about the audience? what’s the context? that would change everything, and is just as important as anything in the play, content-wise.
MD: What would it take to activate this room now?
M1: there’s still a lot of artistry in this – and with statistics – first, we want to know where they came from
EK: But I don’t need to go to the theatre to know that killing a gay man in Wyoming is bad
CN: But aren’t you curious about what conditions could let that happen?
EK: Not really.
PL: But it’s also about attention – you know all sorts of things are bad. if something in wyoming is brought within your attention skillfully, you’re going to be more disposed to care
DL: Let’s go back to Mike’s question: we are the types to come to this seminar – some esthetes, some are activists, some are in between (or annoyed) – but could theatre enable some kind of political change, in this room?
AML: maybe – there’s no much relevance here, so much with Simone Weil, I don’t see why it couldn’t inspire all kinds of things.
W4: I think it’s telling that the example we came with – the exonerated – is about a powerful person seeing it, not about the masses
MD: but the masses are individuals – audiences break apart
MAD: yeah, there doesn’t have to be a riot for the event to have credence – the revolution could be quiet and take as long as evolution, it can take a long time
MD: though I’m in favor of revolution too
MAD: yeah, but the desire for people to see the change isn’t the best benchmark
W5: the difference between watching movies in a crowd and watching theatre. an audience’s role in theatre is to socialize our wild natures. the audience is crucial. that’s where change happens.
DL: but that’s a utopian visision … the story of the yokel standing up to save Desdemona
SS: it’s also a recent phenomenon to not participate in the theatre – to shout or demand to see things again – that’s changed pretty recently to something much more constrained
M1: yes, we don’t think about people shouting “don’t go behind the arras!” anymore …
CW: there is a whole other world of theatre that people are ignoring, the so-called “chitlin circuit” – it’s a whole other social scene, with relatively clunky characters and dialogue, but hugely interactive audience and totally alive
DL: that raises the idea of partcipation – the model of what we want and how we’re trained …
Posted in Theater
Tagged authenticity, documentary, journalism, participation, spectacle
The second scene plays out, the nakedness of the pathos enforcing a certain tone shift in the audience – or at least the understanding that outright laughter would be rude – but still any flick of irony in the scene finds a hopeful ripple around the table. Lights up.
W5: her revenge got lost – the emotional basis of it.
MD: there’s something specific about having a list, in the first scene, it’s more emotionally evocative
W6: also in the second scene, there’s something mitigated about the ending – as if Venice can’t be completely destroyed, that part of the contempory vision means less scope.
EK: the second scene seems like journalism. with the first scene, you’re dealing with values and morals that seem out of time, while updating just alerts to you a current problem, not a timeless one.
DL: Okay, but what does that involvement in the first scene inspire you to do – save 17th century courtesans?
PL: Does the 2nd version make you save 20th century prostitutes?
W5: well, the whole notion of being “ruined” in the first scene is outdated, and maybe we do need something to be updated
W4: I stop being sympathetic to the 1st courtesan when she starts in on her revenge against other women. I don’t think the 2nd one is asking the mercs to do anything they wouldn’t do anyway. I can sympathize with her because it doesn’t have the same consequences.
DL: every time you stage shakespeare this happens: are you doing it with ruffs, or updated (e.g. Ruined) – why make the move to update?
M1: when you update a classic often something is lost. I think the first version isn’t as overtly political, but it’s more memorable. You can’t brush it aside like you would a news story.
W5: too often people try update things by just finding a contemporary analogue, but that doesn’t necessarily carry forward the dramaturgy or the language, etc. just focusing on the content leaves out all kinds of other things, the structure -
M2: Didn’t we just go through the Courtesan scene with taxpayers and AIG?
W6: the second scene takes away options.
DL: But doesn’t it implicate you?
W4: the first one is more emotional, but the second is more political, more Brechtian
DL: some people cite the 1st scene as Brechtian because of historical distance, with the 2nd as more political relevant – it’s two very different views of political theatre. People who do these adaptations obviously think that the former isn’t enough – they think you need this information.
MAD: but Ruined seems different from updating Shakespeare, which seems to be the impulse of artiustic directors not trusting their audience to make the connection themselves between the play and their lives. Ruined seems much more about a writer’s imagination, whereas the updating Shakespeare is about people not understanding or distrusting imagination’s role.
PL: Also, with the updating, there’s an enormous contempt for the past – that people can only take it in as costume drama, as estheticized spectacle.
DL: can’t you also say that the urgency of the present overwhelms the spectre of the past …
[further discussion of Ruined, defense of Lynn Nottage, it doesn't depend on Mother Courage, etc.]
DL: Granted. Another angle on this, trying to bridge the tensions between these two views is documentary theatre, which has its own conventions …
The actors have been introduced in the short scenes, then we see Jaffier’s monologue and finally the first scene with the Courtesan. The mood in the room is a little tricky – the comic nature of the first scenes still simmers under the surface into this last scene, so that there are snickers of ironic apprecation to the Courtesan’s revenge
DL: Does this speak to us today? Does it have any relevance?
[crickets]
DL: No?
[crickets]
DL: Okay, well what if we did it like this …
[and this takes CW by surprise! so quickly! back into the white!]
DL: Okay, it’s 100 years after SW’s birth but this doesn’t feel relevant to anyone … so we update it to the 21st century …
[he describes the circumstances for the second Courtesan scene ...]
As this is the last time these four presentations – David, Colleen, Gideon, and James – are flying by, it’s perhaps worth it to comment on just how much information is being laid out in front of the audience in such a short amount of time, and in what manner. Each of the four provides a new layer – or two – of context, both about Simone Weil and about Venice Sauvée, often taking their pass at similar bits of information, not unlike different fighter planes strafing the same piece of ground from different altitudes.
Some of this is about simple accretion, about spacing out facts enough for the audience to be able to take them in. Is it only 7 numbers that most adults can hold in their heads without difficulty? With area codes did that sphere of comfort expand to 10? With dramaturgy in the theatre does it expand even more? What sort of mnemonic devices with regard to plot and character have we all internalized from the hours and hours of narrative that spool through our senses throughout our lives?
When Gideon is talking about Weil’s views of the city and state, are we thinking about MD’s characterization of the Obama Inauguration as political theatre? When we hear about Weil’s anguished exile in New York, are we thinking of Euripides’ banishment from Athens? When we hear James talking about Weil’s obsessive tinkering with her text, do we think of the notorious struggles that plagued Christopher Durang after the critical drubbing of Laughing Wild?
Probably not. But what about when we see two soldiers in conversation with a prostitute? Are these figures essential building blocks of stories, or do we need to look even more deeply to our assumptions, to scrape off the letters or numbers that have been painted on each side to the wood grain beneath?
The last minutes are ticking by as more and more people are being fitted into the space – extra chairs around the table and against two walls on platforms – the participatory etiquette of these latter seat always thrown a bit in doubt, as their occupants are outside the light and beyond the strict pale of the seminar’s esthetics.
But now we’re starting. The music cuts out while David is stranded in the middle of the white box. He announces the night’s activity as the seminar’s “season finale” where political theatre will be defined the Very Last Time …
And now he’s worked his way around the tables to the black brick wall, lump of blue chalk in hand, asking for definitions …
W1: Brecht
JB: Hey, that’s the earliest Brecht has ever come up!
DL: and that’s the great thing about Brecht – you write him down and then you can forget him! But okay, why Brecht?
W1: Because he’s one of the earlier proponents of what seems political -
W2: Actually Euripides would be earlier …
CW: Snap!
W3: I just saw a play by Christopher Durang -
DL: But all these people are writing differerent things -
And now MD raises the idea of all theatre being political, which DL tries to encapsulate by writing “CATS” on the wall, which MD takes issues with – or with the snark -and they go back and forth on this in a slightly spiked, slightly joshing fort of way
MD: also political events – the inauguratio, for example
W4: theatre that asks for action from the audience
W5: is there a difference between political theater and social relevance?
M1: is it about trying to make people act politically, or is it insisting on seeing art and experience through a political prism?
DL: Okay … what about results? Hold that thought …
And we dip here into our programed part of our program …
It’s the 13th and last official performance of Venice Saved. The jokes are flying, the mood is just a little giddy. Outside spring has a descended with a venegance, sunny and breezy and light, so much so that it seems odd to be indoors in a windowless theatre.
Last night’s show is being exhuberantly rehashed, with various audience members being given off-the-cuff nicknames – Plastic Bag Guy, Mr. Hamas, Crazy Angry Lady, Miss Ivebeentogazawellactuallyjusthewestbank – but the mood, however punctuated by head-shakes, is still bouncing and upbeat. As always, the cast marvels at the rules each audience adopts for itself about when and how people participate, and the spectacle of individuals working themselves into a lather.
And over what? This is exactly what the cast can never quite understand, because they are in and not out, and the audience is out alone.
