Why the Theatre: In personal essays, college teachers, actors, directors, and playwrights tell why theatre is so vital to them 9780367861889, 9780367861957, 9781003017615

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why?
Part I The Creative Role of the Audience
1 Vouchsafe Me Audience
2 Training the Eye
3 Undeveloped Freight: Listening Together in the Playhouse
4 A Shakespeare Professor Becomes a Playgoer
5 Acting the Storm: Twenty Years of Tempests
6 From Theatre to Classroom: Making Teaching Effective
Part II The Life of the Actor, Director, and Playwright in Performance
7 Why the Theatre?: The Breaking of the Fourth Wall
8 Play, Devising, and the Creative Process
9 I Am Thrilled by an Impure Theatre
10 In the Nick: Theatre in and of Our Times
11 “The Play” May Not Be “The Thing”—But Something Is
12 Why Butoh Theatre: Thoughts of the Actor, Questions From the Director
13 Amateur Hour, or Notes From a Hack Playwright
Part III When the Theatre Moves Beyond the Stage Into the Real World
14 Theatre for Health
15 Why Make Theatre in the South Pacific? A Personal View of Theatre in Aotearoa/New Zealand
16 Empathy Is Essential
17 The Art of Failure
18 Why Teach Theatre?
19 Making Theatre Around the World, and What It Has Taught Me
Part IV Theories and Thoughts About What the Theatre Can Do When Given Form Onstage
20 The Cruelty Tourist and the Emancipated Spectator: Looking for an Essential Theatre
21 Theatre and the Digital Native
22 Remembering Dreams
23 Theatrical Pleasure and Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel
24 Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” as Theatrum Mundi
25 Why (Not) Theatre? Stage, Screen, and Streaming in a Pandemic
26 Because
Epilogue: “Yeh, Boss”
About the Authors
Index

Citation preview

WHY THE THEATRE

Why the Theatre is a collection of 26 personal essays by college teachers, actors, directors, and playwrights about the magnetic pull of the theatre and its changing place in society. The book is divided into four parts, examining the creative role of the audience, the life of the actor, director, and playwright in performance, ways the theatre moves beyond the playhouse and into the real world, and theories and thoughts on what the theatre can do when given form onstage. Based on concrete, highly personal examples, experiences, and memories, this collection offers unique perspectives on the meaning of the theatre and the beauty of weaving the world of the play into the fabric of our lives. Covering a range of practices and plays, from the Greeks to Japanese Butoh theatre, from Shakespeare to modern experiments, this book is written by and for the theatre instructor and theatre appreciation student. Sidney Homan is Professor of English at the University of Florida and a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars. An actor and director in professional and university theatres, he is the author or editor of 18 books on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights.

WHY THE THEATRE In Personal Essays, College Teachers, Actors, Directors, and Playwrights Tell Why the Theatre Is So Vital to Them

Edited by Sidney Homan

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Sidney Homan to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Homan, Sidney, 1938– editor. Title: Why the theatre : in personal essays college teachers, actors, directors, and playwrights tell why the theatre is so vital to them / edited by Sidney Homan. Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020035056 (print) | LCCN 2020035057 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367861889 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367861957 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003017615 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Theater and society. Classification: LCC PN2049 .W459 2020 (print) | LCC PN2049 (ebook) | DDC 792—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035056 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035057 ISBN: 978-0-367-86188-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-86195-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01761-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Norma and all those who love the theatre

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsx

Introduction: Why? Sidney Homan

PART I

The Creative Role of the Audience

1

9

  1 Vouchsafe Me Audience Nick Hutchison

11

  2 Training the Eye S. P. Cerasano

17

  3 Undeveloped Freight: Listening Together in the Playhouse Robert Price   4 A Shakespeare Professor Becomes a Playgoer Alan C. Dessen

24 32

  5 Acting the Storm: Twenty Years of Tempests38 June Schlueter   6 From Theatre to Classroom: Making Teaching Effective Frederick Kiefer

47

viii  Contents

PART II

The Life of the Actor, Director, and Playwright in Performance55   7 Why the Theatre?: The Breaking of the Fourth Wall Gary Lagden

57

  8 Play, Devising, and the Creative Process Brian Rhinehart

62

  9 I Am Thrilled by an Impure Theatre Sidney Homan

69

10 In the Nick: Theatre in and of Our Times Jerry Harp

76

11 “The Play” May Not Be “The Thing”—But Something Is Erica Terpening-Romeo

82

12 Why Butoh Theatre: Thoughts of the Actor, Questions From the Director Yokko (Yoshiko Sienkiewicz) and Brian Rhinehart 13 Amateur Hour, or Notes From a Hack Playwright Paul Menzer

87 93

PART III

When the Theatre Moves Beyond the Stage Into the Real World 14 Theatre for Health Joanne Howarth 15 Why Make Theatre in the South Pacific? A Personal View of Theatre in Aotearoa/New Zealand David O’Donnell

99 101

106

16 Empathy Is Essential Kristin Kundert

115

17 The Art of Failure Katherine McGerr

120

Contents  ix

18 Why Teach Theatre? Gina MacKenzie 19 Making Theatre Around the World, and What It Has Taught Me Avra Sidiropoulou

125

133

PART IV

Theories and Thoughts About What the Theatre Can Do When Given Form Onstage 20 The Cruelty Tourist and the Emancipated Spectator: Looking for an Essential Theatre Ralf Remshardt 21 Theatre and the Digital Native Donna Soto-Morettini

147 149 158

22 Remembering Dreams166 Fran Teague 23 Theatrical Pleasure and Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel171 Joseph Candido 24 Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” as Theatrum Mundi Daniel T. O’Hara 25 Why (Not) Theatre? Stage, Screen, and Streaming in a Pandemic Patrick Hart

178

184

26 Because Cary M. Mazer

190



196

Epilogue: “Yeh, Boss” Sidney Homan

About the Authors 198 Index204

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

William Butler Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” is by kind permission of United Agents LLP on behalf of Caitríona Yeats.

INTRODUCTION Why? Sidney Homan

The main title of this collection, Why the Theatre, is a statement as much as a question. I posed the question to 26 contributors: why is the theatre so important to you? What in your experience as a teacher, scholar, director, actor, or playwright, and—most certainly—a member of the audience would lead you to convert that question into a statement of principle, belief, into a deep and emotionally held conviction? One of my graduate students observed that the question I posed is in a way irrelevant because, of course, the theatre is as necessary to life as breathing. We don’t need to ask why we breathe, any more than we need to ask why the theatre. Both are simply . . . there. True, the theatre is “there,” and conventional justifications or celebrations will have a satisfying obviousness about them: theatre brings people together; it is an escape from the stress of life; it shows you situations similar to your own; it mirrors the past and the present, and can anticipate the future; it allows you to learn about yourself and to take pleasure in the skill of actors and directors.1 Still, in working with the writers in this collection, I found myself as much the student of my colleagues as their editor. For they go beyond those well-intended justifications just mentioned as they speak about what is ultimately their theatre, the theatre they know, whether in the audience or onstage, in the classroom or as seen through their own scholarship and writing. The theatre they define is, at length, a personal one. In speaking about their real-life experiences with the medium, they offer us, I believe, an alternative mirror to that of the stage itself, a way of giving voice to our own experience, our own pleasure and profit from attending a performance.

2  Sidney Homan

Of course, you could ask the same question, make the same statement, about any art form—the novel, the cinema, poetry, sculpture. Each has its own aesthetic, its own justification and pleasures; each makes a special claim on us. But the theatre, I would suggest, is among the most “real” of all art forms. It is live, taking place in the same present space and time as ratified by an audience. We watch fellow humans onstage, enacting illusory characters, to be sure, but illusions that are palpable and reflect in part the performers’ own real lives. There is a “presence” in the theatre that is unique to the medium. In speaking in detail with passion and conviction of their actual encounters with the stage, the writers here underscore why the theatre is vital for all of us, why it stands as a reminder of what it is to be understanding and human. I should add that several of the contributors respond directly to the current coronavirus pandemic and the reasons why, especially during this crisis, the theatre is so necessary. And while the contributors wrote before the most recent racial events that have so exposed and torn asunder our communities, for me, the writers, in a variety of approaches and styles, celebrate the theatre’s creation of a bond between actor and audience, a community that is inclusive and productive—and an alternative to our national tragedy. This personal theatre they share is expressed in the four sections in this collection: the creative role of the audience; the life of the actor, director, and playwright in performance; when the theatre moves beyond the stage into the real world; and theories and thoughts about what the theatre can do when given form onstage. Still, I must confess that this four-part division is a bit artificial, for I think that each essay could fit in two and in most cases three or even four of the sections. I offer below a brief preview of the essays with the hope that it will show the reader the range of responses to this obvious but also, I think, vital question of “why the theatre.”

Part I: The Creative Role of the Audience In “Vouchsafe Me Audience,” Nick Hutchison celebrates a theatre where the fourth wall is broken by design, but also even sometimes by accident. He recalls a production of The Comedy of Errors where on Dromio’s last line, “like brother and brother,” the cast “leapt into the auditorium and danced with the audience in the aisles, shook hands with those who wouldn’t dance . . . [so that] . . . old, tired building came alive in the sheer joy of what we had seen and shared.” He then provides numerous examples from a theatre of “inclusivity” reminding both audience and actor of “what it means to be human.” In “Training the Eye,” S. P. Cerasano examines how a production’s visual dimension trains us to be more careful observers. She focuses on the actor Anthony Sher, who excelled in such visual language, culminating in his playing Lear, with the result that his movement and gestures had a “thrill” and also “an

Introduction  3

intelligence of [their] own.” Beyond this, training the eye in the theatre “helps us better perceive each other in everyday life, in ways that are unspoken.” Robert Price in “Undeveloped Freight: Listening Together in the Playhouse” recalls a Richard III where the actor playing Richard, in a burst of improv, delivered a very contemporary, gross insult to Buckingham, at first onstage and then in the house. A King Lear tenderly kissing a dead Cordelia, “the tiniest kiss heard from all the way up in the gods” and “in the cheapest of the cheap seats.” The change of a single word in a line from Brendan Behan’s The Hostage in a production in Dublin during the ceasefire between the ­British and the IRA, which led to an impassioned reaction in the audience and backstage. For this actor–director, the theatre is “happening right here, inside of us.” In “A  Shakespeare Professor Becomes a Playgoer,” Alan C. Dessen talks about experiences as an audience that made him realize the gap between his assumptions as a reader and the meaning of a play when staged. He tells of a production of Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life with its “unlikely, tacked-on happy ending” that was so brilliantly acted, however, that “only when exiting into the afternoon sun did I realize that I’d been had.” A forceful production of 3 Henry VI showed this major scholar, who has reviewed hundreds of productions, his own limitations as “a reader of playscripts.” June Schlueter in “Acting the Storm: Twenty Years of Tempests” focuses on the ways various directors have staged the opening storm scene, concluding that each “consistently treated the storm as an event that takes place on a stage,” thereby inviting the audience to be “willing participants in the make-believe.” For her, Peter Brook’s 1999 Paris production of The Tempest was a further step “toward such artifice and metaphor,” so that the text is always already waiting to dramatize its own theatricality. Fred Kiefer in “From Theatre to Classroom: Making Teaching Effective” speaks of productions that have changed his attitude toward Shakespeare. An All’s Well That Ends Well in 1981 by the Royal Shakespeare Company that combined the elegance of the era with a class consciousness and led to his adopting for his classes a play he had never liked before. Or how the director’s “visual imagination” in The Tempest revealed, for Kiefer, a new aspect of Shakespeare’s final play. This change in attitude is at one with the notion that the audience collaborates in the meaning of a performance.

Part II: The Life of the Actor, Director, and Playwright in Performance In “The Breaking of the Fourth Wall,” Gary Lagden traces his love of the theatre to the storytellers in his dad’s workingman’s club and his upbringing in a community that celebrated Welsh culture. Learning how to bring out an actor’s free physicality” and being “on voice,” he focuses on his most recent play, Fly Half.

4  Sidney Homan

Staged in his hometown before his neighbors, he experienced “the word, the image, the story being shared in the moment with the audience. In “Play, Devising, and the Creative Process,” Brian Rhinehart asks the question, “How does one establish an atmosphere, space, and process for creativity to take place?” He suggests that through the communal process of “devising,” actors can let go of their inhibitions, be courageous, trust their imaginations, and thereby share in the collective excitement and creative satisfaction that comes from a group creating a work of art from nothing. He illustrates this with an account of his devised production Dispersal in Germany and the United States, from conception, research, rehearsals, to performance. For me, theatre justifies itself, in a way rewards us, by moving offstage and into our real world. In “I Am Thrilled by an Impure Theatre,” I tell of a tour of Florida prisons with Waiting for Godot where the inmates insisted on being part of the performance. Of an elderly couple who wove their own horrendous life in a Nazi concentration camp into a performance of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. And of my own experience as an actor in Fredric Rzewski’s Coming Together where I “lost” myself in the role, forgetting I was onstage as I delivered lines from the diary of an inmate who had died in the Attica Prison riots. Jerry Harp in “In the Nick: Theatre in and of Our Times” speaks of how “the theatre ghost is some convergence of the remaining human energies circulating in the place long after the final performance has ended.” Then, he offers current examples of how such theatre is no less “a vital response to the living moment.” Through a detailed analysis of the rehearsal process of Rebecca Lingafelter’s staging of Anne’s Carson’s Antigonick, he shows how, by the very act of coming to terms with the text, exploring “the [actor’s] voice as body and the body as voice,” the director and cast affirm the essence, the significance of this “sacred and secular space”—the theatre. In “ ‘The Play’ May Not Be ‘The Thing,’ ” Erica Terpening-Romeo describes a production of Romeo and Juliet by her Anonymous Theatre where each actor rehearsed privately with the director, the cast coming together for the first and only time on “opening night.” No less, the audience, “rendered . . . indistinguishable” from the cast, became one with their fellow townspeople onstage. Terpening-Romeo champions a theatre whose ultimate purpose is to bring people together, strengthening our sense of community, especially in the wake of the coronavirus. In “Why Butoh Theatre,” the artist Yokko, interviewed by her director Brian Rhinehart, describes her performance in the one-woman show Butoh Medea, exploring the events and influences that led her to this powerful Japanese theatre, built on what one critic calls a “visceral choreography.” For Yokko, “the important thing is not what Medea did but what made her do it.” When onstage, she seeks a “powerful presence when the audience cannot take their eyes off the performer,” a moment where “the performer’s flower allows the audience’s own flower to open.”

Introduction  5

In “Amateur Hour, or Notes From a Hack Playwright” Paul Menzer calls theatre “the art of social proximity, not social distancing,” then reminds us that “it’s always closing time at the theatre,” that “theatre is in love with loss.” Describing himself as an amateur playwright, he reminds us that the words “amateur” and “amorous” both “describe a condition of the heart,” and moves from here to Shakespeare’s Pyramus and Thisbe, the “most elevated expression of love . . . presented by a group of blue-collar workers.” Our current crisis for the theatre may be “a chance once more to overcome social distance, to get close to those special things all of us non-geniuses love.”

Part III: When the Theatre Moves Beyond the Stage Into the Real World The veteran actress Joanne Howarth in “Theatre for Health” addresses the question “why the theatre” with examples onstage and offstage in terms of how it has been important for her “own health” in “body, mind, and spirit”—not to mention “that of wider society.” Her heart was “opened” by the Lear of Glenda Jackson, and she recalls times as an actor “hearing the voices, living inside the skin of someone who is and isn’t me.” In highly personal accounts of her work both onstage, as in Henry V, and off, she celebrates the “mind gym” provided by the theatrical experience, which appeals to “the individuality of everyone in the room to take us on a shared journey.” In “Why Make Theatre in the South Pacific?” David O’Donnell, in what he describes as a “personal view,” recalls a performance of Foreskin’s Lament that took New Zealand’s obsession with rugby both literally and symbolically, eliminating the barrier between stage and house and displaying for a “stunned audience” a “culture defined by male aggression [and] an obsession with violent sport and political division.” O’Donnell asks: can a theatre help define a nation? He speaks of a theatre offering “the risks of experimentation, the joy of the avant-garde, and the challenge of new perspectives.” In “Empathy Is Essential,” Kristin Kundert celebrates empathy as a basic theatrical principle, what she calls “the uniting of heartbeats and breath” during a production. She traces her personal encounter with this empathy from her experience in high school plays, to her work with Karamu House, the oldest African American theatre in the nation, to her present role as Artistic Director of Theatre at the University of Georgia, where she teaches her students how “to see the ‘other’ as a living human being,” as a way out of our nation’s present malaise. In “The Art of Failure,” Katherine McGerr defines the theatre as “the art of making failure the beginning and not the end,” as “a rare place in our culture where vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness,” a medium that, through the process of rehearsal and performance, allows her to teach “resilience, empathy, and adaptability to the next generation.” She talks about directing a musical where her first goal was “to set up a space where everyone . . . felt safe failing in front of

6  Sidney Homan

each other,” and advises not to mistake what is lacking in one’s work for deficiencies in oneself. Gina MacKenzie’s essay, “Why Teach Theatre?,” is based on her own considerable experience working with young actors. Drawing on an array of plays—A Chorus Line, Into the Woods, Godspell, and High School Musical, among others—she combines her work as a director with analyses of the plot and lyrics to show how the theatre, especially for young people, can nourish an acceptance of self, the practice of empowerment, and the ability “to imprint itself on the heart of those who have experienced the performance.” In “Making Theatre Around the World, and What It Has Taught Me,” the actor/director Avra Sidiropoulou recounts her varied experiences with productions around the world that celebrated her convictions about the theatre’s political significance and the ways it can encompass various cultures, bring together actors from different backgrounds, and adjust to local conditions and challenges. Uniting and transcending differences among people, she describes herself as “rewarded with the opportunity to inspire, to move, and, ultimately, to transform.”

Part IV: Theories and Thoughts About What the Theatre Can Do When Given Form Onstage In “The Cruelty Tourist and the Emancipated Spectator: Looking for an Essential Theatre,” working from Artaud’s notion of the “Theatre of Cruelty,” Ralf Remshardt maintains that, with the pandemic in mind, “the truly dangerous contagion of the theatre is psychic rather than physical.” He then provides detailed accounts of his experience with what he calls a theatre of excursion and immersion, offering “a rupture, an assault, a calling-into-question of the theatre’s ordinary modes.” Encountering in Peter Brook’s L’Homme Qui a patient who had lost all perception of the left side of the world, or Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death (2009), which “left its audiences transformed in breath and brain,” he seeks those “experiences in the theatre where the form renews itself.” After examining research and commentary on how heavy internet usage has diminished “empathy” for the “net generation” or “digital native,” Donna SotoMorettini in “Theatre and the Digital Native” asks how this omnipresent technological obsession of young people may affect theatre in the future. Or how might we change the traditional “passive” theatre to allow, indeed encourage, “the interactive, co-creative role that internet experiences provide?” How, she asks, can we adopt “some of the attributes that attract digital native audiences, [while] maintaining [the theatre’s] force in enhancing the basis for empathy?” In “Remembering Dreams,” Fran Teague recalls trying to find out more about a musical called Swinging the Dream, a show based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and with artists like Benny Goodman and Butterfly McQueen. But with any detailed records of the production having been lost,

Introduction  7

she realized that, “[though] I would never know certain things,” the production’s “elusive nature was part of what fascinated me.” In live performance, memory, like childhood, is ephemeral, with each of us retaining only “what is needed or desired.” For her, “the ephemeral nature and self-conscious theatricality” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and of Swinging the Dream remind us that “we are all in the theatre, enmeshed in one another’s performance.” In “Theatrical Pleasure and Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel,” Joseph Candido recalls a question by the great director/scholar George Kernodle: except pleasure in the theatre, “what else is there?” Candido reflects on his experience as an audience for Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, staged in 2017. He defines this pleasure, inherent in the theatre, as one of “multifarious effects,” specific movements, gestures, expressions, delivery, sometimes small or quiet, meant “to delight and unsettle at the same time.” The “speaking pictures” of Intimate Apparel create the pleasure by which the audience explores an “imaginative site” where they hear “the still, sad music of humanity.” In his essay, “Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’ as Theatrum Mundi,” Daniel T. O’Hara collaborates with the poet Yeats in justifying the theatre as a means by which tragedy is “not . . . self-destructive” but “subsumed by the vision of [a] spiritual quest.” This is a theatre that “permits” us to “imagine anew the tragedy of death,” where, by the “equalization” or “compensations” of performance, “we return exactly the same.” Suffering and return, this arc of “gaiety transfiguring all that dread,” are prefigured in Yeats’s three smiling Chinese wisemen, looking down on “all the tragic scene.” In an essay especially provocative for this collection, “Why (Not) Theatre? Stage, Screen, and Streaming in a Pandemic,” Patrick Hart argues that, because of the pandemic, for “the vast majority of us the small screen at home constitutes by far the more significant influence upon the cultural fabric of our lives.” He points out that “both film and then television started out by feeding parasitically upon the theatre.” In similar fashion, the novel “cannibalized” older genres such as the epic, romance, and tragedy. He then envisions a theatre that might “dispense with the need for an audience entirely,” one of “more relaxed, inclusive spaces,” marked by a “responsiveness to the requirements of local communities.” In 50-some entries, each beginning with the title of his essay, “Because,” the scholar/playwright Cary M. Mazer responds directly to the question of the collection, “why the theatre.” At times he teases with a single sentence (“Because if it isn’t here and it isn’t now, it isn’t theatre”), or plays with a line from Shakespeare (“Because, when Hamlet says ‘now I  am alone,’ he isn’t”). He speculates that “when a person stands in a performance space and raises an arm . . . the act . . . comes from a matrix of needs and desires and fears pointing to an imagined future and impelled by a consciously or unconsciously remembered past.” And he recalls how his own mother wept when she described a sentimental moment in a television show of the 1950s.

8  Sidney Homan

Epilogue: In “Yeh, boss!” I remember a little girl, playing Puck, who in her joy in getting a laugh from her audience taught me how to answer the statement and the question posed by this collection.

Note 1. See Olivia Moloff, blog for The Old Creamery Theatre, “Why We Go to the Theatre (And You Should Too),” Spring 2004 (accessed May 3, 2020), www.oldcreamery.com/ about-theatre/blog/why-go-theatre/.

PART I

The Creative Role of the Audience

1 VOUCHSAFE ME AUDIENCE Nick Hutchison

It is spring, 1976, and I am on a school trip, my first to the hallowed ground that is Stratford-on-Avon, to see Measure for Measure, which we were studying in class. However, on arrival we discover that an administrative slip-up meant we had tickets for the wrong show: instead of that rather gloomy problem play, we were treated, by some theatrical serendipity, to Trevor Nunn’s production of The Comedy of Errors, jazzed up into a modern-day Greek farce, with a stellar cast including Judi Dench, Nick Grace, and Francesca Annis, and complete with added musical numbers. It was wonderful: hilarious, outrageous, and life-affirming. But the key moment for me came at the very end. In what I now recognize as a typical Trevor moment, the cast sang the curtain call to a rousing version of Dromio’s last lines, “like brother and brother,” and at the very end they ran in a line to the front of the stage—and they kept going. They leapt into the auditorium and danced with the audience in the aisles, shook hands with those who wouldn’t dance, hugged, embraced those who were willing, and as the house lights came up everyone in that old, tired building came alive in the sheer joy of what we had seen and shared. As the broken shards of the fourth wall crashed around my eyes, I knew this was where I wanted to be, that theatre was a world to which I had to dedicate my life, that I wanted to make an audience feel that same joy and wonder. I cannot in all honesty boast that I have achieved that ambition, but I do firmly believe the reason theatre survives, despite centuries of doom-mongers predicting its imminent demise, is this covenant with a live and present audience: that it is the fact that we are there, watching, that makes theatre special; that it is our awareness of the artifice of drama that makes it exciting, and that the more theatre acknowledges its reliance on, and dialogue with the audience, the more that audience will keep on coming back.

12  Nick Hutchison

Of course, it is a given that the theatre needs an audience on the most basic level: without tickets sales no show or company can survive, especially in these days of diminishing government subsidy. Every actor will tell you the stories of playing to two people and a dog in a dingy room above a pub in an unfashionable part of town. From Shakespeare’s time on, the theatre has been driven by financial considerations. Show business is first and foremost a business, and the history of theatre is littered with the burnt-out carcasses of shows that didn’t make it, their names whispered among theatre folk more nervously than naming the Scottish Play and leaving behind them broken reputations and livelihoods: in my lifetime, Bernadette, Fields of Ambrosia (“where everybody knows ya”), and The Hunting of the Snark. Similarly, theatre needs an audience not just to pay its way, but to justify its very existence; there is simply no point in mounting a play if there is no-one there to see it, a point brilliantly made by Tom Stoppard in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where the players gradually realize that they are performing to no one: You don’t understand the humiliation of it—to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable—that somebody is watching.  .  .  . No one came forward, no-one shouted at us. The silence was unbreakable, it imposed itself upon us; it was obscene. We took off our crowns and swords and cloth of gold and moved silent on the road to Elsinore. You can see this existential need for an audience in all those Shakespearean epilogues where a character/actor asks for our approval to release them from their theatricality: Puck, Rosalind, Pandarus, the King in All’s Well, and, of course, Prospero. They all need our applause; they need us to finish the play for them, to offer completion. And there is no question that one slightly less high-brow reason we keep going to the theatre is the sense of danger, the vicarious thrill at the possibility it could all go horribly wrong. I’m sure the reason Shakespeare and Co charged more for the first night of a new play was not just the frisson of being there at the start, but also the added possibility it could all fall apart. Audiences love to share these moments: I  was there when the door wouldn’t open, when the set collapsed, when the actor was drunk, when the hydraulics didn’t work and Idina Menzel had to sing “Defying Gravity” while remaining prosaically earthbound. Hence all the stories of the hell-raiser actors of the golden age: “You think I’m drunk; wait till you see the Duke of Buckingham.” The plethora of anthologies of theatrical disasters; hence, too, the success of Mischief Theatre’s The Play That Goes Wrong, and its numerous offspring. It may not be laudable, but we do love to watch a train wreck on stage. But I  believe the relationship between performer and audience is much more potent, more symbiotic, than mere financial or existential necessity, or the

Vouchsafe Me Audience  13

potential for disaster. It is in the communality of the storytelling, the “shared experience,” as Mike Alfreds so notably coined it in the name of his company, formed in 1975 and still going strong today, that theatre is most compelling, most essential to our cultural life. I further believe that in the UK, at least, with the proliferation of social media and streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, iPlayer), theatre is moving more and more toward a recognition that its unique contact with a live audience is what sets it apart. From its very origin, telling tales round a campfire, through the community theatre that was the Miracle and Mystery plays of the Middle Ages, via the Globe, Rose, and Blackfriars theatres of the early modern period, through to our twenty-first century, theatre thrives best, achieves most, when it includes the audience in the experience, acknowledges their existence and their contribution to the performance. I am fortunate to have grown up through my professional life, as an actor and now director in theatre, with the development of the Globe Theatre on Bankside, and now the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse there, and I have been privileged to be part of the early life of the Blackfriars Theatre in Staunton Virginia, home of the American Shakespeare Centre. These theatres, lit by daylight, candlelight, or an equivalent thereof, reproduce the playing conditions of Shakespeare’s time, where the audience are lit the same as the actors, where it is impossible to ignore from the stage the throng of people watching, listening, and reacting to the performance, where there is no fourth wall—nor third or second, for that matter. The excitement before a show in these venues is palpable: the audience know they are going to be a part of the performance, not merely passive spectators, and that their reactions to the play will inform their understanding of it, and indeed, the way the players perform it. (The only time I have felt such excitement before a performance in a conventional proscenium theatre was before a performance of Hamilton: the buzz of knowing that you are about to experience something totally out of the ordinary—and have had to re-mortgage your home to do so.) I can recall so many moments in these playhouses where our involvement was integral: Tim McInnerny as Iago in Othello at the Globe in 2007, frighteningly hilarious, with the audience wrapped round his fingers, and then the extraordinary moment when he asked us directly, “And what’s he then that says I play the villain?,” daring us to answer, and in the silence that followed making us all complicit in his lethal intent. Mark Rylance, audience-manipulator extraordinaire, using a heckler in Hamlet to transform the “To be or not to be speech” into something entirely spontaneous, not the most famous lines in dramatic lit, but something immediate and from the heart. As the oh-so-hilarious groundling yelled out “that is the question” just before Mark could speak it, he paused, considered, and finally agreed: “Yes! That is the question . . . whether tis nobler in the mind” etc., etc. It was such an electrifying moment that there were apparently people in the audience who thought the interloper must be a plant. One of the most horrifying and awkward moments I  have ever spent in a theatre was Out of Joint’s production of Macbeth, which I saw at Wilton’s Music

14  Nick Hutchison

Hall in 2005. Set in an African republic civil war, the murder of Lady MacDuff and her family was carried out off stage with machetes and a brutal soundscape; then the director threw up the house lights and we were offered the opportunity, for a pound I think, to go into the next room to see the carnage. I’ve never felt an audience so shocked to be put on the spot so much: who wants to witness butchery, but it’s only theatre and are you missing out if you don’t? A few souls, braver than me, went, those of us who stayed rooted to our seats, relieved, morally smug and left to wonder what we had missed. Sixteen years later, the moment haunts me still. This shared experience is by no means confined to those reproductions of a bygone playing space, but is increasingly potent in modern theatre. We expect that in Brecht we are going to be talked to, lectured even, and that the alienation we will feel is essential for our political education, but what we tend to forget is how good a writer he is at arousing those emotions he wants us to objectively examine. I have directed several of the lehrstucke, learning plays, and while I was nervous at first, I was delighted to discover how funny, how moving, how superbly written and structured they are, and how the audience response to the verfremdungseffekt is one of delight and excitement, rather than the sense of being at a rather worthy political rally. This metatheatricality, the reminding of an audience that what they are seeing is theatre, is obviously not new; it dates back to Shakespeare (“our wooing doth not end like an old play”; “If this were played upon a stage now I could condemn it as an improbable fiction”) and further still to the Greek theatre with its satyr dances after tragedy to distance the audience from the horror of what has gone before. Still, whatever fancy name you give it, it is ultimately just reminding the audience that it’s not real, that you are watching something artificial that needs your input to work. Many of my most memorable recent theatre trips have been where this inclusivity is at its most obvious. Tom Morris directed Swallows and Amazons at the Bristol Old Vic in 2010, and not only did we pelt the villain with (woolen) snowballs handed out to the audience during the show, but at the end of the play the cast handed the front row two exquisite models of the eponymous sailing boats, and we handed them back, delicately, carefully, row to row, to the back of the auditorium, watching the salad days of the children of the play, and of our own childhoods, retreating further and further into the past. A wonderful moment of shared loss and wonder, audience and performance both merging into something rich and strange. Sally Cookson’s production of Jacqueline Wilson’s Hetty Feather in 2014/5 had the same bravura approach to the audience, opening with the line “My name is Hetty Feather, and this is my story,” and never allowing its circus design to distance us from the poignant story of our orphaned heroine. Emma Rice’s work with Kneehigh; Frantic Assembly’s physicality, especially in the sensational Black Watch for the National Theatre of Scotland from 2008 onwards; the physical longing of much of Geko’s work on tour—these all take the audience with them

Vouchsafe Me Audience  15

on a journey into storytelling. They include us, celebrate us, rather than pretend we don’t exist. Indeed, in the last decade I think the arc of theatre is toward more inclusivity, probably as a result of the plethora of media mentioned above. The trend toward immersive theatre is becoming pronounced. You Me Bum Bum Train, devised by Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd in 2004, was one of the first immersive pieces to really garner both critical appreciation and audience success, but it has been followed by many others determined to put the audience at the center of the action. Even the rival medium of film has muscled in on the theatre’s territory, with Secret Cinema turning movie screenings into an interactive, theatrical event. Back on the boards, both The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street have been successes in offbeat venues in London, and former NT head Nick Hytner’s productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and most notably Julius Caesar at the new Bridge Theatre in London introduced mainstream audiences to the delights of the immersive experience. I remember all too well when Caesar was shot by the conspirators and his security detail made all the promenaders hit the floor. This audience member was of the mind that, at my advanced years, prostrating myself on the ground was an immersion too far. Much to my children’s delight, a member of Security (aka Stage Management) disagreed, and I was bundled down with little ceremony. All or nothing: you awake your faith or you depart this place. Even where there is no direct contact with the audience, there can still be with the best theatre a sense of community engendered by the fact of having shared something special: the RSC’s eight and a half hour Nicholas Nickleby in 1980, when seen in one day, had the audience chatting and comparing notes like old friends. The sensation of having experienced something together at great length left everyone with a mutual sense of well-being and camaraderie. I felt a similar, maybe even stronger connection to the audience after the Elevator Repair Services eight-hour Gatz in 2012 in London: the experience of sharing with an audience every word of The Great Gatsby was powerful and moving; the fact that after all that time you actually did not want it to end was extraordinary, those last famous words ringing in your ears. Event theatre at its most potent. If some of my most powerful theatrical experiences have been when the whole theatre has been complicit in both the storytelling and the story told, I believe we can throw the value of such experiences into sharp relief by thinking about the opposite evenings in the theatre, those nights when you feel cheated and robbed of your admission price. I have sat through too many productions where the cast seem to be having a great time at the audience’s expense, without any acknowledgment that their self-satisfaction is in inverse proportion to our enjoyment. Pofaced productions of worthy plays that talk down to the audience or patronize us; Restoration drama where so much work has gone into a meticulous vocabulary of the language of the fan, but no thought has gone into why we should in any way care. I personally cannot abide those authors who themselves, or via their estate, preserve their works in aspic, so that we can look and admire but not be

16  Nick Hutchison

engaged (yes, the Beckett estate, I’m looking at you). Productions of Shakespeare that treat it like gospel, handed down in tablets of stone from Mount Stratford, but which make no attempt to touch our lives, or access our emotions, soaking us in a warm bath of iambic emollient, but with no real contact with the story they purport to tell. If all the world is a stage, I think the stage needs to address all the world in exchange: to include us in an experience that is, to quote Mike Alfreds again, “different every night” but that speaks to us and with us—not at us. When everyone in the building is a part of the experience, when theatre acknowledges it is theatre, but that the very artificiality of the experience is what makes it real, then I know why theatre has survived and will continue to flourish: it offers a communion of what it means to be part of a shared culture, what it means to be part of a shared experience, what it means to be human.

2 TRAINING THE EYE S. P. Cerasano

I was never a naturally “visual person.” Instead, I responded more to words and sounds than to pictures. But when I was in the seventh grade, my mother took me to see a production of The Tempest. I had seen some simple children’s plays previously, but this was different. It wasn’t a “kid’s play.” It was instead a play for adults, with elaborate scenery and costumes and intricate stage business. If I close my eyes, I can still see the delicate Ariel flying about, a frightening monster coming up from below the stage, and a beautiful young girl finding love while her father, a tall powerful magician, waved his staff, making it all happen. At that early age, I don’t know that I understood much more than the plot. I recall that moments were quite scary and the opening scene—the deafening thunder and lightning of the tempest—was unforgettable. In short, the whole experience seemed ­magical, and in retrospect, it was probably the event that set me on the path to where I have ended up professionally. As I grew older, playing music consumed much of my free time, but as theatre gradually drew me in, the one thing that I had to learn was how to be a viewer. Not simply to listen to the verse, but to actually catch the careful nuance of stage movement and to comprehend how significant it is. As I have come to understand over the years, this is one of the most valuable capabilities that we can learn from interacting with live performances. Theatre not only encourages us to become better listeners, a skill often encouraged in modern society, but also trains us to become more careful observers, an important competence rarely discussed. Shakespeare, in particular, pays meticulous attention to movement in some texts, although it is often implied more than openly signaled. Of course, in offering advice to the traveling actors, Hamlet counsels the troupe to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” Actions and words, he argues, must be complementary in some way; “with this special observance,” Hamlet continues, “that

18  S. P. Cerasano

you o’erstep not the modesty of nature.”1 Today, Hamlet’s advice seems simplistic and obvious: “drama should mirror actual life, so don’t overdo it.” Still, when it comes to stage movement, Shakespeare has amazing powers of descriptiveness. One delicious example occurs when Henry V is trying to prepare his frightened soldiers to blast through the walls at Harfleur. Here he directs them to imitate the action of a tiger: Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage; Then lend the eye a terrible aspect . . . Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide, Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit To his full height!2 Doubtless the dramatist had seen tigers pacing in the royal menagerie at the Tower of London, and he had watched closely enough to see the sinews and nostrils gather together as the creature readied itself to spring forward onto its prey. In the same place lion baiting was conducted, and in this context, observers could witness a dog in pursuit of a lion “that will fly / With his face backward” or the same animal “valiant” on the attack. Then there were travelers’ tales and drawings of the “slow” elephant with its ponderous motion.3 According to the Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare,4 the word “action” only made its way into Shakespeare’s texts 115 times, with variable uses.5 Among them, kinds of action are interestingly portrayed. There is, Cassius posits in Julius Caesar, the “personal action” that defines a man.6 Or, as Morton explains the reasons for the failure of the young Hotspur and his army in 2 Henry IV, there is the “action” that connotes the bodily strength: that same word “rebellion” did divide The action of their bodies from their souls,  And they did fight with queasiness, constrained.7 Then there is Cordelia’s assurance to her father that “no unchaste action or dishonored step /  . . . hath deprived me of your [Lear’s] grace and favor.”8 In As You Like It, Silvius warns Rosalind (disguised as Ganymede) of the sting that might be hidden in a letter he is delivering as a result of the “waspish action” of its writer.9 Hamlet, the play in which the word “action” might reasonably be used often, if only because the prince spends so much time pondering it, offers some interesting variations, with “courteous action,” “pious action,” passionate action,” and “piteous action.”10 Finally, in his well-known soliloquy “what a piece of work is Man,” Hamlet portrays Man as “in action how like an angel.”11 In practice, I was awakened to the significance of stage movement—the actual ways that actors walk, stop, turn their heads, extend their hands, and direct their

Training the Eye  19

eyes—early on in my education, and it has made all the difference in my fascination with the theatre. This enchantment was fostered by observing the careers of some very charismatic actors, a few who have gone on to become household names and others whose professional lives have played out more quietly. In the 1980s, I became captivated by Shared Experience, an exciting Londonbased acting company which performed in a small fairly intimate space called the Bloomsbury near the public library up on Euston Road. The company’s specialty was the adaptation of novels for the stage. On one occasion I  attended repeat performances of their production of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in an experiment to see whether actors really did perform their roles identically night after night. I learned that they mostly did, but that there were tiny differences. More than this, I learned that one character, “Mr B.,” a gentleman–villain played by Ian Reddington, created the most disdainful elements of his character not only with salacious looks and leering glances, but with tiny gestures—a dismissive flick of a hand, a confident, playful rub of thumb and ring finger which signaled his calculations against the pitiful strivings of the serving maid that he sought to rape. Later on, I trained my eye on an incredible actor, Antony Sher, whose astonishing physicality in Royal Shakespeare Company productions of Richard III and Tamburlaine the Great rejected whatever restraint Hamlet worried over when he spoke of the “modesty of nature.” Instead, with bold strokes Sher taught me the many ways in which movement molded and ultimately created character. At this writing, Sher’s career has spanned nearly 35  years. I  have never met him, but I have heard him speak about acting. He is the rare kind of actor who can dissect his roles in language that genuinely illuminates the work he does. To this end, his three published production diaries are a gift for theatre historians who will, for decades to come, be able to gain a sense of what it was like—from the inside—to perform particular roles in some of the most significant productions that the RSC has mounted, directed by eminent hands such as Bill Alexander and Greg Doran. What interests me is to what a significant degree Antony Sher has brought concepts of movement into both the conceptualization and the praxis of his performances. I first encountered Sher’s work when I  was asked to write a review of the RSC’s 1984 production of Richard III for Shakespeare Quarterly.12 There, in the Barbican, in seat A34, Circle Left (I still have the ticket stub), I was treated to one of the most illuminating experiences of my academic life. Following surgery for an injured Achilles tendon, Sher decided to perform the role of “crookbacked king” leaning on black elbow crutches. The effect stunned the audience, not only in terms of the fact that he then resembled the “bottled spider” as Richard is described in the play, but that the implements became extensions of his arms. Sher used them as weapons, as fingers to toy with the hem of Lady Anne’s gown when he courted her, as appendages to bully the noblewomen at court, holding them at length, accusing them of cruelty and attacking them before they themselves could launch their own attacks on him. Later, at the Battle

20  S. P. Cerasano

of Bosworth Field, he exchanged the crutches for a sword and mace, scuttling across the battlefield with terrifying alacrity. The spider had become a large and horrific beetle, with legs that wielded weapons of war, the king lashing out at his enemies, sometimes laughing maniacally even as the odds were against him. Previously, Laurence Olivier had memorialized Richard III by what he had done with Shakespeare’s verse, but his character was mostly static, in part because he was carrying a large prosthesis on his back in order to shape the traditional image of the “hunch-backed king.” In sharp contrast, the complexities of Sher’s action found fresh new dimensions within the role that made visible the character’s psychological convolutions. The image of the crutched king was chosen for the front issue of the Quarterly when my essay appeared, and Sher’s first production diary— Year of the King: An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook—has since become foundational to understanding the play in performance, an invaluable “museum” of drawings and commentary preserving a landmark production.13 After this, I followed Sher’s career assiduously. Seven years on, his performance of the lead in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great demonstrated another kind of athletic prowess, coupled with emotional and intellectual vitality, which was coming to define some of his early roles. In the Sunday Times, reviewer John Peter noted the carefully crafted detail that Sher wove into the role. He played it with a rippling sense of relish. His eyes swivel and glint. His body is wiry and athletic. In moments of pleasure he sticks out the tip of his tongue like a cat which knows no one else will dare to touch the cream.14 Likewise, another reviewer noted that Sher portrayed a nomadic warrior, crouching and squatting.15 Benedict Nightingale wrote of the ways in which Sher captured the play’s primitivism: “He pads restlessly around the stage, sniffing blood and, at one point, bathing in it. He crouches, spitting and barking like an embattled chimp.”16 Most spectacularly, Malcolm Rutherford was impressed when “in one scene he enters on a rope just like Tarzan, kicking down his enemies on the way.”17 Because his stage career is so extensive, I will devote the rest of this essay to more recent (and divergent) roles—Falstaff and King Lear. In developing the character of Falstaff for the 2014 RSC Productions of 1,2 Henry IV, Sher described an interesting phenomenon, one in which his actual practice of learning lines for the part of the wayward knight was assisted by physical movement. He started with the first Falstaff/Hal scene (1.2), noting “I saw Falstaff’s first line ‘Now Hal, what time of day is it, lad?’ I say it again, and again, pacing around. I move on to his next line . . . Then I say the two lines together.” In the case where he found himself stumbling on a word or phrase, the task was “one of repetition, of developing a kind of muscle memory with the line, like a dance step or a fight move.”18 But concurrent with learning the scripts of both Henry IV plays, Sher had begun to ponder how his Falstaff would be portrayed.

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Initially, he thought that the character might be re-conceptualized as “a kind of British version of a Vietnam vet. With a ponytail and bandana, an earring, big scruffy beard.” Then, in conversation with the director both agreed that the atmosphere of the plays was like “a love letter to an earlier England,” so the costume had to be Elizabethan, but perhaps with elements of the roughness proposed earlier.19 In preparing for performance, first there was the under-costume that would have to be built to bulk out Sher’s size. It would probably add weight, so immediately Sher wondered how he would move around the stage. Some insight was provided by Ralph Richardson’s famed performance in the 1945 Old Vic production. Kenneth Tynan, who wrote a celebrated review, commented that it was a serious Falstaff, “too rich and many-sided to be crammed into a single word.” Moreover, Richardson performed the role with great dignity, “Sir John first, and Falstaff second.” “There was particular dignity in his movement,” Tynan observed. “As the great belly moved, step followed step with great finesse lest it overtopple, the arms flapped fussily at the sides as if to paddle the body’s bulk along.” Falstaff “proceeds at his own chosen pace, like a gorgeous ceremonial Indian elephant.”20 Although Sher’s under-suit presented challenges, he found a way to make it work for him. (“I try lying on the ground—good—I have to paddle my limbs like a beetle on its back in order to turn over and heave myself up. I try ­walking— good—a roll to my gait.”21) Nonetheless, when the audience first caught sight of Sher’s Falstaff, he didn’t “enter” in any traditional manner. He emerged from a prone position on the floor, from beneath a pile of blankets, having slept off last night’s drinking match.22 How many readers, or even spectators, ever imagine ­Falstaff being prone? Mountains rise, and Falstaff is frequently described as a towering mountain of a man with an overwhelming personality. It’s difficult to ­imagine how a character could “overwhelm” from the floor. But engulf he did, and the unexpected entrance was the first glimpse into that combination of amusing and farcical personality that was behind the old gray beard. I surprise even myself by including Sher in the role of King Lear (performed, as he records in his diary, in 2016 with the RSC) as the final example here because the uses of movement were not embedded in the lead role alone. Nevertheless, this didn’t mean that careful consideration to movement wasn’t given. It was. But the main role was one in which movement was sometimes diverted into kinds of mental action, the “tempest of the mind” evidenced by Lear, or the odd movements built into other characters in the play, such as what Sher described as Poor Tom’s “mad tumble” of language accompanied by a range of movements, “some of them twisted and jerky, almost like cerebral palsy.”23 And Lear, as Sher notes, is one of the three roles, along with Prospero and Falstaff, written for older men.24 (Presumably, who are not marked by a broad range of movement.) Yet, for Sher, the requirements for the role differed greatly from those of Falstaff and, in this new situation, he interestingly relegated some of Lear’s disability to mechanical devices. For instance, at 1.1 Sher entered the stage carried aloft on a palanquin; in

22  S. P. Cerasano

a parallel gesture, at the end of the Dover scene he collapsed onto a little cart, and in the final scene he was drawn onto the stage on the same cart holding Cordelia’s dead body in his arms.25 Lear was played as an older man from early in the performance. In some sense he grew increasingly diminished as the performance unfolded, turning into another version of the Fool, losing strength and physical fiber.26 Consequently, much of Sher’s earlier impulse to “action” was carried by different performance elements, namely by verbal movements or actual stage devices. And except for the slowing of any actor performing Lear as he moves toward his eventual death, the physicality that was integral to Sher’s former roles informed this performance differently. The usual outpouring of energy in Sher’s movement was apparent only occasionally, as in the strength of Lear on the heath. In closing, I would underscore that I have learned many things from actors. One of these is that stage movement is not merely a support system for the poetry of Shakespeare’s plays. Movement not only produces a thrill on stage, it also also creates an intelligence of its own. It shapes a role, often in profound ways. Furthermore, incorporating new actions into familiar roles can challenge the old conventions of performing classic roles. In this way, stage action, used thoughtfully, can open up dimensions of characters that we think we have already pinned down. Movement can catch us unaware; it can startle and mesmerize; it can revolt and attract. After all, training our eyes to attend to movement, no matter how small, is part of the truly humanistic training offered by the theatrical experience. And perhaps, having done so, it potentially helps us better to perceive each other in everyday life, in ways that are unspoken.

Notes 1. All of the Shakespearean quotations in this essay are quoted from Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, eds., The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (New York: Penguin, 2002); William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. David Bevington (Peterborough: Broadview, Internet Shakespeare Editions, 2018), 3.2.17–19. 2. William Shakespeare, Henry V (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1868), 3.1.7–9, 15–17. 3. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (London: Methuen, 1602), 1.2.20–21, 4.1.19–20. 4. Marvin Spevack, ed., The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). 5. An online concordance claims that there are 120 incidents of the word. 6. 1.3.76. 7. 1.1.96. 8. 1.1.227–28 (F1623). 9. 4.3.10. 10. 1.4.60, 3.1.48, 3.2.130 sd, 3.4.128. 11. 2.2.275. 12. S. P. Cerasano, “Churls Just Wanna Have Fun: Reviewing Richard III,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36.5 (1985): 618–29. 13. Antony Sher, Year of the King: An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook (London: Chatto and Windus, 1985). This was reprinted, with a new introduction, in the US, in 1992, and remains in print today.

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14. John Peter, “An Act of Sher Magic,” The Sunday Times (London), September 6, 1992, pp. 8, 13 (Features). 15. Irving Wardle, “Marlowe’s Rambo Triumphant,” The Independent, September 6, 1992. 16. Benedict Nightingale, “Savage Ruler of a Human Jungle,” The Times (London), October 18, 1993, p. 34 (Features). 17. Christopher Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine,” Financial Times, October 16, 1993. 18. Antony Sher, Year of the Fat Knight: The Falstaff Diaries (London: Nick Hern Books, 2015), 56, 76. 19. Ibid., 31, 37–38. 20. Ibid., 51–52. 21. Ibid., 100. 22. Ibid., 116. 23. Antony Sher, Year of the Mad King: The Lear Diaries (London: Nick Hern Books, 2018), 186–87. 24. Ibid., 238. 25. Ibid., 197, 200, 223. 26. Ibid., 170.

3 UNDEVELOPED FREIGHT Listening Together in the Playhouse Robert Price

It has not been an easy year. Perhaps they never are. Perhaps they never can be. But without any risk of exaggeration or hyperbole, this one, 2020, the year of Covid 19, the year of the virus, has been particularly horrid, and during plague years, as now, as formerly, the playhouses, of course, are shut. Personally, too, it’s been tricky, for on Friday, March 13, as it turned out, the last day of live learning in the conservatoire, the final Friday that the pubs were still open in Old London Town, on that Friday I resigned (after 11 busy years) from my post as a voice coach and theatre director at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. I will not dwell on the reasons for that decision here, but it was not, let us say, either an easy or a happy one. So . . . here I sit at home, unemployed, unemployable, amid a global pandemic, with, at last, a little time to muse upon this excellent question: why the theatre? So, why. Indeed. Why . . .? And this is not, after all, either a meaningless or an easy question, for I have a little painful admission to make, a confession if you will (phew, here goes, here goes . . .). You see, I make this confession despite an entire professional career spent making theatre, spent acting in plays, spent directing them, and, especially in recent years, spent training other deluded souls to try to act in them, at posh sounding institutions with familiar names, at the LAMDA and the RADA and the Bada and the blah blah blah—just big buildings in the end of course, despite their carefully maintained brandings, just buildings in our cities with large rooms in them, rooms where experienced people converse with talented people in an attempt to help them learn potentially unlearnable things.

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I make the confession despite the fact, indeed, that all of the most meaningful relationships in my life, my dearest colleagues, my friends, my lovers, my wife, and my children  .  .  . all of them, all come specifically and directly from the activities of making theatre. And this is not to mention my (slender) income and (precarious) self-esteem  .  .  . and  please don’t get me started  on the fortunes (and hours) I’ve lavished on watching plays, or all the books I  have (nearly) read, the endless courses I have taken, the master’s degree I pursued from The Royal-Central-School-of-Speech-and-Drama. Despite all of that, you see: I am not always entirely sure that I even actually even really like the theatre . . . I certainly don’t like its ludicrous expense (for something so frequently so shockingly mediocre); its predictability (the wearyingly compulsory agreed aesthetics of the “biz”); the drone; the bit when we got the movement director in; the whumph at the end; its risible snobberies and its institutionalized cruelties (there’s no shortage of tyrants and no shortage of fools). Finally, more than anything else perhaps, I do not like its tiresome trendiness. Oh, how I dread the endless dramas about lockdown to come, the dystopian meditations upon pestilence and plague we’ll all have to sit through together, like that terrible decade when every play simply had to have a waterboarding. And, frankly, to be really,  really honest, beyond not really  liking  the theatre, sometimes—on a bad day—usually furiously disappointed and tipsy outside a grand-royal-national something-or-other, I recall these lines from “A Scattering,” Christopher Reid’s memorial to his wife, the actor Lucinda Gane: The theatre is a big, ramshackle, blindly trundling machine. With bits falling off it, it clatters through the generations, more wasteful of lives than a losing army . . .1  . . . and I even positively despise it. So, perhaps, in these unusual days of theatrical darkness, in this, the first time ever (in my 51 years anyhow) that we can’t all just breezily roll into whichever town we’re close to and catch that new thing at the whatchamacallit that everyone says is really rather good, or scan the reviews for a clever, classy show to impress someone cool on a date, or, alternatively, to set off swotty and solo to see that play we’ve always been curious about, an obscure Rattigan, an early Coward, a difficult Aphra Behn (the furtive and nerdy pursuits of a covert fan of the canon), in this absence, perhaps, this question—why the theatre—is particularly ask-able. Because now, without it, we can conduct a unique experiment; we can find out, precisely and honestly, what it is (if anything) that we’re missing. One thing we’re most definitely not missing in our dreary “lockdowns” is entertainment—diversions, stimulation, even of the highest-brow kinds. For,

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quite apart from the venerable pursuits of reading and watching DVDs, as long as the electricity keeps flowing and the internet holds out, we have near infinite resources of fine movies and TV to watch, as well as audio books and podcasts and radio shows and archived recordings of all sorts of performances from all time and around the globe to consume, all linked up for us by our thousands and thousands of virtual friends—a vast collection, filtered algorithmically for our delectation. And there really is some wonderful stuff . . . the theatre alone is astonishing: Ariane Mnouchkine’s Moliere, Brook’s Beckett from the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, a different Schaubühne production every evening, Kama Ginka’s wonderful, metaphysical Black Monk. We can fly virtually to Epidaurus and watch Nikos Karathanos’ production of The Birds by Aristophanes or be astonished by the radical accomplishment the Red Torch Theatre’s signed Three Sisters in Novosibirsk. Cripes! A magnificently curated theatrical season you could only have actually witnessed in the flesh if you’d been infinitely leisured and rich as Croesus. Available and free (or, at least, cheapish) into that living room you now hardly ever leave. Blow wind, come wrack: let the damn plague run its course! I’ve got my Amazon Prime and my digital theatre +. I’ve got it covered! So, again: what, exactly, are we missing . . .? Oh, and here’s a thing for you: given all of these resources of home entertainment combined with the invariable expense and frequent terribleness of live theatre, why was it that on that Friday 13th 2020 I mentioned earlier, in England at least, the last normal-ish day, the day that I huffed out of LAMDA, a day when 250 people lost their lives to the virus in Italy, why was it that early on the morning of that day, my wife Elizabeth, our eldest son Charlie, and I collectively reached the conclusion (via an admittedly tense but still just-about civil family conference) that it was, on balance, worth the risk for Charlie to travel up to London, by train and by tube, to sit, surrounded by 1,126 people (more or less) for seven hours in the Olivier auditorium of the National Theatre watching Robert Le Page’s (admittedly superb) Seven Streams of the River Ota? Why did we (even ever so slightly) gamble with our firstborn’s health on this treacherously unreliable activity of theatre going? Why were we so irresponsible? Well. I think the answer—or at least an answer—could be found by watching the streaming one of those productions I mentioned earlier. If you’d have been on top of your viewing game during the crisis of 2020, you might have noticed the availability of the Schaubühne’s Richard III, free to stream on April 3, a production that Charlie and I had been fortunate enough to watch on its opening night at the Barbican in London, in the much happier days of February 2017. Although widely acclaimed, especially for Lars Edinger’s mesmerizing turn as the megalomaniacal Richard, some critics, notably Michael Billington of the Guardian, had criticized the director, Thomas Ostermeier, for failing to explore

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the contemporary political resonances of Shakespeare’s play. Billington, in his review, went as far as to describe the production as “culpably evasive” for ignoring these possibilities “at a time when the far right is on the move throughout western and central Europe,”2 a response that astonished me reading the papers over coffee and muffins the morning after watching it because, for me at least, Ostermeier’s production contained the single most politically provocative moment I  had ever witnessed in a playhouse, exquisitely realized through a sublimely played ludic conceit by the Schaubühne’s skillful ensemble (not at all the beginners’ metatheatre for the under-12s that settled into the Globe many years ago, and increasingly bedevils the RSC, little more—let’s face it—than the relentless pursuit of the cheap laugh). About halfway through the evening, an increasingly erratic and frustrated Richard/Edinger seemed to lose control of himself during a banquet scene and lurched off-script, attacking the actor playing Buckingham by forcing food into his face and then smearing it all over his suit. Both Richard’s conduct and the wider company’s confused reaction to this violation suggested at the very least an erratic improvisation gone a bit wrong or maybe even some kind of diva-ish breakdown. Edinger then flipped out of German and taunted the terrified Buckingham by seeming to coin the not quite plausible English phrase: “You look like shit . . . have you eaten pussy yet today?” Richard/Edinger, apparently delighted with himself, repeated the phrase several times, turning it over in his mouth, testing it and tasting it, before looking to instigate an escalation of effect by spinning out to the auditorium, and, via a chilling display of pantomimic capering, sought to enlist the support of the 1,158 (or so) audience members by drilling us into a chorus, yelling: “you look like shit have you eaten pussy yet today” back at the woebegone Buckingham. It was all very confusing and it seemed to me that as well as forcing something of a metaphor for the cruelty of the twentieth century into the tastefully safe space of the Barbican theatre, the company were, brilliantly, exploring this nastiness via a quintessentially Shakespearean irony, because we in the audience weren’t quite sure if this was an actor pretending to be a character behaving madly or a mad person getting away with pretending to be an actor. Where were the boundaries? What was happening? Was it just schtick? Naughty fun for grown-ups or Augusto Boal’s Forum theatre masquerading unvirtuously as metamisbehavior? And, as someone called out in a subsequent performance, “Why is no one telling him to fuck off?” Some groups and individuals joined in and some didn’t. You were forced to make a choice, and Edinger took his time. I’ve read about it since. It was contrived, crafted, an agreed space in the play for this game to be played, a clever exploration indeed of the cruelty of power and our willing and culpable complicity in its operation. For me it was riveting and shocking and exciting and funny and sexy and transgressive and offensive. Listening, I felt acutely and uncomfortably aware of

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my teenage son sitting next to me. Sonically marooned among these tasteful welleducated metropolitan types, many of whom were gleefully chanting this weird (and problematic) phrase back at the stage. So here we had a uniquely theatrical, viscerally powerful, exciting passage of skillfully crafted dramatic art. Bravo! Thank you, Berlin! And I wouldn’t dare to think that watching that passage of the play will have made me a better person. But it did make me feel something deeply and it made me think about cruelty and violence and anger and power and comedy, and I think I understood something that night that I didn’t quite understand before and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. And of course, of course: it just doesn’t work in anything like the same way when you watch it in your house on the telly. It just doesn’t explode; you can see the workings of the choice; you can think about it dramaturgically; consider the mise en scène; agree or disagree with the conceit; contest its misogyny; but that’s it . . . you can only understand it . . . merely “read” it. And the  why of this failure of theatre to really translate into other media is complex. It’s to do with atmosphere, I  guess, synchronized heartbeats, perhaps . . . the now-ness of live theatre. But partly, too, and for me most crucially, it’s because of the sheer unmediated physicality of the behavior of sound in a playhouse, the physiology of how voice and listening interact, their intimacy and immediacy. The surprisingly folksy chain of subglottic pressure, adducting skins, and compressed air composing the complex sound signal bouncing out from the voice of the performer to thrum through the auditorium before finding its way into the ear itself. Into us. Inside of us. And once it’s within us—without wishing to spend too much time back in Speech Science 101—we can marvel at the delicate transformation of this complex wave back into perceived speech: first caught and communicated via the vibrations of the tympanic membrane (the perfectly named ear drum), then transmitted onwards down a chain of three tiny, vibrating auditory ossicles, amplified in its journey, before being handed through the oval window (such a beautiful name) by the last of the ossicles, the stapes, and transmuted from the trembling of bone into ripples pulsating through the spiraling sealed pools of lymph contained in our cochlea. In the Barbican that night, 2,317 paired portable puddles of the inner ear all vibrated stereophonically and synchronously in complex resonant sympathy to the actor’s voice and thoughts before, finally, the ripples slosh against the Organ of Corti, where this oscillation in the endolymph fires up the auditory nerve to stimulate the temporal lobe, which, finally, concludes the process by decoding language out of neurological signals from Edinger’s brain to my brain, with a delay (given the speed of sound and the size of the Barbican theatre) of—at most—one-seventeenth of a second. So, when Richard insults Buckingham, it’s not happening over there; it’s happening right here, inside of us: we’re physically complicit in the making of its meaning, in real time, in a shared space. And you can’t turn away or turn it off, even when you disagree, even when it’s rubbish. You can’t unfriend it. It’s

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already happened. And this intense and uniquely theatrical exchange of sound and meaning between an actual ear and a real mouth can strike us within the unit of a single word, a single syllable, even sometimes within a single sound, like the time I caught the detail of King Lear pathetically kissing the forehead of his dead Cordelia, the tiniest kiss heard all the way up in the gods, in the cheapest of the cheap seats, a sound which in measurable intensity would be something like a million times quieter than the screams and yells that accompanied the blinding of Gloucester earlier in the evening. And this collision between the audience and the actor, by the way, can shock and excite in far less curated ways than in my example of the Schaubühne’s carefully constructed coup de theatre. The impact of a word can really surprise you, as Emily Dickinson articulates in her poem of the unknowableness of the effect of what we say to each other: Could mortal lip divine The undeveloped Freight Of a delivered syllable ’Twould crumble with the weight.3 I first understood this—first really  got it—  as an actor in Dublin in 1996. I  was playing Leslie, the captured English soldier, in a production of Brendan Behan’s  The Hostage  in the Abbey theatre, one of my first professional gigs. Behan’s play explores the trajectory of a political kidnapping through the rough grammar of the music hall. The published version captures the processes of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at Stratford East where the play was first devised and performed in 1958. So it’s more of a record of a devising process than a traditional text per se, and, because of that, there have always been various versions of the script (as well as an English translation of An Giall — Behan’s original Irish language one-act “Hostage” play) to work from in revivals. Rehearsing a play about the troubles in Ireland’s National Theatre that winter had been an intense experience, especially given how a 17-month ceasefire, negotiated between the British government and the IRA, had been coming under increasing strain during the previous year, as Parliamentary byelections reduced John Major’s tiny majority and Ulster Unionist influence seemed to grow at Westminster. It shattered—spectacularly—on February 9, during the first week of our rehearsal period, with the detonation of a huge 1400 kg bomb in Canary Wharf. The mood in Ireland was one of fury: a once-in-a-generation peace had been obliterated by a combination of Tory incompetence and Loyalist Machiavellianism. In act two of The Hostage, Leslie (the conscripted soldier) and Theresa (a country girl skivvying in the brothel where he’s imprisoned) are forming the sweet bonds of friendship and attraction that sit antithetically to violence and hatred within the play’s dialectic. They flirt and find themselves rehearsing some of the

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key arguments of the play, and when Theresa points out that the reason for the armed republican struggle is the presence of British armed forces on Irish soil, Leslie quips back: “And what about the Irish in London? Thousands of them. Nobodies doing anything to them. We just let them drink their way through it.”4 Behan is flagging up and satirizing the stereotypical anti-Irishness of the English working class. The line is provocative and might raise a giggle or a snarl from an attentive audience, but in the Abbey archive I had found another version of the scene containing a darker, more aggressive line for Leslie. Rather than “drink their way through it,” someone—Behan, Littlewood, Alfred Lynch (who originated the role of Leslie)?—had suggested, “We just let them bomb their way through it,” an edgier, more hibernophobic line from an author who had himself served time in an English borstal for attempting to bomb the Liverpool docks at the age of 16. Excited by my discovery, I suggested to the director that maybe we could try it, sharpening the bite of our production and bringing something of the mood of the current moment into the theatre. He’d thought for a moment and then said a firm no. Our show previewed and opened and the run was going fine—the reviews were grand—the houses were okay. It was, in other words, the kind of mildly disappointing experience that characterizes a life in commercial mainstream theatre. Meanwhile, the IRA bombing campaign continued in London. Then one night (I think it was the night after the bombing of the Earls Court Road), and completely to my surprise, the director asked me to try the line, the alternative line, the line with bomb in it. So I did. One word, from “drink” to “bomb.” A single syllable lasting a fraction of a second. What happened next is hard to articulate; there was a “for fuck sake!” from the back of the stalls, someone else left the theatre, and a row broke out backstage followed by raised voices in the foyer. A minor kerfuffle, then, but it wasn’t that: it was the feeling of the air being sucked out of a communal space, the way the atmosphere changed instantly, the feeling in the playhouse of an acceleration of hundreds of hearts, an entire audience changing their minds about you, turning on you—all of this freighted by a single syllable. And what was it that the audience were so angry about? National guilt? The stupidity and ignorance of the British? The oppression of 800 years? All of it was there in that moment. I came off stage that night shaking; the rest of the cast seemed angry with me (although no one actually said anything). I had the nauseating feeling that I had done something terribly wrong. We changed the line back the following night. Whatever it had done had been too unpredictable, too chaotic, but from that moment on I owned a certain knowledge about the potential power of language in the theatre, and it’s kept me going. It’s my answer to the question.

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Why the theatre? That’s why. I have other stories I’d love to tell you, but there is no time to tell them here. So, when the rain stops falling and the plague passes, put on a show. I’ll give everything I have to be there with you, sitting in the dark, listening.

Notes 1. Christopher Reid, A Scattering (Oxford: Areté Books, 2009), 56. 2. Michael Billington, “We’re in Crisis—so Why Has Ostermeier Stripped Richard III of Politics?” The Guardian, February 17, 2017. 3. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924); Bartleby.com, 2000, www.bartleby.com/113/. 4. Brendan Behan, Behan: The Complete Plays (Grove Press: New York, 1978), p. 186.

4 A SHAKESPEARE PROFESSOR BECOMES A PLAYGOER Alan C. Dessen

As an undergraduate in the 1950s, I was exposed primarily to New Criticism (aka Formalism), and as a graduate student in the early 1960s, I was imprinted with what might be now termed Old Historicism. However, in the 1970s I stumbled into theatre history and performance history, with the latter linked to the huge number of productions I  was able to see at various venues over the following 40 years. However, any answer to the “Why the theatre?” question was taken for granted and not a significant part of this process. Now that my hearing and, more important, my ability to process what I hear has diminished, I no longer look forward to playgoing and belatedly have come to recognize how much fun and enlightenment I  had both in seeing so many shows and being able to talk to astute theatre professionals about the work that went into them. With Shakespeare scripts I often had information of potential value to them, but they were far better informed on matters theatrical. Keeping those conversations going in London; Stratford-upon-Avon; Ashland, Oregon; and other venues has been a high point of my career. My immersion in the world of theatre began at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival where, starting in 1974, I  taught a summer course linked to that season’s productions, often with an actor or director as co-teacher. As a novice playgoer, I had many lessons to learn—and thereby hangs my tale. One of the shows on offer in the indoor Bowmer Theatre in 1974 was Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life with its unlikely, tacked-on happy ending. The production, however, was so well directed and the acting so compelling that I was carried along by the experience, and only when exiting into the afternoon sun did I realize that I’d been had—a telling introduction to how and why theatre can be so special. Two years later, I arrived a day early for my class and got a lastminute seat at a far corner of the large outdoor amphitheater. When the young

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actor playing the Fool, Rex Rabold, delivered his lines to Lear in 1.5 that climax with “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise” (44–451—it can be a funny line or an amusing putdown), those seated around me laughed, but three days later, when I was in the third row and saw that actor seated on a railing with tears in his eyes, I could not understand why those idiots behind me were laughing. Another lesson learned—this time about the role played by seating or sightlines. Looking back at those early years of my playgoing—essentially my post-­ graduate school education—several shows stand out. My first encounter with King Lear (a now legendary 1964 event in Stratford, Ontario) was directed by Michael Langham with John Colicos as Lear and a supporting cast of actors who became festival regulars. In those days, I was not taking notes and cannot provide details about what made this production so distinctive, but I do remember that even at the outset of her distinguished career, Martha Henry was able to make me and others really care about Cordelia to the extent that the final scene had an enormous impact. If I count movie versions, I have now logged more than 60 versions of this tragedy—and perhaps if I saw this one today it would not have the same impact—but I was not the only one in that huge auditorium too moved to applaud at the end of the performance, the only time I have had that reaction. Something very special had just happened—and hoping, perhaps naively, for more such moments is why I kept going back to the theatre. Two very different Oregon productions in the 1970s stand out for me. As an undergraduate I had a one-on-one tutorial for which I was assigned The Winter’s Tale, a play with a sequence of events I could not take seriously (and said so in my session). A few years later I saw a touring production (with Bert Lahr as Autolycus) that reinforced my dismissal of the script. In 1975 my co-teacher was director Audrey Stanley, who was working with two wonderful actors, Jim Edmondson and le Clanche du Rand, as Leontes and Hermione. In advance of my class, I was worried about how to deal in depth with this play I had mocked as a know-it-all student, but by the end of the two weeks it had emerged as (and remains) one of my favorites. Audrey and her creative team made inventive use of the resources of the indoor Bowmer Theatre (e.g., to distinguish between winter and spring, to provide a huge shadow of a threatening bear), but the goal for her and the pay-off for my class and me was the staging of the final scene. With all the actors dressed in white, Hermione rose from below in a curtained kiosk clothed in an even brighter white, and so motionless that playgoers kept consulting their programs to see if she was indeed a statue. When Paulina called for music, we heard Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” (in 1975 it had yet to become a musical cliché). At Paulina’s plea to descend and “be stone no more” (5.3.99), there was a suspenseful pause, a graceful movement down, and the clasping of hands (an onstage image that had been set up by several earlier moments). I learned from an actor that the agreement to descend was based on Hermione’s assessment at each performance that Leontes

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had truly repented as displayed in how Edmondson delivered “I  am asham’d” (37). The payoff was in his three words (or two words and a sound): “O, she’s warm” (109), which to me became one of the most moving speeches in the entire canon—all this from a play I had mocked as a reader. I have seen 20 or more versions of this moment since 1975, some of them very successful (though these days the tendency is to have a cool Hermione–Leontes reunion and make the Hermione–Perdita meeting the emotional high point), but I have been imprinted indelibly with this 1975 joining of hands. I saw this production four times, as did most members of our class (in those beneficent days, the students who had purchased a full block of tickets could get for free any unsold tickets on the day of the show). For performance number four, I got permission for our group to watch the play from a sound-proofed booth with the dialogue piped in so that Audrey could comment on details about the staging as the scenes progressed (a fascinating and highly informative experience). We were tightly packed into a small space, but when we got to that final scene, I vividly remember a voice from behind me saying emphatically, “Audrey, shut up.” All of us wanted to experience that ending one last time. To complete a trip through the entire Shakespeare canon, the planners of the Oregon program presented the three parts of Henry VI in three separate summer seasons in the outdoor theatre. Part 1 was a romp with much action and movement that included a version of “capture the flag” as one group, then another, took hold of the upper stage and waved their banners. Part 2 (a script I much admire as a reader) was heavily cut, with one reviewer describing it as a Shakespeare spaghetti western. As with The Winter’s Tale two years earlier, with Part 3 in 1977 I was afraid that I would have nothing to say about a script I had so far managed to avoid. Again, I was surprised, and again, I learned some valuable lessons about my limitations as a reader of playscripts. More than any other director during my roughly 20 visits to Ashland, Pat Patton was the master of the outdoor Elizabethan stage. For this potentially confusing jumble of events and figures (often read as no more than a prelude to Richard III ), he provided color-coded costumes and props (e.g., roses, cloaks, banners) and framed the action by beginning and ending with an empty throne. The narrative had an enormous thrust as events rushed by with an occasional quiet moment involving Henry VI in bold relief. I was impressed by Larry Ballard’s delivery of his speech (3.1.84–89) where he compares men to a feather “commanded always by the greater gust,” a passage to which I had never paid attention but aptly sums up the choices that follow and emerged for me as the center of the play. Michael Santo got plenty of mileage out of the big speeches from the future Richard III and invested some lines (again, several I had ignored as a reader) with a sly humor, as with his comment when Clarence changes sides again: “Welcome, good Clarence, this is brotherlike” (5.1.105). The analogous actions in the script were clearly signaled, most notably the three parents lamenting their murdered sons—Richard of York (1.4),

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the father who had unknowingly murdered his son (2.6), and Margaret (5.5)— and her smearing Rutland’s blood on Richard of York’s face was echoed when her embracing young Prince Edward’s body left blood on hers. However, with the exception of the hapless Henry VI, there was no advance in understanding among those involved in the murderous sequence of events, a never-ending cycle of violence and brutality. The final scene was powerful. After Edward IV has shown off his baby son, the script concludes with his couplet, a celebratory “Sound drums and trumpets! Farewell sour annoy! /  For here I hope begins our lasting joy” (5.7.45–46), lines that had been undercut by Richard’s asides and Judas kiss along with the memory of Margaret’s earlier curse (“if you ever chance to have a child, / Look in his youth to have him so cut off ”—5.5.65–66) and the previous deaths of young Rutland and Prince Edward. With the departure of the Yorkist victors, Patton’s final image had Richard alone onstage depositing Henry VI’s rosary on the empty throne. Whatever moral or spiritual force Henry had represented as an alternative to the cycle of violence had come to this moment: an insidious smiling Richard alone at the center of power and the rosary of a saintly murdered king resting on an empty throne. The show as a whole, but particularly the final scene, was a revelation to a dismissive reader. Even this episodic history play could carry a huge punch, particularly in a 1977 post-Viet Nam context. As with The Winter’s Tale, my inadequate “reading” had been transcended thanks to the skills and insights of theatrical professionals. In 1978, I  made the first of my annual playgoing trips to London and Stratford-upon-Avon that lasted for 40  years. I  started at that particular time because my late friend, Homer (Murph) Swander, who had brought me to Ashland in 1974 and knew how much I had been impressed by the Oregon 3 Henry VI, urged me to see the RSC production of the Henry VI trilogy, directed by Terry Hands and starring Helen Mirren and Alan Howard, that was ending its run at the Aldwych in London. I saw and much enjoyed this powerful and elaborately staged series.2 However, another production I was lucky enough to see (I needed the help of an RSC insider to get a ticket) was one of the final performances of the RSC Macbeth directed by Trevor Nunn with Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, and Roger Rees at the Young Vic. This show started in 1976 in Stratford’s the Other Place, a small space with a minimal budget, and was eventually seen by many viewers thanks to the Thames Television adaptation. That rendition at the Young Vic was the only time this script actually worked for me on stage, and I would rate it as the most powerful production of a Shakespeare play I have ever seen. Why that reaction? I had read the play in high school, been given a close reading with much attention to imagery as an undergraduate, studied it in graduate school, taught it, and even by 1978 seen a number of productions, but the version I saw at the Young Vic, in a seat very close to the action, was still a revelation. When I  talked with a few actors after the show, they were pleased at my excitement but a bit weary after more than two years of performing this one

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script. I won’t go into great detail, for I hope many readers will have seen and appreciated the televised version. Clearly, these actors knew exactly what they were saying and found ways to convey those meanings to me and my fellow playgoers. The often maligned England scene worked for me as a testing of Macduff, particularly in the reciting of “the king-becoming graces” by Roger Rees’s Malcolm (4.3.90–94), in which each of the 12 words (“justice, verity, temp’rance, stableness . . .”) was given equal emphasis to highlight what has been missing from Scotland under Macbeth. In the banquet scene, Ross’s response “What sights, my lord?” to Macbeth’s how can you “behold such sights, / And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks” (3.4.113–15) was not a throwaway line but was invested with suspicion, even anger, so as to become an indictment from an astute observer. In this minimalist show with few props (e.g., the apparitions were hand-held voodoo dolls), every detail, every action carried weight. One item blurred in the film version is the staging of Macbeth’s call to action before the final battle (5.6.45–51), which ends with “I gin to be a-weary of the sun” and ends with “Ring the alarum bell! Blow wind, come wrack, / At least we’ll die with harness on our back.” At this point at the Young Vic, McKellen hit a shaded light hanging from above to make it swing back and forth. That variation of light and darkness on his face (in keeping perhaps with the “fair is foul” motif ) was a chilling, unforgettable visual image. Most important, what I got for the first time at the Young Vic was a powerful sense of terror as theorized by Aristotle’s pity and fear, not from the onstage violence but from what was displayed in the clearly charted deterioration of the two Macbeths, particularly in the banquet scene and the sleep-walking—and here I highly recommend the Thames video. In the former, the central speech of the play for me is Macbeth’s “What man dare I dare” response to the second appearance of the ghost, which ends with “Why, so, being gone, / I am a man again” (3.4.98–107). While delivering those last five words, McKellen physically degenerated into a figure that seemed sub-human, with what appeared to be saliva dripping from his mouth, one of the most remarkable onstage images I have ever seen and my all-time favorite example of dramatic irony in the playing off of words (“I am a man again”) against image. In my seat close to him, I found this moment eerie—and scary. Judy Dench’s sleep-walking was just as powerful and revealing, especially her delivery of the “O, O, O” that follows “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand” (5.1.51–53). The director cut the Doctor’s immediate reaction (“What a sigh is there”) because the actress delivered a prolonged scream that my students link to a soul being tortured in Hell. The deterioration or descent of these two figures could not have been clearer or more frightening. After many encounters, I thought I “knew” this play, but no, I did not. I cannot think of a better response to “why the theatre?” My cluster of examples from the 1970s sets up the beginning of my addiction to theatre, especially Shakespeare’s plays. I learned a lot from other shows,

A Shakespeare Professor Becomes a Playgoer  37

even less than successful ones, for as a theatre historian I got some of my best insights from moments that did not work or were cut because they seemed to today’s directors or actors to be illogical or unrealistic (and telling a theatre professional that I liked his or her show because it displayed a useful then-versus-now anomaly was not part of my conversations). The gap between my assumptions as a reader and what I actually experienced in the three productions I have singled out changed my attitude and brought a sense of humility far removed from the cocky undergraduate who had scoffed at The Winter’s Tale, the academic who had dreaded seeing 3 Henry VI, and the reader–teacher who was already nearing an ABM state (Anything but Macbeth).

Notes 1. Citations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 2. I was able to see all three parts in one day. The final lines of Part 3, as already noted, are “Sound drums and trumpets! Farewell sour annoy! / For here I hope begins our lasting joy.” In this production, the trumpets and drums seemed to signal not a festive celebration but, given the incessant conflict of this tetralogy, a call to arms so that the startled men onstage pulled out their weapons and were ready to fight again—a summary comment on the events of all three plays.

5 ACTING THE STORM Twenty Years of Tempests June Schlueter

Jim Lusardi and I co-edited Shakespeare Bulletin, a journal of performance c­ riticism and scholarship, for 20 years. During that time, we saw some 100 productions a year—so many that when Jim pulled up in front of our house on College Hill, my husband would announce, “Your playmate is here.” Indeed, Jim was one of my two theatre companions—the other my husband, Paul, who reviewed productions in the Lehigh Valley for the local papers. So, over a 20-year period, from 1983 to 2002, I had the privilege of seeing every play in the Shakespeare canon, many—such as The Tempest—multiple times. This included the 1984 Piccolo Teatro di Milano’s La Tempesta, directed by Giorgio Strehler, in Italian, at the Pepsico Summerfare, SUNY Purchase; Jonathan Miller’s 1988 Tempest at the Old Vic; Peter Hall’s at the National Theatre the same year; Declan Donnellan’s production at the Barbican with Cheek by Jowl, also in 1988; Peter Brook’s 1990 production at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris; the 1989 Tempest at the Roundabout Theatre in New York, directed by Jude Kelly; the 1991 Venezuelan mounting of La Tempestad by the Rajatabla Theatre Company, directed by Carlos Giménez, in Spanish, at the New York Shakespeare Festival; George C. Wolfe’s 1995 Tempest at the New York Shakespeare Festival; several Royal Shakespeare Company mountings—Ron Daniels’s in 1982, Nicholas Hytner’s in 1988, Sam Mendes’s in 1993, David Thacker’s in 1995, Adrian Noble’s in 1998—and a number of fiveactor ACTER presentations at various colleges and universities. If we didn’t get to a production ourselves, we read and edited our reviewer’s commentary on it. With each new mounting of this magical play, we witnessed not only Shakespeare’s masterful command of text, which stabilized each production, but also the director’s and actors’ presentation of that text in a manner that made each production—even each performance—unique. Obsessive viewings of any one play never proved boring or routine, for we learned early on that each production

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would reveal something new about the play. As Paul Nelsen and I put it in the Festschrift we assembled for Jim following his passing in 2002, it does not take 100 productions of a play to come to realize that every performance is an act of criticism: it takes only two.1 Twenty-five years ago, at Harry Keyishian’s 1995 Shakespeare Colloquium at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Jim and I explored what we had learned about the relationship of script to performance and about how the two in tandem yield what is often a fresh, insightful interpretation of Shakespeare. We made Act 1, scene 1 of The Tempest our focus, recognizing that those 68 lines held a plethora of meaning and offered a powerful example of the range and impact a director’s choices can have. But, we admonished our audience, we needed to abandon the idea of a production that the text should effect and think instead of a production that the text could effect. Desmond Heeley, set and costume designer at Stratford, Ontario, once described the opening scene of The Tempest as a pair of jaws waiting to snap shut. The great danger, he averred, was in succumbing to the opportunities it affords for spectacle and, as a consequence, clumsily upstaging Shakespeare’s richly evocative script. In The Open Door, Peter Brook says much the same thing. Describing the inception of his 1990 Tempest in Paris, he recalls his first attempt at mounting the play in 1957: My first production in Stratford had followed the accepted view that The Tempest is a spectacle and therefore had to be brought alive by elaborate stage effects. So I enjoyed myself, designing striking visual moments, composing atmospheric electronic music, introducing goddesses and dancing shepherds. Intuitively, I now felt that spectacle was not the answer, that it disguised the deepest qualities of the play.2 Brook goes on to characterize that opening scene as a “frightening trap.”3 Despite the cautionary view of such distinguished theatre people, theatregoing Shakespeareans are commonly regaled with spectacular Tempests—that is, spectacle conceived as elaborate stage effects, the opening scene featuring a realistically simulated shipwreck full of thunderous sound and furious lightning, ­billowing sails, tangled ropes, and even heaving decks, in which the spoken words are indistinguishable from the general uproar. But is this a productive way to realize 1.1 on the stage? The Folio stage directions do signal sound and fury: A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard. Other stage directions call for A cry within and, when the ship founders, A confused noise within. It is also implied that we hear at intervals the offstage master’s whistle: “Tend to th’ Master’s whistle” (1.1.6–7),4 says the B ­ oatswain, and when Antonio asks, “Where is the Master, Boatswain?,” he replies, “Do you not hear him?” (1.1.12–13). Another stage direction, anticipating the apparently imminent shipwreck, adds a touch of visual realism: Enter

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Mariners, wet. Still, when all these stage effects are added up, it remains clear that the main work of creating the storm must be done by the language and the players who embody it: “Blow till thou burst thy wind, if room enough!” (1.1.7–8); “What cares these roarers for the name of king?” (1.1.16–17); “if you can command these elements to silence and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more” (1.1.22–24); “Down with the topmast!” (1.1.35); “All lost! To prayers, to prayers! All lost!” (1.1.52); “We split, we split!” (1.1.61). As an index to the activity onstage, some of it perhaps frenzied, there are more than 13 entrances and exits within 68 lines. In 1985, Lafayette College hosted five actors from the London stage, under the auspices of ACTER, for a week’s residence, during which they met with classes and offered two performances of King Lear. The storm scene in Lear (3.2), of course, presents many of the same difficulties in performance as the opening scene of The Tempest; moreover, these difficulties are accentuated in the context of a five-actor version of the play that makes minimal use of costumes, properties, or stage devices. When two of the actors appeared in a class Jim and I were teamteaching, students were curious about how they would stage the storm scene. In response, the actors improvised a pantomime involving two people caught in the toils of a pitiless storm. Relying solely on their bodies, they generated a storm by playing its effects upon them—the wind that twisted their faces and staggered their movements, the chilling rain that blinded their eyes and wracked their limbs, the thunder that made them flinch and crouch in terror. The performance was an epiphany for the students and for us. How do you make a storm on the stage? A student finally said, as though the answer had not already been given, “You act it!” As impressive as the demonstration was, that answer wasn’t quite the whole truth. Act the storm they did. But we as audience had been willing participants in the make-believe. What the actors could not supply was the sound and fury of the actual storm we had been ready to imagine. So it is with the opening scene of The Tempest. The stage directions stipulate a situation and certain non-verbal stage effects that will support the players in evoking it. More importantly, the script provides a richly suggestive and interactive language for the players to realize in voice and action. It is they who must enact the scene, creating and sustaining the illusion of storm and shipwreck. But we as playgoers, responding to the signals they vividly generate, become their collaborators in the process. How do you make a storm on the stage? You act it—for an audience. We, of course, are that audience. But another audience is before us onstage, trapped within the script (like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Stoppard’s play) and within the raging storm. The Boatswain must struggle with the elements and with his unruly passengers, the members of the court who insist on meddling in the work of the mariners. “A plague upon this howling! They are louder than the weather or our office” (1.1.37–38), he cries, only to be greeted by curses—“A pox o’your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog!” (1.1.41–42). Clearly,

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the spoken words must be heard so we can appreciate the crisis. Moreover, there is a feature of the scene that is curious if the scene is to be staged realistically. Gonzalo twice interrupts the storm to offer humorous reflections on the Boatswain (1.1.29–34, 47–49), and the end of the scene is given not to the breaking-up of the ship but to Gonzalo’s meditation on his fate: “Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground—long heath, brown furze, anything. The wills above be done! But I would fain die a dry death” (1.1.65–68). When mounting the play at the National Theatre in 1988, with Michael Bryant playing Prospero, Peter Hall was forced to conclude, “although it is often described as a naturalistic scene, it isn’t wholly naturalistically written.”5 The second scene in the play complicates the staging of the first not only because of the change in locale from ship to island but because of the revelations it makes concerning the event we have just witnessed. In the calm that follows the storm, we share the distress of Miranda, whose perception of the shipwreck is the same as that of the characters on board. Her anguished reaction, however, is contradicted by Prospero’s reassurance: “There’s no harm done” (1.2.15). Having doffed his “magic garment” (1.2.24), he proceeds to assert his mastery over the “spectacle” that seemed to her to be raging out of control. The spectacle, in short, was just that—a theatrical display, an illusion—the creation of Prospero’s art. While Gonzalo closes 1.1 by referring to the “wills above,” the storm and its consequences are in fact an expression of the will of Prospero. What impact should this disclosure have on the staging of the first scene? When we recall that the storm scene ends not with the actual wreck of the ship but with Gonzalo’s meditation, we begin to wonder what an audience might see on the stage. Would there be evidence of Prospero’s art? Later in the second scene, when Prospero puts Miranda to sleep and calls for his attendant spirit, Ariel, the script offers a possible answer. Ariel is the agent of Prospero’s art, the instrument by which the magus creates and controls conditions on the island. Hence, he now asks whether the spirit has “Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee.” “To every article” is Ariel’s reply (1.2.194–95). Ariel’s report might be taken as a gloss on the staging of the earlier scene, for the presence of Ariel in that scene, to perform the tempest, would prove a powerful signal to the audience that Prospero’s art, as it otherwise proves to be, is theatrical. Jonathan Miller’s 1988 production at the Old Vic, with Max von Sydow as Prospero, did not open with a realistically rendered storm scene. In fact, none of the productions described here did. The striking pattern in this 20-year survey was that directors consistently treated the storm as an event that takes place on a stage. In Miller’s opening, [a] filmy black cloth covering the entire stage billows and raises massive waves that lash against the small deck set high above the stage floor. Frightened mariners cling to the fragile rails of their tiny platform and bootlessly pull at ropes that disappear into the darkened sky above. The threatening

42  June Schlueter

sea dwarfs the ship and its vulnerable burden. Against the fury of the storm, they are pitiless creatures huddled together, their words drowned by the winds.6 The transition to 1.2 pointed up the theatricality of the storm when the black cloth that was its visual correlative disappeared into a downstage trap. In its place stood Ariel, shortly to be joined by Prospero and Miranda, on a sun-drenched island set against a blue cyclorama. Unfortunately, though Miller made his storm menacing, he missed the opportunity to have the actors’ speeches define the fury: the only intelligible line was Gonzalo’s wish for “an acre of barren ground,” spoken as the storm subsided. In Peter Hall’s production, the ship was created by the dropping of rope ladders and a sail from above, its movement by the gentle swaying of the Master and Boatswain as they stared out front: The scene began not noisily but in a kind of deadly quiet that seemed much more dangerous. The first noise was an eerie howl to provoke the Boatswain’s “Blow till thou burst thy wind”; the court emerged from the two traps at the front of the stage, and it was their altercation with the Boatswain that raised the volume, rather than the external noise. They subsequently mimed the lurching of the ship when the storm intensified.7 Convinced that the scene is not “naturalistically written,” Hall had his players speak the lines carefully, at times rhythmically and hypnotically. Moreover, when the ship apparently split and the mainsail fell, he emphasized the artifice by having Gonzalo wrap the sail around himself as he spoke the quiet coda, as he turned upstage into the darkness, Miranda was standing there in his place, gazing appalled at Prospero, who had entered through the audience and now knelt at the front of the stage facing her, exhausted by the terrible ordeal of raising the tempest.8 It was Prospero’s spiritual crisis that would become the informing principle of this production. Interestingly, neither Miller nor Hall made Prospero or Ariel an onstage presence during the opening scene. But in Sam Mendes’s 1993 RSC production, Alec McCowen and Simon Russell Beale, as Prospero and Ariel, were both onstage, Ariel as agent of the storm and Prospero as its beholder. Under a swinging hurricane lamp, the mariners in slickers leapt from trapdoors to man their endangered ship, their acting and amplified voices alone simulating the crisis. Ariel, unsmiling, stood by to observe his handiwork, and beyond the upstage scrim, illuminated by a spot, stood Prospero. Twice Ariel stopped the swinging lantern and froze the action. At scene’s end, the backdrop rose to reveal Prospero,

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a white-haired, bearded Victorian gentleman wearing an embroidered robe over his waistcoat, standing downstage, his staff extended toward a weeping Miranda. In George C. Wolfe’s 1995 New York Shakespeare Festival Tempest, remounted on Broadway, Prospero, played by Patrick Stewart, returned to prominence. But it was not because Prospero was present in the opening scene. Instead, he was represented by legions of his spirits. The set was a large raised circle of sand. While drums sounded offstage, the mariners and the courtiers in formation created the body of the ship, with the Boatswain in front holding the wheel, another behind him holding the mast, yet another holding the sail. As they swayed and spoke their lines oratorio-like, Prospero’s spirits used flashlights to drench them in lightning. The storm intensified, signaled by the firing of caps and the increased noise level of the drums. To this point, the scene seemed fairly tame. But then, in an electrifying maneuver, spirits in the form of five Brazilian stilt-walkers attacked the stage, surrounding the hapless travelers with swirling lengths of blue fabric that threatened to engulf them. Another spirit with a model ship on a staff mimicked their desperate plight. The stage was alive with activity when Gonzalo made his final cry, and then, abruptly, it cleared, again becoming a mere circle of sand. A further step toward artifice and metatheatre was taken by Peter Brook in his 1990 Paris production, with Sotigui Kouyaté as Prospero. Brook wanted his stage to be perceived as “a place for playing in, or, in other words, a place in which theatre does not pretend to be anything other than theatre.”9 He also wished to exploit the close contact between actors and audience in his intimate theatre, the Bouffes du Nord, so that the spectators would participate in the magic. The set devised was a simple rectangle of sand outlined by bamboo poles. In the opening scene, which was the product of 20 different tries, bamboo poles figured prominently: The tone, as well as the theme of magic, is set from the first scene when two musicians take their places and [Bakary] Sangaré as Ariel walks out balancing a long bamboo tube on his head. He takes it in his hands and tilts it from side to side, producing a swishing sound that grows increasingly insistent. Figures in black materialize from the wings, carrying a few bamboo poles that become oars and a masthead, and with the crazy swaying of this ensemble to drum and violin and the cries of the opening dialogue, a tempest is raised.10 The bamboo poles were manipulated by the characters to suggest not only the ship but also the surface of the water rising in waves around it. Later, the same sticks would be used to create Prospero’s cell and to evoke a forest. The transition to the “island of the imagination” was thus easily made. During rehearsal, the company had experimented with a model ship in the first scene and then abandoned the prop. But it turned up in another context in the final production. In his first scene with Prospero, Ariel entered “with a ship with a red sail balanced

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on his head,”11 and when he made his report, he enacted “the storm with his intonation and gestures, tossing the little boat.”12 The production that perhaps made most of the play as theatrical illusion was Declan Donnellan’s 1988 mounting for Cheek by Jowl, with Timothy Walker as Prospero. The director’s innovative approach to the storm scene fairly anticipated his prevailing strategy: Five minutes before the production began the actors were wandering around the auditorium without costumes or make-up. The house lights failed to go down and the actors slowly made their way onto the stage. Suddenly one stumbled and fell, and the others began swaying unsteadily, clutching at one another for support. The storm and The Tempest had begun. Prospero, a young theatre director in dark glasses, was shown to be controlling what gradually emerged as an improvisation exercise, forcing a young actor who later played Adrian to leap onto a wicker basket placed centre stage and steer the cast through the storm, thus designating him the role of boatswain, while Prospero himself took the master’s lines.13 Filled with restless creative energy and determined to show his power, Prospero bullied his charges into a series of performances. In this production, Prospero, like Shakespeare, became a man of the theatre—but a rather unpleasant one. David Thacker’s 1995 Tempest at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, with Paul Jesson as Prospero, also emphasized artifice. The thrust stage at the Swan, with audience on three sides and galleries on all four, is already in the shape of a ship. In the opening moments of Thacker’s Tempest, bells and woodwinds sounded on a dimly lit stage. On the forestage, in pale green light, a mast emerged from a trap, to be mounted by Ariel, who attached a sail. As Ariel, Bonnie Engstrom spoke the opening lines to the mariners. She then moved upstage, where the courtiers were assembled around a wicker basket, playing chess, and she animated them. The stage was suddenly filled with storm and struggle, with the Boatswain by the mast fending off the courtiers and the sailors in the aisles, hauling ropes. As thunder and lightning threatened, Ariel stood on a small platform, supervising the action. Quiet descended and the mast sank while Gonzalo spoke his final lines, only to be followed by cries and a crash of thunder on the darkened stage. What is otherwise notable about Thacker’s production is the degree of audience involvement. In 1.1 and throughout, verbal and non-verbal signals from the stage guided the audience’s imagination. There was no “quaint device” in the banquet scene (3.3); the audience had to imagine both the banquet and its disappearance. And it had to participate in the actors’ codes: in 3.1, Ariel and the spirits became the logs that Ferdinand carried; in 4.1, the spirits arrayed themselves like clothes on a line to become the trumpery in which Stephano and Trinculo decked themselves. Throughout the production, the audience was asked to look

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at and listen to the players as they actualized the text, forming a vision of events on the ship and the island that was the stuff of dreams. But that, of course, is what theatre is. Yes, Hamlet speaks of his play as holding a mirror up to nature, but it is Henry V’s “imaginary puissance” that speaks most powerfully to the theatre experience. Hall was right in recognizing that Shakespeare’s plays, like the opening scene of The Tempest, were not “naturalistically written.” Were they, we would be lining up with the New Critics still searching for Prospero rather than enjoying yet another magus, a look-alike but not a clone. At the end of The Tempest, most of the characters—and the audience—are unsure what to make of their island experience. They have experienced illusions and taken them for real, and now they find reality mystifying. How are they to distinguish what is true from what is the work of the magus? Or is the work of the magus what is true? Speaking of the confusion following the opening scene, as staged in his 1984 La Tempesta, Giorgio Strehler imagined the audience’s reaction: But that sudden tempest, so compelling, so full of anguish, so “real”; it wasn’t real? Those human beings dying in travail; they weren’t real? That wasn’t theatrical verisimilitude? It was “pretend,” theatre within theatre! It seemed real theatre, it seemed like reality, but instead it was a theatrical invention.14 At some point during those 20 years of obsessive playgoing, Jim and I learned that there is no real Tempest on the stage. Hence, there need not be a real shipwreck. The directors whose productions we saw understood that spectacle that upstaged the actors, who were at work at speaking the speech and acting the storm, did not serve the play.

Notes Although Jim Lusardi played no role in preparing this piece for publication, the original paper, like so much of our work during the Shakespeare Bulletin years, was a joint effort. Typically, after seeing a production together and talking about it, I would produce the first draft and Jim, who had a near photographic memory, would fill in the details. We were both serious editors, but here Jim’s commitment to error-free writing exceeded mine: whenever an essay we jointly wrote appeared in print, he would proofread it one last time, flagellating himself if ever an error managed to have crept in. 1. Paul Nelsen and June Schlueter, eds., Introduction to Acts of Criticism: Performance Matters in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Essays in Honor of James P. Lusardi (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), 9–16. 2. Peter Brook, The Open Door: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 126. 3. Ibid., 131. 4. All textual references are to David Bevington, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2014).

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5. Roger Warren, Staging Shakespeare’s Late Plays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 160–61. 6. Patricia E. Tatspaugh, “Review of The Tempest, The Old Vic,” Shakespeare Bulletin 7.1 (1989): 8–9. 7. Warren, Staging Shakespeare’s Late Plays, 160. 8. Ibid., 161. 9. Brook, The Open Door, 142. 10. Janet Savin, “Review of The Tempest, Bouffes du Nord,” Shakespeare Bulletin 10.2 (1992): 20–22. 11. Brook, The Open Door, 133. 12. Savin, “Review of The Tempest, Bouffes du Nord,” 21. 13. Arwen Broomhead, “A  Most Majestic Vision and Harmonious Charmingly”: The Tempest in Modern Theatre, with Particular Reference to Sam Mendes’s 1993 Royal Shakespeare Company Production (master’s thesis, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1994), 8–9. 14. Giorgio Strehler and Thomas Simpson, “Notes on the Tempest,” PAJ: A  Journal of Performance and Art 24.3 (2002): 1–17, 2. Strehler’s production, with Tino Carrato as Prospero, was sheer spectacle—stunning, magical, powerful; it was billed as “Special Effects La Tempesta.” Nonetheless, Strehler’s project was to expose the theatricality of the play. Because I consider this production a special case (the players spoke Italian), I have not included it in my survey.

6 FROM THEATRE TO CLASSROOM Making Teaching Effective Frederick Kiefer

For those of us who dwell in the hinterlands of America, London provides a unique opportunity to see plays in production, a rare treat. Living in the Sonoran desert, teachers and students seldom see professional actors perform Shakespeare and almost never the drama of his contemporaries. Fortunately, during research trips to England I have had the good fortune to witness performances that have made all the difference in my teaching. Before I saw a stage production of All’s Well That Ends Well, I had not included it in my syllabus. I knew that the comedy had a largely unsuccessful stage history, and I was not confident that I understood the play. I had been intrigued, however, by reading All’s Well in graduate school and had recently seen the 1981 BBC film, which I enjoyed. Directed by Elijah Moshinsky, it starred Celia Johnson, Donald Sinden, and Angela Down. Seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1982 at London’s Barbican Theatre1 confirmed my hunch that the play had been underrated. In my journal I wrote, “Tonight I am convinced that All’s Well is a very great play. It has terrific emotional force, and what seem discontinuities when one reads the play do not seem a problem in performance.” Directed by Trevor Nunn, this production adopted an Edwardian setting, which had the advantage of evoking the past, but not the too distant past. The milieu was appropriate because the elegance and formality of the era matched the class consciousness central to the play’s action, which concerns the effort of a physician’s daughter, Helena, to marry a young nobleman, Bertram. The social gulf separating the two is vast, and so it is hardly surprising that Bertram recoils from the prospect of marrying Helena. By curing the king of serious illness, however, she gains permission to marry the man she loves. The action belongs to a fairy tale about a wonder-working physician, but, as Michael Billington wrote in his review, the director endowed the action “with a total emotional reality.”2

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Helena, played by the splendid Harriet Walter, came across as neither a nut nor an opportunist, but rather as purposeful and loving. Although Shakespeare’s contemporaries would likely have been more troubled by Helena’s indifference to class than modern playgoers are, the character quickly engaged the audience at the Barbican. The biggest challenge to any reader or playgoer is understanding why Helena should be attracted to a man who possesses none of her virtues; all the other characters, with the single exception of Bertram, admire her. The issue can never entirely be resolved for the simple reason that the script does not offer a clear answer. I came away, however, with an insight that, while utterly commonplace, I had not previously applied to this play: in watching Helena claim the unworthy Bertram as her partner, playgoers recognize that no one is beyond redemption, that anyone, no matter how miserable a human being, has the capacity to be enlightened (if painfully) and thus reformed, even redeemed. Helena, all along sensing qualities in Bertram invisible to others, became the source of his redemption. After the passage of nearly 40 years, the ending of this All’s Well still seems incomparable. Helena and Bertram began to move upstage toward mirrored French doors. They looked into one another’s eyes. The lights dimmed until the theatre gradually became entirely dark except for the spotlight on their faces. Then Philip Franks, playing Bertram, did something surprising and delightful: his facial expression changed. Silently he seemed to say: now I see who you really are. And so the play ended on a note of revelation. As they exited, the couple touched fingers but did not embrace. A particular delight of this All’s Well was the performance of Peggy Ashcroft as the Countess of Rossillion.3 As is true of so many of Shakespeare’s women, she did not drive the plot. But through her conversations with Lavatch and others, she emerged as a beacon of good sense and integrity. Her instincts were invariably generous and true. Knowing Helena well, the Countess came to see her as a daughter and to welcome the prospect of her marrying Bertram. However difficult the subsequent scenes become, our knowledge that the Countess is ensconced on her estate and radiating good sense offers at least the prospect that a moral center exists somewhere, that eventually all will be well. Michael Billington summed up her importance when he wrote of Ashcroft, It is a lovely performance by our greatest actress; and it sets the tone for a production that establishes All’s Well as a masterly realist fairy tale and that sends you out of the theatre filled with a radiant, overpowering happiness. This was the finest Shakespearean production I have ever seen. Inspired by this experience, I immediately began including it in one of my Shakespeare surveys, which deal with the two halves of his career. Students are initially puzzled by the play, of course. The advantage of adopting it is that students have never read it in

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high school and so their responses are fresh. The play has also become especially relevant today because the bed-trick raises the issue of sexual consent. I have now been teaching the play for decades. In fact, I always begin my second Shakespeare course with it. Had I never seen Trevor Nunn’s production, I would have missed the pleasure of introducing this play to undergraduates. I know of no other All’s Well productions that have approached the majesty of Nunn’s. Probably no one has ever equaled his genius not only in making sense of the play but also in creating a supreme theatrical experience. Eleven years later I saw Peter Hall’s version at the Barbican Pit, starring Sophie Thompson and Toby Stephens.4 It was dead on arrival. For most people, alas, Shakespeare’s comedy remains what Frederick Boas called it in the nineteenth century—a “problem play.”5 Most of us enjoy teaching some plays more than others, and The Tempest has never been a favorite of mine. It remains on my syllabus because so many students enjoy it. But it has always seemed a puzzle to me. The play lacks a plot, and, except for Ariel and Caliban, the characters are simplistic and forgettable. What’s more, there is no tension at all. How could there be when the principal character is a magician who controls wind and waves and directs a spirit who carries out whatever tasks Prospero specifies? The exposition in the play’s second scene is so burdensome that it nearly prevents The Tempest from gaining altitude. Before I saw the play at the Barbican, I had seen nine or ten productions. None moved me. Yet the publishers of the First Folio placed this comedy first in their collection of Shakespeare’s work in 1623. That decision suggests that the play was successful in its time. All of this was on my mind when, in December 1992, I learned that a Japanese company was bringing the play to London. I was intrigued that this production would be presented in Japanese, that the director was Japanese, and that costumes and sets were Japanese. So I bought a ticket. What I discovered at the theatre was that the director Yukio Ninagawa had adapted the play by relocating the action to Sado, a bleak island identified with exile off the coast of Japan. Zeami, known as a magician and a founder of traditional Noh theatre, was banished there by the Shogun. We are to imagine that one of the Noh companies on the island is rehearsing Shakespeare’s play under the direction of the impresario Zeami, a Prospero-like figure.6 When the performance began, I knew I had made the right decision, for I was instantly charmed. In the opening scene two halves of a ship’s prow came together to suggest the vessel amid the waves. A sail dropped down from above, its billowing fabric suggesting the sea. When the exposition began, I could concentrate on the visuals, music, and broad outline of the action. I knew that this was going to be a treat. In my journal I wrote: “The Japanese sensibility made the play a triumph. The set design, costumes, sound, and music all were allies in making a powerful—not just beautiful—performance.” The visual imagination of the director reached its apotheosis in the masquelike betrothal ceremony for Prospero’s daughter Miranda and Ferdinand, her

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destined mate. In that scene, each mythological figure wore a kimono designed by Lily Komine. Iris wore little rainbows on hers; Juno’s garb was decorated with peacocks, the bird sacred to her, and she wore a golden headdress; Ceres was decorated with sheaves of wheat. The dignity and stylization of Noh drama worked to make this an extraordinary moment. The reapers brought in giant vegetables, symbols of the fecundity of the earth. Six nymphs and six reapers moved in a line downstage to the sound of haunting music, the deities behind them. My journal entry reads: “This was the single most beautiful scene I’ve ever witnessed in a theater.” That remains true today. The audience responded rapturously. After the fourth curtain call, the actress who played Miranda brought the director into the midst of the cast. It was moving to see how a production in Japanese had such appeal to a largely British and American audience. Since that time, whenever I teach the play, I always read from my journal to bring alive the experience to students who will never witness such a stunning performance. Seeing Ninagawa’s adaptation, I  realized what all the English and American productions of The Tempest I had previously seen lacked— a genuine sense that we were in the presence of magic. Even productions that have not been entirely successful have inspired my teaching. I think particularly of Alan Rickman’s Hamlet in the fall of 1992.7 Most reviewers were cool to both the actor and the production. Michael Billington in the Guardian said of Rickman, “I urged someone to cast him as Hamlet. . . . Now they have done so, but I wish it had been in a less lackluster and lugubrious production than the one by Robert Sturua.”8 But Jeremy Kingston in the Times had a different view: “The great strength and fascination of the production is Rickman. . . . He makes the familiar speeches sound newly-minted from his brain. His tone is conversational, sometimes eliding or eliminating words to make it so.”9 I had been a fan of this actor ever since I saw him in the incomparable Die Hard, and I was eager to see what he might do with the role. The production was playing at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, where there were no reserved seats. After I arrived, the lobby became increasingly crowded, and when the doors finally opened, I found myself literally pushed inside by the crush of playgoers; I didn’t know where I would end up. When I finally regained my balance, I discovered that I was in the middle of the front row. During the graveyard scene, Rickman was staring into my eyes. I suspect that no other actor has ever captured the sour, sardonic Hamlet as well as Rickman. And his capacity for sneering gave an extra charge to the character’s wit. Through the first half of the play, he was excellent, exuding melancholy, defeat, and sexual disgust. One could scarcely believe, however, that this Hamlet might ever be capable of committing a violent act. He had all of the character’s malaise, but little of his occasional exuberance. Sometimes he held his head as if he were suffering a migraine. Charles Spencer in The Daily Telegraph wrote, “this is a Hamlet who seems to have just returned from Elsinore’s psychiatric daycenter.”10 But Rickman’s voice was powerful and expressive. In a large theatre, the

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audience hung on every word. Even when he seemed to be whispering, we could hear each syllable clearly, and what he said seemed deeply felt. There were a few missteps. When the Ghost first entered, he was dressed in a fisherman’s cap and coat. He looked cold, hardly what would seem likely for a character spending his time in Purgatory. But the most unsatisfactory aspect of the production consisted of Rickman’s soliloquies. Because of his lack of range, I could never believe that the character was capable of drinking “hot blood” (3.2.360). The actor’s weakness was most apparent in act 5, when Hamlet returned from his voyage and told Horatio what had happened and why. In my classes I describe how Rickman played the part, and ask students what they think of the choices that he and the director made. When Rickman entered, his shoulders were slumped; he was wearing a heavy coat and carrying a satchel of books; and he collapsed into a chair. Rickman’s melancholy had morphed into a more manic phase. Yet as he recounted events to Horatio, Hamlet stressed the divine hand: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will”; “Why, even in that was heaven ordinant” (5.2.10–11, 48).11 These utterances did not bring about any change in Rickman’s demeanor. In the graveyard, his Hamlet displayed no serenity. As I listened, I thought to myself: “Alan, focus on the words. He’s not the same man he was.” Instead of believing himself the victim of Fortune, Hamlet now speaks of another power altogether: “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (5.2.200–1). An alert playgoer will recognize that he’s quoting the Gospel of Saint Matthew: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”12 Earlier he felt manipulated by a treacherous and malevolent force bearing the name of a pagan deity.13 Now chance has worked in his favor, and on his voyage he feels that he has been guided. Rickman registered none of that transformation. As my students discuss his choices, they come to see that an actor’s body language, facial expression, and tone must collaborate to match the words he speaks. Theatre people speak of an actor “inhabiting” a part. That’s what Rickman accomplished in spades, at least through the first three acts. Actor and character fused. Despite my reservations about Rickman’s interpretation of his role late in the action, I find myself haunted by his performance every time I teach the play. Because the actor brought such extraordinary intensity to the part, I can easily recall where he stood when he spoke certain lines. His performance was harrowing; Rickman made playgoers feel his suffering. This performance generated more emotional power than any Hamlet I have ever seen. When I left the theatre, I felt sure that Shakespeareans would be talking about this production for a long time. I wrote in my journal, “This is a performance that will be talked about for years to come.” I was mistaken. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor in their 2016 Arden edition, a work of 660 pages, never mention him, though they list other actors from John Barrymore to Simon Russell Beale. Robert S. Miola, similarly, does not name Rickman in the Second Norton Critical edition (2019). Nor does Abigail Rokison-Woodall in her Arden Performance

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Edition (2017). Rickman’s achievement had the misfortune to be obscured by hostile reviewers in the English press. They seemed reluctant to acknowledge that a popular cinematic actor could do justice to the part of an intellectual. Much the same reaction greeted Mel Gibson’s version of Hamlet; I know some academics who condemn Zeffirelli’s film without having seen it. A benefit of seeing Rickman’s Hamlet was that it staged two scenes often cut in performance: the Player’s speech and the play-within-the-play. These scenes both work surprisingly well onstage, as they do in Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film. When I teach Hamlet, I ask students why they think Shakespeare wrote this material. Initially, they are stumped. But as we talk about the issue, they begin to realize that the hesitant Hamlet sees himself as another vengeful Pyrrhus stalking the King of Troy: his sword, Which was declining on the milky head Of Priam, seemed i’th’ air to stick. (2.2.450–52) Before the court sees The Murder of Gonzago, Hamlet had asked the Player, “You could for a need study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines, which I would set down and insert in’t, could you not?” (2.2.509–11). We don’t learn which words spoken during The Murder of Gonzago, if any, may have been supplied by the Prince. But the Player King’s speech might almost be spoken by Hamlet himself: “What to ourselves in passion we propose, / The passion ending, doth the purpose lose” (3.2.179–80). What’s more, we gain some insight into the likely relationship between his father and his mother. When the Player Queen vows that she will never remarry after her husband dies, Ophelia comments, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” (3.2.215). Gertrude, of course, gives scandal by her hasty remarriage. Discussing these often deleted episodes with students helps them recognize how intricate is Shakespeare’s construction; there are no extraneous scenes. Another less than fully satisfactory Hamlet was presented at the Donmar Warehouse near Covent Garden in the fall of 1993. The production by the English Touring Theatre seemed as a whole underpowered, though Eleanor Bron was fine as Gertrude, and so was Pip Donaghy as Claudius. Directed by Stephen Unwin, the production used a mélange of attire from different periods, including American baseball caps, Doc Marten boots, jeans, cycling shorts, and ruffs. I had once seen a play on my campus that used much the same technique; by adopting clothing of different eras, the director claimed that the playgoers would realize that the play was “timeless.” (That was nonsense, of course.) Unwin also made a clumsy attempt to bootleg relevance by using a TV and sound amplification equipment onstage. These seemed to have nothing to do with the words or actions of the play.

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The reason to see this Touring Theatre’s production was the actor playing Hamlet—Alan Cumming. I had never heard of him. Though 27, he looked much younger. A Scotsman, he made no effort to modulate his accent for an English audience. What made this production thrilling was his performance: he spoke the soliloquies better than any other actor I have ever heard. Somehow he managed to make us feel that we were genuinely overhearing a mind in motion rather than listening to an actor who had memorized his lines and recited them in our presence. As Michael Billington wrote, Cumming “has the priceless gift of making the lines spring directly from his brain.”14 John Peter was impressed as well: “This is a hugely accomplished performance from a young actor.”15 How to use in the classroom what I saw? I ask students to imagine how they might speak the soliloquies so that they sound fresh and urgent. How will they decide what words should be emphasized? Where will they pause and for how long? Will observing the iambic rhythm help or hinder the lines’ effectiveness? How will they use body language to express the feelings of the character? And how will they manage to make each soliloquy sound unique? In the years since I saw his Hamlet, Alan Cumming has enjoyed a spectacular career as a stage, TV, and movie star. He won a Tony for playing the M.C. in Cabaret. As the fixer Eli Gold in The Good Wife, he was nominated three times for an Emmy. He has acted in the James Bond film Goldeneye and in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. He introduces Masterpiece Mystery on PBS. As his fame has grown, his acting style has changed markedly, becoming more arch and mannered with every new role. I wish the actor I saw in 1993 were still around. Perhaps I  can best sum up the pedagogical value of seeing drama on the stage by recalling this incident: upon my first visit to London in 1970, I saw Jonathan Miller’s production of The Merchant of Venice, starring Laurence Olivier as Shylock and Joan Plowright as Portia. The director, who set the play in the 1890s, was responsible for the most powerful trial scene I  have ever experienced. And I learned something that I had not previously realized: the single most affecting speech in that scene and indeed in the entire play is spoken not by Shylock but rather by Portia, urging the “quality of mercy.” Admittedly, the treatment of Shylock is controversial, and what is sometimes construed as Portia’s moral insensitivity, if not hypocrisy, can be troubling to audiences today: Marjorie Garber says that Portia’s “famous speech is part of a legal argument and is not the pretty, quotable, ‘philosophical’ set piece it is often thought to be.”16 But even if the speech is as wrongheaded as Garber believes, one could have heard the proverbial pin drop when Plowright spoke the lines.17 Because she was measured, deliberate, and steady in her delivery, her words seemed the outcome of deep contemplation. Every year when I teach the play, I recount this moment of revelation. Theatrical experience is the gift that keeps on giving.

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Notes 1. The production was first performed at the Royal Shakespeare Company theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, November 11, 1981. Its first performance at the Barbican was May 29, 1982. 2. Michael Billington, “Nunn’s Fine Tale,” Review of All’s Well That Ends Well, as Performed by the RSC, London, The Guardian, July 7, 1982. 3. The place name is variously spelled in modern editions. Rossillion is the consistent spelling in the First Folio, the only authoritative text of the play. 4. Peter Hall’s All’s Well was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon at the Swan Theatre, June 24, 1992; it was first performed at the Barbican on October 6, 1993. Oddly, the theatre program stated that the play “was probably not performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime.” 5. Frederick S. Boas, Shakespeare and His Predecessors (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), 345. 6. Ninagawa’s Tempest was performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1988. The Ninagawa Company’s production at the Barbican was performed on December 3–5, 1992. 7. In this production David Burke doubled as the Ghost and Claudius; Geraldine McEwan played Gertrude; and Julia Ford played Ophelia. 8. Michael Billington, “Prince in a Prison of the Spirit,” Review of Hamlet, Sponsored by Thelma Holt and the City of Nottingham, London, The Guardian, September 17, 1992. 9. Jeremy Kingston, “Review of Hamlet, Sponsored by Thelma Holt and the City of Nottingham,” The Times, London, September 17, 1992. 10. Charles Spencer, “A Hamlet Who Gives Up the Ghost,” Review of Hamlet, Sponsored by Thelma Holt and the City of Nottingham, London, The Daily Telegraph, September 17, 1992. 11. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. David Bevington (Peterborough: Broadview, Internet Shakespeare Editions, 2018). 12. The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, King James Version, selfpronouncing ed. (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, n.d. [1940s]), Matthew 10:29. 13. See Frederick Kiefer, Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1983), 260–62. 14. Michael Billington, “Review of Hamlet, as Performed by the English Touring Theatre,” London, The Guardian, November 16, 1993. 15. John Peter, “The Plot’s the Thing,” Review of Hamlet, as Performed by the English Touring Theatre, London, The Sunday Times, October 3, 1993. 16. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 300. 17. Recently I  had occasion to view a video of this production, filmed in what looks like a studio or rehearsal space without an audience. The video does not feel like the production I remember. Two reasons suggest themselves. First, styles of acting have changed markedly in the past 50 years. Second, whenever I have seen the video of a play previously seen onstage, I have felt that the energy and power of the original were missing.

PART II

The Life of the Actor, Director, and Playwright in Performance

7 WHY THE THEATRE? The Breaking of the Fourth Wall Gary Lagden

I remember one night in the Marlborough Arms pub in London, my friend and writer Noel Greig said to me, “There is something extraordinary about a good story; when coupled with accomplished storytellers, there is magic in the air.” I was lucky enough to be born and bred in Wales, a land famed for song, a poetic turn, and tall tales. Sitting in my dad’s local workingman’s club as a youngster, I wondered at these glorious storytellers who could bemoan and laugh in one breath. Who were never for a second concerned about adapting a tale that had been told many times before to fit in the emotional narrative of the moment. How everyone was called David, and there are so many as he is our patron saint. These Davids are told apart by the shortening to “Dai,” followed by a distinguishable feature. Some are straightforward enough: Dai Fish (He fished a lot), Dai Film Star (He had a smart hair cut), or my favorite, Dai Half Way, who was christened when someone saw him making it only half way up his street to work before thinking better of it and doing an about turn back to bed. When a Rolls Royce car was hired by the boys in the club as a surprise for me and Dad to watch Wales play rugby in Cardiff, or when Patsy Mallen decapitated a sea trout with a golf club. The last two are used in my play Fly Half, but more of that later. These stories, parable-like and fabulously ridiculous in equal measure, have had a lasting effect on me. It could be argued that this purest form of storytelling is the root of great acting, great theatre. These stories and tellers are in the moment, aware of the surroundings, the audience, and the potency of language to convey a message, to show the way to someone who may be lost or simply to make us laugh. The generosity of these people still moves me. They were working people, older than me, who had an insatiable need to take you on a journey and share.

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There is an effortless quality to a story well told, and it seems so simple. After all, most of us (certainly I am) are suckers for narrative. What is happening to a particular character and what is going to happen next is key to most of the performing arts. However, I  would argue that the live end of this spectrum—­ theatre—moves in a way that no recorded event on a screen can. There is ­something so special about the act of sharing the room with a story or storyteller. It is alive, it is for me, it is now. The moment of connection when the famed “fourth wall” is removed was something that felt right for me (long before I knew what the fourth wall was). It was highlighted early on in the club with Dad or especially during our yearly celebration of the Welsh culture—the Eisteddford. I do not speak Welsh, coming from the industrial South; I wasn’t alone. My gran had spoken it as a child, but that was knocked out of her at an early age and only popped out occasionally. There is a Welsh word, “hiraeth,” which roughly translated means missing home: specifically, Welsh people missing a time, a place that may soon no longer exist, and which rang true for me. The coal mines of the day were being dismantled by political choices and the very Eisteddford itself felt ancient and important, yet strangely at risk just as the Welsh language was lost for the majority of this community. However, I  think this cultural cringe—the need to speak English with as broad a Welsh accent as possible—became a badge of honor, especially every March  1, St  David’s Day. We were encouraged to do this and make sure we looked people in the eye as we did so. I remember my drama teacher Mr. Matherick talking to us with great passion about what the Welsh word “hwyl” meant before the Eisteddford began. Like me, I don’t think he spoke Welsh, but he had tears in his eyes as he spoke of the “fervor, excitement and motivation” of this land. It was on a school trip to the Barbican Theatre in London that the power of theatre was highlighted. We saw the RSC’s 1989 production of As You Like It directed by John Baird. Sophie Thompson played Rosalind with brilliance throughout. She had the perfect duality of playing the moment but knowing the audience was there. There was a delicacy to her initial moments but an unerring and breath-taking strength to her vocality and physicality when she hid as Ganymede. I was fascinated by her ability to be moved by the frustration of the scene with Jerome Flyn’s Orlando, and yet she never separated herself from us. It felt like magic. What was she doing that made this so relatable? Was it vocal technique? The physical presence? Her nature? When she performed the famous epilogue to the audience, to us all, I believed she was speaking directly to me alone, and I was hooked. This live interaction was profound. I was suddenly so connected, and, wonderfully, the language that I had always felt a little beyond me was relatable and alive. Sophie Thompson shared not only with her fellow actors but with us all, and had a need for not only her character but also the audience to be part of the experience.

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The sharing in the space is absolutely why theatre seems to work on a different level. The event is unique, cannot be replicated. Plays can be performed but stay only in the walls of those buildings, in the minds and the feelings of those present. In recent years as a director at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, I have encouraged the actors to explore the joy of the live event. The fact that each performance is an original. The relationship with the audience is nuanced and changes each time. Our heartbeats are different; our previous circumstances changed. This conversation between human beings in the theatre space can encourage an authentic experience in what can be described as the false world of performance. I trained as an actor at RADA and was in awe of the technique that was being taught to us all. The encouragement to use yourself as a starting point for character, the heightened state of concentration, with a freedom that enables transformation, and yet still to have the overriding need to share with a live audience. Vocal, physical, and emotional techniques were all explored in order to tell the tale. The three years at RADA were transformative, and I have not been involved in a creative process since when the training I received has not been mined and used. Katya Bloom, our Laban tutor, said, “Gary, sometimes all you have to do is put one foot in front of the other.” A note that popped into my head for the first time in 25 years just before the premiere of Fly Half. Robert Palmer, my vocal tutor, told me I spoke like I was downing a pint of ale: “Try instead to speak like you are sipping a gin and tonic.” Everything was in order to be heard, to maintain a freedom that would encourage the ability of the actor to share, not just once but through the rigors of a long tour. To make sure that everyone in the audience was party to this work and we all had the right to be there. I loved the focus on acting as a job, as work that can be honed, a craft that is a work in progress that will develop over the years. After graduation, as well as more mainstream work, I was lucky to find myself working in young people’s and community theatre, starting with Nottingham Playhouse Roundabout and then numerous other companies. The shows were not performed in theatres. It was exciting. As a traveling company, we would set up in school halls, community centers, foyers—indeed, anywhere we could get an audience to share in a tale. These were exciting times for me. Gone were the smart seats of a London theatre; no more elaborate set or costumes or lights. Instead, these were replaced by the absolute clarity of using your mind’s eye to convey a feeling or image. The theatre could happen anywhere, and people who might not usually have gone were now engaged in stories in their own space. I found this thrilling. In the school halls and other venues, authenticity was key. The young people and other audience members could smell any weakness or lack of commitment to the image or the telling of tales. You simply had to be honest or look out.

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RADA’s training was so important during these years. Using a free physicality and being “on voice” was key to the quality of the work, as well as the unerring eye contact with the audience. They are there—we all know this—so look, engage, and commit. Ten to fifteen performances a week took theatrical stamina, and as ever I was more than grateful to my training for the preparation that was needed. I found it heartening that even though this classical training was respected and actively sought for by directors and producers, it was in the actual performing of shows that its true worth was felt. I recall conversations that I had when directing Othello at RADA, an experience that clarified for me the essence of the training and the desire to share. The excitement of student actors at the change in mood of an audience. The show toured schools as well as performing in the Vanbrugh Theatre at RADA. Tom Martin, who played Cassio, seemed to speak for everyone when after a school performance he said, “I swear they made a difference; their focus was such that we all went into this heightened sense of concentration.” Even what have been called “difficult audiences” became a wonderful badge of honor. Fraser Wall, who played Iago, said, “They were sort of chanting at the start. It was a bit unnerving, but it was so exciting. It was alive.” Skye Hallam, who played Bianca, went further: “It is their right to see these plays and our privilege to tell these stories.” Again, like Sophie Thompson, there is this need of the actor to tell the tale. The play begins and the connection between player and audience becomes one. This experience clarified for me the essence of the RADA training and the desire to share. It is this desire to share with an audience who may not necessarily be regular theatregoers that was the driving force behind creating the play Fly Half. It is the first play I have written, and again I was drawing on the inspirational tutors and directors from my past, a number of whom I have mentioned earlier in this piece. None more so than Geoff Bullen, a RADA legend and someone who is noted by many as having the unique gift of being a director who genuinely likes actors. Fly Half was born out of a 20-year creative conversation with Geoff. We had always seen an invisible but tangible link between theatre and sport. Encouraged to “just go for it” by producer Jayne Williams, we began the process of creation. The ritual of the game, the legends that it produces, and the creative expression of the players on the pitch seemed to mirror the glory of theatre. Rugby Union is the national sport of Wales, and the “fly half ” is known as the creative heartbeat of the team. As the world changes, Darren, the central character, bemoans the sterile nature of the professional game and also the lack of expression and flare. When we coupled this with the brilliant songwriter and singer Gareth Moulton, who wrote songs in response to the text and performs them live every show, we started to feel that we were on the right track. Essentially, Fly Half is about the relationship between a father and a son. It is a love letter to my hometown and the glorious men and women who told me those wonderful tales all those years ago.

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That it opened in my hometown rugby club of Aberavon, before an audience of many of the people who encouraged me to mine the imaginative world— this will forever stay with me. My family, schoolteachers, friends, club men and women, all saw a character who spoke directly to them, as if there were no fourth wall. I was looking the audience straight in the eye, trying to hold the mirror up again. A character who tells a tale of working-class flare and subtlety while encouraging one and all to run with the ball, express, and show. Fly Half received wonderful reviews, and this storytelling piece now tours rugby clubs, community venues, and theatres across the UK. This play sums up why theatre is so important to me. The word, the image, the story being shared in the moment with an audience who may not necessarily have seen theatre before and also in the unusual setting of a rugby club. The very fact that the conversations after the performances are lively and engaged is so pleasing. The stories continue in the bar, this time the audience taking center stage. I am lucky to spend my days telling tales to people in a room. Breaking the fourth wall and connecting directly with others. Theatre has afforded me the unique gift of meeting like-minded folk who appreciate the thrill of this live, never to be repeated moment.

8 PLAY, DEVISING, AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS Brian Rhinehart

One of the most fundamental aspects of human life is that we are playful. As D. W. Winnicott observes, “only in playing, the child or adult is free to be creative.”1 Play sharpens the senses, sparks the imagination, increases intelligence and social sensitivity, and spurs the imagination into the act of creation. Sociologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and educators have been saying the same thing for over one hundred years, that play is a significant developmental process in the life of all human beings, and that it enables the brain to grow in ways that allow for an understanding of the external world and the people surrounding us. In play, we learn how to give and take, how to manage our needs and desires, and how to create lasting social relationships. Through play, we are able to transcend ourselves, to break free of the limitations and prohibitions that inhibit us in everyday life. Play offers an escape from the constrictions of reality. It enables us to assume a multitude of identities, to commit all manner of actions with no fear of (real) penalties or retribution. You can be who you want to be in play; you can cross boundaries, break rules, live other lives with no fear of judgment. In play, anything is possible. Working and teaching mainly in the areas of directing, improvisation, and devising, play has become a central focus of my work and research over the last 20 years. I realized early on that only with a safe, trusting environment, one that is free of the concept of failure, can play occur. This is crucial, because without an atmosphere of play, creativity is stopped in its tracks.

Play and Devising After spending years as an actor and director, I became somewhat frustrated with working, as I saw it, merely interpretively on other artists’ texts. I then discovered

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the form that would become my central focus as a theatre professional, devising. Devising is an inclusive, democratic approach to playmaking, one that involves actors, directors, and designers much more closely in the actual generation of performance texts. It is a collective rather than individual mode of creation, one that relies heavily on play and improvisation to produce original material. It was through devising that I discovered Neva Boyd and play theory. The sociologist Neva L. Boyd was the first and arguably the most important proponent of games and play in childhood education. Working at Chicago’s Hull House in the 1920s, Boyd worked tirelessly throughout her life to promote the developmental necessity of play and its indispensable contribution to the physical, emotional, and psychological growth of children. Her work was groundbreaking and paved the way for a century of pedagogical research, as well as the acting training technique and immensely popular entertainment form known as improv. Boyd is credited with influencing Viola Spolin, who went on to change the face of American theatre in the twentieth century. Boyd showed her the teaching value of play, and Spolin then applied it to theatre. She was later to claim her indebtedness to Boyd’s extensive research into play, while incorporating Boyd’s ideas about games and playing into her own theories of improvisation and acting.2 Spolin would go on to have a huge impact on theatre, film, and television, inspiring groups such as Second City, the Groundlings, and Upright Citizen’s Brigade, which have produced scores of legendary comedic stars over the last five decades. Boyd, with her emphasis on games and playing, is also given a great deal of the credit for creating the conditions necessary for another important development in contemporary theatre, the collaborative playmaking technique known as devising. Unlike improv, which is mostly an ephemeral form, here and gone, devising is oftentimes a means of producing and reproducing an artistic product for a paying audience. As devoid of rules as it seems to be, devising is not wholly undirected play. There are guidelines and principles that undergird the process, and there is one imperative: be kind and respectful toward others, support them, and find ways to connect with their ideas and assertions. A warm, inclusive spirit ensures engagement in a mode of imaginative play and is essential to making the participants feel comfortable as they contribute their memories, feelings, and opinions about the subject matter. Devising places a great deal of emphasis on complicity, the need to collaborate with and support others, to give as well as take control, and to fully contribute to the communal work at hand.

Teaching Collaborative Creation For the last seven years at the Actors Studio Drama School, I have been teaching directors how to devise with a group of performers, and one of the key principles that I instill in them is that devising is to a large degree about giving up control over many aspects of the rehearsal process—not an easy task for some of them.

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Their function, at least in the beginning of the process, is merely to create the conditions necessary for ensemble play to happen. They must generate interest and curiosity in the theme or subject matter, provide the materials, prompts, space, and atmosphere for the performers to play, and then go away. Devising directors must give up the notion that they are going to somehow fully envision what the show is going to be and say to an audience. I teach them never to lose sight of the creative offers the devisers are bestowing on them just because they have their own idea of how a moment, a sequence, or even how the whole show should look or sound, because I firmly believe that each collaborative creation should come from one source and one source only: the personal histories, insights, imaginations, skills, and talents of its devisors. Directors must also understand some basic concepts about how to manage the creative output of the performers. Specifically, it is imperative to understand that, in devising, avoiding cliched first responses is critically important to the production of original ideas. When faced with a problem or challenge, the brain often resorts to a habituated response, most likely dominated by that which is known, that which has already been lived. This constant re-hashing of what is familiar or predictable is arguably the death of art, but there is a way for directors to override this default mode of the brain. Because we know from neuroscience that creativity results from all the regions of the brain working together to combine new and old forms into something novel and original,3 it stands to reason that devising participants would benefit from a wide variety of mental and physical prompts—e.g., objects, ideas, choreography, texts, videos, sound-effects, songs, props, etc.—to create the optimal conditions necessary for them to produce something singular.

Devising Dispersal: A Gentrification Story In 2007 and 2008, my theatre company began researching the issue of gentrification for a devised piece that would eventually become part of a Fulbright project between the University of Arts, Braunschweig in Germany, and the City University of New York. As with many devised pieces, for funding reasons the show’s construction took place in a piecemeal fashion in which we demonstrated each stage as a work in progress. Throughout the process of its years-long development, the show has taken many forms. The first manifestation was a workshop in Braunschweig, Germany, in conjunction with theatre director Uli Jäckle and the University of Arts, Braunschweig. The German performers were masters of physical expression and form, amazing movers all. From the beginning, we gave them prompts that included multiple artistic and non-artistic forms: poetry, gentrification statistics, original songs, various texts about disruption and displacement. These prompts opened up numerous possibilities for physical expression, for bodies to perform

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in space; they also introduced humor and surprise to what can be a solemn subject, and showed the company a new way of both devising and of thinking about gentrification. The play itself, as we were conceiving it, had an urban, inner-city atmosphere and focus. The German performers understood it completely, probably because they grew up watching American films and television. What they did was transform our gritty NYC vibe into abstract movement, creating a somatic, interpretively open, language that perfectly expressed the theme of dispersal/displacement. Their contribution changed our perspective on how to tell the story considerably. The next phase of development came with the return to the United States, when the company began working with students at the City University of New York. The next challenge was connecting the movement work that we had done to very specific social content. At this point, we narrowed the idea of gentrification down to the borough of Brooklyn, and concentrated all our research there. The CUNY students had less movement and physical theatre experience overall, but they were trained actors, and more importantly, they were deeply connected to the people and to the circumstances surrounding gentrification in their neighborhoods.

Research As a group, they fanned out over Brooklyn and went on quests for interviews from local people of all ethnicities and social strata. The neighborhoods the students chose to canvas were those currently being wracked with displacement and dispersal: they went to barbershops, bodegas, bars and restaurants, and gathered the voices of all the people there, those who were for gentrification and those who were against. Hundreds of interviews were recorded. Fifteen were chosen as texts for the show. Toward the middle of the rehearsal process, we realized that the piece was visually appealing but had no emotional core, so we set out to find the heart of the show. We came up with the connecting idea of the girl with a box who moved through each scene, always carrying the contents of her home in her arms. She provided a narrative thread and transitional device, as she constantly searched for a home. From that point on, the show became about “home,” the need for one, the search for one, and the pain that the loss of one can cause individuals and families. This concept guided the rest of the rehearsal process. We gave homework assignments that encouraged research into the devisers’ family histories. We encouraged them to interview their parents and grandparents about their origins and their journeys to where they are now. The performers were also encouraged to bring their own subjective experiences and personal objects to the work—for example,

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in the final production, one performer sat center stage for ten minutes and talked warmly and emotionally about photographs (projected on screens behind her) of her Long Island neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s. Other research assignments for the rehearsal process included finding: • information and statistics about the Native American tribes that existed in Brooklyn prior to Western settlement; • old family photos; • interviews with Brooklyn residents; • neighborhood songs specific to Brooklyn; • news and media stories of gentrification in Brooklyn: white-flight, redlining, market manipulation, and more; • real-estate broker nomenclature, speech and habits for a comedic piece on brokers; • Brooklyn children’s games specific to Brooklyn, e.g., jump rope games, step games; • poems about the immigrant journey; • photographs of Brooklyn from the 1930s to the present. In addition, they were asked to inquire about their own genealogies, charting their families back four or more generations, and asking questions such as: who are your ancestors? Where did they come from? How did they get where they were then, and where are their descendants now? Who lived in your house or on your land before you? Who before them? Their answers gave a specificity and focus to the complicated and divisive issue of gentrification.

Devising Rehearsals At this stage, many different physical and movement-based exercises and games were used as prompts to generate images and narrative possibilities. Besides being open-ended, the prompts for building individual segments varied, because the richer and broader (and often the more opposite) the inputs are, the more the imagination has to create with. We used a process that combines, reconfigures, and smashes together a wide range of seemingly unrelated physical, artistic, textual, and cultural forms. A typical session that I set up might include as many disparate elements as possible, but always with a mind toward the central theme of “home.” The actors were asked to incorporate the prompt elements (usually five to seven) into one short devised piece, and the devising was organized by the following rules: 1. Break into groups of five to six; 2. In each group, take one hour to create a three- to four-minute piece; 3. Tell a story and, no matter how tenuous or abstract the narrative is, give it a beginning, middle, and end.

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A few of the many prompt elements we gave to the performers over the course of months of rehearsals were: • • • • • • • • • • • • •

a tableau of a family; a song sung to you as a child; a piece of choreography. Theme: a journey; a sad parting; someone laughing uncontrollably; a list of phrases with the word “home” in each one, e.g., home-schooled, old-folks home, funeral home; text from a newspaper article about gentrification in Brooklyn; a sudden arrival; a long departure; someone crying; a child’s dance; a family squabble; a two-minute interview of each group member, transcribed by another participant, based on the question, “What did you love and/or hate about your neighborhood as a child?”

Production The results of such diverse prompts were poetic, expressive, and useful to the play’s construction. We videotaped every session and, as a group, pieced together a rough outline of the show from all the devisers had created. Texts of the interviews with Brooklyn residents were interspersed throughout the production. Most were spoken from the stage by the performers. Others were projected as videos or incorporated into the sound design. The devised scenes varied from the purely physical and symbolic—two young men, dressed as gang members, danced a wordless drama of conflict and reconciliation; to atmospheric fun—a scene featured the entire cast playing the games and singing the songs of Brooklyn children from the last six decades; to poignant and political—two cast members (one being the girl with the box) performing a step-dance/farewell-scene on the eve of her eviction. Ultimately, the success of this and any devised production depends on the contributions of its participants and the conditions established before and during each rehearsal. It was their show. I had only provided a playful, non-judgmental environment, and then facilitated the process along the way. All the heavy imaginative work was done by the devisers. They created and developed compelling and meaningful material, then helped structure and polish it, and in the end, performed it six times in the Rose Nagelberg Theatre, a 300-seat, Off-Broadway venue, for the world to see and enjoy.

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Notes 1. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1971), 53. 2. In their book, Jane Heddon and Jane Milling, Devising Performance: A Critical History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), give Boyd considerable credit for the creation of the new form: “An early pioneer of the therapeutic use of all kinds of games was Neva Boyd, who worked in the 1930s, through the Works Progress Administration, to evolve a series of exercises and children’s games to assist the social development and integration of communities, both immigrant and those shattered by the depression. Her work was predicated on theories of the beneficial effects of play and of group interaction. In the late 1950s two innovative actor trainers, Nola Chilton and Viola Spolin, had independently developed Boyd’s games into a series of connected exercises designed to prepare the actor to work on non-naturalistic play-texts. Spolin acknowledged her debt to Boyd in her collection of games and exercises, Improvisation in the Theatre, which became one of the most influential post-war actor-training texts. It was a short step to move from exercises or games as a preparation for the performance of an existing text, to using these games as a building block of performance structure or story itself ” (34). See: Heddon and Milling, Devising Performance. 3. Stuart Brown, in his book Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul (New York: Penguin, 2010), speaks of the benefit of combining opposite elements to create something new: “Creative ideas are often those that bring together ideas from different domains or fields. . . . Many of the paradoxes of creativity are embodied in play. Creative people know the rules of the game, but they are open to improvisation and serendipity. . . . Much of play takes place in an imaginative world, but is also firmly grounded in reality. It is designed to activate functionally diverse brain regions to synergistically integrate their function” (136). See: Brown, Play.

9 I AM THRILLED BY AN IMPURE THEATRE Sidney Homan

Like any theatre goer, I love a well-made play where, along with whatever reallife ramifications the subject and the characters might have for each member the audience, the illusory world onstage is also complete and pleasurable in itself. But having said this, I am especially thrilled by performances that are not quite so hermetically sealed, where our life offstage seeps into the performance and, conversely, where that onstage world breaks the walls of the theatre. I think of that moment at the end of Ionesco’s The Chairs, as the invisible crowd exits the stage, frustrated that the evening’s deaf and dumb Orator has given them nothing more profound than the word “Angel food” scribbled on a blackboard. As they exit, their “bursts of laughter, mumurs, shh’s, ironical coughs,” as Ionesco’s stage direction has it, are the sounds both “of the [onstage] world, [and] of us, the audience.”1 Along with our invisible representatives onstage, we, too, are puzzled leaving the theatre. This impure theatre, popular in the 1960s, has been revived in New York by interactive plays that allow the audience to enter the onstage world. In Grandma Sylvia’s Funeral, to cite just one example, the audience joins the cast on the set of the fictional Helsenrott Jewish Mortuary, the performance moving from the street to the stage as we become fellow mourners alongside the actors as they run the gamut of emotions from grief to argument to relief with jokes about the deceased.2 For me, this impure theatre offers a double bonus, as the fictive “life” onstage is enhanced by merging with the real life offstage. Ulrich Jäckle’s “Citizens Theatre,” for example, brings citizens of small German towns into contact with actors and directors, creating plays in which they both write and perform, using community settings to address issues of local concern.3

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If one could argue that live theatre is the most realistic of the various artistic media—after all, it takes place in real time, with live actors witnessed and responded to by a live audience—then this impure theatre further complements our reality by making the performance an activity in the world offstage. This was the subject of a recent collection I edited, its title telling it all: Playing Offstage: Theatre as a Presence or Factor in the Real World.4 I have written elsewhere at greater length about two experiences that were epiphanies for me, personal moments when I could affirm this collection’s title, Why the Theatre.5 One was a tour of the Florida prisons with a production of Waiting for Godot, where the inmates, as they had ten years earlier for the Actors Workshop troupe at San Quentin, insisted on breaking into the performances, calling actors downstage, discussing what the characters were saying or doing, offering personal reactions to what was happening onstage. They took to heart the plight of Vladimir and Estragon, their waiting for Godot, as a commentary on their own incarceration, in effect, challenging any distinction between stage and house. As a result of this tour, I found myself reevaluating everything I had thought about the relationship between actor and audience, about the “role” of the latter in a performance. That tour, by the way, led me to put down my beloved Shakespeare for a time, and plunge as actor and director into everything Beckett had written for performance—the stage, television, radio—and then write about it. The other epiphany came when I  was working as a guest artist with the Arts in Medicine Program with teenagers on the psychiatric of my university hospital, doing acting exercises and games with them as a way of helping the patients get out of their confined, self-oriented world, seeing if they could work together as a company. We were doing one of the teenagers’ favorite games, called Freeze, where two actors start an improv, but then can be interrupted by a member of the audience who, coming onstage, dismisses one of the actors and then assumes their exact physical position. On the audience’s signal “unfreeze,” the actor begins a new improv, starting with the same pose but now creating a new situation. When one teenage girl, who had suffered such horrendous abuse in her home she had not said a word since coming to the unit six months earlier, suddenly cried out “Freeze!,” the staff came racing to the room to see what had happened. She took the place of the startled actor onstage, and for the rest of the afternoon was up and down, joining in the skits, doing improv at a level that left me and the staff, not to mention her fellow patients, breathless. As I was about to leave for the day, a sad occasion for all of us since, for better or worse, I had become something of a surrogate father for the teenagers, she stopped me and asked if I knew why she had “decided to speak today after never having spoken since [she] came to the unit.” When I confessed I didn’t know why, she gave an answer that,

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for me, defined everything I had tried to do in the theatre, and had tried to do for these patients: Well, you see, Sid, the theatre is real but not real. It’s about halfway to life, just like me . . . not as scary as life. That’s as far as I’m ready to go just now. That’s why I spoke. Do you understand? I understood.

Marat Sade I’ve known other moments when the theatre so affected the young. In 1973, at the request of his psychiatrist, I took a student, unfortunately a very disturbed young man, to see a performance of Weiss’s Marat Sade.6 The set designer had hung a huge net with half-foot openings downstage so that the people in the house were like spectators protected from the asylum’s inhabitants. From his whispered comments, sounds of approval and sympathy, his clutching my arm at especially intense moments, I could sense that my student was very moved by the performance. At the end, the actors suddenly came rushing downstage, flinging themselves into the net—which had not been touched up to this point—then reaching through as if to grab people on the front row, many of whom cried out in shock, or sank back in their seats to avoid hands now gesturing wildly at them. The young man, however, rose from his seat and, racing to the stage, flung himself onto the net, as if to embrace the actors. Many in the audience thought he was a cast member. On the drive home, he confessed to me that he felt a bond with the performers, then tried to dismiss his impulsive actions with, “Anyhow, for people like me . . . you know . . . there’s not much difference between real and fake.”

Ionesco’s Rhinoceros Even a polite audience, one that offers little more than attention and applause— though actors, to be sure, are grateful for that—contributes to the meaning of a performance, their challenge not manifest but subtle. Some years back I received a grant to tour Florida with a production called Florida’s Madding Crowd.7 A collage of scenes from various plays focusing on the role of the individual in big cities, suburbs, and small towns, its theme was: how can we balance our self-interest with the demands of society? How can we maintain our integrity in a modern world where people are all too often faceless, mere numbers? The grant specified that we were to use the performance as a springboard for informal discussion with the audience over coffee and doughnuts. At a community college in Miami, before a mostly elderly audience, we had finished

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doing the two final scenes from Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. First, Berenger’s conversation with the compromising Frenchman Duddard who, arguing that resistance will prove fatal, tries to convince him to accommodate the rhinos who have taken over the town. Before the last scene, I reminded the audience that for the playwright, the animals represented any vicious minority imposing its will on a people, and that Ionesco, a worker in the resistance, has in mind Germany’s occupation of France. We concluded with Berenger’s monologue from the end of Rhinoceros. He first entertains the idea of capitulating to the rhinos, even envying their horns, their rough skin, their raucous cry. But then, taking a beat, he resolves to resist them to his dying breath, not to give in, to remain “a human” even if he is the last human left in town. At the discussion afterwards, I was standing beside one of my actors talking with a group, when at the back of the hall an elderly couple in their nineties approached, a frail man and woman clinging to each other. In deference, the crowd parted, like the Red Sea, so that they could make their way to us. The old woman told me how pleased they were with the performance, and to that the old man added, “Especially that last scene and also what you said about the Nazi occupation.” In my naiveté, I replied, “Oh, was it something about the acting, maybe Berenger’s speech that you liked?” The old couple were silent for a moment, then communicating in that speechless way of two people who have known each other for a lifetime, the old woman said, “Oh, no, not so much the performance, not anything you did. Don’t get me wrong—you all were fine. But it was nothing you did.” Looking at her husband, each silently agreeing that what they were about to do was proper for the occasion, they pulled up their sleeves, revealing the concentration camp numbers imbedded in their upper arms. My eyes welled with tears, as did those of my actor. And with this the woman patted me on the check with a simple, “Don’t cry. You had nothing to do with that, sonny. It happened so long ago.” On the ride home to Gainesville, we thought about how this loving couple had received the play, enriching the performance by weaving it into the tragic fabric of their own lives.

As an Actor in Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together The conductor Michael Lewanski observes, Everything in [Coming Together] . . . works to create in the audience some re-creation or distillation of or metaphor for prison life, while simultaneously allowing questions to arise in a listener’s mind as to what the prison itself is a metaphor for. The avant-garde composer Frederic Rzewski provides the narrator with a “neverresting” baseline “of percussive instruments, consisting of an endless, inevitable, inexorable string of 16th notes, [that] is limited to only 5 pitches—an intentionally

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simple (equally intentionally populist?), pentatonic collection.”8 The effect for the listener is harsh, insistent, prating—“maddening,” as one member of the audience described it. This score is juxtaposed with, even as it complements the subject of the narrator’s monologue, a letter written by Sam Melville, one of the participants in the bloody riots at Attica State Prison in the spring of 1971. (Melville died in September of the next year of wounds suffered in that uprising.) The text is real, graphic, as Melville describes his life in prison. At times he is optimistic, sure that his sentence will pass quickly, that his emotional and physical health is “excellent,” and that despite whatever may lie ahead, he himself feels “secure and ready.” He compares himself to a lover, contrasting his “emotions in times of crisis” as he experiences the “indifferent brutality,” the noise, the bad food, “the ravings” of fellow inmates. If he is sometimes given to “histrionics,” he insists it is only to test the “reactions of others.” The text is repeated so that his letter acquires stronger, deeper, more intimate meanings on the repetition. As he reads, exercises, even talks to guards, he feels for “the inevitable direction of [his] life.” As an actor, I  performed Coming Together with the ensemble of percussive musicians at the Florida Contemporary Music Festivals in the spring of 2014.9 Only a lay musician myself, playing the narrator or, to be more accurate, the character of Sam Melville was a special challenge since I had to time my delivery to the incessant but continually varying rhythms of the percussive bass, even while relaying the subtext of the letter, which, on the surface at least, moves randomly from topic to topic. On the repetition, the musicians began to improvise on the rhythms established the first go-around. I too had to adjust my delivery, as well as the subtext, since the audience was now more familiar with the lines. Actor and musicians had to feel each other out. For me, the character, Sam Melville, as he emerges in this letter, was full of contradictions. His optimism, about his health, about the length of his sentence, might be a pose, a way of denying the reality of his life. Is he trying to convince himself or us that he can survive? If so, then why did he join the riot? Most telling for me was the reference to “lost hysterical men”—is he here displacing his own anxiety on others? His acceptance of a mind-destroying reality seems to break out only when he gets specific about conditions at Attica, from the food to the noise. It was only a few minutes into the piece when I  began to step outside of myself, losing that consciousness of being a performer that usually weakens my identification with the character, and “becoming” (I can think of no better verb) the inmate, Sam Melville, or rather a composite of the inmates I talked with during our Godot tour. No less, I was recalling inmates I met a few years later, during a second tour when my improv company, Theatre Strike Force, and I visited the same ten prisons of our earlier visit.10 The noise, the loudness, the desperation, the way the inmates first viewed us as interlopers, cursing us as we took the stage, and then warming up to the cast once they realized we had come not to spy or judge, but rather to share the theatre with them. As we drove away for

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a performance at the next prison, the inmates invariably would come running along the fence, shouting out goodbyes—and thanking us. I found memories, experiences in real life, infusing my take on the character. Conversely, the character, for me, was no longer just onstage. I don’t blush at the actor’s cliché: I “lost myself ” in the role of Sam Melville. Like my student who had felt at one with the residents of the asylum in Marat Sade, I was now pleading before an audience of fellow prisoners, wardens, members of a parole board, visitors to Attica. More than one member of the audience told me they were at once intrigued and frightened by this strange character before them, a character born from Melville’s text and Rzewski’s “rhythmic cacophony,” as a composer friend calls it. At one point, I even saw in my mind’s eye the actor who, in playing Flo in Beckett’s Come and Go, confessed to me that in her mental picture of what has happened to the character offstage, the subject of her two friends on the bench, she had called up the long-suppressed memory of her parents being murdered by the Red Guard who invaded her home when she was a young girl.11 I am one of those actors who has to take an impossibly long time memorizing lines, a source of some anxiety, I am sure, for fellow actors and directors. But during Coming Together, I soon found myself making direct contact with the audience, after the first few measures never having to look down at the script on the music stand before me. The complex script, at one with the complex score by Rzewski, had literally and psychologically been implanted in my memory. I realized the day after the performance that this very same thing had happened to me a few years earlier when I played an old man, a professor afflicted with Alzheimer’s and able, only through quotations from Shakespeare, to recall the events of his life. Like Coming Together, All Our Yesterdays, by my son David Homan, is a composition for narrator (the professor) and musical ensemble.12 Knowing my difficulty in memorizing lines, he assured me that I  could carry onstage with me the script interspersed with the musical score (some 17 pages in length), as if I were a teacher giving a lecture to his class. “After all,” he reminded me, “the musicians will have the score on their music stands.” Then, with a twinkle in his eyes, he added, “And besides, you are an old professor, sometimes forgetful, who likes to lecture about Shakespeare to students. It’ll be just like real life.” As I came offstage, after the 25-minute performance, David rushed up to me. “What happened, old man? You put the script on the stand, but never opened it.” I had delivered all 17 pages from memory, and without a flaw, even given the challenge of having to time my delivery to a musical score, as I would do later with Coming Together. At the end of Coming Together, after the score had been repeated, on my last lines I  impulsively left the stage and addressed the audience in the first row, appealing to them, as I feel Melville must have done with the reader of his letter, to understand my condition. Breaking that fourth wall, unable to separate my real-life encounters with inmates and the prison system from the anguished

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character I was privileged to enact, delivering lines that came not from a playwright but a man who lived, rioted, and died at Attica, and being myself a musical layman caught up with professional musicians and not doing as badly as I feared I might—all this, I think, added to my own small contribution to that impure theatre that thrills me.

Notes 1. Donald Allen, trans., The Chairs in Four Plays by Eugene Ionesco (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 160, 192. 2. I talk about this and other interactive plays in an essay with Daniel Homan, “The Interactive Theater of Video Games: The Gamer as Playwright, Director, and Actor,” Comparative Drama 48 (Spring–Summer, 2014): 169–86. 3. See Ulrich Jäckle and Brian Rhinehart, “Town vs. Landscape: Citizens’ Theater and the Re-Envisioning of Actor and Stage,” in Playing Offstage: The Theater as a Presence or Factor in the Real World, ed. Sidney Homan (Lanham, MD and London: Lexington Books, 2017), 71–86. 4. Sidney Homan, ed., Playing Offstage: The Theater as a Presence or Factor in the Real World (Lanham, MD and London: Lexington Books, 2017). 5. I discuss this tour of the Florida prisons with Waiting for Godot in Beckett’s Theaters: Interpretations for Performance (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1984), 31–57. And for the account of my conversation with the teenager on the psychiatric unit, see “Sticking It to the Audience,” in Playing Offstage: The Theater as a Presence or Factor in the Real World (Lanham, MD and London: Lexington Books, 2017), 36–38. 6. Peter Weiss’s film, Marat Sade, Hippodrome Theatre, Fall 1973. 7. Florida’s Madding Crowd, a tour of 15 cities in Florida with a theatrical production, funded by the Florida Humanities Council, 1973–1974. 8. Michael Lewanski, “On Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together,” July  11, 2015 (accessed July 10, 2019), http://www.michaellewanski.com/blog/2015/7/11/on-federicrzewskis-coming-together. 9. Coming Together, a production of the Music Department, University of Florida, for the Contemporary Music Festival, Spring 2014. For a recorded performance of Coming Together. See: https://www.bing.com/search?q=Coming%20Together%2C%20 Rjewski&pc=cosp&ptag=G6C999AEAF735706C&form=CONBNT&conlogo= CT3210127. And for the score alone see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= RSuuwJFw4wU. 10. A seven-day tour of the Florida prison system with Theater Strike Force, funded by the Florida Humanities Council, December 1991. I first wrote about this tour in the online journal Underground Voices (accessed July 10, 2019), http://www.underground voices.com/UVHomanSidney2.htm. 11. See Samuel Beckett, “Come and Go: Samuel Beckett’s Play for Women,” Women’s Studies 39.4 (April 21, 2010), and published online. 12. All Our Yesterdays, a suite by David Homan for chamber orchestra (flute, oboe, clarinet, strings, and piano—and actor) premiered at Merkin Concert Hall in New York on February 12, 2004. For more about All Our Yesterdays and details of the Merkin Hall premier, see David Homan’s website, homanmusic.org.

10 IN THE NICK Theatre in and of Our Times Jerry Harp

Where I  attended college, there was a ghost, the headless Benedictine, who appeared when the numbers of the month, day, and hour coincided; for example, on November 11 at 11:00 PM, the headless Benedictine walked. Although this was, of course, nonsense, when the hour of coincidence occurred after dark, I was careful not to stray outside. My refusal to believe was no reason to be foolish. As it happened, the building associated with the ghost was also the building that housed the theatre, a connection I didn’t get until much later, when I realized all theatres have ghosts. There is a tradition of leaving on a “ghost light” when the theatre is not in use, which provides illumination for whoever enters first and needs to find the lighting console; but theatre lore has it that the light appeases the theatre ghost; some say the light is there so the ghost can perform when others aren’t around. At the campus where I teach, the cast members of our plays even include the theatre ghost’s name on the attendance sheet posted on the greenroom wall. It makes sense that theatres have ghosts, for these are places where people gather to create new lives in an art form with roots in religious ceremonies of the ancient and medieval worlds. It’s little wonder there’s a ritual of striking the set immediately following the final performance. Like ripping a bandage off quickly to make the pain more bearable, the set has to be dismantled right away lest the lives it has hosted linger too long, delaying the grieving that actors undergo once a show is over. I’ve come to believe the theatre ghost is a convergence of human energies still circulating from the multiple productions over a period of years and decades, sometimes even centuries. A place for the coming together of the sacred and the secular, the theatre is where living bodies and voices respond uncannily to the theatre of the world—as the old trope has it—in which we live.

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It isn’t that I believe in the zeitgeist, but I believe in whatever the zeitgeist is a metaphor for. Back in 2016, I began noticing recurring instances of Sophocles’ Antigone responding to the various struggles that our moment of history had brought us to. That was the year the Brooklyn-based acting company Outside the Wire presented a staged reading of the play in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown and the public demonstrations that followed. As the website for Ferguson’s Center for Social Empowerment said, “By performing Sophocles’ Antigone for diverse audiences in Ferguson, our goal is to create a safe space for people to stand up, speak their personal truths, and feel respected and heard.” That was the year the theorist and social critic Slavoj Zizek published a translation of the play, in the introduction to which he reminds us that the way truly to be faithful to ancient stories, which emanate from a tradition of pliable narratives, is to adapt them to the present.1 In his Foreword to this edition, Hanif Kureishi emphasizes the political stakes of the play as showing that “useful rather than deadly conflicts make democracy possible.”2 That was the year the Profile Theatre in my hometown of Portland, Oregon, performed Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts, five adaptations of the ancient classic by five contemporary women playwrights. One of the five episodes focuses on a war widow who spends the entire performance demanding the return of her husband’s body. Another began with an African American woman standing on a pedestal, an image evocative of Greek statuary while also disturbingly harkening to times in American history when African bodies were put on display for sale. All five parts of the Antigone Project were concerned with the frailty and dignity of human bodies and the struggles of marginalized voices. That was also the year I ran into my colleague Rebecca Lingafelter, a professor in our college’s Theatre Department, and having recently learned that she was about to undertake a production of Antigonick, Anne Carson’s translation/ adaptation of Sophocles’ play, averred that I kept seeing signs of Antigone, which I took to be signs of the times. She allowed that the moment seemed awash in particularly virulent forms of patriarchy. When we later met to talk about the play over coffee, she handed me a copy of Carson’s text that a student had given her, the hardcover edition with vivid, surrealist illustrations by Bianca Stone.3 “I’m trying to figure out how to translate this object onto the stage,” she said. Part of what influenced her was the 2016 national elections when, like many of us, she assumed Hillary Clinton would be our first woman president. With the election of Donald Trump, the political landscape shifted so palpably that she became newly aware of the deeply internalized misogyny of our world. As she found herself growing increasingly angry and sad over the times, she turned more and more to ancient Greek theatre, a longstanding interest of hers, which she regards as a fit vehicle for the purging of such emotions. By the time her work on the production was underway, she was pregnant and knew her child was a girl, so the freight of the situation, which now included questions of what kind of world this girl would enter, weighed on her constantly.

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Fittingly for this play about Antigone’s struggle to be heard as she demands the dignified treatment of her dead brother’s body, the night I attended rehearsal was all about the interplay of bodies and voices. The evening began in the black box theatre, with Lingafelter leading the cast through a series of exercises in which they prompted each other’s bodily movements through verbal vocal cues and then prompted each other’s vocalizations through bodily movements, which then led into prompting both voice with body and body with voice at once, the whole group interacting until they found some kind of closure. It was an exercise, as I understood it, in the voice as body and the body as voice, seeking ultimately to break down the false distinction between the two. This work led into exercises in the voicing of lamentation, which emerged from the work that Lingafelter’s local acting company, Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble (PETE), did with Marya Lowry, a professor of theatre at Brandeis University and scholar of lamentation styles around the world. In Lingafelter’s reckoning, lamentation has a revolutionary capacity: “It gives voice to a segment of the population deprived of a voice in political spaces.” She later expanded on these reflections, averring that voice is a complicated matter, influenced by everything from gender to birth order to relationships with one’s parents, on and on. Whatever their sources and strengths, our voices can also get trapped by our struggles, traumas, and shame. The kind of lamentation work that she brought to the Antigonick production has the capacity to break people out of the conventional and stereotyped patterns in which it’s all too easy to get stuck. As Anne Carson writes in her prefatory poem, “The Task of the Translator”: dear Antigone,  I take it as the task of the translator to forbid that you should ever lose your screams.4 Those screams were crucial to Amanda Tugangui, who played Antigone. They helped her, as she told me, because the lamentations used in this production were, rather than articulate language, sheer expression, something primal coming from within the body. As she further put it, in a state of extreme grief, this kind of lamentation in effect says, “This is how my soul sounds.” Her first moment of lament in the play occurred when Antigone first sees Polyneikes’ body, when her cry was half lament and half burial song. But just before Antigone enters the tomb at the end of the play, Tugangui’s lament became something even more extreme, a primal cry expressing disbelief that all this could be happening. At the same time, like the intertwining of body and voice, lament and articulated speech are not wholly separate; from lament new modes of speaking can emerge, as when Antigone asks, “who can grow me a new brother,”5 a line that Tugangui found especially difficult to negotiate because of its emotional power and connection to events in her own life. It’s a line that she says recurs in her life still, even years after the performance.6

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It’s commonly observed that if we attend to the explicit arguments of Antigone (which invokes kinship, eternal law, and the gods) and Kreon (who stands for social order and human law), both sides have plenty to recommend them.7 But we hardly need a full dramatic production to rehearse such arguments. Both Lingafelter and the cast members I interviewed indicated that, especially in Carson’s rendering, the play carries us into a realm prior to argument, prior even to an agenda of stated beliefs concerning social order, the gods, or who speaks for the common good. It has the capacity to access something far more primal, chthonic, and embodied, something that touches on the energies that draw humans both together and apart, but which remains inchoate, deeper than can be accounted for fully by overt statements of value and belief. None of this is to say that overt statements lack importance, but rather that, cut off from this deeper realm, they become withered branches. Nor is this to deny that such primal energies have their dangers; indeed they do, which is why we need the taproot of art to give them form. As Lingafelter said to me, this primal realm is accessed in dream states and the sacred rituals of the theatrical playing space. “How else can we talk about this realm,” she asked, “than through things like dream states, music, and theatre?” The dreamlike quality of Bianca Stone’s illustrations was part of what drew her to translating the hardcover edition of Antigonick to the stage. However, when we met for a follow-up conversation two years after the production, she said that once she was well into the work, she pretty much dropped this idea of translation. At that time, she didn’t even know what had become of her copy of the book, having forgotten that she loaned it to me. So I handed it back to her. Paging through it as we talked, she kept noticing how many details from the illustrations had made their way onto the stage after all: a set of wooden chairs, the Chorus composed of women, a table laden with food. “Oh, look at that,” she said, having come across a drawing of a rocky landscape with a wedding cake in the corner, an image she had forgotten about. As the production developed, she placed the action on the day of Antigone and Haimon’s wedding, so at the center of the stage was a huge wedding cake that at one point Kreon destroyed, the material inside then becoming the dirt of Antigone’s burial. Lingafelter must have stored these images in her unconscious, she agreed, for later use when the play needed them. Back on the night I attended rehearsal, once the work with body, voice, and lamentation was complete in the black box theatre, we all moved to the main stage, where the Chorus spoke their lines in markedly subdued tones. I thought it was part of the performance, the muting of voices as a sign of grief, but Lingafelter spoke up: “What happened to your voices?” A member of the Chorus responded, “We got very small.” Another Chorus member, Eliza Frakes, recalls feeling safer in the smaller space, whereas the main stage felt overwhelming. Lingafelter encouraged them to bring the bigger energy they had in the black box into the larger space. As Frakes explained when we spoke by phone, this was not a matter of puffing themselves up, but rather of grounding themselves in the

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gravity of the story. Such was her relationship with Lingafelter and the rest of the cast that she felt “very safe and held in that vulnerable space” that the play brought them to; this sense of being held was part of what allowed her to bring her greater energy to the main stage. Like Antigone, she had to work to make her voice heard in a space not her own. At one point in the process of working up this production, Lingafelter, who tends to be a real problem solver, found herself more and more letting go, even to the point of ceasing to care how good the play would be. It was taking on its own momentum. As she put it, something about Bianca Stone’s illustrations and the open-endedness of Carson’s version of the play helped her to let go. Carson distills Sophocles’ six concluding lines of moral summing up to “Last word/wisdom: better get some/even too late,” followed by a stage direction of Carson’s own invention: “exeunt omnes except Nick who continues measuring.”8 Although little is said of this character that Carson adds to the play, Nick is a presence throughout; the only other mention is in the character list: “Nick a mute part [always onstage, he measures things].”9 In Lingafelter’s production, the character was played by Morgan Clark-Gaynor, who uses they/them pronouns. The director’s idea was that Nick would mark the time by making hash marks with chalk on the theatre walls. Thus, “Nick” acts on the sense of the name related to notch, tally, or mark, as well as the sense of a precise or exact moment or a critical juncture; as the Chorus says, here we are we’re all fine we’re standing in the nick of time.10 Because Clark-Gaynor is an excellent visual artist, their markings started converging into drawings that created, alongside the play, an adjacent work speaking back to what was happening onstage. During rehearsals, Clark-Gaynor was pretty much left to their own improvisations, though they and Rebecca agreed on certain basics for each performance, such as beginning on the same level as the audience, marking the bottom of the stage, and working up, as well as always including certain figures: hills, lightning, clouds, eyes, a dead woman floating above hash marks, and waves. Clark-Gaynor developed a backstory in which Nick, who cares deeply for the humans in this story, was Antigone in a former life, whose role after death is to mark the time. In the space of the tomb, which the audience could see projected onto a screen, Amanda Tugangui’s Antigone became the next marker of time as she began drawing hash marks on the walls. Clark-Gaynor described how Lingafelter presented the play as a work that responds to the sexism that keeps cycling into the world in new iterations, thus calling forth new iterations of markings for the particular nick of time where we find ourselves. Eliza Frakes said that, as it happened, the call backs for this production fell on the day of the

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women’s march, which she wanted to attend, but she also knew the play would be its own political act. For Frakes, who since her college graduation has worked as a production assistant in a TV writers’ room, there is nothing like live theatre. As much as she likes movies and television, she insists they can never replace live theatre’s ability to tap into something humans have been doing for millennia. It’s a space where the audience is part of the action; in every performance, the audience and actors form a relationship, and then something new happens with the next audience in the performance to follow.11 In the course of our conversation, Clark-Gaynor spoke of their passion for both theatre and political activism, devotions that are far from separate. I believe all these voices involved in the Antigonick production are getting at why the theatre remains vital. It is an intensely sacred and secular ritual with deep roots in human history. It’s a collaborative enterprise that depends on everyone, the audience included, showing up with their most personal and distinctive passions. It taps into the primal, bodily energies that connect us with the earth, each other, and the rest of the cosmos. It’s a powerful form of social and political intervention. It’s a space where bodies gather to bring our stories into action, invoking the spirits of the living and the dead.

Notes 1. Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Slavoj Zizek (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), xii–xiii. 2. Ibid., x. 3. Sophocles, Antigonick, translated by Anne Carson, illustrated by Bianca Stone (New York: New Directions, 2012). When quoting from the text, I shall use the 2015 New Directions edition, which includes page numbers, as the 2012 hardcover edition does not. 4. Sophocles, Antigonick, 2015 paperback edition, 6. This poem does not appear in the hardcover edition. 5. Ibid., 31. 6. For anyone interested in more about lamentation in Antigone, I recommend Bonnie Honig’s Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially 121–50. 7. Judith Butler provides an especially helpful and nuanced treatment of the arguments in her Wellek Library Lectures, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1–6, 31–40. 8. Sophocles, Antigonick, 2015 paperback edition, 44. 9. Ibid., 7. 10. Ibid., 37. 11. It’s only right that here I acknowledge the influence on me of Sidney Homan’s The Audience as Actor and Character: The Modern Theatre of Beckett, Brecht, Genet, Ionesco, Pinter, Stoppard, and Williams (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989).

11 “THE PLAY” MAY NOT BE “THE THING”—BUT SOMETHING IS Erica Terpening-Romeo

The most profound and connective theatre experience of my life was—and was not—a performance of Romeo and Juliet. The show took place in July of 2018 in the old Town Hall building, called the Community House, of the rural Western Massachusetts town where I now live. The hall was packed beyond capacity. It was a sticky evening, the hottest of the season so far, and people fanned themselves with their programs to keep cool. The audience chairs were arranged in half-circles, filling about two-thirds of the Hall’s open space. Completing the circle with the audience were 20 empty chairs, labeled with the names of characters from the play that was and was not about to be performed. There were no wings, no backstage space; everyone present as the show began was seated in the audience save for me, standing nervously before the room with an overfull binder in my arms. The binder held the blueprint of a show none of us had ever seen. I introduced myself and explained, to the best of my ability, what was about to happen, and then sat down. By the end of the night, 20 members of the audience were seated in the labeled chairs, with several more standing in the audience, singing their separate parts in a round they had only ever practiced with me and a brief, looping recording on my phone. In the last moments of the performance, the Community House vibrated with the sound of 25 overlapping voices singing together for the first and only time. So ended the first annual production of Hilltown Theatre Anonymous, a project adapted from a model pioneered by Anonymous Theatre Company of Portland, Oregon. The concept, if not the execution, is wickedly simple: a play is cast in secret. Each actor rehearses their role one-on-one with the director, telling no one of their involvement. On show night, everyone sits in the audience, cast and spectators alike, and each actor makes their first entrance from their seat, speaking their first line from the audience as they come onstage. Actors

“The Play” May Not Be “The Thing”  83

encounter one another for the first time in the moment of performance. The play is staged only once. The Anonymous shows I  attended in Portland impressed me—the feat of such a wild gimmick executed with polish and finesse astonished in itself—but they also did something else. The project attracts many of Portland’s finest actors, and, due to the relative smallness of the city’s theatre scene, this meant that the casts were usually made up of people who knew one another: colleagues, friends. I loved watching them encounter each other onstage, surprise one another, and light up with the electricity and joy of that surprise. I thought of Anonymous when, some years after leaving Portland, I landed in a small farming community in rural Massachusetts. I wanted to bring Shakespeare to the community in a way that felt vital, to find an angle that would appeal especially to folks in town who often felt shut out by classical theatre, or even theatre more broadly. I wanted them to be surprised. And it occurred to me that I also wanted to watch my new neighbors encounter each other the way I’d seen the Anonymous actors do in Portland. I approached Anonymous Theatre and asked for their permission to adapt their model and operate as a rural, East Coast satellite. They agreed. Eight months later we were in the Community House, sweating and giddy, wondering what had just happened to us. I must break the form here to make a confession: I am writing this from the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, weeks into what will likely be many months of uncertainty and selective quarantine—an indefinite, worldwide heldbreath. In this moment, many generous and industrious theatre-makers are finding ways of moving their creative content online, or making already-online content more widely available. I truly admire their ingenuity and generosity, but must admit that I have no appetite for this content. When I interrogate my lack of appetite, I find that it has little to do with the insufficiency of the medium. I certainly haven’t argued with the cynics among my colleagues who say lately that film and television have had the jump on recorded narrative for decades, and us theatre folks can’t expect to compete. But the truth is, I have had very little appetite for film or television either, except to dull anxiety and pass the time. And theatre is not meant to pass the time. At its best, theatre makes us feel time more acutely, more achingly; it makes time feel impossibly full of itself and of our own aliveness as it rushes swiftly over us. Perhaps this could be achieved remotely, but I have my doubts—and even if it could be, I am not sure I could take it. My appetite for narrative content may be suppressed, but I am still hungry. I have deep longing for a collective experience. I look out the window of my home office at the suspended New England spring and consider the paradox so many of us are grappling with: that we are simultaneously more isolated from and more connected to one another than we have ever been. We are united, in a way unprecedented in my lifetime, by our terror, our trepidation, our gratitude, and our grief. As a result, despite our profound disorientation, there is a unity between our internal and external landscapes; the outsides match our insides. Our

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feelings cohere. It occurs to me that this state of collective, coherent extremity is what theatre simulates. Theatre offers the essential community service of simulating extremity under safe conditions in order to test and trigger our capacity for catharsis. Like a psycho-spiritual reflex test, theatre is a mallet tapped precisely against the soul to make sure it still works. I am reminded of the procedure I underwent as a kid to address some faulty wiring in the lower chamber of my heart. During this procedure, called an ablation, synthetic adrenaline was pumped into my bloodstream to trigger tachycardia— rapid heart palpitations. Once triggered, the offending cells in my heart could be located and burned away. For reasons still unclear to me, I had to be partially conscious during the seven-hour surgery; I  remember the sensation of overdrive, of so much electricity coursing through my body that I was rendered motionless. Theatre, according to Aristotle at least, is a similar procedure: gather the people, generate enough intensity to trigger a controlled experience of suffering (or joy), activate catharsis, and send them home cleared out. However, if I had shown up at the Brooklyn Hospital on the day of my procedure with a tachycardic episode already underway, the adrenaline would not only have been gratuitous, it would also probably have killed me. In the midst of this pandemic and the widespread suffering wrought, there is no need for the adrenaline, the mallet for the soul, the simulation of extremity. Extremity is upon us. And yet, we have just as great a need for the procedure itself, the cleansing fire. So where does that leave us? Surely, I am not arguing that theatre is effective only in times of prosperity and peace. I do not believe that. But as medical facilities have adapted to the extreme and particular needs of this moment, the theatre will also have to adapt, in form as well as function. I do not know what we must become on the other side of this thing. In the absence of any inborn clarity, I find myself re-reading the great arbiters of theatre to find what wisdom they have for us. In director Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, in his section on “Holy Theatre,” I am alarmed to find a description of French dramatist Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty as: “a theatre working like the plague, by intoxication, by infection, by analogy, by magic, a theatre in which the play, the event itself, stands in place of a text.”1 Now, Artaud is not my cup of tea. And yet, while I cannot believe this moment calls for a theatre of cruelty, and it is impossible to endorse anything right now that works “like the plague,” the notion of an event that stands in place of a text, and is itself a kind of text, appeals to me. I say this as a lover of texts. I am a sucker for a good text, which is why I feel so entirely devoted to Shakespeare, whose texts are objects of such awe and delight that it seems both foolish and ungrateful to imagine throwing them over for anything else. But despite the frequency with which my colleagues and I in the theatre lean on the directive to “serve the story,” Brook’s invocation of Artaud reminds us that the story is, first and foremost, there to serve us. Do I only take issue with story for story’s sake when tragedy is on the menu? Brook has an answer for me there as well, in his rebuttal to the criticism leveled

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at him for choosing to produce particularly brutal plays: “the complaint was that the theatre today is wallowing in misery,” that, in eschewing Shakespeare’s lighter fare for the grimmer of his tragedies, his theatre denied Shakespeare’s fundamental wisdom that “the rite of winter includes a sense of the rite of spring.”2 Brook agrees with his detractors in a sense, but not with their proposed alternative: they are not searching for a holy theatre, they are not talking about a theatre of miracles: they are talking of the tame play where “higher” only means “nicer”—alas, happy endings and optimism can’t be ordered like wine from cellars. In our current context, this last feels especially apt and cutting; he might as well be telling us, you cannot wish away this moment. You cannot spare yourself or your loved ones by averting your eyes. You cannot pass the time. Fair enough, Peter Brook. But if tragedy may cause us more suffering than we can bear, and comedy may be palliative at best, numbing and distracting at worst, than what is left for us? Where will we find our theatre of miracles? I re-read W. H. Auden’s 1969 poem “The Art of Healing,” and my ears ring with the voice of another writer invoking the wisdom of yet another luminary from a previous century: “Every sickness is a musical problem, so said Novalis, and every cure a musical solution.”3 This assertion is plainly and obviously true to me, though I’m not sure I can explain why. Perhaps because it removes sickness from the realm of the explicable and places it, with music, in the realm of the ineffable. I believe that sickness—of any kind: mind, body, or soul—is inherently mysterious and music inherently miraculous, and that life’s miracles exist in response to its mysteries, or at least play in the same key. Novalis, an eighteenth-century German poet, mystic, and philosopher, spent his life advocating for a philosophy that could explain the world without disenchanting it, a unifying framework that was at once modern and magical.4 This framework came to be called Magical Idealism—a phrase that certainly seems to share some ontological DNA with a “theatre of miracles.” Novalis was both a Romantic and a romantic: he wrote tirelessly on the harmony between art and nature, took on a sexy pseudonym (he was born Georg Phillip Friedrich von Hardenburg, which doesn’t have quite the same mystical ring), wrote aching poetry arguing that “death is the romantic principle of life,” lost his first great love to consumption when she was still a teenager, and died of that same disease before the age of 30.5 His favorite play, I hardly need mention, was Romeo and Juliet. He and I have that in common. Which brings me back to that hot night in July of 2018. To the cast and audience alike, the Anonymous form rendered them essentially indistinguishable. The story of Romeo and Juliet mattered less than the fact of our having assembled together in that strange way to tell it. When people spoke afterwards of the moments that moved them, they spoke of the sense of revelation and awe when

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the next person leapt from their seat and joined the fray. Romeo’s murder of Tybalt was shocking and tragic not because we were so wrapped up in the story, but because it was Hilary’s pregnant body acting out vengeance against Gregory’s lithe dancer. The “suspension of disbelief ”—traditionally considered essential to evoking theatrical catharsis—was unnecessary, even contrary, to the experience. In fact, disbelief was the very ingredient that made the experience so delicious: Is that really Maddy standing on her chair as Juliet on the balcony? But I’ve known her for 30 years and have never seen her do anything like this—I can’t believe it! I have no doubt that we put on a good show that night, but am less certain that it was good theatre. I’m not even sure which criteria to apply in order to answer the question. Because of the wide range of abilities and levels of experience in the cast, there was certainly some bad acting on display. There was also some transcendently good acting, much of it by folks performing for the first time in their lives. But entirely absent from the show was what Peter Brook would call “deadly” acting, the result of a well-trained, technically proficient actor performing on autopilot, inoculated against the rush, immediacy, and sanctity of what they are about. A  deadly actor is at work, not at church. And we all went to church that night. I take almost no responsibility for the show’s success; all I did was cast the actors, help them to memorize their lines, and solicit some community testimonials on the play’s themes to weave in among the scenes. Those efforts, executed well or poorly, might have something to do with making good or bad theatre, but they have nothing to do with making something holy or magical. Thinking back now, nearly two years later, I am still unable to account for it. But I know what I am hungry for. What is building up in us now must be released, one way or another. I imagine the purging rituals will be many and various. I ache for the moment when we all creep out of our bunkers and gather in unadorned community spaces, everyone on the same level, in the same light, dressed as themselves, in their own skin. I look forward to assembling with my friends and neighbors in a circle of chairs, to seeing and being seen, to surprising and being surprised, and to making the hall of an old building ring with the sound of many voices as we vibrate ourselves well again.

Notes 1. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Touchstone, 1968), 55. 2. Ibid., 56. 3. W. H. Auden, “The Art of Healing,” The New Yorker, September 27, 1969 (accessed April 20, 2020), www.newyorker.com/magazine/1969/09/27/the-art-of-healing-inmemoriam-david-protetch-m-d. 4. Jason Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 80. 5. Ibid., 76.

12 WHY BUTOH THEATRE Thoughts of the Actor, Questions From the Director Yokko (Yoshiko Sienkiewicz) and Brian Rhinehart

What is Butoh? The simple answer is that Butoh is an experimental, avant-garde dance form that originated in the late 1950s with legendary artist Tatsumi Hijikata and his collaborators in Japan. His fellow artists, including his most influential dancer, Kazuo Ohno, and their followers have also contributed greatly to this constantly developing art form, now flourishing throughout the world. However, a more considered reply to the question of “What is Butoh” inevitably butts up against the impossible task of separating Hijikata’s work from his personal history, social situation, and cultural background. Hijikata’s early dance style was influenced by a myriad of forms and genres, from German expressionistic dance (neue tanz), to ballet and modern jazz dance, to literature (French and modern Japanese novels), paintings, and Dada. Making a definition of Butoh even more difficult, Hijikata was vehemently opposed to codifying Butoh into a fixed and rigid system of art, and throughout his lifetime continually avoided all statements about and assessments of his work. Though he had a short career as an artist, he left behind thousands of intense and iconic performances, but more importantly, he left a legacy of exploration and experimentation that contemporary Butoh practitioners continue today. The insistence on constant development and resistance to easy definition that Hijikata fostered throughout his lifetime has made Butoh into a mutable and heterogeneous art form, one that continually defies expectation and rigidity, and perpetually allows for innovation and artistic growth. One performing artist who carries on Hijikata’s tradition of innovation and unpredictability, and one who has sought to promote and advance Butoh as an international art form for years, is Japanese artist Yoshiko Sienkiewicz, known professionally as Yokko. While not technically considered a Butohist, because her approach (very untraditionally) introduces text, character, and narrative into the Butoh dance, Yokko is an artist who has created her own performance style

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within the flexible and mercurial form that Hijikata established. And her background and approach to Butoh is no less diverse; her version of Butoh is based on a synthesis of her training in Eastern and Western art forms and programs. I had the pleasure of directing Yokko in two original productions: Butoh Medea and Hide Your Fires, based on Euripides’ and Shakespeare’s legendary female characters, respectively. Both had their world premiere at the United Solo Theatre Festival in New York City, and both of these productions then went on to play in various theatres throughout the U.S. and Europe, to significant acclaim. Critics were especially taken by the sub-textual emergence of Medea’s pain that Yokko brings. The “visceral choreography” expresses itself as “she contorts herself in maddened grief [that is] mesmeric.” One found this expression in “the simple flick of a wrist to the wild thrashing of her head.”1 For Tom Wicker, Yokko “moves like a liquid shadow, fingers stretching and pulling the gauzy material as if it were a membrane,” as she becomes a “primal force on stage.” He calls attention to that moment when Yokko tears off her clothes, then her wig, an action Wicker describes as “stripping away the demonized ‘witch’ and ‘enchantress’ of myth, until there’s nothing left.”2 More than one reviewer cautioned that the show is “not for the faint-hearted.”3 What follows are sections of an interview I conducted with Yokko where we touched on the theme of this collection, “why the theatre.” *** BR:  Theatre

is obviously a major part of your life. Can you tell us what it was about theatre that interested or inspired you so deeply that you would devote your whole life to it? YOKKO:  My honest answer is that I do not know, but I was drawn into theatre for sure. If I thought about it more, my answer would be: because it is happening now. And it affects not only the audience’s emotional but also their energy level. Then, why not music? Or other live performance? I love a story, a good story which touches me physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I want to be inspired, moved, awakened by a work. And a good story does to me more than any artwork. I grew up more with films, TV, books, and comics. Theatre was not common for the middle class in my hometown. I owned a lot of books and comics; I literally lived in the world of the stories I read. Several are still vivid in my memory. I was so affected by the death of the lead character in a romance comic book set during the Russian Revolution I could not function for at least a week. I was 10 at the time; my world turned into grey. Even if I did not like the ending, I kept the story going in my head, rewriting it, and then telling my own version to my friends and family.

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I was also so inspired by female heroes in TV dramas, like doctors and lawyers who work for people, change lives, perform miracles. I wanted to be a hero like them, but when I realized that I could not be a lawyer and a doctor at the same time, I had to choose what I wanted to be. Would it be a basketball player, a tennis player, a diploma, an archeologist, a dancer? There is only one job in the world where you can live a thousand lives—an actor. When I was in the hospital, having lost all my skin and hair, that dream to be an actor was destroyed. I did not smile for an entire year. Then my mother took me to see a movie by my favorite actor, Robin Williams. His Patch Adams made me laugh and cry again. I always wanted to be like him, making people laugh and cry at the same time. I wanted to touch people just as he touched, moved, inspired me. In theatre, the audience is right there in front of us. They are alive; we are alive. The energy between us is real. Through the performance, we can create the experience—together. How thrilling this is! I still do not know why I  am so drawn into theatre, but I  feel theatre is my home. Theatre artists are my family, beyond cultures, races, and nations. My soul is on stage. I belong to theatre—for sure. BR:  What

attracted you to the character of Medea? me, the important thing was not what Medea did but what made her do it. Her actions were not premeditated. In our Butoh Medea it is only at the last minute that she decides to commit murder. I wanted to make her human, quite against the traditional image of Medea as a woman scorned, the lost soul whose act of murder, as she tells the audience in Euripides’ play, is premeditated. With your help, I focused on Medea’s inner struggles. Some critics did not like this idea, but, again, we wanted to make her more human.

YOKKO:  For

In Noh Theatre there is a category of Yugen plays where most often the ghost/spirit tells the audience what happened to them in life, and then goes back to the place they came from. So, our character is not Medea but her spirit; this is the concept we use in our show. With physical movements ranging from dance to the manipulation of her body, we wanted to bring to the surface what she is feeling. For me, Medea’s obscene act is inseparable from her grief, her love of Jason that is itself distorted by how he cruelly devalues her, and—yes—her love and compassion for her children. I remember a special moment in rehearsal when, with tears in your eyes, you put your face close to mine and said, “YOU GOTTA LOVE YOUR CHILDREN!” This let me bring to the surface what is dark inside her. Without darkness, there is no light. I try to convey this darkness, this conflict in her by turning my head right and left, as if she had two minds, making her by my movements like a broken machine. Like movement, the sound is also part of the dialogue. I designed sound as a spirit of Medea she would hear in her head so that the audience can be with her as she goes on her journey. At one point, the sound of rain

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transforms into buzzing human sounds of women, blaming Medea, and then this buzzing dialogue is replaced by sharp uncomfortable sounds, like subway wheels. BRIAN:  Let

me ask you the question of this collection. For you—why the theatre? Why does it so absorb you, your life, your passion? Why is it important to you and to your audience? YOKKO:  I had lost all my hair at 19, and all my skin at 21—my illness. I was pretty miserable. But my director/teacher pushed me to take off my wig in public. No one knew about my illness; no one knew my secret. I still remember the moment I took off the wig. I did it on stage without telling anyone. The audience gasped—shocked. My scene partner could not breathe for a while. But I felt good that I did it; I felt good that I lived that moment. Now I realize this was the first time I was myself in front of the audience, and I did not run away from the moment. For me, theatre is transformation. We performers transform on stage mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, and the audience will transform too. When we take a risk on stage, that energy will go to the audience. My movements on stage come from the characters’ souls. If what I do is true and real, I get deeper into what is real, and that can resonate with the audience. Brian, you told me, “You need to create a relationship with the audience,” and I think about this every single performance. And so the physical and mental and emotional challenges I go through as Medea are all to create a relationship with the audience, and that audience is new, different every night I come onstage. Actually, I  wanted to do film, but I  have thick accent with these unique ­features—I do not look like a Japanese. What could I  do? I  needed to create something original. So, if no one would cast me, then I cast myself. That’s what I did in Butoh Medea. I am alone onstage, before the audience. The challenge for the actor of a solo show is how to be emotionally real, reactive to, and interactive with characters who aren’t there. But if you have a good director, then what your audience sees and hears is the doorway for them to enter the mind of the character, their psychological journey. BR:  I asked

why the theatre. Now, why Butoh theatre? Butoh Medea I  used what is called “Pure Movement” by using the awareness of my body to release areas of muscular tensions so that my energy flows through my entire body. If there are some emotions stored or blocked in my body, they come out and then I can get deeper and sustain the condition from the previous moment. Butoh’s physical movements range from dance to the manipulation of the body, and the result is a transformation through the change of consciousness. I think the most rewarding moment

YOKKO: In

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for the actor and the audience is this transformation, changing or shifting. Breakthrough. Getting over something. For me, there is a fusion between Butoh and Method acting. The dance becomes a dynamic and personal and physical expression—it is living with the struggles (literally) that provokes the performer. If the performer is in a real state of struggle, that affect the audience—because of humanity. Instead, I emphasize “reflection” because that is my experiences from Yoga, Acting, and Butoh. However, what I do is maybe taboo in some Butoh dance lineages, because many artists believe Butoh is not emotion. And so I am probably not doing “pure” Butoh in Butoh Medea nor in Hide Your Fires, or any other work I created. We are inventing a fusion of Butoh dance, the Stanislavsky system, and physical theatre. Whatever serves the story and the character. If that works for the audience, I am down for it. What makes me so fascinated about Butoh craft is one can find very similar elements in Western acting craft, like using imagery language/words to move the body. The body is being moved by something else. And I  want to add that this is why you and I  are using Butoh in my current work, again for one person. Hide Your Fires, Lady Macbeth as seen through Butoh. After all, for me the darkest figures in Western theatre are women: Medea, Lady Macbeth. For me, too. I want Hide Your Fires to bring the audience into the presence of the accursed spirit of Lady Macbeth, to experience her nightmare of stifled ambition, unfulfilled desire, and ultimate loss. Telling her story solely through her perspective, fusing Japanese Butoh dance, movement, and various texts to take them inside the mind and body of one of Shakespeare’s most famous villains. YOKKO:  At a performance of Butoh Medea at St. Lawrence University, two students told me that it “changed [their] lives forever.” For me, the moment when the performer shines can be one of vulnerability, a powerful presence when the audience cannot take their eyes off the performer, when the character is believable, real—a three-dimensional human being. If the character is truly breathing and living in the moment, you forget an actor is performing. Totally drawn into the world of play, the audience forgets everything in their daily lives, and opens up their subconscious, their memories. BR:  Yes.

Everyone has their own Butoh. I believe that everyone can be transformed, and I’m most interested in creating works of art that invite the audiences to allow the seeds of the flower within them to bloom. This moment when the performer’s flower triggers the audience’s flower to open, I call it Butoh. On stage, I wish to be that flower one day. I do not think I have yet achieved that level, but I wish I could do that someday.

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Notes 1. The response of a Jordan Rosin in Fest, a Differing View, and Female Arts (accessed February 1, 2018), https://jordanrosin.wordpress.com/portfolio/butoh-medea. 2. Tom Wicker, Fest, August  14, 2015 (accessed February  1, 2018), https://www. fest-mag.com/edinburgh/theatre/102831-butoh-medea. 3. Juliette Crump in the 2006 essay, “ ‘One Who Hears Their Cries’: The Buddhist Ethic of Compassion in Japanese Butoh,” in How Butoh, the Japanese Dance of Darkness, Helps Us Experience Compassion in a Suffering World, ed. Jeff Goldberg (November  13, 2017) (accessed February  1, 2018), https://www.festmag.co.uk/ theatre/102831-butoh-medea.

13 AMATEUR HOUR, OR NOTES FROM A HACK PLAYWRIGHT Paul Menzer

Theatre is a grubby art. Sometimes even sordid. Hostage to fortune and a million contingencies. Liable to weather, traffic, and missing donkey heads. The health of the lead actor and the bit player alike. The sense and solvency of the producers, the timbre and the temperature of the theatre. On and on, through a litany of banality and roster of mundanity, any bit of which can derail even the most thoughtfully conceived and skillfully executed theatrical event. It’s embarrassing, really, when you think about it, the degree to which a sublime script, able direction, and skilled actors can be undone by a tripped circuit breaker. This windy preamble is merely to state the obvious. Theatre is immensely wasteful, and intensely hard. Difficult in the best of times, and, at the time of the writing of this essay (i.e., not the best of times), it can’t be done. The fact that you can’t do theatre in a plague is precisely, and paradoxically, what makes it worth doing. Let’s be clear: you can write a play during a plague. But anyone can write a play. It’s as easy as lying. But you can’t do theatre during a pandemic. And for the very good reason that it could kill you. The aldermen of Elizabethan London knew this, and took the very sound step of closing the theatres when the plague descended. More than 30 deaths a week and it was curtains for the Curtain. A red flag for the Red Bull. Even the Globe itself stopped turning. Literary history usually treats this as a pity. Think of the plays we lost. English Renaissance drama could have been even richer had the doors stayed open. But then think of the lives that were saved by closing the theatres, any single one of which is worth a thousand plays. The city fathers of early modern London get a bad rap from theatre history. But they knew one thing about theatre that we’d all do well to remember. It can kill you. The fact that theatre can kill you means that it can also save your life. This isn’t true of novels and lyric poetry. At least not in the same way. Far From the

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Madding Crowd might be a good public health policy at the moment, but while Hardy’s splendid novel can provide figurative solace, it can’t do you any harm. I  recommend reading it, as I  recommend reading Marianne Moore’s collected poems, or Zadie Smith’s novels, or, heck, the lyrics to Beyonce’s “Get in Formation” (though you shouldn’t get in formation during a plague, at least not without masks). But the fact that these splendid works of literature might save your life but cannot kill you signals their detachment from the gnarly materiality of the world. Literature, in fact, can be a great way to socially distance oneself from the intransigent grip of reality, if you can afford such luxuries. But theatre is an art of social proximity, not social distancing, and the fact that theatre relies upon conditions uncongenial to public health threatens to make a fool of the title of this book. To the question “why the theatre?” we might offer a cautionary rejoinder, a collection of essays called Why Not the Theatre. Why not the theatre? Because it will endanger the lives of the actors, the audience, the bartenders and house managers and dressers and wig wranglers and prompters and lighting technicians and on and on. There is no adequately compelling argument for theatre when lives are at stake. I’ve a sneaking suspicion that theatre likes it this way. When the fire curtain falls at a West End theatre, it is both a safety measure and a celebration, a precaution, certainly, against our immolation but a boast as well about the wrack we’ll all come to. (That’s why Shakespeare’s company put a thatched roof on the first Globe, so it could burn down a decade later.) This is why, so often, at the outset of a performance someone or other mentions that, “in the event of fire, please . . .” It’s not a warning, it’s a prayer, a wager with history, with which theatre is forever hedging its bets. And so, before each performance, actors often offer an incantation to guard against imminent erasure and thus position each performance in the seam between the eternity it seeks and the mortality it has to settle for. Whether courting fire or funding, theatre is forever rehearsing its fatality. It’s always closing time at the theatre. Theatre is in love with loss, and so adores the idea of its own demise. It remains, then, to determine the life force that counters this death wish. To try and locate the heart of theatre, in what follows I’ll argue that theatre is, at its heart, an amateur pursuit, even when it is compensated. But then, as I’ll explain, doing something out of love also has its compensations. *** I’m a hack playwright. It’s embarrassing to even write that sentence in an essay that mentions Shakespeare and other luminous writers. But this means I’ve sat in a rehearsal room during the preparation of a half-a-dozen plays that I’ve written and cringed through every moment. I don’t know about other writers, but being a playwright in a rehearsal is like being a eunuch at a brothel. You don’t know where you fit in. But these experiences ground my thinking about what makes

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this intensely difficult, immensely wasteful, potentially life-threatening exercise worth the while. I’d like to mention a play I wrote to make a broader point about “why the theatre” when the world is writing a companion volume called “why not the theatre.” The play was called Invisible Inc., about battling magicians, and was produced in 2012 for a few weekends of performances at Long Center for the Performing Arts in Austin, Texas. One of my guilty pleasures of the year 2012, when I was working on this play, was a record called—hilariously and perfectly—“Celebration Rock,” by the postpunk duo called “Japandroids.” The record made me wish I was 16 again just so I could hear it with those ears. It would have changed my life. In any event, in an interview the singer, Brian King, described how hard he finds it to write songs and his envy of those who are born with more facility, and he said, There’s a difference between people who are born with that special thing and people who love the people who are born with that special thing so much that they want to try their best to get as close as they can to it. I know exactly what he means. The special thing that Brian King is describing is genius, and a lot of us love the special things made by those with the special thing. Now, we’re not geniuses, or at least I’m not, but I’ve always wanted to get closer to the special things that Shakespeare and Jonson and Behn made, that Gilbert and Sullivan made, that Wilde and Coward made, that Churchill and Stoppard made, that Lori-Parks and Ruhl make. I can’t do what they do because I don’t have that special thing, but I can at least try to get as close to it as I can. And one way to get close is not just to watch or read their special things but try to make my own. In other words, I  write plays that I  want to see on stage. At one point, I wanted to see a play about magicians, and I wanted Tom Stoppard or Noel Coward to write that play for two primary reasons: one, it would be much better, and two, I wouldn’t have to do it. But Stoppard seems pretty busy and Coward’s productivity has recently fallen off. So what were my options? If I didn’t do it, who would? I’m not saying this play was as good as it would be if someone with the special thing had written it. It certainly wasn’t, not even close, but it was the best I could do, the closest I could come, and the best I could do was good enough. Which is to say that I’m an amateur. I’ve only ever made enough money from the plays I’ve written to put an odd number of tires on my car. Now, according to the great theorist Roland Barthes, “the amateur is defined as an i­mmature state of the artist: someone who cannot—or will not—achieve the mastery of a profession.”1 But he goes on to suggest that in certain fields, photography for instance— but he might have said “acting”—“it is the amateur,” and not the ­professional, to which the art aspires, is even its apotheosis. Barthes’s notion is that there are some

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things that the amateur might do better than the professional, love, for instance. After all, if an amateur lover is a redundancy, a professional lover is an oxymoron— not to mention illegal. So, while the amateur photographer or amateur actor might not be as technically accomplished as the professional, they are the more honest articulation of the art’s ambition. You can find a lot of “amateur photography” online: mostly flowers, sunsets, nudes (I’m told). For amateur drama, substitute Shakespeare, Simon, and Alan Ayckbourne for “flowers, sunsets, and nudes.” Because there are as many amateur productions of Shakespeare and Neil Simon (I’m told) as there are photos of sunsets and puppies. Our lives, in fact, are suffused with amateur efforts, and are all the lovelier for it. Talk about amateur hour, here’s another rookie move: if you look up “amateur” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, it will tell you that an amateur is “a person considered inept at a particular activity.” A more technical definition of an amateur is “a person who engages in a pursuit . . . on an unpaid basis.” Well, I say nuts to Merriam, and that goes double for Webster. Because both definitions debase the word they attempt to describe. If we drill down into the core of the word, we find love at its heart. For the word “amateur” grows out of the Italian word, “amatore,” or lover, as do amateur’s cognates “amour” or “amorous.” So “amorous” and “amateur” have the same root, although the words have branched off in different directions: “amorous” is something we hope to grow, “amateur” something we hope to grow out of. But “amateur” and “amorous” both describe a condition of the heart. Another way to put this is that an amateur lover is a redundancy, for at the heart of the amateur is the heart. To describe an “amateur” as inept or unpaid is, then, a sad fate not just for the person but for the word, which has fallen away from its original meaning. A  word that once defined someone who does something out of love now means someone “inept,” as though we can only perform expertly those things we do for money. Because of course the antonym of “amateur” is “professional,” at least according to the dictionary. And just as “amateur” equates incompetence with impoverishment. A “professional” is someone not just competent but compensated. Think of the way our popular idioms reinforce this difference. The rank amateur versus the paid professional. “What a bunch of amateurs” versus “leave it to the professional.” “Amateur hour” versus “a professional job.” Indeed, one of the more damning criticisms you can make today is to accuse someone of acting unprofessionally. But amateur performance—i.e., acting unprofessionally—has a long and venerable place in our culture, and Shakespeare’s best-loved comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is, at its heart, his most amateurish play. Amateur drama is at the heart of a Dream because drama is, at heart, an amateur pursuit. There are certain professions, and the theatre is just one, where if you can think of anything else you might be happy doing, you might just want to do it. The pay scale for actors

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often begins at zero, and often ends there as well. But one of the points I’m pursuing here is that there are more bottom lines than one. Just one last note from out of the dictionary. A sample of examples of “amateur” and “professional” from a range of dictionaries is quite telling. For whether it’s the Oxford English or the Urban Dictionary, the usage examples reinforce a cultural prejudice against the amateur. The examples for “amateur” are frequently about pursuers of the arts—the “amateur actor mangled his line,” “the amateur photographer flubbed the shot”—while examples of “professional” are generally taken from the practice of law or medicine. As though those who pursue the arts are unpaid incompetents and those who help us sue one another are keen-eyed precisionists—and well-paid ones at that. This brings me to Pyramus and Thisbe—the play the Rude Mechanicals perform—and to ask why Shakespeare featured at the heart of the heart of this wedding play not the triumph of erotic, romantic, or companionate love, but amateur love, or “love.” (It’s annoying, of course, that Shakespeare’s “bad play” is better than most people’s best. I’d kill to write something as funny as Pyramus and Thisbe.) For at the celebration of the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta, what Shakespeare chose to present was the comically inept efforts by a group of amateur actors doing a wholly inappropriate play. (One question the play immediately prompts is that if these were thought the most fit men in all of Athens, can you imagine who they turned down?) It’s probably significant that what Shakespeare thought was the most elevated expression of love was not, it turns out, the bed-sheet shenanigans of his young aristocrats, but the expression of love found in a play presented by a group of bluecollar workers. It’s as though William Shakespeare, whose imagination ranged from the heights of the Himalayas to the depths of the Mariana Trench, whose imagination was a gyrocompass without restraint or limit, a free-range imagination, a supernova of invention—it’s as though he could imagine no greater expression of love than five handicraft men willing to do something for nothing. Now, I  shouldn’t romanticize this too much. Theatre is hostage to fortune, as I claimed at the outset, and when Bottom doesn’t turn up for rehearsal, the men worry that they won’t get to put on their play. This is an inevitable part of amateur drama—it has to, at some point, hit the skids. Somebody has a scheduling conflict, a critical prop gets lost in the mail, the lead actor gets turned into a donkey, and at this point in Midsummer Night’s Dream one of the actors agonizes over the opportunity they’ve lost. He says that if they’d been able to perform, they’d all of been “made men.” He sounds a little like that wedding singer who was planning on pocketing some tips along with the brisket. Or at least hoping for future gigs. But Dream is a comedy, so everything comes out all right in the end. The scheduling conflicts clear up, FedEx delivers the props, the lead actor hadn’t actually been turned into a donkey, it was just Shakespeare’s vision of puberty, or it was all a dream, a good one or a bad one, depending on your perspective.

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And, of course, Pyramus and Thisbe is one of the most durably, predictably crowd-pleasing pieces of drama you can put in front of an audience, whether they’ve paid for it or not. Short of actually giving the audience cash or liquor, it’s hard to think of a more guaranteed way to please an audience than the playwithin-the-play of Pyramus and Thisbe. And so we shouldn’t, even today, draw too hard a line between amateur actors and professional ones, since even professional actors often find themselves working far below their pay grade, a grade that always includes doing something for nothing. Acting is one of the most uncertain and heartbreaking professions in the world; there’s a fine line between the waiter and the actor, and it’s called unemployment. The reason that so many actors are waiters is that they’re waiting for the next audition, waiting for the next chance to seize an opportunity, if not a paycheck. Let’s return to the grubby art of theatre and think about the homely verbs we use to describe its profession. We “make” theatre. We “do” theatre. We make do. That’s what theatre does and has always done, and that’s what it will have to do, to make do. Earlier I  claimed, morbidly, that theatre is in love with loss and adores the idea of its own demise. Theatre is also in love with life and adores the idea of its own resurrection. The curtain call to Godspell is the paradigmatic case, but every curtain call is a comeback, a celebration that the fire didn’t come, at least not this time. That’s why Shakespeare’s company put a thatched roof on the Globe, so it could burn down ten years later and they could then rebuild it. The cast comes back at the end of the play to remind us that they’re not really gone, not yet at least. They’ve lived to play another day, and so might we. Barthes, again, in Mythologies, describes the spent actor at the end of long play returning, exhausted, to the stage one last time to be literally restored, reanimated by applause, brought back to life—like Tinkerbell—by the sound of hands clapping in concert, willing him back to life.2 And so the theatre too will return to the stage, willed back to life by the sound of two hands clapping. And that’s all it will take. Just two hands, and then more hands, and then all hands on deck. The theatre has always and will always come back, again and again. When Bottom returns from a restorative bout of inter-species sex, it’s a kind of resurrection. Refreshed, even redeemed, by his rare vision, he wishes to convert it into a ballad to be sung at the end of the play. Theatre may be, in 2020, at a turning point, but let’s call it a returning point, a chance once more to overcome social distance, to get close to those special things all of us non-geniuses love.

Notes 1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 98–99. 2. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 120.

PART III

When the Theatre Moves Beyond the Stage Into the Real World

14 THEATRE FOR HEALTH Joanne Howarth

I was lucky enough in 2018 to spend eight weeks rehearsing King Lear with the phenomenal 80-year-old Glenda Jackson as Lear. We played London’s Old Vic for five weeks. Glenda had given up acting for 25 years to be a Member of Parliament and this was her first time back on the stage. I was playing Gloucester’s housekeeper (3rd Servant on the cast list) and torch-holder. Thus, I got to be a fly on the wall as this icon rediscovered her incredible resources as an actress, literally defrosting her instincts and power. She knew how to mine the text from the first day: after 25 years in Parliament, the rhetoric and volume were not an issue. But I observed her learning to listen again, to soften, feel the blows, play in response to what was given her in the moment. She opened her heart and her enormous emotional power was set free; she was vulnerable and alive and playful at every point by the time we reached performance. Just as Carl Jung understood in 1936: “Most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts.”1 Because of my experience in theatre I, like many actors, have been called on to be a corporate trainer now and then, primarily teaching business leaders how to listen, to others and to themselves. It is an actor’s job to be in touch with their instinct to hear and be responsive to the tiniest impulses in their own heart, in their text, in their audience, and in those they are playing opposite, to let that impulse respond through their body truthfully, and to place their attention just where it needs to be. So, mind, body, and spirit work together, close-wired. Combined with creativity, imagination, and vocal and physical expressiveness, these are skills that appear to be the holy grail of the personal development and corporate training industry.2 But why would businesses want their leaders to be like actors? Aren’t they often bitchy, self-centered, and vain? I would say these are overridden by a resilience and commitment that the corporate world would die for.

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We also have “Doctor Theatre,” as we call it: mind over matter that cures the most violent ills for the duration of the play. The show must go on, and if a theatre actor is sometimes self-protective, it is because they rarely take time off for sickness, I am always appalled at the amount of sick leave staff take in other workplaces. Since I walked into the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford age 9 to see the Christmas show, saw the red plush seats and felt the buzz, I have given up what many take for granted to keep hooked up to the drip of theatre. I have forgone a regular wage packet, having pets, a pension, booking holidays, just going to bed when others do—all for the theatre. I am not famous: I am rarely the lead. I am a jobbing actor making a steady but small living in a world I love. So “why the theatre?” is a very personal question for me. I will explore here why it has been important for my own health—body, mind, and spirit—as well as that of wider society.

“Work, work your thoughts, and therein see a siege,” Chorus, Henry V 3 I had better come clean. I have worked as an actress for 38 years, marking out the years of my life by who I was being and where I was being them. As I write this, I have just had a rare full year without acting on stage, and I am experiencing the absence of theatre as a very physical phenomenon. So that is where I will start, by looking at what theatre provides that now needs topping up in my life diet. Physically, theatre acting requires stamina, agility, balance, control—all of which are honed during a rehearsal process and can only be partially replicated by swimming and yoga and power walking. The buzz of aliveness in every pore is a drug I crave. Most of all, the power of breath. It is different doing film and television: the resonance and breath control required to fill a theatre and not only sound expressive but be truthful is breathing at another level. Inspiration drives creativity; inspiration is breathing in. An agile voice can express needs and feelings, bypassing thought, pulling up truth from the bottom of your belly. For me, playing the Chorus last year in Henry V was like surfing, feeling the audience breathe with me as we rode together on the challenges of Shakespeare’s fabulous images. Rolling with his phrasing and verse structure is better than a wave off Bondi Beach. Sound healing expert Sarah Warwick says on her website that “all matter is vibration and . . . [s]cientific studies show how sound can reduce pain, improve memory, clarity, vitality and the ability to take action.” You may have experience of this. How many have hummed away pain, or is that just me? I have spent time with Sarah and felt good; I have spent time on stage and felt great.4 Then there is the mind gym of theatre performance: “how do you learn your lines?” is the most common question asked at stage door. It is our job. The better the play is written, the easier it is. The more sense I can make of what I am saying the better; or I can build the images, focus the pictures in my mind so the listeners see them to “work their thoughts.” Many actors find learning a very physical process. What am I actively doing to others with each phrase? What has triggered

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my response? The bigger the gap between jobs, the harder learning is; the mind is a muscle and, as long as I use it, it stays pumped up like a superhero ready for action, keeping senility at bay. Then there is the less tangible “spiritual” side, hearing the voices, living inside the skin of someone who is and isn’t me. There is love for my stage families as well as the relief of expressing nightly, in a structured way, what I could get locked up for in real life. It can be something of a purging, whether it’s hurling vases and potty-mouthed Portuguese insults as Catherine of Braganza in Jessica Swale’s Nell Gwynn,5 the soul searching agony of smothering my disabled son every night OffBroadway in The Pull of Negative Gravity,6 or roaring outside the door as the wife and unseen demon in Patrick Stewart’s head as Shakespeare in Edward Bond’s Bingo7 (like Primal Therapy every night).8 But best of all is sharing laughter: there is no tonic like the joy of playing a cannily timed line and hearing the audience erupt with laughter. Especially if it is a packed Globe Theatre in London, where you can feel the reverberation of their happy hearts. Which brings me to the buildings. As a kid I fell for the plush seats and lights; then I got backstage and wondered at the workshops and wardrobe departments. Theatre is a team, with a huge range of skills, creating worlds together. This to me is the magic. I  have always loved technical rehearsals where all the different expertise comes together. Structures, colors, the fantastic that you dreamed of in rehearsal now tangible and real and sometimes a bit wobbly and needing attention—just like the actors. The buildings are where we all live, behind the plush, sometimes for months. I love the dressing room, generally draughty and cramped, but where the rapport begins; it’s the nearest I  get to the women’s circles of old, sitting around their spinning wheels and fires, but we ladies are sharing advice on lipstick, hormones, and the patriarchy. And while taking holidays as an actor is always a problem, there is the traveling to make up for it. I have toured to tiny village halls and huge hippodromes around the UK, toured in Germany, China, Lebanon, South America, New York, and California, and beyond. We sang for our supper but were welcomed and shared experience with a fascinating cross-section of the international community. One night I performed Ben Jonson, then had a company drink with Prince Charles before running topless through a snowy wood at midnight with a Polish theatre company. Life is full of surprises.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is. Infinite. Man has closed himself up till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks in his cavern,” William Blake9 Along with prostitution, acting is one of the oldest professions. Theatre can happen anywhere, and wise fools have always told stories to cleanse “the doors of

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perception” and put their own times into context. Theatre is a part of the international conversation, and I hugely value being a part of that. Theatre can also respond quickly to local and world events, re-assessing the constructs that we build our world on. In 2005, I was invited to play in Jonathan Lichtenstein’s The Pull of Negative Gravity in New York City, where the number of soldiers committing suicide on their return from the Iraq war was not being dealt with. The play looked at a microcosm, the human toll in a tiny Welsh village of an injured soldier who had come home. Each audience member could be with us, breathe with us and the real people the story was based on. Connecting. The play hit hard and “grown men were seen blubbing afterwards in the toilets,”10 as the Guardian review said. It moved on the conversation in the national papers. I am proud to be part of bringing silent issues into the open, sometimes saying the unsayable and, as with this play, often finding laughter in humanity. A company of actors knows how to build trust very quickly, as they share the intimacies of their own lives as the bedrock of the world of the play. We are sensitive to each other’s vulnerabilities and give each other courage to share the best and worst of ourselves. We are practitioners who embody words and ideas and engage with others to explore them through empathy. Our stories give us the chance to test moral and ethical boundaries by trying them out, in a safe place, and the audience can experience the familiar through the prism of a new perspective. As a team, we accrue our shared research and become the experts in a motley collection of subjects for just as long as we need to be, so we can live “truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”11 Sometimes the plays are current and we research in the past. In 2017, I was in Parliament Square by James Fritz,12 set now, about a young mother (my daughter) setting fire to herself outside the Houses of Parliament in protest at current events. We became experts in hospital burns units, civil disobedience, and falling over without bruises. I also brought my own experiences to the table: of Greenham Common peace camp and the time spent sitting by hospital beds watching my parents die. Life is a mixture of the political and the personal, and with James and Jude the director, we distilled this situation into a pure shot of provocation for our audience. Every night I felt them connecting moment by moment with us, and afterwards they would be in the bar arguing, even fighting over their response to what they had lived through. Many were disappointed by the startlingly callous ending because it is not how they wanted the world to be, but as they lived it together, their response was raw and immediate. Theatre isn’t real; it isn’t trying to be. We can be aware of the allegories: trying them for size and quite possibly disagreeing. Still, the debates that arise help us to structure our opinions, put the TV news in context. I mentioned touring Henry V, which was chosen for Shakespeare’s exploration of the morality of power. I played the Duke of Burgundy and the Chorus, the peace negotiator sharing how the war had unfolded. For research we had the

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text, reports of the real battles and the real dukes, but I needed someone closer to home. As gender-blind casting is happening more often, we actresses find ourselves digging for the hidden women of history who we can use to inspire us when playing traditionally male roles. This time I used two, ancient and modern: Christine de Pizan (1364–1430), a political writer and poet at the Court of Charles VI of France; and Mo Mowlam (1949–2005), the plain-speaking and convivial politician who oversaw the signing of the Good Friday Peace agreement in Northern Ireland in 1998. Christine gave me the right to be there, and Mo the passion and humor and charm that move even the most hardline warriors toward accord. I didn’t need a Ouija board or the help of a shaman. Christine, Mo, Shakespeare, Philip the Good, and I  communicated across the centuries every night as we brought the audience with us. Theatre can stretch the threads of communication across the experience of generations, learning from each other across time. Theatre uses empathy, myth, ritual and listening, the working of the body, the beating of hearts, and the individuality of everyone in the room to take us on a shared journey. I have experienced a crowd of strangers breathe, laugh, yawn, debate, and sometimes even pray together during the best theatre experiences. Not alone with a screen, but together. That has to be healthy.

Notes 1. Carl Jung, “Roosevelt ‘Great’ Is Jung’s Analysis,” New York Times, October 4, 1936, p. 4, section N. 2. Daniel Goleman, “The Focused Leader,” Harvard Business Review (December 2013): 50. “Focused leaders can command the full range of their own attention: They are in touch with their inner feelings, they can control their impulses . . . they can weed out distractions and also allow their minds to roam widely, free of preconceptions.” 3. William Shakespeare, Henry V (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1868), Act II, Chorus. 4. Sarah Warwick, “Module 5: The Science of Sound,” www.lifesong.co.uk/heart-ofsound-training. 5. Jessica Swale, Nell Gwynn (London: Nick Hern Books, 2015), ISBN:978-1-8-4842559-0. 6. Jonathan Lichtenstein, The Pull of Negative Gravity (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004), ISBN:1-85459-839-2. 7. Edward Bond, Bingo (London: Methuen, July 11, 1974). 8. Arthur Janov, The Primal Scream (New York: Dell Publishing, 1970), ISBN: 0-349-11834-5. 9. William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” 1790. 10. Lyn Gardner, “Edinburgh. The Fringe Awards Best Director: Gregory Thompson,” The Guardian, August 25, 2004. 11. Sanford Meisner and Dennis Longwell, Sanford Meisner on Acting (New York: Vintage, 1987), 15. 12. James Fritz, Parliament Square (London: Nick Hern Books, 2017), ISBN:979-184842-708-2.

15 WHY MAKE THEATRE IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC? A Personal View of Theatre in Aotearoa/New Zealand David O’Donnell

May, 1981. We squeeze into the tiny theatre, lucky to have scored tickets for this sold-out show. A  buzz of anticipation threads through the auditorium, which was created by volunteer labor from a former office building. People scan their programs, finding the names of some of Wellington’s best-known actors. We are seated in two raked seating blocks at a 90-degree angle to each other, creating a stage at floor level that juts in a V into the audience, a rudimentary thrust stage. The lowish ceiling adds to a slight sense of claustrophobia. The dim lighting preset reveals the rough wooden benches and corrugated iron of a rugby changing shed. The auditorium lights fade. Suddenly the double doors at the side of the stage burst open and half a dozen rugby players explode onto the stage. Those doors open straight onto the street and the men have sprinted across the road from the park opposite where they’ve been warming up by playing rugby. Briefly we hear the roar of traffic before the doors slam shut. The men are panting, sweaty, covered in mud. Their joking banter overwhelms the small space, startling us into rapt attention. Someone turns on a shower, strips off their muddy gear, and begins showering only a few feet from the front row. Real mud sluices from real sweaty bodies as some of the men playfully flick their jock straps at each other. Two hours later, the team captain lies dead, killed in an act of treachery by an ambitious rival. A disillusioned player, nicknamed Foreskin, breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to us, a tirade of beat poetic monologue that sums up some of New Zealand’s history of fanatical religious worshipping of rugby and its heroes. Finally, Foreskin shouts, then whispers repeatedly “whaddarya?,” a slang phrase frequently used by male bullies intimidating others in the changing shed or the schoolyard, running together the words “what are you?” in a rasping kiwi accent. What are you? Who are you? Who are we? The familiar phrase morphs

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from a threatening taunt to a demand for the audience to respond, to self-analyze, to seek a definition of national identity. What are we? A culture defined by male aggression, an obsession with violent sport and political division? The lights fade on the stage. There is no curtain call. We sit in shocked silence, wondering whether to clap, or not. The moment passes. A few people whisper to each other. Some stand and start to vacate their seats. Stunned, we file out of the auditorium. On that night in 1981 at Circa Theatre, Wellington, theatre arrived in New Zealand. Of course, theatre arrived in New Zealand many years before that, on ships from Sydney and Singapore and San Francisco, touted by traveling companies who circled the globe bringing art and entertainment to the far-flung colonies. But Foreskin’s Lament, written by first-time playwright Greg McGee, electrified New Zealand theatre in ways that would have repercussions down through the following decades. For me personally, it showed that locally written, live theatre could create a visceral and unforgettable experience that cut right to the heart of my identity as a New Zealander in ways that no imported script could do. Can Pacific tehari “decolonize” the stage? accurately portrayed the ugly side of Pākehā (white) nationalism. The violence implicit in the national sport of rugby was the perfect metaphor for a bullying, masculine-dominated culture epitomized by then-Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, a Donald Trump-style combative politician who manipulated public opinion and the popular vote until his abrasive approach alienated even his own party supporters and he lost the 1984 election. The toxic masculinity of this culture was racist and homophobic, and sought to dominate and suppress women (labelled “fluff ” in the play). McGee’s play balanced the violence inherent in a rough contact sport with grim dark humor. When university-educated Foreskin argued with the middle-aged war-veteran coach Tupper, their rhetoric echoed the wider debates in New Zealand society between left- and right-wing factions, between the cities and the rural areas, between the innate conservatism of the older generation and the liberatory politics of the post-war, baby-boom generation. The first performances of Foreskin’s Lament coincided with Muldoon’s government’s decision to allow a South African rugby team to tour New Zealand in 1981, despite the fact that Muldoon had signed the Gleneagles Agreement (1977) discouraging sporting contact with South Africa because of its racist apartheid regime. This decision led to mass public protests and civil disobedience on a scale never before witnessed, and intensified social divisions between the left and right. The conflicts between Foreskin and his fellow rugby players mirrored those raging in the community outside the theatre walls. These debates were argued a few feet away from the audience, creating an intoxicating, interactive atmosphere. I believe the impact of this play could only be felt in a small studio theatre, with almost no separation between actor and spectator, with the audience breathing the same air and living moment-by-moment confrontations with the characters. I can still recall the smell of the liniment and sweat. The audacity of the extreme

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naturalism at the beginning, coupled with the shock of the Brechtian-style direct appeal to the audience at the end, made the most of the live experience. It remains vividly in my memory to this day.

Can Theatre Help to Define a Nation? Why make theatre in a small, postcolonial country? Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand) is geographically remote from the acknowledged centers of international theatrical excellence in Europe, Asia, and North America. With a population of only 4.8  million and limited arts funding administered by the government agency Creative New Zealand (formerly the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council), Aotearoa has struggled to maintain the professional theatre infrastructure that was built in the 1960s and 1970s. Two of the longest-established theatres (Downstage in Wellington and the Fortune in Dunedin) were permanently closed (in 2013 and 2018 respectively) due to financial insolvency. With the notable exceptions of the Creative New Zealand-funded Auckland Theatre Company and the Court Theatre (Christchurch), most professional theatre is produced by independent companies replying on project funding, or ad hoc groups on a profit-share basis. Yet, despite the perilous state of the theatre profession, drama schools and university theatre courses are fully subscribed, and there are more locally written plays and devised works being produced than ever before. The national scriptwriting agency Playmarket reported that in 2018, 84% of all professional theatre productions staged in Aotearoa were work created here.1 In this article, I  argue that locally created theatre has helped to define and shape the identity of this postcolonial country. I write from the perspective of having worked in the theatre of Aotearoa since graduating from Toi Whakaari: The New Zealand Drama School in 1979. Over those 40 years, I have been an actor, director, producer, and dramaturg, and since 1992 I have taught thousands of students in university theatre courses. Over those 40 years, I have both created and consumed the theatre of Aotearoa, attending hundreds of productions of locally written and overseas plays. Among those performances are many that have helped to shape my perception of the place of Aotearoa in the world.

Creative Collaboration in Aotearoa While Foreskin’s Lament epitomizes the development of New Zealand playwriting with nationalist themes, this country has a long and proud tradition of non-scriptbased, devised and avant-garde performance, with origins in 1970s ensembles such as Theatre Action, Living Theatre Troupe, Blerta, and Red Mole.2 In March 1978, shortly after beginning my first year of drama school, I  attended the opening night of Ghost Rite at the Wellington Opera House, produced by the performance collective Red Mole, founded in 1974 by poet Alan Brunton and director Sally Rodwell. As Murray Edmond recounts, the company’s aesthetic was inspired by

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the European avant-garde, particularly French and German cabaret, the Dadaists, Andre Breton, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Valentin, and Karl Kraus.3 In my memory, this production remains one of the most inspiring pieces of theatre I’ve seen. The 1380-seat Opera House was full of excited fans, some of whom sat in the boxes adjoining the proscenium arch dressed in top hats, tails, and Victorian dresses. The opulence of the Opera House was a far cry from the Balcony, the strip club where Red Mole had originally built a loyal audience by performing cabaret style shows on a Sunday night. In an era where the well-made naturalistic play was the norm, Red Mole was a radical rupture, channeling the spirit of overseas experimental theatre I had only read about. The production was a colorful succession of surreal imagery and movement, interlaced with musical numbers from pop singer Beaver, the Country Flyers rock band, and Red Mole’s resident composer Jan Preston. In the first half, a seedy MC in a white suit called Neville Purvis (Arthur Baysting) ad-libbed with the audience. Ghost Rite was fully alive, unpredictable, mashing up the cosmic and apocalyptic imagery of Brunton’s poetic text with subversive comedy, surreal props, mask, mime, movement, puppetry, dance, and magic. Its vivid theatricality attempted to chart the history of the universe, and, as Edmond suggests, the show balanced the notion of New Zealand as “paradise” with a sense of impending apocalypse, “insist[ing] on a sense of crisis which can readily be identified both with New Zealand society, and the feeling of entrapment of the Muldoon years.”4 This was theatre as an event, an experience, rather than as storytelling, but its relevance to New Zealand politics in the late 1970s was obvious. I have been constantly inspired by the spirit of invention in New Zealand theatre, where lack of money and resources often provoke imaginative solutions. When Jerzy Grotowski popularized the term “Poor Theatre” in the 1960s, these principles were already well established in New Zealand. Playwright Bruce Mason wrote of his experience performing his solo show The End of the Golden Weather (1959): I’m a kiwi, born and bred. We’re at our best in a corner: good improvisors, bad experts, as an American critic once said of us. No theatrical framework? Right then, I would create my own. Touring a play is expensive? Then cut to the minimum, table and chair. Scenery is costly to make and cumbersome to cart around? Do it all with words: appeal to the audience’s imagination. Casts are expensive? Be your own. Do all forty parts. Play anywhere, in any circumstances, to any audience.5 Red Mole was the longest-lasting of the alternative theatre companies sparked by the international 1970s experimental theatre movement, and its legacy lives on in films, published scripts, academic articles, and in the preference of many young practitioners to created group-devised collaborative theatre rather than acting in other people’s scripts. My experience as a teacher at Victoria University

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of Wellington has been that students commonly band together in their courses to create their own work at university. The next stage is forming their own companies and mounting their works in the local Fringe Festival and in the relatively small spaces at BATS Theatre, a stronghold of experimental work by developing and mature practitioners. Typically, these companies last three to five years, but some have gone for much longer. One example is Trick of the Light, a multiaward-winning company founded by Hannah Smith and Ralph McCubbinHowell in 2011. Trick of the Light’s first show, The Engine Room, was based on the political controversy around the 1981 Springbok tour, and their original works span a wide range of genres and topics, but they specialize in small-scale, tourable shows like The Bookbinder (first performed in 2014), characterized by a magical, transformative storytelling style that appeals to adults and children alike. The Bookbinder has been performed throughout New Zealand, in Australia, the UK, the USA, South Africa, and Canada, exemplifying the entrepreneurial spirit of younger New Zealand theatre-makers who create their own original material and tour it internationally, often with great success.

De-Colonizing the Stage: Māori and Pacific Theatre Aotearoa/New Zealand is a Pacific nation. Along with Australia, our closest neighbors are the island nations of the Pacific islands. The ancient connections between the peoples of Polynesia were forged through centuries of sea voyaging in ocean-going waka (canoes), trade, and migration.6 The signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 was presented as a partnership between the Māori tribes of New Zealand and the British crown, but in reality was a subterfuge to secure sovereignty in New Zealand for the British monarch and to open up the path to partition and sell Māori land to migrants from the British Isles.7 The Treaty is acknowledged as the founding document of New Zealand, but remains contentious to this day. Since the 1970s, theatre has been one of the most visible and public forums for exploring the legacy of the Treaty, along with New Zealand’s postcolonial history and bi-cultural heritage. The first play by a Māori writer, Te Raukura: The Feathers of the Albatross by Harry Dansey (tribal affiliations Ngāti Tuwharetoa, Te Arawa, Ngāti Raukawa), was staged in Auckland in 1972 and powerfully depicted Māori resistance to Pākehā aggression and confiscation of land in the nineteenth century.8 Since then, scores of plays by writers of Māori descent have traversed the histories of racism, struggles by Māori to be acknowledged as the Indigenous people of Aotearoa, the consequences of the post-war Māori urban drift, the part Māori played in the world wars, and many other issues. Māori theatre has played its part in educating the mainstream about the ongoing negative fallout of colonization in Māori communities. As an audience member, I  have had some of the most profoundly affecting theatrical experiences in plays by Māori writers. For example, Waiora: Te Ūkaipō: The Homeland (1996) by Hone Kouka (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti

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Kahungunu) is groundbreaking theatrical storytelling with a remarkable emotional power. Set in the 1960s, it examines the impact of the post-war urbanization of Māori whānau (families) as they moved from rural homelands to the cities in search of employment, education, and opportunities for their children. The play depicts this process as traumatic and divisive, as the father, Hone, attempts to invisibilize the whānau’s Māori identity in acts of colonial mimicry designed to progress their status in Pākehā society. The play blends aspects of tikanga Māori (customary value system) with European dramaturgy to create an unforgettable theatrical experience. It mixes naturalism with stylized Māori performance, depicting the family’s Tīpuna (ancestors) as a chorus that performs haka (rhythmic dance), waiata (songs), karanga (ceremonial call), and karakia (prayers or incantations) as a sub-textual counterpoint to the realist action. The Tīpuna are fully visible to the audience but remain unseen by the characters, apart from Rongo, the teenage daughter who is traumatized by the separation from her iwi (tribe) and homeland. Her emotional distress builds throughout the play and culminates in her almost drowning in the ocean. In the two full productions I have seen of this play, I witnessed many in the audience in tears at the emotion of the climax, then springing to their feet in standing ovation as the lights faded. Kouka’s achievement in this play is to synthetize a significant chunk of social history into a family drama where audiences can fully identify with and empathize with the characters. As a Pākehā theatre-maker, I  have twice had the privilege of touring with Māori theatre companies, and the experience of making theatre within the context of tikanga Māori has been life-changing. The first of these was acting in the 1998 production of Hone Kouka’s Nga Tangata Toa, produced by Kilimogo Productions (Dunedin), directed by the veteran director and kaumātua (tribal elder) Rangimoana Taylor (Ngāti Porou) and Hilary Halba. Taylor ran the rehearsal room according to Māori protocols, such as a mihi (introductions and checking in) prior to rehearsal, karakia (prayers) at the beginning and end of the day, and sharing kai (food) as part of the rehearsal process. In 2008, I had the honor of directing Te Karakia by Albert Belz (Ngāti Porou, Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Pokai) for Taki Rua Productions. The creative process was framed by tikanga Māori and involved sharing artistic decision-making with Rangimoana Taylor, who in this production was both kaumātua and actor. Kaumātua are commonly employed in Māori theatre, because they have the cultural knowledge to ensure that dramatic situations—especially those depicting some kind of trauma—are handled with sensitivity and cultural safety. In my experience, tikanga applied to rehearsal enhances the desirable qualities of a good rehearsal process—fostering a sense of creative collaboration, a committed, cohesive ensemble, mutual respect, good humor, and playfulness. Alongside the development of Māori theatre, writers, directors, and actors of Pacific Island descent have created a significant body of work that deals with the Pacific diaspora and migration to New Zealand. Because theatre brings communities into shared spaces where they can experience performance together, it has

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been an important secular space for exploring Pacific identity in Aotearoa. Pacific theatre often entertains and educates at the same time. Many Pākehā New Zealanders (myself included) first learned about the massacre of peaceful protestors by New Zealand police in Western Samoa in 1929 through Samoan playwright John Kneubuhl’s Think of a Garden (1992). Kneubuhl’s play depicted the legacy of New Zealand as a colonial power in the Pacific, governing Western Samoa from 1914 to 1960. Think of a Garden is told from the perspective of a mixed-race child, part Samoan, part American, and the family story at the heart of the play involves the audience emotionally as well as intellectually. This emotional engagement opens the process of empathy, for Pākehā audiences to identify and experience some understanding of what it feels like to be marginalized and oppressed by a dominant culture.

The Role of Theatre in Twenty-First Century Aotearoa In 2019, I attended a production called BOYS at Toi Whakaari, my old drama school. Created and directed by Eleanor Bishop, BOYS is a feminist deconstruction of the toxic masculinity in McGee’s Foreskin’s Lament. presented in the context of the international #MeToo movement. BOYS begins with an all-male ensemble enacting the opening scene of McGee’s play, but their sexist banter is disrupted by a chorus of women dressed for a night out. The women strongly reject the sexist values of the “boys,” displace them in delivering the text, blending fragments of McGee’s script with media reports and case histories of predatory sexual behavior by powerful men outed by the MeToo movement. BOYS is a post-dramatic piece examining the nature of gender and power, suggesting that male dominance in society has remained largely unchanged in the four decades since McGee’s play was written. After the show, I talked with a male student who said the play had really made him think about issues of consent and respect for women. The ongoing cultural significance of Foreskin’s Lament in New Zealand culture reflects Emine Fisek’s statement that “the stage has long been a site for thinking about community formation and collectivity.”9 Yet Fisek also warns that “the idea of a theatrical community is never a given and that it is best approached as a problematic, or a question.”10 This production of BOYS engages with the problematic nature of theatrical representation itself, particularly when it is commonly assumed to be an accurate reflection of collective national identity. While deconstructions and adaptations of Shakespeare are not uncommon, in BOYS a female director acknowledges the classic status of a New Zealand play, and shakes up the play’s themes to reflect urgent issues in today’s context. Eleanor Bishop went on from an honors degree at Victoria University of Wellington to complete an MFA in Directing at Carnegie Mellon University in the USA and has worked with some of New York’s most iconic theatre companies, including the Wooster Group and the Builder’s Association. Bishop’s pathway into professional theatre

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was through mixed theoretical and practice-based university courses rather than through a drama school. For me, she demonstrates the value of a self-reflexive approach, mixing intellectual rigor with a playful theatricality. She exemplifies a younger generation of New Zealand theatre-makers who are well educated and internationally connected, with the courage to take theatrical risks. Bishop’s work on sexuality and gender, such as Jane Doe (2015), a multi-award-winning participatory piece on rape culture, is highly political but also formally innovative. Theatre is a potent tool for manipulating our emotions and our empathies, so we must retain a critical stance even as we are swept away by skilled storytelling and dynamic theatricality. Like the Māori and Pacific theatre practitioners discussed above, Bishop’s feminist strategies emphasize diversity rather than collectivity and problematize the politics of theatrical representation. If Greg McGee was the poster boy for Pākehā New Zealand theatre in 1981, Eleanor Bishop more accurately reflects its spirit now. In twenty-first century Aotearoa, sport continues to attract significantly more media attention and funding than the arts, yet live theatre in Aotearoa forms a vital function in bringing communities together and maintaining a discourse of the local in the face of globalization. Together with the visual arts, music, film, and literature, theatre has helped to define what it means to live in Aotearoa and to be a New Zealander. It is in the theatre that I have found meaningful encounters with the principles of Te Ao Māori, the Indigenous culture of this country. It is in the theatre that I have learned of and reflected upon many crucial events in the history of this country and the Pacific region. It is in the theatre that I have empathized with the struggles of Pacific Island migrants and marveled at their adaptability, cultural collaging, and ability to express politics through comedy and play. It is in the theatre that I have experienced debates in gender and feminism that have contributed to wider social awareness and political change. It is in the theatre that I have experienced the risks of experimentation, the joy of the avantgarde, and the challenge of new perspectives. Prior to colonization, social transactions in Indigenous Aotearoa were negotiated through performance—through ritualized physical encounters mediated by song, dance, speech-making, and storytelling. These Māori traditions have blended with the ritual of Western theatre, providing continuity of expression, defining relationships, and making sense of an ever-changing world through live performance.

Notes 1. Murray Lynch, “Director’s Word,” in Playmarket Annual: New Zealand Theatre 2019 (Wellington: Playmarket, 2019), 3. 2. See Murray Edmond, “Lighting Out for Paradise: New Zealand Theatre and the ‘Other’ Tradition,” Australasian Drama Studies 18 (April 1991): 183–206. 3. Murray Edmond, “From Cabaret to Apocalypse: Red Mole’s Cabaret Capital Strut and Ghost Rite,” Ka mate ka ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics 4 (2007): 119–53, 125.

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4. Ibid., 137. 5. Bruce Mason, The End of the Golden Weather (Wellington: Price Milburn, 1970), 9. 6. Sean Mallon and Damon Salesa, Tangata o le Moana: New Zealand and the People of the Pacific (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2012). 7. Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2013). 8. Diana Looser, Remaking Pacific Pasts: History, Memory, and identity in Contemporary Theater from Oceania (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014). 9. Emine Fisek, Theatre & Community (London: Red Globe Press, 2019), 5. 10. Ibid., 6.

16 EMPATHY IS ESSENTIAL Kristin Kundert

March  4, 2020, due to the appearance of a global pandemic and a trifecta of preexisting conditions, I  put myself into quarantine. I  stocked the pantry and hunkered down with my dog and cat in a loft in an old mill on the banks of the Oconee River. Several days later, my hometown of Athens, Georgia, where I teach acting and voice at the University of Georgia, wisely anticipated the ramifications of Covid-19 and locked down our small city. Georgia and the United States soon followed suit, and within a week my whole industry had shuttered. With dizzying speed, life on the entire planet suddenly appeared unrecognizable. The world, as I  perceived it, was slaughtered by a secret invader. Everyone I  know works in the theatre/film industry or in academia, and suddenly this came to a screeching halt. No work for the foreseeable future. No income. No art. No creation. Being among the lucky ones with a job that allowed me to work remotely, I struggled to move my classes to the virtual universe, while my students coped with unreliable technology to finish the academic year without direct interaction with their classmates and teachers. Acting classes with no touch. No true eye contact. No immediate impulsive response to another human. All productions in progress were cancelled. All future productions put on hold. Just as if close relative or friend had died, my first response was shock. How can I exist without theatre? How can I live without telling stories and sharing the nature of existence with others eager for understanding, laughter, and peace? The uniting of heartbeats and breath in the context of a theatrical production and its collective act of creation seemed necessary to my life. I cannot even remember a time in my life without some form of theatrical creation. When I was only 7, I began to construct plays for myself and my two younger sisters to perform for our relatives at family gatherings. My naivete assured me that I was capable of being the writer, director, and star. Thank goodness my

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family was patient, as I am sure these young attempts were fairly painful to watch. In junior high, I started performing in plays at school and church. In my first school play, I was cast as Ma in It’s Cold in Them Thar Hills. I only got the part because I had an ear for dialects and easily captured the east Tennessee twang. For my director, a junior high English teacher, that dialect was all that was necessary to craft a believable character. I was lucky growing up in a small rural community to have a high school teacher with an MFA in acting so, unlike most rural midwestern schools, we produced four plays a year by canonical playwrights from Euripides and Shakespeare to Shaw and Mamet. With the theatrical fire burning in my soul, I began college double majoring in theatre and biology with a pre-med track. I had included this science education as I was truly fascinated by the study of how human beings functioned—and to pacify my family. While they were very supportive of my theatrical work, they felt I was too smart to be satisfied with a career in the theatre. (At the time, I didn’t grasp just how demeaning that was.) I could assure my family and their friends that I would be a doctor someday. Besides, medicine and the study of acting seemed to be basically the same discipline to me. Different ends to the same means. Both were about investigating the nature of how humans’ minds and bodies react and function. When, after several semesters, attending to my pre-med studies and continually rehearsing a show proved difficult, I took a hiatus from theatre for a few months. I was miserable and realized that I didn’t really want to be a doctor. I just wanted to play one on TV. I left school, ran off to New York, and spent a year working day jobs and auditioning. While I did manage to find some acting work, it was nothing I could survive on and I longed to get more training and complete my degree. I finished college near the city at SUNY–New Paltz and went to straight to graduate school to obtain an MFA in performance at Ohio State University. Immediately after graduation, I went to work at Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio. Karamu House is recognized as the oldest producing African American theatre in the nation. In 1915, it was established as a settlement house by Russell and Rowena Jelliffe in order to bring people from different races, religions, and socio-economic backgrounds together to participate in common ventures. The Jelliffes soon discovered that artistic endeavors were a perfect means of uniting these disparate peoples. The Playhouse Settlement, as it was called then, produced theatre, dance, music, art, and educational classes for youth and adults in all of these areas. With the influx of African Americans from the south in the 1920s, the Playhouse Settlement became a home for many of the best Black artists of the time. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Ruby Dee, and Robert Guillaume are just a few of the notables who spent time there. In 1941, the Settlement was renamed Karamu House to reflect the strength of the African American influence on its growth. Karamu means “a place of joyful gathering” in Swahili. My time at Karamu was indeed filled with joyful play, creation, and growth.

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That year at Karamu changed my whole relationship with theatre and the powerful potential it possessed to unite humanity. I  joined the company of Karamu’s touring theatre for youth, which traveled within the local school systems to enact folk tales of different cultures from around the world. International storytellers would share their tales with our company of actors, and we would listen over and over again, allowing the material to sink into our bones. We would then repeat the stories back to their authors to make sure we grasped the intent of the speaker. Then we improvised the characters stories into theatrical narratives. Finally, we brought these short fables back to the original storytellers to confirm their cultural accuracy. We performed plays from Nigeria, Tanzania, the Congo, Mexico, Germany, India, and Native American lore. We toured these stories to schools in the greater Cleveland area from the poorest inner-city elementary schools, where the children went through a metal detector upon entering, to affluent private schools with pristinely manicured grounds. All of the students openly embraced the work with laughter, with joy, and learned to better understand the differing cultures. Also, and very importantly, they observed that actors of varying races were able to come together to celebrate the diversity of voices in our world. Perhaps this allowed them to better empathize with the “other” in their communities. While at Karamu, I also taught acting to local adults and played several of the roles in the main theatre season. When there, I was the only female Caucasian artist, and for the first time in my life experienced what it meant to be the minority. By the end of my year, I felt as if I was completely accepted into the world, and at that same time I felt that I would never be accepted completely. As a girl from a small Wisconsin farm community, I had journeyed far from my learned experience when joining Karamu. Some days were hard, yet I listened, struggled, and felt blessed for the opportunity to share in the journey of African Americans in our country. I was honored to be asked to assistant direct a production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by August Wilson. Several times I  silently wept while watching the rehearsal process and the actor’s exploration of their history in America after being stolen from their homes, enslaved, and denied their very humanity. Observing the process of creating and performing this play illuminated just how powerfully theatre can educate and develop understanding. When you fully listen to another’s story and place yourself in their shoes, you cannot help but empathize with their journey and celebrate our shared humanity. When I left performing full time and went on to begin my life as a professor in academia, these experiences were reflected in my first philosophy of teaching statement. Twenty-five years ago, I wrote: Theatre both reflects and influences society; consequently, the study of theatre becomes the study of the human condition and is obligated to unite and invest in the global community. In studying theatre, a student

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will immerse herself in the historical context of a play. She will learn the economics, politics, technology, values, religion, and literature of a given period. She will come to understand the historical progression of humans through history and hopefully this knowledge will lead her to determine her place in society and commit to understanding and empathizing with all people. The study of performance, specifically, allows a student to investigate the psychology and behavior of all humans. Walking in another’s soul can’t help but teach openness, empathy and wholeness. It reunites the breath with the body, voice and emotions. It challenges the intellect and critical thinking. It develops values and encourages acceptance of differing opinions. I work hard to create a comfortable ensemble in my classroom where students feel safe and respected. I guide them to protect and motivate each other so they might trust their impulses, value their instincts and celebrate their humanity. These ideas and values have shaped all of my teaching for the past quarter century. I have always felt that by training actors, I was actually training humans in their growth to wholeness. It is perhaps a religious endeavor. Not all of my students have gone on to successful performance careers. Some are applying the lessons of empathy in more direct ways. They hold wildly varying jobs, including: union organizers, K–12 teachers, youth pastors, yoga and self-defense instructors, doctors (several of whom are on the front lines in the coronavirus battle), activists (for the environment, women, and children), PAs, journalists, and advisors to progressive politicians. One young man, who is the senior education advisor to Senator Elizabeth Warren, once shared with me how he learned to apply empathy in my acting classes. So, here we are in this present moment. America, as we know, is imploding. Not only are we under constant threat from a hidden viral enemy that has shuttered our theatres, we are being ravaged by fear and hate. As we isolate ourselves in our homes, separating from the humanity of our local communities, our leaders isolate America from the rest of the world. The president is a corrupt, proven liar who condones the uprising of white supremacists. His rallies whip up fear and hatred of minorities. His rhetoric encourages violence against African Americans, immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, and the disabled. Black men are being hunted and gunned down in the streets. Jewish temples are being shot up and graveyards desecrated. Immigrants to our county are kept in cages on our borders. Chinese and Latin Americans are harassed, beaten, and discriminated against. The poor are denied basic health care and painted as deserving of death because they have lived unworthy lives. All empathy for others seems to have evaporated. As I hide away in my little home grieving the loss of my art and my country, I  can’t help but wonder what might save us. How can we stop the cancer of fear and hate infecting our nation while a pandemic further isolates us from one

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another? My many years in the theatre have shown me that empathy is what stops the advancement of fear. Empathy grows when learning the stories of others. It comes when we inhabit a space together and share our breath and sync our heartbeats while participating in the catharsis of storytelling. We must find a means of growing empathy while keeping safe with physical distancing. Some theatres and performing artists hungry to create are exploring ways in which “theatre” can be done in the virtual world. Many solo performances are being developed and broadcast live online. Some theatres are streaming previous productions for free across the globe. Even multiple cast texts are being performed live. Actors in their own homes act through plays without ever coming into contact with each other for a remote audience over Zoom. While I loathe to call this theatre as it isn’t up close and visceral, it definitely is a new means of performing and sharing stories. We must look forward to ways in which we can continue to grow our understanding and empathy. If, in our isolation, we completely lose our ability to see the “other” as a living, breathing human being, we will emerge from the pandemic and what remains of our society will be lost to hate. We must envelop diverse stories from all faiths, races, genders, and social economic backgrounds. Now, at this moment in time, theatre is more essential than it has ever been.

17 THE ART OF FAILURE Katherine McGerr

I’m writing this essay after a rehearsal that didn’t go the way I hoped it would. My ideas just didn’t work, my vulnerability was received as insecurity, and I tried too hard to prove myself—or was I just enthusiastic about the work? I’m too embarrassed to remember the specifics. I failed today, in my first week assistant-directing a Broadway show, and today, of all days, I’m on a deadline to write an essay on the “why” of theatre. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a people-pleaser. On the upside, this inclination gave me strong self-motivation, adaptability to external circumstances, and easy access to empathy. On the downside, it left me little sense of self-worth. When I failed to achieve an external measure of success, I had no internal measures with which to define the moment. Given my outward search for validation, I find it ironic, and even a little heartbreaking, that I found such affinity—and aptitude—for theatre. The art of holding up ideas for approval from a paying, public, live audience seemed to demand a kind of ego that I would never have. I went to college in New York City, which afforded me the privilege of exposure to some of the most excellent and successful art in the world. Instead of participating in student-made theatre on campus, I worked as an intern for a nonprofit company producing new, international plays. The experience proved to be a double-edged sword: I quickly gained a sense of professional standards and taste, but I was surrounded by work that far exceeded what I could make at the time. I got validation of my own good instincts but missed my chance to try them out, free of knowing how my abilities didn’t yet measure up to the rest of the world’s. In the summer of 2011, the dichotomy between my confidence in my own work and my drive for artistic and professional success was at its greatest. I’d just been accepted to the drama school of my dreams, which was both thrilling and full of unknowns. I was in my fifth year with a summer theatre company I deeply

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admired and feared at the same time—where my skills were honed and I  had continual opportunities to show what I could do with them, but where I also sometimes felt blamed or even punished when something went wrong. In the middle of this particularly challenging summer season, I took a break from the office to attend a lecture given by Rocco Landesman, then-Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. The first “act” (as he called it) of his lecture was devoted to failure. Arguing for a redefinition of success in the theatre industry, and for the importance of arts education, Landesman described innovation as “the art of productive, noble, fun failure.” Instead of shaming failure, Landesman argued, we should reward it as a means of discovering “alternate pathways to success.” He called on arts education—and I still remember the words nearly ten years later—to “give the luxury of failure to our students.”1 For the first time, I realized: I was attracted to theatre not despite the risk of failure that it posed, but rather because of it. What I had thought was the art of garnering others’ approval was actually the art of inventing new, individual measures for it. And my hesitation, as a theatre-maker, to take bigger risks and more confidently seize the opportunities in front of me didn’t signify a lack of skills or ideas, but rather an inability to navigate the creative process in moments when my skills and ideas didn’t yet work. This concept of failure and success not being opposites—and of the intrinsic link between good art and good education—guided me through my training and led me to three principles that have been the foundation of my artistic and professional work ever since. *** The first principle was tolerating and even enjoying my own failure. In acting class one day, my teacher—the legendary and extraordinary Ron Van Lieu—had me try my hardest to do a scene as badly as possible. (He called the exercise our induction into the “Squirrel Valley Players” acting troupe.) By giving me this permission to be bad, Ron stopped my self-censorship. With the freedom to make choices that might be wrong, I created so much more space to make and see choices that worked, too. Similarly, in clown class, my classmates and I not only practiced failing in front of each other, but also laughing at it together. Incidentally, it was through celebrating my ineptitude at comedy that I actually found my sense of humor: funny comes from fun, and so by letting myself play with an audience through my inability to understand a joke or execute comedic timing, I could harness my failure to be quite entertaining. The second principle came from my parents, both professional educators whose passion and patience for learning is one of the greatest gifts I’ll ever receive. In my second year of drama school, I struggled to marry my growing artistic flexibility with strong leadership in production, and I was put on academic probation because of it. I initially perceived this probation to mean that I had failed as a

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student, but when I shared the news with my parents, they told me: “if you don’t screw up, no one can teach you.” With this reframing, I stopped correlating the deficiencies in my work with deficiency as a person. I found a bravery to look at myself and my ideas that assured my collaborators that they could be honest with me. I couldn’t control how I was seen by the people around me, peers or teachers, but I could avail myself of every learning opportunity in front of me. My work may not have been the best, but it grew the most. Through the work I did to reframe my own educational experience, I also discovered my own skill as a teacher—or, perhaps, trained myself to be the teacher I lacked. I signed up to work in a playwriting program for local middle schoolers, hoping to recover the joy in storytelling that I felt I’d lost. I had no formal teaching training; I aimed simply to create for my students what I wished for myself: a space to fail, safely, with someone supportive by their side. When I took my attention off myself and redirected it toward bringing even the wildest of the students’ ideas to life, paradoxically, I saw my own artistry and leadership emerge for the first time. By worrying less about whether my work was “right,” and more about whether it validated the voices and visions of others, I could be inventive without ego; I regained both my confidence and my sense of purpose as an artist. The third principle—and the one that enabled me to carry this confidence and joy back into my directing—came from a longtime friend and mentor, Jenn Rae Moore, who stage-managed the first professional productions I assistant-directed. In our rehearsals together, whenever someone apologized for a mistake or an idea that didn’t work, Jenn would playfully respond with: “that’s why we have these little get-togethers.” It was a small gesture, but it constantly reinforced for me that the point of rehearsal is exploration, not perfection, and it created an atmosphere in which collaborators could talk freely and non-judgmentally about what was and wasn’t working yet. Not only has Jenn’s phrase became a sort of mantra for me in my own rehearsal rooms, but it’s also become the tenet in my teaching that I most often hear students quote. I’ve heard it chorused in the hallway, seen it written on students’ dressing room mirrors, and even had it jokingly but lovingly repeated back to me if I apologize too much. I directed a musical last year that asked students to encounter unusually high emotional and physical demands. I  made it my first goal to set up a space where everyone—myself included—felt safe failing in front of each other: to lead with my vulnerability and love, to risk sharing my own ideas first, and to find the joy when ideas didn’t work—with a little dance party, a laugh, a hug—while reminding the room what new discoveries we made about a moment from the failed choice. It took patience; there was one tricky number in particular that we rechoreographed at least four times, including once in tech. The staging was probably never completely “right,” but with each version of it that didn’t work, we learned more about what it needed to be. Moreover, in tolerating the versions we knew were “wrong,” we discovered that our confusion and frustration with the moment was actually partly its point: it was a moment

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when characters were obscuring their intentions from one another and creating confusion as a tactic. By creating an environment where we felt supported failing together, we could playfully, nonjudgmentally, and patiently look at the work for as long as we needed without giving up. The final product was well received—it was probably some of my best and boldest directing to date—but I am most proud of how many students, in thank-you cards or evaluations, described the process as rewarding, safe, inspiring, and fun. As a student, I only remember hearing about my teachers’ successes. I once confessed to a professor in drama school that I was scared about a project; she told me never to admit it to my collaborators because they would stop seeing me as a leader. I once asked another mentor if she ever struggled with anxiety, and she changed the subject. I understand now that fear and anxiety can’t be allowed to become the focal point of the process—that, too, is a type of ego that distracts from the work. I  also know that I  can never fully understand the obstacles to artistic success that these two women experienced in generations before mine. However, I deeply believe that you cannot train young theatre-makers to succeed without teaching them how to fail, so I make it a regular practice with them to share my failures openly. In my directing class, I show photos of my productions that didn’t work alongside photos of the ones that did; in acting class, I am transparent about my own fears so as to intentionally model ways of coping with them. In production, I identify when my ideas don’t work and have a little celebration about it. The good ideas will celebrate themselves. To any student who makes a mistake, I tell the story of when, in my college theatre internship in New York City, I sent an email blast to the wrong list—and was met with a blessedly generous response from the artistic and managing directors, who, instead of getting angry, just said “hey, mistakes happen.” I’m still feeling disappointed, embarrassed, and a little scared about the way my rehearsal went today. I’m better at failing but I haven’t mastered it yet. I know more about my own resilience than I did when I first started out—I know not to confuse my vulnerability with weakness. I know to enjoy what my experience today taught me about the art I’m helping to make: I learned more about the story because of why my ideas didn’t work and, as it happened, I found newfound empathy for a character who worries too much about getting things right and comically over-apologizes. I know to be generous with myself, especially as I work on a bigger stage for the first time, and not to view deficiencies in my work, today or any day, as a deficiency in who I am. And I also know to take the attention off of myself and find a larger sense of purpose, so before sitting down to write, I called up a former student and mentee and shared my experience, in the hope that it will give her some comfort or inspiration if she ever feels the same way. Why theatre? Because it offers an unparalleled means of teaching resilience, empathy, and adaptability to the next generation. Because it’s a rare place in our culture where vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness—though I believe

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more theatre professionals could stand to acknowledge it, and I often wonder if Landesman felt the same way when he encouraged the industry to reconsider its measurements of success. Why theatre? Because it’s the art of making failure the beginning, and not the end.

Note 1. Rocco Landesman, “Art Works: A Conversation,” A Case for the Arts, Chautauqua Lecture Series, July 18, 2011, at the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY. Lecture. As quoted in Nick Glunt, “Landesman: The Arts Build Better Communities,” July 18, 2011 (accessed April 30, 2020), https://chqdaily.wordpress. com.

18 WHY TEACH THEATRE? Gina MacKenzie

Why teach theatre? Because Aristotle was right, and so were Gilbert and Sullivan, Rogers and Hammerstein, Hamlisch and Kleban, Sondheim, Webber, and countless more. The heart of all theatre is the heart of all life, and the beating sound that heart makes is applause. What is the blood that pumps through that heart of applause that keeps every performer alive? It is the same life blood that has fed theatre since the ancient Greeks: anagnorisis and peripeteia, or recognition and reversal. These principles are the underpinning not only of Greek tragedy, but of all its derivative forms as well, especially the often under-appreciated musical theatre. Some might not consider musical theatre to share the same characteristics as Greek tragedy. In many ways, in fact, it does not. Much of musical theatre relies heavily on spectacle, a theatrical element identified, but denigrated, by Aristotle. Frequently, though, the spectacle of musical theatre works in tandem with anagnorisis and peripeteia to create an immersive, audio-visual, cathartic experience for both actor and audience. When Aristotle set forth his defining criteria for tragedy, one of his underlying motivations was the merger of the political and personal sides of theatre, codifying its power through didacticism. Aristotle understood that theatre possesses the singular power to be able to communicate ideas to a wide audience of varied peoples. This singularity is part of the beauty of the art form. He also recognized, to some degree, its ability to control. From that possibility of control stems theatre’s power, which can be either freeing or imprisoning. Theatre is meant to teach and guide, but not to indoctrinate, and that careful distinction must always be upheld, especially when teaching theatre, for when teaching theatre arts, the goal should always be to give freedom to the performers, not to force them into any one interpretation, means of expression, or style.

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For 15 years, I had the privilege of directing a high school theatre group. The group had two performances each academic year: a full-scale musical in the fall, and an intimate dramatic presentation in the spring. I learned much more than I ever taught in those 15 years, and each lesson, for me, reinforced why it was that I was teaching theatre. Each lesson starts, as it usually does in musical theatre, with a song, and each of those songs is truly either an experience of anagnorisis or peripeteia. Teaching theatre is, in part, about building a community of “One.” That song, the culmination of Hamlisch and Kleban’s 1975 score for A Chorus Line, teaches anagnorisis through the simultaneous recognition that an actor is a seamless part of an ensemble and a fierce individual. The number, performed in front of mirrors to make the cast appear infinite, is a precision piece. With choreography reminiscent of the Rockettes, the performers are meant to appear totally unified. Ironically, the lyrics tell the story of a very singular individual, the “singular sensation,” ostensibly the protagonist of the musical being cast during the entire audition process of A Chorus Line. She is most notably described as “Uncommonly rare, very unique / Peripatetic, poetic, and chic” (Hamlisch and Kleban 1975). She is the exact opposite of the oneness of the cast, performing in homage to this character the audience never sees. That lyric, “Peripatetic, poetic, and chic,” is Sondheimesque in its word play, and imbedded in its rhythm is the grapevine step done with it. Even that step, one of the most basic in jazz and theatre dance, belies the complexity of the woman being described. She is an enigma, a woman who reverses herself. This is more than whimsy or caprice; this is ironic and intentional complexity. That is musical theatre itself, deceptively simple to the audience, but intensely and purposefully intricate. Teaching the beautiful complexity of musical theatre is one of the first and most important lessons to pass on to students. Performers are eager to learn lines and lyrics, but frequently, and especially when they are young or new to the art form, they miss the larger picture of why they are performing at all. “One,” as a number, taught me to teach them at the beginning of every rehearsal period that all theatre is peripatetic. It is fraught with inconsistencies and contradictions, and it is only in those that we can find any truth in the art or in ourselves. Another peripatetic song of self-discovery that I had the pleasure of directing for a magnificent young performer is “I Know Things Now,” from Into the Woods. In this now classic intertwining of fairytales, Little Red Riding Hood sings “I Know Things Now” after she has been cut free from the belly of the Wolf. The character, in this version a nearly pubescent girl, muses, And I know things now, Many valuable things That I hadn’t known before. Do not put your faith In a cape and a hood.

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They will not protect you The way that they should. And take extra care with strangers Even flowers have their dangers. And though scary is exciting Nice is different than good Now I know: Don’t be scared Granny is right, just be prepared. Isn’t it nice to know a lot! And a little bit not. (Sondheim 1987) The lyrics are her description of her own peripatetic moment with a twist. She understands the value of the lessons she has learned; she knows this learning process is maturity, but she also knows that knowledge can and should have its limits. This is an important lesson to translate when teaching theatre. Every young performer needs to know their lines, lyrics, blocking, steps; they need to rehearse and rehearse more and then they need to let it all go and realize there is another element to performer, the spontaneity that comes from being in front of a live audience. That is the “little bit not,” and it is incredibly hard to teach. Another reason to teach theatre, especially to high school students, is to help them gain acceptance of themselves. The average high school student questions everything about their existence: physical appearance, gender and sexuality, intelligence, ability, self-worth—just to list a few. Theatre has the ability to teach them both through script and process that doubt and imperfection are normal and that making theatre is also about making mistakes. The song title “God Loves Little Fat Girls, Too,” from Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?, really sums up the content. In it, the female protagonist, a primary school girl, reacts against the bullying she receives from her classmates. She questions aloud, as characters in musical theatre are apt to do, her self-worth: I know I would have lots of fun If I could be friends with . . . Anyone. Does god love Fat girls like me? (Quinn and Jans 1985) Singing this or hearing this validates the feelings of self-doubt and insecurity performers and audience alike have. As the song goes on, Eddie, a little boy who is also bullied, responds in a gesture of friendship, affirming the need for, and promise of, human connection. Teaching theatre provides that connection. It brings together students, many of whom may feel disenfranchised and alienated

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from their peers, into a space of connection, where there must be cooperation and respect to achieve the end goal of performance. The song, in its own anagnorisis, also validates during the rehearsal process the recognition that things will not always be perfect. Sometimes, in fact, they will be terrible, but they will get better. Teaching theatre is teaching the realization that with time and practice things will get better, if the performers are willing and able to accept each other and recognize each other’s value. “I’m Not That Smart” from The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is another song about recognition of value. The musical, set in the present day, recounts the events of a small-town spelling bee and its quirky pubescent participants. During the competition, the competitors are forced to admit and face their limitations. In “I’m Not That Smart,” Leaf Coneybear admits: I’m not that smart. My siblings have been telling me that for years— That I’m not smart. We’re schooled at home. They see who’s bright. It breaks my heart I’m not that smart. (Finn 2005) Here, as in “Little Fat Girls,” is another instance of the type of bullying that adolescents endure on a daily basis. Coneybear is made to feel inadequate, and that impedes his confidence. The irony of the song is that, by the end, Coneybear is seized by intellectual inspiration and is able to spell the word he is given. He is able, at least temporarily, to realize that he is smart. It is both anagnoretic and peripatetic for him, as he gains knowledge about himself that allows him to reverse his fate. Coneybear is certainly an unlikely tragic hero, but he is a completely typical teenager. His experience in the song is another reason why we teach theatre. So many young people come to the theatre thinking they really do not have the ability to perform, but when given the chance, they prove to themselves that they can in fact rise to the challenge of the situation. We teach theatre to teach self-confidence. “Astonishing” from Little Women is another number that reinforces self-­ confidence on several levels. The musical, based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, is an excellent and under-appreciated adaptation, which stays true to the spirit of the novel. In it, Jo’s character sings in a brilliant assertion of self, over romantic and even familial love, “Astonishing.” The song ends with these lyrics, meant to be belted out: I will blaze until I find my time and place. I will be fearless,

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Surrendering modesty and grace. I will not disappear without a trace. I’ll shout and start a riot. Be anything but quiet— Christopher Columbus. I’ll be Astonishing, Astonishing, Astonishing. Jo here has turned down a marriage proposal and is trying to find and assert herself as a woman writer. Most of all, she does not want to be a woman like everyone else, but wants to be a woman making her own choices, finding her own path. The song demonstrates both anagnorisis and peripeteia as she recognizes that she is the opposite of what society expects a woman to be, and she is conscious of her reversal of those expectations and stereotypes. She is unafraid to make that reversal; in fact, she embraces it. For some theatre students, it takes that level of fearlessness to get on stage at all. Teaching the bravery just to get on stage and not freeze or panic is a constant challenge for those who work with young actors. That skill is essential, though, not just for young actors, most of whom will never pursue careers in theatre, but for life. There is little more important we can teach adolescents than to be brave and to astonish. The song, as well as theatre overall, is about empowerment. Books can give example of great iconoclasts who were able to empower themselves and others, but no amount of knowledge can empower a person alone. Empowerment is a skill that must be practiced. It takes the “fearlessness” about which Jo sings. Theatre gives young people the space to practice empowerment by putting them on stage in an environment that nurtures fearlessness. It is up to any teacher of theatre to cultivate that environment, to demonstrate to theatre students that “We’re All in This Together.” Yes, at some point, in most discussions of theatre for younger performers and audiences, Disney musicals make an appearance. “We’re All in This Together” is the finale of Disney’s High School Musical. At first glance, maybe even at glances two through one hundred and two, the show, adapted from a Disney Channel movie, and the song seem cloyingly saccharine. That is an honest and visceral response for most audience members over 18; however, the show and song in particular honestly convey another important part of why we teach theatre. We teach it to demonstrate that nothing can be done alone. People, young and old, need community to accomplish anything. We need human connection. That connection is the heart of theatre. It goes beyond even the importance of anagnorisis and peripeteia. It speaks to that indefinable but essential bond between performer and audience. The strength of that connection is in direct relation to the strength of the performance itself. “We’re All in This Together” is sung by the entire cast after the basketball team, science club, and drama clubs all come together to support Troy, the star basketball player, and Gabriella, the nerdy science transfer student,

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earn the leading roles in the spring musical. According to the musical, it takes an entire high school to help two performers earn their rights to perform. That may not be far from the truth of what we teach. It does take so much more than any individual talent to make a performance work. Along with so many other factors, a successful musical performance requires the ensemble and the audience, both represented in “We’re All in This Together.” The students, who are the show’s ensemble, also act, just before this finale number, as the audience for Troy and Gabriella’s audition. The doubling of ensemble/audience function reinforces the song’s lyrics that the cast should embrace. Everyone who touches or is touched by a performance is part of its creation. No person is more or less valuable than another in that creative process. That can be a hard lesson to teach a high school sophomore with a leading role, but there are few lessons more important. As the lyrics proclaim, Everyone is special in their own way. We make each other strong (we make each other strong). We’re not the same. We’re different in a good way. Together’s where we belong. (Gerrard and Nevil 2006) There is strength and support in acknowledging and honoring each other’s unique talents. Teaching theatre means demonstrating and modeling that behavior, so that students can use those lessons regardless of their future career or life lessons. The future is the focus of “Beautiful City,” the often-forgotten song of Godspell. In it, Jesus sings: We can build a beautiful city. Yes we can, yes, we can. We can build a beautiful city, Not a city of angels But we can build a city of men. When your trust is all but shattered, When your faith is all but killed, You can give up bitter and battered, Or you can slowly start to build! (Schwartz 2011) Most literally, the song is about Jesus and his followers building a new community in spite of the resistance they face. It is, truly, about so much more and speaks to the process of both building a show and molding a performer. In the midst of Godspell, nestled between the raucous “We Beseech Thee” and the tear-jerking

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“On the Willows,” it is hard to convince the cast, or even the Jesus (in the high school production I co-directed, a young woman), that this song is important. To the ensemble, it is a place to breathe. To the actor playing Jesus, it is gearing up for the drama of betrayal and death. To achieve the cast’s connection with the song, necessary for the audience also to connect, it is key to give them understanding of how they can relate this to their own experience. It is making them realize that they have all been in a place where their world was in shambles. They may have even had days at rehearsal when they felt bruised and battered by the process, but they persevered, and the theatrical moment they are creating is their “Beautiful City.” It is helping them to know that beyond this performance experience lie their lives, ready to be built. The song is one of recognition, but not of the present moment. It teaches actor and audience alike to recognize the future. It is fate, inescapable, and undeniably tragically Greek in origin, but also and unlike Greek fate, filled with hope and promise. “Happiness,” the closing song of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, asks the cast and the audience to be present in the moment, instead of looking toward the future to find the joy of the every day. The cast and Charlie Brown sing: Happiness is singing together when day is through. And happiness is those who sing with you. Happiness is morning and evening, Daytime and nighttime too. For happiness is anyone and anything at all Loved by you. (Gesner 1967) It shows the quiet hope of looking around at the simple things and valuing what means something to each person. In the song, it doesn’t matter if the object or event that bring happiness is something shared by many; all that matters is that it is something that brings each person joy. The song teaches that the judgment of others does not matter. That certainly reverses the unusual teenage mindset that many internalize and bring forth into adulthood, that the only things that should matter are things their peers deem important or valuable. The lesson to teach is that it is okay, really that it is necessary to be happy in yourself, to show love, and that showing love will bring love in return. That kind of love requires intense commitment and devotion; it is the kind of love about which Diana sings in “What I Did For Love,” the second to last song in A Chorus Line, sung just before the 16 auditioners the show has followed are cut to the eight who are being cast in the fictional show. Diana first sings, “Kiss today goodbye / The sweetness and the sorrow” (Hamlisch and Kleben 1975a). It is an acknowledgment that the audition process and performance are filled with complex and often competing emotions. Diana, first alone, and then with her fellow auditioners, sings, “Gone, love is never gone / As we travel on / Love’s what we’ll

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remember” (Hamlisch and Kleban 1975b). This, one of the most moving love songs ever written, is not about romance, but about the love of theatre itself. It’s about the love of action, of doing, of creating. It is about that ability that theatre has to imprint itself on the heart of those who have experienced the performance. That is unteachable, but it is the ultimate reason that we teach theatre. We teach theatre to teach love.

Works Cited Finn, William. “I’m Not That Smart.” In The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. New York: Ghostlight Records, 2005. Gerrard, Matthew, and Robbie Nevil. “We’re All in This Together.” In High School Musical. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Records, 2006. Gesner, Clark. “Happiness.” In You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. New York: Masterworks Broadway, 1999. Hamlisch, Marvin, and Edward Kleban. “One.” In A Chorus Line. New York: Masterworks Broadway, 1975a. Hamlisch, Marvin, and Edward Kleban. “What I Did for Love.” In A Chorus Line. New York: Masterworks Broadway, 1975b. Quinn, James, and Alaric Jans. “Little Fat Girls.” In Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? Georgetown, CT: Original Cast Records, 1985. Schwartz, Stephen. “Beautiful City.” In Godspell. New York: Ghostlight Records, 2011. Sondheim, Stephen. “I Know Things Now.” In Into the Woods. New York: Masterworks Broadway, 1987.

19 MAKING THEATRE AROUND THE WORLD, AND WHAT IT HAS TAUGHT ME Avra Sidiropoulou

In my work as a theatre director, I  have often used theatre travels to seek to “learn by learning,” to study—sometimes consciously, other times not—the ­pre-expressive behavior of the human being,1 common cells of response that exist in different performers, and different trainings and methodologies. I have tried to reach out for meaningful collaborations and to build bridges that not only enrich our understanding and experience of theatre but also help us make the world the better, more open place it deserves to be. Creating collaborations with people from different ethnic, cultural, religious, and other backgrounds, contributing the stories of their homelands, and their own extensive physical and mental voyages, artists may help forge new transcultural, transnational, human relationships, and transcend the private realm in favor of the communal and the public. My involvement with Persona Theatre Company, a very small hub of talent based in Athens, has taken me to different parts of the globe, where meeting “the other” involved being attentive to how acting and performance could communicate visions of a more generous world. In these transcultural encounters, production meetings were often conducted through extensive Skype calls; rehearsals stirred explosive arguments, linguistic miscommunication, and political debate. Thankfully, there were also moments of shared solidarity and empowerment as well as creative accidents and moments of sheer delight and enlightenment both during the creative process and in our interaction with the local audiences. This is my theatre map.

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Learning to Fail

MAP 1 Athens

Back at home, in 2005, I was directing Stephen Berkoff’s Lunch, a play about a lonely middle-aged woman who seeks companionship and affection in a cynical wandering salesman. The production was not a hit. The competition to draw audiences has always been fierce in Athens, a city of over 4 million which boasts more than 1,500 theatre productions annually. There were days when we had to decide whether to actually run the show, and a couple of times the performance was indeed cancelled as a result of just a handful of people showing up. The loneliness that characterized Berkoff’s script soon pervaded our own experience as a small performing arts company in a competitive free market: we operated on minimal advertising and a small budget, which comes with the territory of being a tiny not-for-profit theatre group. There was one night in particular that the auditorium looked emptier than ever. A young director at the time, I felt like an epic failure. The ordeal of sitting through the performance was too much, so, as soon as the show was over, I tried to escape the gaze of the few spectators in the room. As I rushed out of the door, a young woman caught up to me. Obviously, there was no escaping the humiliating encounter. She asked me if I was the director of the show and when I cringed, nodding in the affirmative, she said, simply: “I’m really glad I came. You’re so brave to put this on.” The encouragement of that woman’s words has since helped me face some of the difficulties inherent in our art. It reawakened a sense of responsibility to the audience—however big or small—and the pleasure one derives in being present, in keeping the art going against all odds.

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Trusting Trouble

MAP 2 Nicosia

Tension is part and parcel of our profession, especially among actors and directors. One of the most common and excruciating battles that a director has to face is the actor’s fear of “the unknown,” which, left unattended, can hinder the rehearsal process. My experience directing Ibsen’s a Doll’s House in Cyprus in 2019 felt like an exercise in rehearsal politics. Even though the end result paid off from an artistic point of view, no doubt also the result of a talented group’s investment in the production, the practicalities of the project had been challenging from the get-go. After all, “in an ensemble of people who barely know each other, insecurity, impatience, and self-centeredness are to be expected.”2 As the production budget had been cut into exactly half of what had been originally planned, it was a struggle to keep the aesthetic vision on par with the finances and have the actors satisfied. As a go-between the producers and the artists, I  had to constantly negotiate and manipulate the givens. The rehearsal period of five weeks (three weeks dedicated to tablework, through which the final, revised script was generated) was way too short by any European standards. Being underpaid, most of the actors were simultaneously involved in other acting gigs, which meant that their rehearsal time became even more limited. Multiply this by 7 (our cast members) and you get a director who strives to have just a handful of sessions, with everyone present during tech week, and an assistant director who is constantly on the phone trying to accommodate everyone’s changing needs, scheduling and rescheduling rehearsals. I  decided to let go of hard red lines and go with the

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flow, accepting the time and production limitations as well as the cast’s individual particularities as a given. In rehearsal, the group dynamics changed in the course of the weeks, when power issues by the local “star actors” gradually began to subside as they became more comfortable with the directorial concept and more trusting of their fellow performers. However, while the commitment to what we were trying to achieve seemed to grow day by day, paradoxically, so did the tensions in the cast, a fact that could be attributed to the general insecurity of putting together and performing Ibsen in just a few weeks! What was truly fascinating was watching actors eventually adjust to the character he/she was embodying and cope with the challenges he/she was experiencing on a personal as well as a group level: the actress performing Nora became more of the character who tries to keep everyone happy, even by concealing surfacing agendas; Torvald was reticent and self-involved, seemingly uninterested in the psychological climate in rehearsal; Krogstadt was duly alienated from the rest of the cast; and Dr. Rank was immersed in his own little philosophical cloud, which allowed him to observe what was going on around him, occasionally coming up with discerning witticisms about the play and the process. The actress who performed Kristine Linde was also wrapped up in her private struggles. In fact, every actor was slowly but surely meeting the character. That role formation, the blending together of actor and role already during rehearsal, was an important lesson for me.

Breaking the Barriers

MAP 3 Istanbul

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I wrote Clytemnestra’s Tears originally as a dramatic monologue. The play soon led to two different projects, a solo piece in Greek and a trilingual version starring three actresses who shared the title heroine’s part. In the latter project, the Britishborn, New York-based Kristin Linklater took on the role of the aged, shattered queen, remote and detached; the Greek Themis Bazaka played the mature character at the peak of her passion for murder; and the Turkish actress Derya Durmaz embodied the young, innocent princess, suffering the pangs of love, having just been left behind by a war-thirsty husband. Staging the trilingual production at Tiyatro Oyunevi in Istanbul (2004) and at the Dimitria Festival in Thessaloniki in Northern Greece (2005) was an attempt to put to test the idea that theatre helps transcend linguistic as well as cultural barriers. Theatre is by nature democratic, an art of juggling conflict and friction. While the three actresses “fought” for a piece of Clytemnestra’s self, the rubbing together of such disparate cultures as are the Greek, Turkish, and Anglo-Saxon not only provided a fascinating backdrop to the unfolding of a character steeped in contradictions but also revealed mild prejudices and specific cultural assumptions. During rehearsals, analysis of the power politics in the myth of Atreus led to insights about the handling of the Greek–Turkish relations. On less relaxed occasions, heated political debate would suddenly erupt from an innocent reading of a line, stirring peace-making interventions by the British actress. Interestingly, the ongoing political conflict that has characterized the history of the Greece and Turkey surfaced also in the artists’ efforts to be extra careful with each other, which, in turn, resulted in an atmosphere of fragility and risk in performance. Closer to opening, the exchange of practices seemed to push us toward a new discourse of tentative assent, embracing some of the cultural unease that had been accumulating over the weeks. The reception of the production was extremely warm. Among the most moved of the audiences were some elderly Rums (the Greek minority of ­Istanbul— Turkish citizens of Greek ethnicity), who were able to follow the Greek and the Turkish text. The coming together of those two languages in particular, of ­performance traditions and, ultimately, cultures was, in their own telling, a way to remember that the best way to understand the “other” is to live with it.

Babel Bonding In 2018, I worked in Verona, co-directing with Professor Eric Nicholson a workin-progress entitled Promise Endings, which was based on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Shakespeare’s King Lear. This was a Performance as Research project bringing together a cast of Italian speakers born and raised in Italy but also ones from Brazil and Argentina, and English speakers born and/or raised and trained in South Africa, Iran, Australia, the United States, and England. The workshop focused on an in-depth comparison of the two classical plays, exploring relationships among words, gestures, and actions, even in the context of their distinct performative traditions.

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MAP 4 Verona

Rehearsing during a period of ten days, we made up a lively group that worked from and within different backgrounds and training systems. The texts featured two main languages—English and Italian—while a few choral parts were in ancient Greek. The actors were a motley of experienced professionals and some amateurs, a fact which made working under pressure an exercise in practicing patience and generosity. Some people knew Italian; others, like myself, only communicated in English. However, the difficulties in communication bonded the team. King Lear and Oedipus at Colonus seemed just a pretext, an opportunity for us to grow as artists and practice the ethics of good collaboration. On the day of the performance, the weather had been volatile. We had been rehearsing and were to perform in the open theatre “Educandato ‘Agli Angeli’ ” under cloudy skies. By late afternoon, things looked ominous. The college, where the open theatre was located, also featured an unattractive indoor classroom with a proscenium stage. That seemed, alas, the only alternative to the open space, a gorgeous green hill with cedars and rose bushes. Before we even had a moment to consider what was best, the storm broke out. Fifteen people, walking under the heavy rain, self-coordinated to transfer the props, furniture items, and costumes indoors. We were very disappointed that our work would have to be compromised. We sat in the ugly room soaked and dejected, hoping for a miracle. It was already 5pm and the performance was scheduled to start at 7pm.

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In about half an hour, the clouds had cleared and the sky was of the brightest blue. Having a little more than an hour before the show, we were faced with the dilemma of risking moving everything back to the open space or playing it safe and settling with the auditorium. Various arguments ensued, the pros and cons of each option severally voiced, until we decided to take the risk: everything was moved out and back to the park, where we set up, making small adjustments to protect the actors from the slippery ground and the spectators from the wet seats. The audiences arrived under a crisp sky and the performance happened. The sense of precarity that enveloped our entire experience had made every performed moment all the more significant. Significantly, our “hybrid script-in-action was able to ‘produce’ performative phenomena, thanks to its experimental and heterogeneous method.”3

Against/Together

MAP 5 Tehran

I directed And God Said originally at the Garajistanbul Arts Centre in Istanbul in 2009, a production that evolved into a Greek–Turkish–Iranian collaboration, part of the 28th International Fadjr Theatre Festival in Tehran (2010), with a new speaking part (that of God) added to the performance and performed in Farsi by an Iranian actor. In both the Istanbul and Tehran productions, the main body of text was spoken in English, with the last scene of the play staged in the hosting country’s home language, namely, in Turkish and in Turkish and Farsi, in the Istanbul and Tehran versions, respectively. Mixing languages and cultures on stage became our means of exploring alternatives in human communication. From a

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dramaturgical perspective, the portrayal of language as an ineffective means of communication became a structural tool in performance. Effortless communication was challenging, as each culture’s inherent characteristics kept resurfacing during rehearsals, winking at stereotypes—the predictably explosive nature of the Greeks, the skillful diplomacy of the Turks, the mellow, intelligent obstinacy of Iranians.4 Seemingly light-hearted company moments were impregnated with surreptitious tension, as we were getting acquainted—or being forced to comply—with the customs and rules of our hosts. Most notably, due to the censorship measures imposed by the Iranian festival, we had been obliged to make radical adjustments in costumes and staging before transferring the Istanbul production to Iran. The strain of needing to re-block entire scenes, in order to avoid having the two protagonists physically touch each other, stirred feelings of shared indignation during our visit in Tehran. Our resentment was particularly strong when we were asked to perform the play in front of a stateappointed censorship committee. Nonetheless, during our rehearsal and tech time at the Sangelaj Municipal Stage, we came a lot closer to our Iranian actor and the crew, not to mention the appreciative audiences in performance. Through an experience of meeting and working with “the other,” a task of considerable psychological exertion, we were eventually able to experience a “genuine kind of sympathy for what each party/individual/artist and culture represented.”5

In Society

MAP 6 Madrid

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In 2017, I was invited to offer two theatre workshops at the reputable RESAD (Real Escuela  Superior de  Arte Dramático) in Madrid. I  arrived in Spain at the time of the Catalonia controversy, when the whole country was in turmoil and Spanish flags hang out of almost every building around the Retiro park where RESAD is located. The workshop on adaptation felt particularly appropriate during that time of upheaval. The students were asked to provide in writing their own version of the Prometheus myth, recontextualizing it to a contemporary setting of special thematic relevance. Five or six groups of directing students first wrote and then read their short plays in class. Interestingly, current politics was present in almost every group’s work—the figure of the Catalan pro-independence leader Carles Puigdemont featured as a modern-day Prometheus who brings the fire of liberation to his people. Social and political circumstance also prevailed in another student adaptation assignment that used Euripides’ Trojan Women as a reference text. Hearing the ancient words in Spanish translation was thrilling. More than anything, however, the pressing reality of forced migration and massive refugee waves in the Mediterranean Sea made the context of the tragedy highly topical. The images that the students generated were extremely relevant to the visual onslaught we had all been surrounded with in the media: migrant boats capsizing off the coast of Lesvos, desperate mothers nursing their infants ashore, the past and the future colliding in one frozen moment in time. As audiences, we were also placed in the position of the native islanders, who responded to the arrival of the refugees. The actors had handed a piece of paper to each audience member, with text that was meant to convey the varying and conflicting emotions of each islander. Becoming implicated as both watchers and agents created a genuinely communal, cathartic experience that few other mediums aside from theatre can offer at times of global crisis.

A World of Difference In 2015, I  traveled to the capital of Estonia to work with students from the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre as well as the Viljandi Culture Academy. At the beginning of the two-day workshop, I found myself sitting in front of at least 50 young acting and directing students in a fascinating prewar building in downtown Tallinn, trying to gain the trust of what seemed to be a taciturn, albeit quietly confident group. I  remember taking a deep breath before I began to talk about the myth of Oedipus and its significance today, being conscious of how the group was responding to a stranger from a not-so-friendly country—at that time Greece was negotiating its precarious future in the EU and the negative stereotypes of the lazy and rebellious Greeks held strong.

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MAP 7 Tallinn

How do you inspire? How does creativity begin? I  conjured up an image of modern-day Thebes as a city struck by the plague of the economic crisis. I invited the students to speak freely about things they associated with ancient and with modern Greece. The room became animated. Then, as the group was split into several work teams to think out and stage a scene from Oedipus Rex, one of the tallest and blondest persons I had ever met approached me and said: “You know, Estonians are notoriously reserved people.” The dedicated groups worked intensively. Original adaptations of scenes in Estonian and Russian filled the room and the outside premises in that freezing sunny afternoon. Oedipus, the symbol of the quest for truth, was our fuel for exploring the possibilities of cross-cultural understanding and communicating the truth about our roots, where we come from, what our position in a global community is. As I was giving feedback, after the scenes were performed, I realized that I was bringing in the legacy of my own ethnic origin but also of my training and my methodology to a company of people who had been brought up and educated in an entirely different cultural context. The weight of the responsibility, however, had been transformed into an opportunity: to pass on this legacy but also to learn more, to know more, to interact with what is fundamentally strange, to connect with the world.

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Theatre and Conflict

MAP 8 

Tel Aviv

In 2013, I  visited Israel, invited to give a talk about the fraught relationship between playwrights and directors at the Jewish–Arab theatre in Jaffa, in one of the most historic and picturesque areas of Tel Aviv. As we gathered in the theatre lobby, I realized that the topic of my talk was of no real interest to me at that moment. Instead, I wanted to talk about collaboration, about making theatre that is essential to community building, about ways to bring people together. I gave up my written notes on the spot and initiated a conversation with the actors, writers, and directors about their own experience working in the theatre in a conflict zone. There was a lot to share. They talked about divided Jerusalem. I talked about divided Nicosia. We talked about theatre and borders. During my visit, I  also conducted a directing workshop at the Western Galilee College in Acre (Akko), an ancient port town near Haifa. The group consisted of a mix of engaged BA and MA Jewish and Arab students. The students, each from a very distinct cultural and religious background, rehearsed diligently, collaborating in groups with the task to direct and act in given scenes from classical popular plays. I was surprised to see how well everyone worked together, eager to learn and experiment, even as they were asked to devise and stage their own response to the theme of “conflict.” The participatory nature

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of theatre boosted that determination, the desire not to let prejudice get in the way of knowledge.

Struggles and Rewards

MAP 9 London

Phaedra I was a multimedia project that involved working with artists from the UK, Greece, Cyprus, and New Zealand. Performing at Tristan Bates Theatre, in the heart of Covent Garden, generated a euphoric feeling of being present, which is so essential in the theatre. So did the full houses for nine performances and the feedback we received from our attentive, intelligent audiences. What made the experience especially strong, besides the experimental multimedia character of the piece, was all the hard work that had gone into the project. In my capacity also as

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producer, I had initially got the project started in 2017 with a workshop in Athens; I had struggled to raise money and had submitted proposals to the most established theatre institutions in Greece—receiving a hefty pack of rejections. I had made the choice of approaching theatre venues in London and gone through what seemed unnecessarily regimented procedures. All throughout, I had been responsible for the logistics of working across four countries and for building and sustaining a team spirit through Skype production meetings and even Skype rehearsals! By the time we managed to raise money and get the show to travel to the UK, thanks to the support of the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation in Greece, the group dynamic was very strong. Rehearsals initially took place in Stratford-upon-Avon, where the actor Elena Pellone resides, and one of the fondest memories was stealing into the RSC rehearsal space overlooking the river, in order to try out our costume-set together with our designer Mikaela Liakata. We then transferred to London for the final part of our rehearsals, and those based in the UK provided accommodation to the artists traveling from abroad. For a few days we basically spent our entire time making everything happen—from building the show and catering to its special technical needs, such as extensive video projections, to promoting it to keeping everyone’s spirits high when the venue producers revealed the less desirable face of theatre as purely a money-making business. The solidarity that had accompanied the conception of project through to its delivery almost two years later was exhilarating, and the sense of achievement kept the energy of the show to its highest. Our resilience had paid off.

The Sky’s the Limit

MAP 10 

New York

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This journey ends in New York, the center of all things artistic, the metropolis I’ve always considered to be the cultural capital of the world. It ends at the very beginning of my theatre career, in the city where my theatre and aesthetic formation started. It was back in 1997, when, still a graduate student at Columbia University, I walked into the Thirteenth Street Repertory Theatre in Manhattan, along with two fellow artists (Kate Mueth and Sarah Canner), looking for a place to present my very first play, Sexodus, which tells of a bizarre, imaginary meeting between Electra and Medea. The premiere took place on a sweltering hot June night in the tiny black box space, filled with real garbage—an integral part of our makeshift set. It was homeless Medea’s excruciating long pause after she had introduced herself to the audience that confirmed for me that I wanted to spend the rest of my life making theatre. To have those two women revive the ancient myths in such an intensely urban context, to almost hear the spectators hold their breath in that stifling humid heat, as Medea shared her need to tell a story “that means something to the world”—that, for me, was the beginning of a committed life in the theatre. It also marked a pledge to remain truthful to my vision to always address the big, human issues that survive across spatial, temporal, and cultural borders. Several years later, in 2007, when the solo production Clytemnestra’s Tears became part of the repertory program at La MaMa, I was experiencing the same thrill and being once again rewarded with the opportunity to inspire, to move, and, ultimately, to transform.

Notes 1. Eugenio Barba, The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, translated by Richard Fowler (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 9–10. 2. Avra Sidiropoulou, Directions for Directing: Theatre and Method (New York: Routledge, 2018), 73. 3. Eric Nicholson Avra Sidiropoulou, “Opening Up Discoveries in Promised Endings: An Experimental Work in Progress on Oedipus at Colonus and King Lear,” Skenè: Texts and Studies (Studies I) Series (2019): 414–29. 4. Sidiropoulou, Directions for Directing, 318. 5. Ibid., 319; Avra Sidiropoulou, “Directing (for and) Across Cultures: The Adventures of and God Said Through Greece, Turkey and Iran,” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20.3 (2015): 316–20, 20th anniversary issue.

PART IV

Theories and Thoughts About What the Theatre Can Do When Given Form Onstage

20 THE CRUELTY TOURIST AND THE EMANCIPATED SPECTATOR Looking for an Essential Theatre Ralf Remshardt

I am a cruelty tourist. When I pack my mental suitcase for a trip to the theatre, Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double is always at the ready. I can hear this demon-saint and high priest of the avant-garde, with the mad grin of his final rictus and the hot breath of urgency, whisper into my ear his demand for a Theatre of Cruelty—not of violence, but of necessity, a theatre “that is difficult and cruel for myself first of all.”1 From television, I expect no more than diversion, from movies entertainment. But from theatre, I expect much more; I expect a modicum of cruelty. Of course, I am often (cruelly) disappointed. Artaud’s exacting challenge to the artist to find an “analogy between a gesture made in painting or the theatre, and a gesture made by lava in a volcanic explosion” or else to give up “babbling,” is the ultimate, entirely unfair and unreasonable reality check to those of us who have consigned ourselves to creative careers.2 Nevertheless, I set out again and again—as a director and as a witness to performances—in hopes of being splattered with a little lava, to be subjected to instants of delicious suffering. But at this moment, my theatrical luggage sits empty. This book comes at a fraught time for the theatre. Not the usual harping on theatre’s imminent demise as a cultural institution (which, as per Mark Twain’s familiar quip, is an exaggeration); nor the indwelling fact of its perpetual evanescence, its joyful self-erasure in the very act of performance, for which Herbert Blau pithily observed that it is “an occasion which exists most substantially in the rehearsal of its disappearance.”3 Most of us who make and teach theatre shrug off the first and embrace the latter emphatically. No, as I am writing in May 2020, health ordinances have indefinitely shuttered theatres worldwide in the wake of a global pandemic. This a blow potentially much more severe than the occasional plague closures that forced the temporary retreat from public spectacles throughout history—the Athenian loimós of 430 BCE that reappears as a devastating

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plague in Sophocles’ Oedipus the same year, or the London pestilence of 1593 during which the quarantined Shakespeare perhaps composed Romeo and Juliet— “a plague on both your houses!” The Athenians and the Londoners, after brief hiatus, played on.4 When and how our twenty-first-century theatre will spring back to life remains, for the moment, to be seen. Theatre’s implied association with contagion, however, has been a longstanding trope of anti-theatricality. Along with their fulminations against the idleness, lewdness, transvestism, irreligiosity, and other real or imagined offenses of public performance, Puritan enemies of the Renaissance stage usually threw in dire warnings about the hazards of close physical association. But the truly dangerous contagion of the theatre is psychic rather than physical, an accusation that is at the root of Plato’s dismissal of mimesis (imitation) as an inferior practice that infects the minds of its audience with a desire to emulate the worst behaviors of dramatic characters.5 In the 1930s, fed up with the facile boulevard drama of his day, Artaud likened the “essential” theatre he craved to the plague. Artaud’s notional plague, however, was not a medical contagion but a spiritual perturbation, attacking the lungs and the brain—breath and mind—of the victims, but also overturning all rules and strictures of civil society: If the essential theatre is like the plague, it is not because it is contagious, but because like the plague it is the revelation, the bringing forth, the exteriorization of a of a depth of latent cruelty.6 Here is the idea of an essential theatre as a “revelation” of some latent force our diurnal selves will rarely admit to. Susan Sontag has argued that Artaud, in his pursuit of a theatre that is “morally rigorous” rather than hedonistic, is reaching for a transcendent conception of performance that is essentially Platonic (oh irony!), but stripped bare of the pretensions of mimetic art and freed from the compulsions of referentiality.7 How would such an essential theatre look? Is it even possible? How could I attend it? It would have to be a theatre-as-itself, a pure phenomenological experience, a complete being-present, a totality, an immersion, a cruelty. Is it like the piece I once saw by a Bulgarian playwright in which there are no actors, no director, only the audience? In this remarkable theatrical experiment, the spectators were called upon to create the show by reading letters from a box on a table at the center of the auditorium, letters from a man (we slowly discovered to our horror) who had immolated himself to protest poverty and political indifference.8 Or the version of Shakespeare’s Tempest that omitted Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban, and in which the increasingly unhappy actors whose movements had been tracked across the theatre-island all evening by GPS, finally broke open the stage floor to excavate and consume the body of Shakespeare himself ?9 Or perhaps the multi-hour, street-roaming bacchanal by São Paulo’s Teatro Oficina that culminated in an orgiastic celebration by the (mostly) nude actors and audience?10

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All of these contain elements of the essential theatre: a rupture, an assault, a calling-into-question of the theatre’s ordinary modes, and a surprising extension of its very possibilities. As cruelty tourist, I understand that the essential theatre exists not often in a totality, but in lucid moments that demand absolute attention. The director Peter Brook once observed that the mental snapshot is a potential “acid test” of great theatre: When emotion and argument are harnessed to a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself—then something in the mind burns. The event scorches on to the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell—a picture. . . . [T]his shape will be the essence of what it has to say.11 The history of the theatre is spiked with these pictures, these moments in which something alchemical occurs, a kind of significative inversion, a phenomenological loop, in which the representation transmutes a thing more real than the thing it represents, and a truth appears as epiphany. It happened when the vengeful Furies of Aeschylus’ Oresteia caused Greek women to gestate spontaneously in terror;12 when David Garrick as Hamlet encountered the ghost of his father in petrification so vivid it made his audience shudder;13 when Helene Weigel as Mother Courage in Brecht’s play upsurged in silent anguish at the offstage execution of her son (a moment George Steiner in The Death of Tragedy called “raw and terrible beyond any description”).14 To me, one such essential picture of the essential theatre is the stricken face of actor Yoshi Oida in Peter Brook’s own masterly production of L’Homme Qui (The Man Who) from 1993. Brook, now in his mid-90s, has spent the better part of his eminent career conducting an inquiry—a recherche théâtrale, he calls it—into what makes performance possible and necessary. To that end, he traveled to Africa with his troupe in 1972 to explore the roots of performance and adapted (not without controversy) the Indian epic Mahabharata into a nine-hour spectacle in 1985. His most recent production, simply called Why? (2019), used the case of Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold, liquidated by Stalin in 1940, as a lens through which to ask what price we are prepared to pay for an art that commits itself to truth in a world that can’t stop lying to itself. L’Homme Qui, which I  saw at the Theater der Welt festival in Munich, was adapted from Oliver Sacks’s 1987 book of neurological case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Given that brain events are both private and puzzling affairs, there seemed little scenic intrigue in such a premise, and yet it was among the most searingly memorable evenings of theatre I have experienced. The thrust stage was an (almost) empty space, set with a few pieces of furniture in neutral white, and two video monitors and a camera. Here, in the time of little more than an hour and a half, Brook and his multi-ethnic cast conducted a wondrous tour of the wounded self. Alternating the roles of patients and doctors, slipping into new personae with sovereign ease, they enacted Sacks’s harrowing but often

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wrenchingly comic clinical tales of people who, as a result of accident or illness, had lost an essential mental facility: some had become arrested in time, the speech of others had become a cascade of meaningless syllables, some could not find half of their body or half of the world, everyday objects had become riddles to them. The evening’s most stirring moment occurred when a patient with unilateral neglect (the Japanese Nō-trained actor Yoshi Oida), who had lost all perception of the left side of the world, was asked to shave. Meticulously, he shaved the right half of his face and then stopped, convinced he was done. But when the doctor directed him to turn around to his right, to where a video monitor reflected his entire face, half still covered with shaving cream, the patient froze in horror. He looked to the mirror, then to the monitor again, grasping his face in stark bewilderment. This could not be! Finally, in agony, he whispered: “Please, let this end.” Oida’s haunted gaze was the mark of the stricken self: perception and the world had come into irreconcilable opposition. In the theatre, no one stirred. The acting of Brook’s cohort is a kind of miracle: never solicitous, and yet lacking any Brechtian formality or distance. These actors never fool us: they are acting, presenting. But no, they are doing more: they are creating lived observation in a theatrical rite both solemn and joyful, and not a moment, from the most trivial to the most agonizing, is without a vivid sense of exploration and understanding. Only through the veracity of this acting can the play achieve the nearly impossible: to give us any sense of what it might be like to suffer from something that is so categorically unspeakable, unstageable, unimaginable. I treasure many of these snapshots from Brook’s productions. However, as often as it arrives at a point of revelation (and it does), Brook’s is still a classically Aristotelian theatre, an Enlightenment theatre. As many have argued—none more forcefully than British playwright Howard Barker—the consensus of the Enlightenment about the possibilities of human progress (that elusive Rousseauian perfectibility) has irretrievably shattered, if it ever existed, and the confusions of the last half-century require a new art, a new theatre. Barker calls it a “theatre of catastrophe,” which does away with the consolations of realism and clarity and sets the spectator adrift in the turbulent seas of her own profuse imagination and the “abolished unconscious”15 of her dreams. Formally, the watchword is a term introduced by scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann: postdramatic theatre;16 that is, a theatre not of texts faithfully rendered (the ethos to which American theatre still clings to its detriment) but of objects and bodies unleashed, a theatre that cares little about maintaining the boundaries to dance or opera, or to ritual and procession, a theatre that casts its audience into proximity of the Real with disconcerting sleight of hand just as it theatricalizes the world. In so doing, it acknowledges that performance has become the dominant epistemological lens of postmodernity: everything can be understood as somehow performative. If Artaud called for abolishing the stage and creating a site “without partition or barrier of any kind,”17 the postdramatic of the twenty-first century obliges with an abundance of forms.

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Of all of those forms, there are perhaps two chief ways in which the essential theatre can most powerfully transform the constellation of audience and performance: excursion and immersion. Both physically uproot the spectators from their habitual posture of voyeurism and make them experiencers rather than onlookers. One late afternoon in the spring of 2014, together with 20 other people, I found myself standing in the Monastiraki metro station in Athens at rush hour, holding aloft a sign with a name of a person I did not know. It was the beginning of a remarkable performance, No Man’s Land, conceived by Dutch artist Dries Verhoeven. Each of us was approached by an actual refugee (not an actor) who subsequently guided us, without speaking, on an individual journey through the streets and alleys of the unfamiliar city as dusk fell. Over headphones, meanwhile, we heard a composite narrative about migrants in Greece, drawing on the painful experiences of the Syrian and other diasporas. After more than an hour, all of the separate journeys converged on a desolate plot of urban land where 20 cabins had been constructed. Each experiencer finished the performance separately in one of these enclosures, in intimate proximity to “our” refugee, who whispered and sang into our ears. Verhoeven’s experiment dislodged us from the safe womb of the theatre and created a layered play with the tensions between the public cityscape and the vulnerable self in which the fate of the refugee was refracted and doubled in our own vulnerability.18 This literal “stepping outside” is what I  mean by excursion: leaving behind not only the physical and institutional construct of theatre, but also the comforts of generic category. For, is this even still theatre, or is it something else? Such ambulatory, site-responsive performances have proliferated to the degree that we have come to realize how the dislocations of modern existence are only imperfectly represented by solemn fictions played out on painted stages, by “great reckonings in little rooms.”19 Progressing into the unknown, the experiencer is repositioned, taken off balance, forced to “remap” their sensibilities, to become more permeable. In theory, this is part of the same project of engaging in dissensus that Jacques Rancière has articulated in his essay “The Emancipated Spectator.” Rancière urges the return of the (idealized) spectator to a state of free inquiry and interpretation. Rejecting theatre’s a priori claims to community, he writes that “in front of a performance, just as in a museum, school or street, there are only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs that confront or surround them.”20 Several companies, like Blast Theory in the UK or Rimini Protokoll in Germany, masterfully deploy these locative performance strategies as a way to challenge participants with the cognitive and emotional paradoxes of inhabiting the neoliberal mediasphere. Remote Mitte (2014), a piece by Rimini Protokoll that I attended,21 took us from a military cemetery to the top of a skyscraper in central Berlin, traversing the dense agglomeration of contemporary and historic sites through a trajectory that included a disused psychiatric hospital, the East Berlin TV tower, a church, and other urban monuments. The collective sensation was

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one of realizing bit by bit how much our experiences in the urban scene are indeed shaped by external factors, are “remote controlled.” The group was both individualized, isolated by the headphones, but fused by the common soundtrack as well as being part of a collective spectacle (as when all participants suddenly performed a dance move or a foot race in a public place, prompted by a voice unheard by passers-by). The city was revealed, layer by layer, to be a performative space. But such performances (sometimes called “promenade”) don’t need to inhabit actual urban reality to feel real. I  found an Iraq war-themed production titled Stovepipe that took place in the basement of a shopping center in West London often too closely authentic for comfort (which of course was the point).22 Spectators were thrust first into the realistic facsimile of a buzzing trade fair for private security operators, then convincingly transported to a hotel in Amman, where a hard-bitten South African mercenary was preparing to give the keynote address. A  minute into his speech, a siren scattered the audience, and soon we found ourselves watching three mercenaries on a tour of duty in Iraq that would go horribly wrong, culminating in the fiery death of one man and precipitating the perplexing events of the play. I knew I was in a London mall, but the production had rendered the texture of its world so faithfully and set such a breathless pace of cinematic episodes and flashbacks that the rapid change of venue and situation became a visceral analogue of the deepening political and emotional chaos and the peregrinations of the audience through the maze of sets offered a palpable allegory of the labyrinth of danger, power, and profit that was war-time Iraq. Brett Bailey’s performative installation Sanctuary (2017) took another approach to the trauma of conflict.23 Constructed (when I saw it) inside a large warehouse space on the tumbledown end of Hamburg harbor, Sanctuary was a promenade performance that took its structural, visual, and thematic cues from the founding myth of Europe, the rape of Europa by Zeus, and of her grandson, the maneating beast Minotaur. Shaped as a vast gloomy labyrinth (sans Minotaur), but made of chain-link fencing reminiscent of refugee camps, Bailey’s installation permitted only seven spectators at a time to enter. At each turn of the tortuous journey—red lights and buzzers signaled when one could proceed—this accidental group of strangers encountered a performer in a diorama-like setting giving a short narrative of their often-harrowing experiences while intently holding the spectators’ gaze in turn, in a manner both mesmerizing and vexing. Some were directly traumatized by war and displacement—a shopkeeper from Syria, a photojournalist from Iraq; others reflected European populism: a street sweeper in Berlin with vaguely xenophobic leanings, an elderly Le Pen-voter in France. Bailey has long played with the borders of liminality, and it was not until the end that the audience learned that those apparently authenticating, appellative gazes that collapsed the space of pretense and gave the episodes their raw power were themselves deceptive; the performers were playing out composite, partly fictionalized stories, even though they drew on real experiences. The piece was

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inarguably emotionally charged, and yet I felt a twinge of betrayal. Immediately, I checked my assumptions: was I expecting theatre not to be contrived? How real does it need to be to be true, or essential? The strategy of immersion, complementary and overlapping with excursion, has gained much recent currency, likely in part because it emulates cinematic and video game narratives. Immersive theatre is most often a full-body experience, but the immersion may also appeal to a particular sense such as the auditory imagination. The UK company Complicite, led by Simon McBurney, has been a pioneer in creating visionary, complex, and layered productions. In The Encounter (2015), a solo performance, audiences found headphones at their seats, which they wore throughout the two-hour, intermission-less show.24 Encounter details the travels of Loren McIntyre, a photographer, who in 1969 found himself lost among the people of the remote Javari Valley in Brazil. A key prop on the almost empty stage was a binaural microphone shaped like a human head that produced surprisingly lifelike three-dimensional sound inside the listener’s aural perception. As McBurney (as McIntyre) went deeper into the jungle, so the audience proceeded deeper into the character’s consciousness until he arrived at a place the Indigenous people associate with the beginning of time, leading to a shattering climax. The sound design was so intricately interwoven that it was often unclear whether the sounds were live or recorded, present or past. In that way, this production was also a meditation on temporality, presence, and language. The combined effect was one of submersion in a holistic, almost dreamlike or hallucinatory experience, one in which liveness and mediation coexisted to great effect. Another company, Punchdrunk, has amassed an impressive track record of site-responsive performance work in the UK, and also in the US, including the long-running Sleep No More in New York. The Masque of the Red Death (2009), set entirely in the forbiddingly cavernous Old Town Hall of London’s Battersea district, was perhaps the pinnacle of Punchdrunk’s skillful marriage of narrative and thematic content, atmospheric density, and spatial dramaturgy.25 Nominally, the production was derived from several stories by Edgar Allen Poe, but the heart of the work was experiential and presented itself in the fragmentary, nonlinear, and sometime recursive manner of a quest-driven video game. Admitted in small groups, the participants were handed white masks with beak-like noses, instructed not to speak or interfere with what they saw, and sent forth into the dimly candle-lit hallways, stairwells, and rooms of the gaping Victorian edifice. The distancing and dreamlike effect of witnessing everything through the mask led in my case to a pleasant sense of disembodied half-presence, a bold childlike curiosity, and a reckless disregard for personal space; thus I  found myself expectantly flowing, milling, and weaving with many other similarly wraithlike figures in and out of sitting rooms, dressing rooms, bedrooms, banquet rooms, opium dens, wine cellars, garrets, and laboratories—sometimes through secret ­passageways, such as a fireplace that led to an adjoining room.

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Punchdrunk’s extraordinary attention to period detail put into play a sort of architectural performance that gave this presumptive Poe-world a simultaneously surreal and hyperreal appearance, from the many varied interiors to the impressive former grand staircase of the Battersea Town Hall with its balustrades and statuary, at the foot of which extended a poetically incongruous birch forest. Anywhere here, one might happen onto a solemn wedding or the disturbing funeral of a young bride, or the savage duel between two men, or a strange and tense dinner party that descended into demonic chaos. At the end of three hours, my sense of time had effectively evaporated when I found myself driven by loud alarms toward an enormous ballroom where the finale had begun. This was the domain of Prince Prospero of the title story, and here Punchdrunk’s actors, accompanied by a live band and pyrotechnics, were celebrating in a wild and orgiastic dance the exorcism of the Red Death. Or perhaps the exorcism of conventional theatre. For as I joined actors and audience in the dancing, any remnants of caution and critical detachment gave way to a feeling of elation and giddy abandon. Notably, the Red Death of Poe’s story is an inescapable pandemic, but Punchdrunk’s production was itself an infectious event (one of the first to go “viral” on social media). Like Artaud’s metaphorical theatre-plague, The Masque of the Red Death left its audiences transformed in breath and brain—I attended the ­production with a group of students who could not stop talking, thinking, ­arguing about the piece for days afterwards. Artaud’s vision of an essential theatre is a reminder that an art of half-measures, an art that doesn’t confront itself with its own necessities, perishes, though its death may be protracted and even wellattended. I have always searched for those limit experiences in the theatre where the form renews itself, and sometimes I have been lucky to find them. In the essential theatre, a little lava goes a long way.

Notes 1. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 79. 2. Ibid., 80. 3. Herbert Blau, Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), xiv. 4. In 1606, when plague closed the theatres, the Privy Council decreed that playing could resume if there were fewer than 30 weekly deaths of the disease in London. See James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 273. 5. Plato, The Republic, Book X, https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/republic/section10/. It was Plato’s student Aristotle, in what may be the first great act of critical reclamation, who prescribed catharsis as the medicine against such wayward contagion and so rehabilitated mimesis. 6. Artaud, The Theater, 30. 7. Susan Sontag, “Artaud,” in Selected Writings, ed. Antonin Artaud and Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xxii–xxiii.

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8. Alexander Manuiloff, The State, presented at the Theatertreffen festival in Berlin, 2015. 9. Shakespeare’s Last Play, by the Dublin-based group Dead Centre, in a co-production with the Schaubühne Berlin, 2018. 10. Teatro Oficina, Macumba Antropofaga, creators of music & audio, São Paulo, 2017 (Not only was I disrobed, but I was compelled—greater indignity!—to wear a Trump mask). 11. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 136. 12. The ancient anecdote about this occurrence is doubtful, and I  cite it only to be illustrative. 13. There is a famous description of the scene by the German philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg from 1775. See A. M. Nagler, A Source Book in Theatrical History (New York: Dover, 1959), 368–69. 14. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Knopf, 1961), 354. In May 2020, Brecht’s theatre, the Berliner Ensemble, gave rare access to an archival recording of Mother Courage made in 1957. I found the famous moment of Weigel’s “silent scream” haunting indeed: she sinks onto a stool with a mask-like impassive face as the drumroll offstage announces the impending execution, but when the shots echo, her body convulses and she throws her head back with mouth agape and eyes closed, her hands knotted in her lap. It is a perfect embodiment of the violent contradiction between her maternal emotions and her economic interests, a Brechtian gest. 15. Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theatre, 3rd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 52. 16. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, translated by Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006). 17. Artaud, The Theater, 96. 18. Dries Verhoeven, No Man’s Land, co-produced with Fast Forward Festival and Onassis Cultural Center Athens, 2014. See also Aneta Mancewicz, “Intermedial Performance as Public Sphere,” in Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere, ed. Katia Arfara, Aneta Mancewicz, and Ralf Remshardt (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 27–42. 19. “It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room” is Jacques’s familiar line in As You Like It (III.iii)—thought to refer to the recent death of Christopher Marlowe—and it was adapted for the title of Bert O. States’s wonderful Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 20. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2011), 16. 21. Remote Mitte, by Rimini Protokoll in co-production with Gorki Theater Berlin, 2014. Dir. Stefan Kaegi. 22. Stovepipe, by Adam Brace, co-produced by the Bush Theatre and the National Theatre in London with the Hightide Festival, 2009. Dir. Michael Longhurst. See my review in “Ware House,” Theatre Journal 62.2 (2010): 271–75. 23. Sanctuary, by Brett Bailey, co-produced by Third World Bunfight and Theater der Welt Hamburg, 2017. Dir. Brett Bailey. 24. The Encounter, by Simon McBurney and Complicite, based on the book Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu, in co-production with the Edinburgh International Festival and others, London, 2015. Dir. Simon McBurney. 25. The Masque of the Red Death, by Punchdrunk, based on motifs by Edgar Allen Poe, Battersea Town Hall London, 2008. Dir. Felix Barrett. See my review in “Threepenny Opera and The Masque of the Red Death,” Theatre Journal 60.4 (2008): 639–42.

21 THEATRE AND THE DIGITAL NATIVE Donna Soto-Morettini

Introduction I’ve recently watched two young audience members during two different theatre productions. The first was done in traverse staging so I could watch the young girl throughout the entire play. A second was staged in the round and the young girl was seated across from me, and again she was in my line of vision the whole time. The first girl, very young (age 4 or 5?), watched for perhaps 10 minutes, then got out a tablet and some earphones and proceeded to enter her own technological world of diversion. The second girl (age 9 or 10?) watched her shoe as she bounced her crossed left leg throughout act I. Despite being in the front row and very close to an extremely active production, she rarely looked up to watch the actors. The two experiences, coming so close together, seemed to me to be unrelated to the quality of the productions we were seeing. Most of the audience members were engaged and even stood for the second production as they applauded. Two young people do not create a trend, a cause for alarm, or a sample of any statistical weight—they merely remained in my mind as a provocation. As I considered these two young girls, I began to wonder if the children of the technological generation can respond to live theatre in the ways that generations before them have? Much of the discussion currently about generational differences between what has been called the “net generation” or “digital natives”1 and those raised before/ during the rise of internet technology centers on how a generation of people who have been raised spending a significant amount of time in interactive virtual worlds might differ from the generations before them. My recent theatre experiences have prompted me to think about whether live theatre will find an audience among the current net generation and all those that will follow. The scope of this consideration is of such a scale that I must be modest about what I can cover here.

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I want to explore two questions in turn, and I do this in the knowledge that while it is too soon to answer them, it is most certainly not too soon to raise them: 1. Is the rising number of hours young people spend in the virtual world doing more than changing their relationship to the real world? Might it, in fact, be rewiring their brains? If so, what does that mean for the future of live theatre? 2. Has heavy internet usage eroded empathy? If so, what does that mean for the future of live theatre? There’s quite a body of work now on how technology has changed our relationship to the world. Initially, researchers focused on how the increased speed and access of information would change us in a social sense, but latterly, many have come to be interested in how technology may actually be rewiring brains, particularly those of a generation that spends increasing time on the internet. This research is interesting not only in epistemological terms (especially as it relates to brain plasticity, to how we learn, and to how we accede and respond to a “real” world), but also in ontological terms (as it concerns what it means to be a subject in a social/technological world that is increasingly encroaching on every area of our lives and possibly redefining what we see as the “self ”). In her book Unselfie, Michele Borba outlines the extent of immersion in the digital world: The average eight- to eighteen-year-old is plugged in to a digital media device about seven hours and 38 minutes a day (that doesn’t count time spent texting or talking on cell phones) . . . and almost 40 percent of twoto four-year-olds use a smartphone, MP3 player, or tablet.2 The statistics suggest that much of what digital natives are learning about what it is to be human is being learned online, in isolation.

The Rewired Brain? Some have seen the isolated, non-social nature of internet activity as a contributor toward a less empathetic world. In her consideration of how technology is affecting a young generation of users, Susan Greenfield considers the demonstrable brain changes detected in heavy internet users. Her surprising conclusions are that atypical brain wave responses among heavy internet users are typical of people diagnosed along the autism spectrum.3 She goes on to link specific autismlike traits to heavy internet users, including lack of eye contact and lack of emotional intelligence. We need much more research before we can conclude that heavy internet usage results in autistic-like traits, but as Greenfield points out, it is certainly the case that the reverse is true: autistic people are more comfortable in cyberspace than in face to face interactions. She also notes links between atypical

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brain wave patterns in facial recognition that is characteristic both of autism and heavy internet use. Greenfield makes the point that there is enough early evidence about the ways in which excessive screen time begins to create autistic-like behavior to concern us now. A more recent study, which considered research on attentional capacities, memory processes, and social cognitions, concluded that the nature of internet interaction (with its stream of digital distraction) creates a “non-ideal environment for the refinement of higher cognitive functions” during the critical early periods of brain development. The study goes on to note that the first longitudinal research in the area has concluded that digital multi-tasking and heavy usage in early adolescence creates marked decreases in verbal intelligence and “impeded maturation of both great and white matter regions.”4 There have also been recent articles and studies referencing a phenomenon called “digital dementia” [DD]. One team concluded that digital dementia is indeed a growing problem and issued a warning: “during the next decade, DD might be regarded as a common state of human beings because many people around world are expected to be affected by DD caused by overuse of mobile devices.”5 Alongside this early worry about cognitive deficits, there have been studies looking at not only brain changes, but also the addictive quality of digital life, with one study concluding that “[Internet Addicted] individuals were worse at inhibiting their responses especially in the face of Internet-related cues and were also highly driven by immediate rewards even in the face of potential losses and uncertainty.”6 While it is clearly early to be claiming any absolute conclusions about the effects of digital life on our adaptive brains, there are enough research-based concerns to inspire some worry about long-term cognitive effects in the brains of digital natives.

Declining Empathy In 2010, a study at the University of Michigan demonstrated that dispositional empathy among college students had declined by 40% between 1979 and 2009.7 One of the conclusions of the study was that empathy can be acquired/ enhanced, and that if increased use of screen technology was implicated in the decline of empathy, there would be relatively simple measures for addressing this. Still, there may be good reasons to feel confused over the relationship between heavy internet use and an empathy deficit, if we subscribe to more biological/ evolutionary theories about why humans have empathetic capacity in the first place. If empathy is hard-wired, how can we see a socially induced decline? If we do see a socially induced decline, must we not therefore conclude that empathy is NOT hard-wired in the sense that we all have it, but rather that there is a biologically locatable affordance in the brain that enables empathy to be learned in

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prosocial contexts? Simon Baron-Cohen’s work, Zero Degrees of Empathy, suggests that levels of empathy are highly variable in human beings, and that empathy has the capacity to be eroded.8 Empathy, as Mark Honigsbaum points out, is surprisingly difficult to define. For Roman Krznaric, empathy is “the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions.”9 Paul Bloom defines empathy as the “act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does.”10 Along with the varying points of view on the use or otherwise of empathy, there are distinctions in the kinds of empathy we may feel: cognitive empathy, affective empathy, and empathic concern.11 Affective empathy is what we often experience in fictional immersion—the sense of actually feeling what someone else is feeling.12 *** If it were possible to make the case that watching the theatre increases our empathetic response and capacity to view our fellow humans with greater understanding, that would go some ways toward arguing the case for its importance in society in general. Historically, of course, this case would seem to have been asserted for some 5,000  years, in Aristotle’s doctrine of catharsis and purgation. In his view, the theatre allows us to immerse ourselves in a fiction to the extent that we can purge ourselves of the feelings of terror and pity. It seems to me a noble (if possibly questionable) conception of the importance of theatre which relies heavily on the idea that we experience feelings of pity and horror, evoked by the sense that what we were watching was “real” and that we could imagine ourselves in the place of Oedipus. This claim requires some unpacking of the notion of the empathy we experience during the fictional immersion experience of watching theatre, since there are some competing possibilities here. We may imagine that we ARE Oedipus in our imagination as we watch his agony. Or we may imagine what it would be like to feel what Oedipus is feeling in his agony, but however we sense our empathetic connection with Oedipus, Aristotle’s claim that theatre provides some purgation of pity and terror proceeds from the assumption that we all have an empathetic reaction from our immersion in a fictional world. Whether this empathetic reaction is universal is certainly questionable. That empathy is what affords narrative understanding of the shared human condition suggests an important function of theatre. At this moment, however, the question we face is whether technological change might alter profoundly our expectations of empathetic response from a theatre audience composed of digital natives. Given the complexities of defining empathy, any discussion of empathetic responses in a theatrical fictional immersion requires that we know what we mean when we speak of consciousness as having an empathetic function, and what we mean when we speak of empathy.

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Perhaps it would be easier for us to move away from this difficulty and start with something a bit simpler: something called Theory of Mind (ToM), which is a capacity often cited as lacking in those along the autistic spectrum. ToM is simply the ability to attribute mental states to other people, and to recognize the kinds of beliefs, intentions, and desires that motivate behavior in others. As one study points out, autistic patients often demonstrate “a diminished ability to interpret the beliefs, intentions and emotions of others,” and this diminished ability limits “the individual’s ability to interact in ways that are generally considered appropriate and adaptive for a particular social context.”13 And in the absence of longitudinal hard data about the effects of prolonged internet usage, we might be on safer ground to consider not whether watching theatre can make us more empathetic people, but whether watching theatre can enhance our ability to understand the minds of others. Because an empathetic response must be based first on having a sense of understanding what motivates the behavior of others. For example, it may be difficult to feel empathy with a woman who has murdered her husband unless we learn that she was motivated by years of violent domestic abuse. I think my argument here is on safer ground if we consider whether theatre might be instrumental in enhancing our ToM: enriching our ability to understand the beliefs, intentions, and desires of others.

A Changing Theatre? I began with two questions, the second of which concerned the future of theatre in light of a possibly technologically altered future audience. This question has been considered by others, but not widely. Steve Dixon, writing in 2007, noted the rise of the use of technology in live performance: “new technologies . . . call received ideas about the nature of theatre and performance into question,” but also, referencing both Aristotle and Warhol, went on to widen the concept of theatre to embrace all individual internet activities: Personas are honed like characters for the new theatrical confessional box, where . . . individuals explore their autobiographies and enact intimate dialogues with their inner selves. The World Wide Web is a site of therapeutic catharsis-overload, and it constitutes the largest theatre in the world, offering everyone fifteen megabytes of fame.14 In their book Performing Mixed Reality, Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi see a similar change happening in theatre: An emerging generation of artists is turning to digital technologies to fundamentally transform theatre. . . . Working at the cutting edge of live performance, these artists are increasingly employing digital technologies to

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create distinctive forms of interactive, distributed, and often deeply subjective theatrical performance.15 Benford and Giannachi see a similarly self-focused trend in these blended live/ technological experiences. No doubt that self-focus reflects the ways in which the switch from analogue to digital thinking has changed young audiences. Michael Anderson takes a stronger position in terms of how theatre must change: “This is not to say that traditional theatre is finished. But in the same way that painting was transformed by the arrival of photography, it does have to change.”16 In his analysis of the way that Contact Theatre in Manchester has appealed to a younger audience, he writes: they have started with the central question: what is the potential of theatre for young people and how can we change it, using young peoples’ interests to engage our audience? The answer is to allow young people to be active participants as well as audiences.17 Is Anderson right to call for a change in traditional theatre production? Do we know enough about how digital natives think in order to theorize such a change? The difficulty in writing about such things is that the “shelf life” of that writing is strictly limited. But from a perspective in 2020, it seems that we can speculate with some certainty about why and how analogue experiences like theatre attendance may find building an audience for the future among digital minds a challenge. In a real sense, the world is an analogue experience; it is a continuously fluctuating and variable experience that unfolds in multiple layers over an endless stream of time. But for a more digital mindset (a result of much formative time in a virtual world), the analogue experience must seem both messy and slow. In a very brief article, Joshua Kim outlines three things that distinguish “digital thinking,” which he describes as a way of understanding the world: 1. a bias toward relentless change; 2. the valuing of rapid iterations and minimally viable solutions; and 3. a belief in the power of data.18 If we take these three ideas as symptomatic of the “digital thinker,” we can see why the analogue world may feel unsettling to anyone with this mindset. We can also see that these three definitive traits are a logical result of much time spent in a digital world. Years ago, Nicholas Negroponte predicted that the future would come down to a distinction between bits and atoms,19 and when one spends much time in the world of bits, relentless change is, ironically, a stable condition. Rapid iterations and minimally viable solutions work well when you know that whatever version of something you put in front of a virtual audience, you will be able to quickly de-bug and redesign as you gather cyber-feedback. And data, of course, is the building staple of the virtual world. Given this kind of mindset, how might traditional theatre appeal to a digital native generation?

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The quick answer would seem to be that it won’t. There is a reasonable amount of research available to those who hope to capture the digital native generation in both marketing and educational sectors. And what this research seems to reveal are some strong patterns between the two domains about what constitutes the digital thinker: shorter attention spans, desire to create/customize content, desire to participate rather than be a passive consumer of content.20 These traits militate against the kind of passive concentration required to watch and think about a play in which they have no immediate ability to interact. Consequently, writers like Anderson can see the value of productions that set out to disrupt a traditionally “passive” theatre, and instead appeal to the interactive, co-creative role that internet experiences provide. And while there is no doubt that such extraordinary work might very well appeal to the digital native, this leaves us with a potent question. Supposing that over the next decade or so, theatres begin responding to digital native audiences by altering their formats to a degree that their work became more interactive and subjective, turning their audiences into both spectator, protagonist, and creator. Might that alteration jettison one of the most important things that a traditional theatre experience (watching a tale unfold over time in a live setting) has to offer? By adapting to the digital mindset, are we in danger of reinforcing the subjective and the “intimate dialogues with our inner selves” that we find in online participation? And if so, are we perhaps in danger of sacrificing theatre’s role in enhancing Theory of Mind: the ability to comprehend the motives, desires, beliefs of others just now, when we need this understanding most? In the attempt to answer the question “why theatre?,” perhaps this is as sound an answer as any: theatre, like other fictional immersions,21 creates for us a deeper understanding of what it is to be human in a larger sense: it educates us in the understanding of the beliefs, intentions, and desires of others, and in that process prepares us for the application of compassionate response to, and empathetic concern for, a world outside of ourselves. In 2017, David Gunkel observed that arguments about technology seemed to come down to two opposing sides: the “network idealist,” for whom virtual technology promised freedom and opportunity, and the “naïve realist” who saw—along with increased surveillance and a loss of the “sense of reality”—a disconnection from face-to-face human communication.22 There is, of course, something in between. And my hope is that, as generations of digital natives advance, theatre may yet find the ways to appeal, adopting some of the attributes that attract digital native audiences, but maintaining its force in enhancing the basis for empathy.

Notes 1. A phrase coined by Marc Prensky, who describes those born after the widespread use of the internet as “digital natives” and those who were born before but have learned internet technology as it has developed in real time as “digital immigrants.” From On the Horizon (MCB University Press, October 2001), vol. 9, no. 5, www.marcprensky. com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-% 20Part1.pdf.

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2. M Borba, Unselfie, kindle ed. (New York: Touchstone, 2016), www.amazon.co.uk; Borba draws from research here in this quotation (V. Rideout, U. Foehr, and D. Roberts, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year Olds (Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation, January 2010); G. Toppo, “Techie Tykes: Kinds Going Mobile at Much Earlier Age,” USA Today, November 2015; Nielsen report cited by V. Glembocki, “How to Raise a People Person,” Parents, January 2015, pp. 50–53). 3. S. Greenfield, Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains, kindle ed. (Ebury Digital, 2014), www.amazon.co.uk, Chapter 11, para 25. 4. J. Firth, “The Online Brain: How the Internet May Be Changing Our Cognition,” World Psychiatry (2019), doi:10.1002/wps.20617. 5. Hideya Yamamoto, Kaoru Ito, Chihiro Honda, and Eiji Aramaki, “Does Digital Dementia Exist?” (accessed April  10, 2020), www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/ SSS18/paper/download/17467/15507. 6. Kep Kee Loh and Ryota Kanai, “How Has the Internet Reshaped Human Cognition?” (accessed April 10, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1177/1073858415595005. 7. M. H. Davis, “A Multidimensional Approach to Individual Differences in Empathy,” JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology 10 (1980): 85. This scale has been widely used since its publication and comprises 28 questions answered on a 5-point scale, measuring response in areas like perspective-taking and empathic concern. 8. S. B. Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy (London: Penguin, 2011). 9. R. Krznaric, Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It (London: Random House, 2014), 45. 10. Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Argument for Rational Compassion, kindle ed. (London: The Bodley Head, 2016), chapter 1, para 7. 11. R. Riggio, www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/201108/areyou-empathic-3-types-empathy-and-what-they-mean. 12. Justin Bariso, 2018, www.inc.com/justin-bariso/there-are-actually-3-types-ofempathy-heres-how-they-differ-and-how-you-can-develop-them-all.html. 13. N. Brewer, R. Young, and E. Barnett, “Measuring Theory of Mind in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 47.7 (March 9, 2017), published online, doi:10.1007/s10803-017-3080-x. 14. S. Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theatre, Dance, Performance Art and Installation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 4. 15. S. Benford and G. Giannachi, Performing Mixed Reality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 1. 16. M. Anderson, “Mediatised Performance and Theatre for Young People,” 67 (accessed April 10, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/00086495.2007.11672306. 17. Ibid., 71. 18. J. Kim (accessed April  10, 2020), www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-andlearning/digital-thinking-and-analog-campus. 19. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995). 20. See: D. Williams, V. Crittenden, T. Keo, and P. McCarty, “The Use of Social Media: An Exploratory Study of Usage Among Digital Natives,” Journal of Public Affairs (2012) (accessed April 12, 2020), doi:10.1002/pa.1414; also C. Kivunja, “Theoretical Perspectives of How Digital Natives Learn,” International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 3.3 (2014) (accessed April 12, 2020). 21. See: J. Black and J. Barnes, “Fiction and Social Cognition: The Effect of Viewing Award Winning Television Dramas and Theory of Mind,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts (2015) (accessed April 12, 2020), doi:10.1037/aca0000031. 22. D. Gunkel, Theorizing Digital Rhetoric, edited by A. Davisson and A. Hess (London: Routledge, 2017), 21.

22 REMEMBERING DREAMS Fran Teague

I seem to be haunted by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare’s play recurs in my life in odd ways. My first experience came early. My mother, an actress, took my younger sister and me to a production when we were very small (perhaps 3 and 4). I have no memory of this occasion, but I do have a lovely anecdote that my mother passed on. In the taxi afterwards, my sister and I argued bitterly about who would get to marry Bottom when we grew up. For us, Bottom was the best stuffed animal possible. Each of us jealously wanted to claim him. (When I finally directed the play, I was in my forties and cast my husband as Bottom, thus fulfilling retroactively my childhood wish.) The first professional production that I do recall was at the Stratford Ontario Festival in 1960. My sister and I  didn’t quarrel on that occasion, but we were fickle in our affections. We agreed that the Puck was our favorite, because he moved about the stage in acrobatic splendor, vaulting from the canopy above the thrust stage to swing into the action. The review in Shakespeare Survey says that the production “was a good tourist performance, in that it concentrated on making the play rambunctious at the expense of the poetry. Indeed, Jake Dengle, though wonderfully muscular as Puck, had no idea how to speak verse.”1 It cheers me to know that my memories of Puck as wonderfully acrobatic have some confirmation, although I am sad that the reviewer scorned a production that remains in my memory a magical occasion. Now, years later, I can still recall what the stage looked like as Puck performed. As a Shakespeare professor, I’ve seen many productions of Dream by now, have worked on a few, and have taught the play for decades, but a specific adaptation of the play has haunted me. One day I was browsing through an old copy of the Burns Mantel Year’s Best Plays series. I find irresistible the back matter in these volumes, the long catalogues of the hits and flops for any given season. Looking at

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the 1939 volume, I was caught by the entry for a show called Swingin’ the Dream, said to be a musical version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in Louisiana, which had closed in 13 days. The songs were by Jimmie van Heusen, the choreography by Agnes DeMille, and the cast onstage included Benny Goodman, Bud Freeman, Louis Armstrong, the Dandridge Sisters, Butterfly McQueen, Maxine Sullivan, the Lindy Hoppers, and Moms Mabley—to name just a few.2 The show’s existence entranced me. I had to know more. That decision led me to a long research project, one that grew broader and wandered in strange directions over the years. Along the way, I wrote a fair amount about the production, and why it might have failed, but I had resigned myself to a lack of information, since no script survives.3 Then, in 2003, a University of Toronto graduate student named Alan Corrigan wrote me that he’d seen a piece I  did about the show and that he’d also found part of a script. I  was ecstatic: some of my questions might finally be answered. They weren’t, of course. Alan had turned up four pages of script from the mechanicals’ show of Pyramus and Thisbe, now labelled “Opera,” with marginal notes about what songs were performed during the scene. His discovery was fun to read and imagine, but it told me nothing about the main plot, nor did it answer my questions about the show’s failure.4 Once again, I had to accept that I would never know certain things, deciding that the production’s elusive nature was part of what fascinated me. In the summer of 2012, however, I received an email from Marcia Hocker, who said her mother had danced in the show. I’m contacting you regarding your book “Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage.” It just so happens that my mother performed in the play “Swingin’ the Dream” and did so for all 13 performances as a tap dancer. Her name was Hazel Ferguson, now Hazel Whitfield and she has been living in Stone Mountain, GA for some eighteen years. I happened upon your book on the internet while doing research about the play and a photo of the entire cast in a January 9, 1940 magazine called “PIC.” I was able to locate and purchase the magazine from a company in New York. I also listened to your narrative on this play.5 While visiting my parents in May, I gave her a copy of the magazine and let her hear your commentary on the web. She was really excited and recognized the music almost immediately. . . . I asked my mother if she would be willing to discuss this experience further if contacted and she agreed. So, should you be planning a discussion at some point, my . . . mother can perhaps provide some further insight. She has the inside track and in her words . . . “Ask me anything. I remember it like it was last week.” (26 July, 2012) Responding immediately, I  soon had Mrs. Whitfield’s phone number and we agreed to meet for lunch. Knowing that one of my colleagues, Freda Scott Giles,

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does research on African American theatre during the Harlem Renaissance, I asked her to come as well, and the three of us met on August 2, 2012. Mrs. Whitfield shared with us her memories of the show, of dancing at the Apollo Theatre, and growing up in Harlem during the Depression. But it was also a lunch that left my theatre history questions unanswered. Mrs. Whitfield had been a child when her teacher told her mother about the show and how the producers wanted a number of children to dance. She had to leave school, fib about her age, and become the one who supported her family before she was 13 years old. She had fond memories of the other children who danced: she had kept up with some of them, and told us about one who had taken a wrong turn and died young, as well as another who continued to dance. But her memories of adult performers in the show were dim because they had been unimportant to her then. She did remember Peter van Eyck, the assistant stage manager responsible for the children, who took good care of her, making her feel protected backstage particularly from one of the other children who pestered her. No such protector had been around at her next job at the Apollo Theatre, although she had enjoyed her time there. But when I  asked about how the Lindy Hoppers from the World’s Fair were worked into the show or whether she recalled particular performers or whether the script had, as one reviewer claimed, too much Shakespeare, she simply couldn’t remember. None of these points was important to her then. Her memory of Agnes DeMille was also vague: she recalled someone “pretty good” teaching them the dances, but the children were not a major part of the show, so most of the choreographer’s attention was focused elsewhere. Just like me falling in love with the Puck in 1960, she remembered the things that mattered to her as a child. She is a lovely, gracious lady, sharp and charming, and of course her attention then, like her memories now, focused on the people with whom she spent her time and the family she had to support in a horrible economy. Of late, many books in the field of performance studies talk about cultural memory and theatrical performance. Words like “surrogation” and “recycling” matter, while the metaphor of theatrical ghosts that haunt the process is a powerful one. As Rebecca Schneider remarks in her review of Marvin Carlson’s generative study, The Haunted Stage, “The spate of recent books on cultural memory and theatrical performance makes this claim [that the theatre allows us to grasp the ‘dynamics of cultural memory itself ’] a kind of turn-of-the-century mantra for theatre and performance studies.”6 (She goes on to name half a dozen such studies.) The books that helped created Schneider’s “turn-of-the-century mantra” do certainly speak to theoretical issues, as well the problems we encounter interpreting an ephemeral performance. But I wonder if we might not pay more attention to the subjectivity and fallibility of our memories, the way we remember not what happened, but what we needed then and now need to recall. Might we pay more attention to what gives us pleasure, what we do when we play at our work?

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For myself, I have loved theatre since age 4: my mother taking us for a special treat and the world’s best stuffed animal form an irresistible combination. The following year I played my first role (a singing sunflower), and I have been working on shows ever since. At 17, I went to Rice University, which had no theatre department, but quite a few extracurricular productions. My first term, I tried out for a production of Everyman directed by John Velz, landing a small role and having a lovely time. At the closing night party, I began talking with a senior, Ben Teague, about books. Two years later we married, and our marriage lasted 40 years until his death. John Velz would direct my dissertation, and we would later write a book together. My husband Ben and I  began inviting friends to come celebrate midsummer night by reading the play aloud with us. I continued to direct, including that production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Ben played Bottom. Theatre was pleasure, closely linked to love. When Ben died in 2009, my friends from the local theatre where we worked gathered around to protect and help me. I found my academic life less satisfying for all sorts of reasons, and I had a lunatic idea. Perhaps it was time to run away with the circus. About a year later I asked if I could shift from the English Department to the Department of Theatre and Film Studies. The theatre faculty had all worked professionally and held degrees in the field. I had neither worked professionally nor had I ever taken a theatre course. Yet somehow it happened. I  have taught dramaturgy, script analysis, and graduate seminars ever since, as well as continuing to work with our local theatre company, directing and taking occasional roles. In the summer of 2019, I played Egeus in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was wonderfully silly: I ordered my moustache (from Amazon, the Zappa model, complete with soul patch), worked on the set and costumes, and even danced in the Bollywood dance number that served as our Bergomask. Why theatre? For me, a Shakespearean, his plays are musical scores. They must be embodied to be realized. Like all live performance, they are ephemeral. Their meanings slip and change. Intellectually, I find that their ephemerality and ambiguity keep them ever fresh and exciting. Humanly, I feel that they are pleasure, hard work for applause, collaboration for love and support. Like music, plays can be a delight when recorded, but the uncertainty of what will happen means that live performance is a delight as well. In class after class I ask my students if they would ever make a choice between live music and recorded music. So far no one thinks that is a reasonable choice to make. I would argue that making a choice between live and recorded performance is just as ill-advised. Watching a Bollywood film, I marvel at the way the music and dancing occur in a perfection of timing that cannot be obtained live, but watching our Bergomask, I marveled at the bodies straining to hit the cues and kick together, time step together, jazz hands together. I also marvel at the night our sound system failed and to the heartbeat of the audience’s clapping we did the number anyway.

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Again, why theatre? My best answer is to say with Bottom, “Masters, I am to discourse wonders: but ask me not what.” Personally, I cannot manage without a good dose of ideas, fun, and love. More objectively, I would suggest that live performance, like childhood memory, is ephemeral: each of us retains what is needed or desired. At the end of a play like Measure for Measure, for example, the audience does not respond to the text nor to the learned footnotes that may accompany it, but rather to the production’s bodies as they show us what Isabella chooses to do to the Duke: say yes, say no, stay silent, perform whatever seems right to the actor. The performance ends the story for that moment, but implicit in that ending is the potential of another performance with a different ending. Furthermore, theatre is playful and invites its audience to play as well. Live performance shows a world in which the time and place is whenever and wherever the production chooses. In a play, the actor’s identity can be fluid: the young can play old, women can play men, a plump redhead can be wearing padding and a wig that obscure a balding string bean. On a stage, the dead can get up and exit stage left or right. While most of us have been trained by novels and films to attend to a narrative point of view, plays have no one to tell us where to look or who to hear. If the star of the show is center stage holding forth, and I want to focus my attention on an attractive background figure, no camera or narrator can cut that figure. That flexibility means that I can control my own experience in a way that mediated performance often tries to restrict. Finally, theatre is communal: whether one is backstage, onstage, or in the front of house, everyone is invited to make the performance work. The staff and crew set up the performers, the performers deliver the play, and the audience responds. If someone succeeds or fails in the task, that person is not alone: others succeed or fail as a result. We are all in the theatre, enmeshed in one another’s performance.

Notes 1. Arnold Edinborough, “International Notes: Canada,” Shakespeare Survey 14 (1961): 117. The IMDB entry on Dengle suggests he had a long career as a character actor in television and film. Incidentally, my sister, a computer programmer, barely recalls going to the theatre. 2. A version of that Burns Mantel list is now online at www.ibdb.com, if you’d like to see for yourself. 3. See Frances Teague, “Beards and Broadway: Shakespeare and the Unacknowledged Agent,” The Upstart Crow 25 (2005): 4–15; Frances Teague, Shakespeare and American Popular Entertainment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 4. For Alan’s account of the show and what he found, you can see his article here, www. borrowers.uga.edu/781411/display. 5. Ms. Hocker is referring to an interview I had done for the Folger Library radio program, Shakespeare in American Life, www.folger.edu/shakespeare-in-american-life#About. 6. Rebecca Schneider, Modern Drama 46 (2003): 324.

23 THEATRICAL PLEASURE AND LYNN NOTTAGE’S INTIMATE APPAREL Joseph Candido

At the very beginning of what was to become a long and happy career in university teaching, I had the good fortune to develop a friendship with the noted theatre historian George Kernodle, whose From Art to Theatre (Chicago, 1944) remains to this day an indispensable study of Renaissance stagecraft. Among other things, George and I, as colleagues with shared interests (he in the Theatre Department and I in English), liked to attend plays together, an activity which, as George grew older and increasingly stricken by Parkinson’s disease, we invariably did at his house through televised or recorded productions. On one occasion, after we had viewed what seemed to me an unusually raucous performance of Twelfth Night, he asked me how I liked it. Eager to impress my older and more distinguished colleague, I replied that I thought the director had ignored the serious undertones of the play, opting instead for uncomplicated comedy designed merely “to please the audience.” George’s response, clearly forged from a lifetime in the theatre as director, dramaturge, and scholar, brought me up short: he said simply “What else is there?” In one sense, the disarming veracity of the statement closes out discussion, for as Shakespeare’s Prospero reminds us in the epilogue to The Tempest, the playwright’s “project” is most definitely “to please” (12–13); yet in another sense, George’s assertion opens up a whole range of q­ uestions ­regarding the nature of theatrical pleasure itself—its astonishing variety and purposes, as well as its multifarious effects on a particular audience at any given time in any given place, including its ability to delight and unsettle at the same time. In what follows, I would like to focus on one particular sort of pleasure that we often experience in the theatre, a pleasure, moreover, that the theatre seems uniquely able to produce, and attempt to define it from what may appear to be a rather oblique perspective: the poetry of William Wordsworth. My point of reference will be a recent production of Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel staged in 2017

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by Theatre Squared, a respected professional company located in Fayetteville, Arkansas. First, and briefly, to Wordsworth. In “Tintern Abbey,” a poem familiar to all students of English literature, the narrator describes a very specific sort of pleasure he experiences upon seeing the Wye valley after an absence of five years. Contemplating the beauty of the place, its steep cliffs, green landscape, orchards, hedge rows, and mysterious dark woods, he again finds himself under the spell of nature’s restorative power. The “forms of beauty” (24) everywhere about him are, moreover, of a very specific sort. Recollected “oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din / Of towns and cities,” they create for him in hours of weariness “sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart” (26–29). It is with that second preposition that I would like to be particularly concerned. Most of us, and I daresay most poets, would have used the word “in” rather than “along” to describe the deep, inner sensations the narrator feels at this moment. Wordsworth’s choice of “along,” however, is extremely significant, for it implies a pleasure materially fleeting yet one that somehow remains lively and kinetic in the imagination, produced in quiet and capable of being recalled in all its vividness because, in a manner of speaking, it remains “alive” within us. Quite literally, it quickens the heart. I would like to suggest that the experience Wordsworth describes is essentially a dramatic one, analogous to those we often have in the theatre; for example, in the rush of feeling that can come upon us quietly, even unawares, but that nonetheless remains so vivid in our imaginations that it may be all we remember about our theatrical experience or, at the very least, the first thing that comes to mind when we recall it. I’m thinking here of those moments of theatrical pleasure that go beyond mere gaudy satisfaction (exaggerated gestures, flamboyant sets, amped-up music, and the like) but rather the sort of pleasure that can take us by surprise and bring real insight with the quiet simplicity “felt along the heart” that, as Wordsworth later observes, so powerfully evokes the “still, sad music of humanity” (92). Intimate Apparel includes several moments of this sort, particularly those centering around the relationship between Esther Mills, a 35-year-old African American seamstress, and Mr. Marks, a Romanian Jewish cloth merchant whom she visits regularly in order to purchase the material she needs to make apparel for her customers. The couple interacts on five separate occasions, each of which creates precisely the sort of rich, subtle, and unforgettable moment of kinetic quiet that Wordsworth describes. As each meeting builds on the former, Nottage gradually pieces together the relationship between the two figures through a series of artful stage pictures in which the smallest gestures, pauses, and inflections speak silently, often wordlessly, to the audience. In the Theatre Squared production, the scenes, all set apart in the upper middle of a bi-level stage with all other playing spaces half-visible beneath, comprised quite literally the physical as well as thematic nexus of the action. Staged physically above the entire rest of the set, they clearly were meant to occupy a privileged, and memorable, theatrical space. For me, the scenes between Esther and the cloth merchant not only comprised the symbolic

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center of the play but also created precisely those dramatic moments of unforgettable and kinetic quiet “felt along the heart” that the theatre is so uniquely capable of producing—especially under the guidance of a sensitive director who can elicit from the actors sustained moments of delicate inflection and strategic pauses in speech and stage movement. The plot of Intimate Apparel is disarmingly straightforward; it follows in perfectly linear fashion the fortunes of Esther, a decent and likable woman whose small social circle includes Mrs. Dickson (her landlady and confidante), Mrs. Van Buren (a wealthy and lonely socialite for whom she makes clothing), Mayme (a prostitute and good friend), George (a man she knows only through their longdistance epistolary correspondence and with whom she makes a disastrous marriage), and finally Mr. Marks, the figure with whom she shares her most intimate romantic moments, but a man denied to her by social and religious convention. This tension gives to their encounters a strained poignancy that Esther shares with no other person, for she and Marks are the only two people in the play who genuinely have something in common—the appreciation of fine fabric that dominates each of their conversations and serves as the most prominent symbol of the unspoken depth of their relationship. Throughout the play they speak, visually as well as verbally, through fabric. In the most quiet, indeed often silent, moments of the play, fabric becomes the vocabulary of love. In each of these encounters, Shana Gold, the director of the Theatre Squared production, conveyed the cultural gap that separated Esther and Marks by keeping them, quite literally, at arm’s length from each other, except on those occasions when they talked about or handled the cloth that was always visible in Marks’s shop. Marks’s overtures always took the form of an invitation to handle fabric, as in their first meeting when he speaks of the “fine and delicate” Japanese silk that has just arrived, and upon which he bestows the tactile gentleness that clearly mirrors the longing he has for Esther. When she also gently takes hold of the fabric, “reveling in the tactile pleasure of the texture” (s.d. 17),1 Gold has the actors each take one side of the silken cloth and slowly draw their hands over it in a fashion that clearly conveys their shared feelings for each other as they transfer their intense but sublimated longings to the object they hold together in their hands. This visual motif of intense focus on fabric joined with awkward movements of separation and distance is, to some extent, built into the play through Nottage’s stage directions. The Theatre Squared production, however, deftly carried it even further than Nottage’s text, always with the effect of creating deeply poignant moments that, in my view, riveted the audience in ways that other scenes in the play could not. To borrow the terminology of yet another Romantic poet, John Keats calls the effect produced by moments like these “aching pleasure”; and in the case of Theatre Squared’s production, precisely this commingled feeling ran through the action with the force of a bittersweet, musical motif. As in opera, both Esther and Marks had their own musical vocabulary each time they appeared together onstage, yet this music could not have been more different from the

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ragtime tunes that provided an alluring undersong for the rest of the play. Theirs was slower, deeper, and more resonant; in Wordsworth’s terms, “the still, sad music of humanity.” Silences, evocative pauses, and delicate gestures always create moments of heightened feeling in the theatre (the feelings that here I’m calling theatrical pleasure), and Intimate Apparel makes extremely deft use of them. The next four encounters between Esther and Marks, for example, function essentially as separate phases of one consistent theatrical “movement” in which the visual and aural work together to excite the audience with expressions of the most painful feelings of frustrated pleasure. Here again, we might think of the figures on Keats’s Grecian Urn, burning with passion yet frozen in time, eager with anticipation yet fated never to have their desires fulfilled. The Theatre Squared production of Intimate Apparel captured instances such as these beautifully, particularly in silence, pause, and gesture. Moreover, the sense of frustrated longing that the characters experience also gets translated to the audience as, so to speak, we “participate” in the moment with the figures on stage. In the second meeting between Esther and Marks, for example, we observe the two of them gently handling another bolt of “hand-dyed silk,” clearly a metaphor for the delicacy and genuineness of their love (25–26), which Marks then sensually drapes over Esther’s back. At her urging (“It would look very nice on you, Mr. Marks”), he also places a bit of it around his own neck, the bright magenta of the fabric contrasting vividly with the black jacket he always wears to remind him of his relationship to his past (the jacket is his father’s, including the missing button that Marks is reluctant to repair) and to his cherished cultural traditions, among them his arranged marriage to a woman he has not yet met and his powerful bond to “my ancestors and God” (26). The whole conversation is pervaded by the awkward pauses and tentative speech evocative of frustrated longing. By the time Esther inquires why Marks always wears black, they have already divested themselves of the fabric, and the literal space between them widens ever so slightly, followed by a long moment of silence as Marks moves away from Esther to re-fold the fabric so that all she sees is his back. Wordlessly, in a silence broken only by a thin, melancholy, and extended musical note (not indicated in Nottage’s text), she sensually runs her hand along his shoulders and exits without a word. The effect of the moment on the audience in the Theatre Squared production was palpable, owing clearly to its contrast with the more conventional, regularly paced dialogue of the rest of the play, as well as the stunning change in tone and perspective it produced. The spectators, like the actors on stage—again to borrow Keats’s terminology—get teased out of thought by the proximity of closure, sharing in the frustration of Esther and Marks when the resolution that they and the audience collectively desire, and which seems so imminent, fails to occur. Even the most inexperienced playgoer can attest to the fact that the theatre, as preeminently a medium that foregrounds dialogue and speechifying, can ironically

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speak to us most emphatically at just such moments of wordless expectation. Again and again, the Theatre Squared performance emphasized such instances. When, for example, Esther pays Marks a surprise visit while he is making tea, we again enter a rhetorical space where protracted moments of silence and meaningful gesture supersede conventional stage dialogue. After a long absence from Marks’s shop, Esther has re-visited it at last to purchase material for her wedding gown. When Marks gradually realizes that the wedding dress Esther is making is for her and not one of her moneyed clients, he displays the finest and most delicate material in his shop, ordered by a “rich lady” who, unlike Esther, cannot appreciate “the delicacy of the fabric.” The stage directions to the scene in Nottage’s text reveal the tension of the moment. I have included in brackets further details of stage movement incorporated into the Theatre Squared performance not included in Nottage’s text: ESTHER:  It’s so beautiful, it looks like little fairy hands made it. It’s too fine for me.

touch it and then refuse. Please. Touch. (Marks watches Esther run her fingers across the fabric. He also touches it, sensually. She closes her eyes. He continues to watch her, savoring the moment.) [Throughout this sequence the long, lonely musical note we have heard before recurs, then slowly dies out to silence.] It is exquisite. Miss Mills, many fine ladies have worn it against their skin, but it was made for you. [Marks draws out the last three words, slowly and emphatically.] I know this . . . (Esther holds the fabric to her face and begins to weep.) . . . May it be your first gift. (He wants to offer comfort, but he cannot touch her.) [Marks stands here, as he does often in the play in his meetings with Esther, with his hands awkwardly at his side.] ESTHER:  I won’t let you. MARKS:  It would be my pleasure. [Marks draws out the word “pleasure,” enunciating it slowly and sensually. They are connected for a brief, wordless moment.] (Esther accepts the length of fabric. They gaze at each other, neither able to articulate the depth of their feelings. A moment. Esther and Marks exit the stage) [separately, in opposite directions, walking past each other wordlessly as they do.] (35) MARKS:  Come

The episode is a fine example of what Jason Shipman, the actor who played Marks in the Theatre Squared production, calls two people “breathing together”—the dramatic effect that he and Britney Walker-Merritte, the actor who played Esther, strove to achieve. At moments such as these, when the “intimate apparel” Esther and Marks so affectionately share becomes the only medium through which they can express their deep longing for one another, the reality of their aching pleasure gets breathed into dramatic life in a manner palpable both to them and to the audience. Ensuing scenes in the production work even further variations on this aural and visual motif. At one moment we again encounter Marks and Esther in his shop after a long absence. Esther’s ill-fated marriage is beginning to

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deteriorate, and she arrives to purchase fabric (fine Scottish wool) for a suit she intends to make for her husband. Again they are at some distance apart, even as each strokes one end of the fabric, after which Marks shows Esther a roll of lace that he has been saving for her alone. The new fabric animates him. Elated, he playfully drapes the lace around Esther’s neck. They find themselves standing dangerously close to each other. [Here there is a meaningful pause as they stare into each other’s eyes.] They are so close that they can inhale each other’s words. (44) In the Theatre Squared production, their dialogue takes on a staccato rhythm, punctuated by pauses and awkward bodily movements. They seem on the verge of finally putting into words their unspoken feelings for each other when Esther crushes Marks by telling him that they can no longer see each other (“I think you know why”), and she exits wordlessly with the wool and the lace (45). But, despite Esther’s assertion, this is not their final meeting. Considerable time has passed before Esther makes her last visit to Marks’s shop. Her marriage, fractured by the adultery of her husband and his squandering of her life savings, has fallen apart. She hopes to start life anew, but there is still some unfinished emotional business to which she must attend. This last meeting between Marks and Esther is the shortest and most deeply meaningful of its kind in the play. Esther, who has come to give Marks a smoking jacket of Japanese silk originally intended for her husband, appears silently, unseen by Marks, taking him utterly by surprise. The silent revelation is the first of many in the scene. There is dialogue, of course, but on this occasion, words surrender dramatic space to a staging of the ineffable in a manner that theatre alone can provide. Here again they speak through the fabric, the same Japanese silk that served as the focus for their first meeting; and again there is the tantalizing expectation, this time even more emotionally charged, that their repressed sensuality may somehow find full expression. On this occasion, Nottage uses dialogue as the muted undersong to the real language of the scene—the stage movements of Marks and Esther as he dons the jacket and the gestures immediately following. In the Theatre Squared production, the moment was played with the most deliberate slowness possible, thus highlighting the subtle meaningfulness of each silent gesture. Nottage’s text has Marks putting on the jacket “carefully,” but the Theatre Squared production made much more of the moment. Marks, who as noted above, had kept his arms mostly to his side in his earlier encounters with Esther, placed them now with sensual delight into the jacket, much to the enjoyment of the audience, many of whom registered their pleasure by approbatory laughter. Nottage’s stage directions were played with such a delicacy and meaningfulness of expression that the actors and audience were allowed to savor the moment together: (Esther takes a step toward Marks, hesitates, then takes another step forward. She raises her hands.) May I? [At this moment the long, lonely musical note is

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heard and continues to the end of the scene.] (He nervously holds his breath and nods yes. Esther reaches toward Marks, expecting him to move away. She smooths the shoulders of the garment, then expertly runs her hands down the jacket’s lapels, straightening the wrinkled material. Marks does not move. Silence. Their eyes are fixed upon one another, then Esther reluctantly walks away, exiting the boudoir without a word. Marks is left alone onstage [gazing outward toward the ­audience] to contemplate the moment.) (p. 57) In instances like this the theatre becomes, if I  may use the term, “Wordsworthian.” Here indeed is the culminating moment in an artfully sustained sequence of lively, kinetic pleasure “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart” that we recall with increasing enjoyment as it builds to a memorable conclusion and, moreover, one that can be happily re-lived in our memories each time we recall it. I am, of course, not at all sure that the form of theatrical pleasure I am trying to describe here is that which my friend George Kernodle had in mind in his wise reproof to me so many years ago; and I am certainly not suggesting that the playhouse is the only place where such imaginative pleasures occur, or that theatre is utterly unique among the arts in this regard. Anyone who has ever stepped into an art gallery, read a great book, or listened to a sublime piece of music, knows that. But I would like to suggest that the theatre (as the place where language, gesture, sound, and even silence, may be deployed to create unforgettable “speaking pictures,” that both teach and delight)2 can hardly be bettered as the imaginative site in which to hear, as we do in Intimate Apparel, the still, sad music of humanity.

Notes 1. My citations of Intimate Apparel are to the Dramatists Play Service edition (New York, 2005), and are noted by page numbers. 2. The famous statement is, of course, from Sidney’s Defense of Poetry, 1595.

24 YEATS’S “LAPIS LAZULI” AS THEATRUM MUNDI Daniel T. O’Hara

“Lapis Lazuli” is a late poem, 1938, composed months before W. B. Yeats’s death in January 1939.1 It is often referred to as one of his “death poems.” A dramatist, as well as a great lyric poet, Yeats instinctively frames his situation, dying as a second world war is sure to break out, in theatrical terms. This spontaneous turning to a metaphorical generalization of the terms of the theatre to frame a monumental, terrifying situation, is common. Why do we do so? In Yeats’s case, it all fits nicely. He became widely known for his plays written as part of the Irish Renaissance, as part of the co-founding, with Lady Gregory, of the Abbey Theatre, at the heart of the cultural and political movement for an independent Irish state. In fact, Yeats received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 primarily for his dramatic work. A very nice fit indeed. However, there is more to Yeats’s story at least. The first 60% of the poem presents Yeats’s immediate situation and widens out from it to the history of civilizations, all framed in the same theatrical terms of tragedy. All the people he knows are variants upon Hamlet, Lear, Ophelia, Cordelia, because “all perform their tragic play.” Why? Not solely because we are all fated to play out predetermined tragic roles—it feels more like we may chose them—but because by doing so we seek something we in the West can gain by no other means: Gaiety transfiguring all that dread. All men have aimed at, found and lost; Black out; Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. (292–93)

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What can this mean? It appears that we—certainly those in the Western world throughout our warring civilizations’ history—tear ourselves apart, characters and civilizations, precisely so that such sparagmos will produce this moment of “Heaven blazing into the head.” This moment of vision also, with Yeats especially, sounds like the moment of orgasm. This is another feature not only of the Shakespearean template Yeats uses but of the Western historical horizon in this part of the poem. Once again, given even some knowledge of Yeats, his life and career, his time period of the last part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, of aestheticism, symbolism, modernism, the literary and artistic movements he has been involved with—all this makes the erotic analogy between orgasm and visionary enlightenment familiar and expected. It is also reinforced by the romantic and courtly love ethics of the poet that Yeats subscribes to, and, it has been argued by many critics, that it goes all the way back to the secondcentury Gnostics at the least. Love, suffering, and death, self-destructive tearing of oneself apart—these are the elements and phases or stages of the Western quest for vision. All is burnt up and torn asunder so that one may experience vision, that heavenly gaiety blazing into the head. And whether this is so for one person or an entire civilization, it is not made greater. A poet dying in his bed or ­Western ­civilization tearing itself apart on the battlefields of a new global war are ­democratically tragic: Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, And all the drop scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages, It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce. (293) So adamant is Yeats about this equalization of tragedy—whether thousands or one experience it, it is all the same—that not even art, art for art’s sake, his previous great refuge, can save him or us. Even if the art is like that of the most celebrated legendary sculptor of ancient Greek civilization: No handiwork of Callimachus Who handled marble as if it were bronze, Made draperies that seemed to rise When sea-wind swept the corner, stands; His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem Of a slender palm, stood but a day. (293)

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Given this perspective, hysterical reactions losing it in arty women’s saloons or on poetic deathbeds, or on the metaphorical stages of everyday life across the Western world, will do nothing to avert the end, nor should they do so. For, “all things fall and are built again / And those that build them again are gay.” This doctrine can be found explained in Yeats’s A Vision (1925, 1937). It is played out in many of his most famous poems, such “A  Dialogue of Self and Soul,” among others. Vico, rediscovered by many modernists, such as Joyce, Pound, and Yeats himself, is a precursor, as is Nietzsche in his vision of the eternal return or recurrence. This doctrine is akin to the wheel of karma in which we return in new incarnations, except that in Yeats’s version (as in Nietzsche’s) we return exactly the same, at some point. Nietzsche has a nineteenth-century materialist version of entropy and recombination that allows on the cosmic scale no radical changes, no quantum influx of contingency and certainly no ethical supervision of the process. While Yeats in the late play Purgatory allow an ethical result, he too does not find an ethical purpose in this doctrine of the eternal return in any of its variants. In this play, a man seeks to escape the wheel of return by killing his father and his son, so that he will die himself or live on as himself at the phase of his life he is in, while purging his mother of her terrible dreaming back of her life in Purgatory. He fails, of course, and as the play ends, the scene of the double murders is beginning again in some Yeatsian Groundhog Day prophetic parody, with the man living the scene through the eyes of his father and then his son, no longer even through his own eyes, but more like that of his mother in her infinite terror of pollution and dread of pollution to come. He lives as himself only when he sees the scene beginning to start all over again. Even with this terrible prospect in view, Yeats would say that his lot is not any greater, nor does he expiate any greater guilt, for if the man is a true Yeatsian, he would be experiencing both “tragedy wrought to its uttermost” and the “gaiety transforming all that dread.” The final two stanzas shift the perspective radically from that of the first three. After a break, as if we moved from one longish first act, we open onto a landscape that sounds more Tibetan than Western, but it is all to be found in the title stone, the gift from Harry Clifton, who turns out to be the father and a famous contemporary Irish poet of the same name. So from the first three stanzas we go from salon to stages around the world, real and imagined, to a Vico-like or Nietzschean history of civilizations and the cosmos, the carved face of lapis lazuli displaying Eastern monks climbing to a mountain chapel with a musician over which flies a “long-legged bird” declared by Yeats to be “a symbol of longevity.” In these stanzas, we have left the realm of symbol or image and have landed in that of the allegorical or visionary emblem. Here, what Yeats sees is declared to be so. The Western world of tragedy, however, is not annihilated but rather subsumed by the vision of the spiritual quest, not by self-destructive tragedy but via disciple and master, poet and musician, study and enlightenment, an internalization of the violent tragedy and its vision that literally is written in stone, emblematic of

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timeless wisdom. Even the imperfections of the stone contribute to the design Yeats reads there: Every discolouration of the stone, Every accidental crack or dent Seems a watercourse or an avalanche, Or lofty slope where it still snows Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch Sweetens the little half-way house Those Chinamen climb towards, and I Delight to imagine them seated there; There, on the mountain and the sky, On all the tragic scene they stare. One asks for mournful melodies; Accomplished fingers begin to play. Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay. (293) The poem itself encompasses the Western sparagmos that produces vision and this Eastern meditative transcendence. Truly global before the term is to be used for any new world order, as the British empire verges upon another self-destructive world war, whose aftermath literally tears the colonial world apart piece by piece, the poem would seem to take the Eastern vantage point, again literally. I cannot help raising the question of where the speaker is, a version of Yeats the poet in his last days. Where is his “stage” located? The poem’s disembodied voice is first heard commenting upon a salon of hysterical women, who, perhaps like newspaper journalists and left-wing writers such as Auden, Spender, or Isherwood, are sounding the alarms about a new world war. Then, the voice appears to be looking around, almost as if on the streets (of Dublin, London, Ravenna, where Yeats often was at the end of his life?), and discovering the masks of Hamlet, Lear, and so on. Suddenly again, the voice is opining upon the history of civilizations—from where? Finally, a break as if the voice has evaporated, before it returns to characterize the lapis lazuli and the design of its carving, as imagined by this disembodied voice. The stone, in life, stands upon Yeats’s desk, or so, after Yeats’s death, the administrators of the estate deem it to be. Yeats, who is so careful of placing himself in a poem—one can think of “The Wild Swans at Coole” (1919), for instance, or “The Municipal Gallery Revisited” (1936)—in “Lapis Lazuli” allows himself to become a powerfully fluent voice free-floating around the world scenes of the poem, a ghostly voice of the one who is almost, or is by the time we reread it, dead. Not only is there a question of place, however; there is also a question of time—what time is it in the poem? The first stanza could better fit in the

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period of the turn of the century (1900), the period when, in reaction to Wilde and his debacle, there was a reaction against the fiddle and the palette, against art for art’s sake and aestheticism. And then, the current urban streets, the rise and fall of civilizations, the setting of the stone, the scene in the stone, the final smiling eyes—do their plural referring to the figures in the stone also include the speaker’s, after all, when Irish eyes are smiling.  .  .  . The poem could be in the theatre of the mind or memory, of course, but do we then supplement the poem with a vision of Yeats on his death bed? Dispersed in space, pervasive in time, yet, perhaps, beyond or outside of both? The frame of the theatre permits the poet and us his readers to imagine anew the tragedy of death and its traditional Western and Eastern, its truly global or world compensations. One of the ironies of theatre history is that while the metaphor and model of the theatre is commonly generalized to produce the image of the entire world as a theatre—whether we think of the Shakespearean commonplace of “all the world’s a stage” or any of its variations—often this universalization happens as the body in performance aspect, the individualization of the person, the actor on stage before us and behind the mask or under the makeup and costume, is methodically into the role to the point where the sense memory of the person is being tapped to fill out the outline of the character in the plot of the play—this physical being disappears from theoretical view. This evaporation, or dissolution, of the body is no less the case here in Yeats’s late death poem. The feeling it inspires, at least in this reader, is one of haunting. Like the old man character at the end of Purgatory, this reader sees the eternal return of the sufferings of experience and the body’s capacity for action vanishing before my eyes, too. Instead, the inscribed disembodied voice, as herein, sounds here, there, and (not everywhere but) anywhere, haunting any possible memory of all imaginable futures. A passage, in extended parenthesis, I  have come across while researching another project, one from Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero, sheds light for me on why theatre is put to use in this theatrum mundi manner: Style is always a secret; but the occult aspect of its implications does not arise from the mobile and ever-provisional nature of language; its secret is recollection locked within the body of the writer . . . what stands firmly and deeply beneath style  .  .  . are fragments of a reality entirely alien to language. The miracle of transmutation makes style a kind of supraliterary operation which carries [humanity] to the threshold of power and magic. . . . It is the Authority of Style, that is, the entirely free relationship between language and its fleshly double, which places the writer above History as the freshness of Innocence. (12–13)2

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Une Fraicheur au-dessus de l’Histoire is the original French for the last phrase of the quotation. Rather than Innocence, which suggests a pure state before history, we have a freshness above history, as if aired out by the winds of the passing storm. To conclude this consideration of “Lapis Lazuli” as theatrum mundi, I must return to the dramatic scene I feel haunts the final lines, when the speaker sees the eyes of the carved monks smiling. Because of both the repetition in those lines—“their eyes, their ancient glittering eyes”—and the accretion of scholarship over the years on this poem, the figure the speaker assumes, I see, is more Lear-like than any other Shakespearean character. As such, then, these lines recall the moment in the final appearance of Lear and Cordelia in King Lear, when the storm-battered old man carries his dead daughter onto the stage and Lear sees Cordelia’s lips move, as if she is alive and speaking. So persuasive is the scene that Lear then dies, too, his heart bursting, smilingly. Yeats’s poem has rewritten this final scene from the play. In this way, Yeats has staged his own ideal death of father and daughter all in one; or, as if Shakespeare’s play had always been displaying Yeats’s revision, even as Yeats now speaks via a decidedly Shakespearean transumptive repetition.

Notes 1. Richard J. Finneran, ed., The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Scribner, 1989). 2. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968).

25 WHY (NOT) THEATRE? STAGE, SCREEN, AND STREAMING IN A PANDEMIC Patrick Hart

For many of my fellow contributors to this volume, I suspect that the instinctive answer to the question “why theatre?” is likely to echo Louis Armstrong’s legendary reply when asked to define jazz: “If you have to ask, you ain’t never gonna know.” This is no longer true for me, if it ever was. There’s a scene in the British comedy series Peep Show in which our two anti-heroes, Jez and Mark, go on a double date to the theatre. Already bored out of his wits a few lines into the opening scene, Jez turns to ask Mark, “When do we get to go out?’ ” Mark whispers back: “As far as I can make out, we get to go out for a bit in an hour, then we have to come back for two hours.” “You’re kidding,” replies Jez, “I think I’ll die.” Despite dirty looks from their dates, the two keep whispering: MARK:  If

this was on television, nobody would be watching. God. Why aren’t we watching television? [Jez and Mark turn their attention back to the play for a few more moments.] I’ve got Heat on DVD at home. We’re watching this, when for less money we could be watching Robert de Niro and Al Pacino. [Jez’s date hushes the two of them, and they return their attention briefly to the play, Thomas Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion.] MARK:  I’m going to pretend I am watching Heat. JEZ:  OK. Let’s just pretend we’re watching Heat. JEZ:  Oh

Mark’s brow furrows in concentration, but the pair’s attempt to project themselves out of their current plight lasts only a few seconds before Jez gives up and leaves, clambering over legs and abandoning Mark to his fate.1 At the risk of the sort of portentousness Jez would delight in mocking, I’d argue that there’s a true comic pathos in that almost instantly aborted effort at

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imaginative escape, in Mark and Jez’s impulse to “just pretend,” followed as it is by its immediate failure. It suggests, among much else, just how much the theatre might have to offer them. The scene merits more detailed analysis than I can give it here, if only as a rich example of the complexities of conditional identification. We laugh at this latest demonstration that Jez has the attention span of a fruit fly, of the pair’s philistinism, and of the paucity of their resources. The scene’s real force, though, comes from our scandalous identification with Jez and Mark. On one level, this identification is straightforward enough: which of us, after all, hasn’t found ourselves trapped mid-row during a tedious performance, thinking wistfully of the money we spent on the ticket and of the sofa and screen back home? And what we do see of the production to which our latter-day Estragon and Vladimir are subjected looks static, clumsy, and dull. But the identification goes deeper. The scene has a more general resonance, offering what sometimes seems to me one of the most concise and cutting (and darkly hilarious) articulations of the screen’s dominion over the stage in contemporary culture, all the more powerful for its simultaneous laceration of the sympathetic dolts through which it is channeled. Notwithstanding claims that Britain’s theatres “draw annual audiences of 34 million—twice that of the Premier League,” for the vast majority of us the small screen at home constitutes by far the more significant influence upon the cultural fabric of our lives, even if streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and now Disney+ have usurped the already antiquarian DVD.2 This is hardly a revelation, but writing this essay after two months of lockdown thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, unable to attend the theatre and, in all honesty, not yet missing it, I’ve had to reassess my own relationship to both theatre and screen, and ask myself why theatre now seems to me so strangely, shockingly dispensable. Perhaps this indifference will pass. Perhaps it is simply that more immediately pressing matters are to the fore, that fear for family and fury at liars in public places leaves little room or energy for thought of what is in any case not available. I suspect, however, that straitened circumstances have forced upon me recognition of what was already lurking: an allegiance to the screen, coupled with an impatience, disillusionment, or resentment at much contemporary theatre. I don’t seek to justify this, let alone to impart it to others, but I do want to try to diagnose, albeit naively, that part of it that is not purely personal. Why, as an academic of early modern literature, as a passionate advocate of performance in and out of the classroom, and as one who reads drama voraciously, does the question “why theatre?” induce in me now an almost instinctive Jez-like shrug, and thoughts of the screen? The pandemic, of course, has made the question “why theatre?’ ” alarmingly immediate in quite a different way. Only this week (in mid-May 2020), the producer Sonia Friedman has argued that without an immediate government rescue package, more than 1,000 theatres will be insolvent by the end of the year, with many shutting down for good.3 In response to the Covid crisis, many companies have gone to admirable lengths to offer what Sarah Bay-Cheng calls “mediated

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theatre,” providing online access to both prerecorded and live streamed performances.4 Alisa Kalyanova’s spreadsheet of online theatre screenings, generously shared online and regularly updated, lists at the time of writing around 270 productions from around the globe that have been made freely available to view.5 Anecdotal evidence suggests that as well as appealing to seasoned theatre-goers, these screenings are attracting an audience of viewers with little or no previous experience of theatre attendance, and perhaps helping to build a new future for theatre. More recently, though, some theatres have begun to charge for forthcoming productions, which will now be streamed rather than performed to a live audience. As I write, a tempest in a tea-cup is blowing up on my Twitter timeline over the Old Vic’s decision to charge from £10 to £65 for access to a live stream of Claire Foy and Matt Smith’s socially distanced performances of Lungs, with “tickets” limited to 1,000 people per night, “replicating the usual audience capacity size.”6 Given that all viewers will watch an identical stream, this has reinforced the impression for some that the theatre is still too often exclusive and class-ridden. The author of a recent monograph on theatre etiquette and the live performance experience, for example, has voiced the suspicion that this pricing mechanism “is actually about that old ‘the pleasure of theatre is its exclusivity’ ideal.”7 Mediated theatre under lockdown, then, is throwing into new light longexisting concerns as to how theatre negotiates its relationship with the screen, while also prompting calls for us to “reimagine better cultural models, & dismantle (rather than replicate) old exclusions.”8 There is already a vast corpus of literature on the fraught relationship between the theatre and the screen, much of it theoretically sophisticated and admirably rigorous. I won’t rehearse those arguments in detail here, but I do want to evoke one of the accounts of intermedial struggle that I’ve found most compelling and suggestive, one to which I find myself involuntarily returning when I  think of theatre. This comes from Fredric Jameson, whose principal concern is with the novel, not the playhouse, and with how novels have been adapted for film and television, but his argument seems to me peculiarly applicable to drama, too. For Jameson, individual film adaptations of novels are invariably involved in an agonistic struggle with their hypotexts, while also allegorizing a wider, more generalized struggle between the two competing media for formal hegemony.9 Here Jameson is following (or adapting) Bakhtin, who suggested that the novel got on poorly with other genres: where it encountered older forms such as the epic, romance, and tragedy, it cannibalized them and sent them into decline. In this encounter of genres, “there can be no talk of a harmony deriving from mutual limitation and complementariness,” but only a battle for primacy.10 Jameson argues that we now see the titanic Hegelian struggle for recognition recast, with the novel as the elder statesman and film as the would-be usurper. There is no reason this model of the survival of the fittest should be our only way of thinking about the relationship between different media, and plenty of

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others have been proposed. Jameson himself recognizes that the Bakhtinian template cannot simply be applied in a one-size-fits-all fashion. As he points out, where the novel saprophagously devoured the already decaying forms of epic and tragedy, the languages of the novel are, for Jameson, “still very much alive,” and continue to exist alongside and in complex relationship with film and television.11 When I try to articulate honestly my own sense of the relationship between theatre and the arts of the screen, though, without attempting first to justify this sense, I find it hard to escape the conviction that we are dealing with a particularly fleshy and nutritious but nevertheless putrescent corpse, assailed by a wake of remarkably charismatic and vivacious vultures. As several commentators have noted, both film and then television started out by feeding parasitically upon the theatre. Film began by mimicking and remediating nineteenth-century melodramatic theatre’s narrative structures and visual strategies: those we now think of as distinctively filmic, such as the close-up, the fade-out, and parallel editing, had been developed on the Victorian stage.12 Television went further, as Philip Auslander observed, following Raymond Williams: it “strangled its host by offering itself not as an extension of the theatrical experience but as an equivalent replacement for that experience,” one “better suited to the postwar, suburban lifestyle: the message is that nothing is lost, and much is gained, by staying home.”13 Theatre has attempted to strike back, and it has become common for stage productions to incorporate screens into their performances in various ways. For some, such partial theatrical appropriations of film and television most commonly function as insidious attempts to claim for the theatre something of the now dominant media’s legitimacy, whatever the production’s superficially avant-garde credentials.14 For others, such performances more often accommodate screens to a more critical end, in order “to probe their status and impact on us in a selfconscious manner,” making us dwell upon “their history of remediating theatre.”15 The truth varies with the individual production, and perhaps even with the individual member of the audience, but where such counter-strategies are effective, it is on a localized scale: there’s no suggestion that they can meaningfully challenge the hegemony of the screen. Relatively speaking, theatre remains culturally marginal. Its principal influence, admittedly significant if not always positive, derives from its role as a testing ground and a pipeline for talent, feeding the insatiable television and film industries. Conversely, much of British theatre is now parasitically reliant upon film and television. One thinks of the many money-spinning shows based on films that were touring British theatres before the lockdown: Friedman’s catalogue of recent productions includes Mean Girls, Bend it Like Beckham, and Legally Blonde, and fellow producer Bill Kenwright’s Ghost, Rainman, Saturday Night Fever, Heathers, and The Exorcist. The Exorcist, in fact, is a paradigmatic case of the polymorphous practices of remediation, being only the latest production in a franchise that began with William Peter Blatty’s novel, but which undoubtedly owes its success to the

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1973 film adaptation. Other productions have a slightly more elliptical but nevertheless obvious debt on cinema: recent examples from Friedman’s stable include The Shark Is Broken, a play about the filming of the blockbuster Jaws, and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, based on an original short story by J. K. Rowling, but guaranteed a worldwide audience in part by the popularity of the film adaptations of Rowling’s other Harry Potter fiction. Along with musicals based on film, such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Dirty Dancing, such productions account for a significant proportion of those 34 million ticket sales Friedman boasts of, and an even bigger proportion of the receipts. TV and film actors sell shows and push up ticket prices—when Harry Potter does Equus, media coverage and a full house are guaranteed. Many non-producing theatres now program stage adaptations of screen hits almost wall to wall, with a slot or two kept free for a ballet or a classic: Shakespeare or Uncle Vanya perhaps, or something on the school curriculum. Most of the big Victorian city theatres don’t really do plays anymore.16 One principal way in which serious theatre has tried to carve out a distinctive space for itself in the face of the screen’s hegemony is through an emphasis on the peculiar merits of the “live” experience. For the audience, though, focusing on live performance alone doesn’t really distinguish conventional theatre from the cinema, beyond fetishizing contingency. The drive to make theatre “immersive” is the logical consequence, but as Helen Freshwater has observed, much theatre that presents itself as “immersive,” inviting or demanding active audience participation, “is really nothing of the sort,” allowing only a narrow range of responses “clearly scripted by social and cultural convention”: “These strategies are as disappointing and mendacious, in their own way, as governmental consultation exercises which simply provide an illusion of public dialogue whilst functioning to legitimate decisions taken by the authorities.”17 What, then, if theatre does indeed stand in relation to the arts of the screen as epic poetry or medieval romance does to the modern novel? What would be the consequences if we were to accept theatre as now merely a residual presence, in Raymond Williams’s sense, in our common cultural life, and acknowledge that it no longer has any meaningful understanding of what it is for, and that its own answers to the question “why theatre?” tend to be singularly unsatisfactory? This is the question I find myself circling back to. I don’t have answers, and perhaps this acceptance has already taken place, even if we are uncomfortable acknowledging it. But what I think I see is a theatre that might dispense with the need for an audience entirely, in which being part of a theatrical community of practice, producing performances for their own sakes, would be what matters. Such a theatre might incorporate elements of the “extra-live” movement, creating more relaxed, inclusive spaces, and be marked, at least at times, by the kind of responsiveness to the requirements of local communities found in the performance history of a play such as The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil.18 Most of all, such a theatre, perhaps

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better rethought of as drama or simply as a utopian return to play, would be freed of the necessity of justifying itself, of answering that terrible question, “why theatre?” and of its constant losing battle to define itself against the arts of the screen.19

Notes 1. “Burgling,” Peep Show, series 5, episode 1, Channel 4, May 2, 2008. 2. Sonia Friedman, “Theatre Stands on the Brink of Ruin,” The Telegraph, May 21, 2020. 3. Ibid. 4. See Sarah Bay-Cheng, “Theatre Squared: Theatre History in the Age of Media,” Theatre Topics 17.1 (2007): 37–50, 37–38. 5. Alisa Kalyanova, “Free Theatre Screenings,” Google Sheets (accessed 26 May  2020), https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JC9gQn8-ehL6vZGPBENdta3QEkcZ Vmbi3rv4_xNzE/edit#gid=0. 6. Alex Wood, “Claire Foy and Matt Smith to Star in Socially Distanced LiveStreamed Lungs at Empty Old Vic,” Whats on Stage, May 27, 2020, www.whatsonstage. com/london-theatre/news/claire-foy-matt-smith-lungs-old-vic-covid_51666.html 7. @KirstySedgman (Kirsty Sedgman) “. . . and My Suspicion Is That This Is Actually About That Old ‘the Pleasure of Theatre Is Its Exclusivity’ Ideal . . .,” Twitter, May 27, 2020, https://twitter.com/KirstySedgman/status/1265652494790807557. 8. @KirstySedgman (Kirsty Sedgman), “Look, Theatres & Their Staff Are Going Through an AWFUL Time . . .,” Twitter, May 27, 2020, https://twitter.com/KirstySedgman/ status/1265652490940420099. 9. Fredric Jameson, “Adaptation as a Philosophical Problem,” in True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity, ed. Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 215–38, 232. 10. Ibid., 231. 11. Ibid., 233. 12. See A. Nicholas Vardac’s pioneering work, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), as well as Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 214. 13. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Psychology Press, 1999), 23. 14. Ibid., 23–38. 15. Karen Jürs-Munby, “Introduction,” Postdramatic Theatre, ed. Hans-Thies Lehmann (London: Taylor and Francis, 2006), 13. 16. I am grateful to Dora Petherbridge for reading an initial draft of this paper: much of the material in this and the preceding paragraph comes from her. 17. Helen Freshwater, “ ‘You Say Something’: Audience Participation and The Author,” Contemporary Theatre Review 21.4 (2011): 405–9. 18. On the “extra-live” movement, see Ben Fletcher-Watson, “Relaxed Performance: Audiences with Autism in Mainstream Theatre,” Scottish Journal of Performance 2.2 (2015): 61–89; Kirsty Sedgman, The Reasonable Audience: Theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing, and the Live Performance Experience (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 99–109. First performed in 1973 by the author John McGrath’s 7:84 company, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil is a work of musical agitprop drama that gives a condensed history of the exploitations of the Scottish Highlands. It toured Highland community centers and is arguably the most influential Scottish play of the last 50 years. 19. One model of such audience-less play that has flourished in lockdown is the roleplaying game, exemplified by Dungeons and Dragons.

26 BECAUSE Cary M. Mazer

Because it is here. Because it is now. Because if it isn’t here and it isn’t now, it isn’t theatre. Because sometimes, even if it isn’t here and it isn’t now, it still might be theatre. *** Because, whereas in other art forms the means of representation and the object being represented are made of different materials—for example, in figurative painting, daubs of pigment on a two-dimensional surface are used to represent a vista of a landscape in three dimensions—in theatre, the means of representation and the thing being represented are made of the same materials. Because theatre is an artistic medium in which the thing being represented—people behaving—is identical to the medium of representation—people behaving. *** Because, even when it pretends to be somewhere else, it’s happening here. Because, even though it is here, we are sometimes meant to take it as being somewhere else. Because, even when it is now, we are sometimes meant to take it as being some other time. Because even when it pretends to be some other time, it’s happening now.

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Because, when a performer tells a story in the past tense about events that have already happened, the act of storytelling is taking place now. Because the events taking place now point to an imagined future. Because the theatre event’s imagined future becomes our future. Because, as it unfolds across time, one “now” following another, it creates its own past. Because, while we are experiencing each “now,” one after another, the theatre event’s past becomes our past. *** Because clothing is costume. Because costumes are clothing. *** Because the character doesn’t exist except in the moments when we witness the character through the presence of the actor during the moment of performance. Because I’m always aware that the actor is not the character but an actor. Because I like to forget that the actor is an actor. Because I can never forget that the actor is an actor. Because I believe the joy or the sorrows of the character even though I know I’m actually looking at the actor playing the part on the stage. Because I believe the joy or the sorrows of the actor on the stage even though I know the situation the actor appears to be in is that of the character in the play. *** Because, when a person stands in a performance space and raises an arm, I immediately intuit that the person has an identity, a consciousness, and a subjectivity, and that the act of raising that arm comes from a matrix of needs and desires and fears pointing to an imagined future and impelled by a consciously or unconsciously remembered past. Because—I’m sorry, call me pre-post-modern if you must—I can’t not intuit all that, even though Peter Brook, Joseph Chaikin, and others want me to able at times not to, just as I can’t look at the façade of a house with symmetrical windows flanking a doorway and not see a face. ***

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Because, when Hamlet says, “Now I am alone,” he isn’t. Because, when the actors are rehearsing at the beginning of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, they’re on the stage in an empty auditorium, even though I and the other members of the audience are actually sitting there. *** Because, if I clap my hands, Tinkerbell will come back to life. Because, even if I don’t clap my hands, Tinkerbell will come back to life. *** Because, if the performance stops so that people can go to the bathroom or have a snack (or, with some performances, go home and go to sleep), it can easily start up again. *** Because, even though Kostya in Chekhov’s The Seagull stages his play in an outdoor theatre just before moonrise because he insists that the rising moon be represented by the actual moon, when we see Kostya’s play as a play-within-a-play within a performance of The Seagull, we know that the moon is not the moon but only a theatrical effect. Because, when Peter Quince, Nick Bottom, and the other amateur actors, meeting in the moonlit forest to rehearse their play, worry about how they can bring moonlight into the performance space when they perform their play for Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding feast, we have no problem in imagining the moonlight of the forest where they are rehearsing. Because the greensward that Peter Quince points to, which he wants to use as a stage, is actually the stage of the theatre where we are seeing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the hawthorn brake he wishes to use as a tiring house is in reality the theatre’s tiring house. *** Because we need not suspend our disbelief because there is no disbelief to be suspended. Because, as Tony Kushner has written, “it’s OK if the wires show, and maybe it’s good that they do.” *** Because, once there is more than one human being in the performance area, they form a community.

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Because the theatre event is created by artists who, in coming together to create the event, form a community. Because individuals come to the place of performance and, for the duration of the performance, come together and, as an audience, form a community. Because the performers and the spectators form a community with one another, for the duration of the performance, through the transaction that takes place in the act of performing and observing. Because each of these communities—among actors on stage, among artists creating the work, among spectators, and between performer and spectator—bear some relation to the local community, the metropolis, the nation, and humanity. Because the relation of these communities to one another, and to the larger community in which the theatre event is being produced and performed, is not always one of identity. Because the relation of these communities to one another, and to the larger community in which the theatre event is being produced and performed, is not always the same in one time and place as another. *** Because a theatrical script carries in its DNA the stage conventions, playhouse architecture, and actor–audience relationships of the theatres for which it was created. Because that script can be used as material to create a theatre piece on a stage, in a building, with actor–audience relationships, and according to cultural, social, and political values completely different from the ones for which it was first created. *** Because theatre, which transpires (and expires) in real time, also can be used to measure time. Because, while some people measure time by family milestones (so-and-so was pregnant at his funeral, and their daughter’s bat mitzvah was the week after 9/11, so he must have died in 1988 so, if he was born in 1914, he was 74 when he died”) and other people measure time by political or cultural events (“I remember D-Day,” or “I remember Sputnik” or “I remember Kennedy’s assassination,” or “I remember the Challenger disaster,” or “I remember 9/11,” or I lived through the Covid-19 pandemic”; or “I remember when Elvis was on Ed Sullivan,” or “I  remember the Beatles on Ed Sullivan,” or “Who is Ed Sullivan?”), theatre people measure time by whether they saw Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade or A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Mahabharata (and, if so, how many parts, all in one

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day or over three nights, and in French or in English); whether they saw Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie or Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, or Ryzcard Cieslak in Grotowski’s The Constant Prince; whether they saw both parts of Nicholas Nickleby, or the original cast of Hamilton, or were at the single 24-hour-straight-through performance of Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (I wasn’t; I  saw the two-twelve-hour-halves-on-two-successiveSaturdays in Philadelphia) . . . and if you did, whether Marvin Carlson was there the same night. Because, though theatre is ephemeral and lives only in memory—or perhaps because theatre is ephemeral and lives only in memory—your imagination can conjure events you didn’t see but that live in the memory of other people who did, as I discovered when I met my friend Mimi’s father, then in his nineties, a Berliner Jew who fled as Hitler rose to power, who told me that he had seen The Threepenny Opera at the Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm, and when I  asked him “which production?” answered, “the first”; or when my dissertation adviser, Bernard Beckerman, told me about having seen the Living Newspaper’s One Third of the Nation; or when a friend invited me to lunch with Norris Houghton and I realized that I was in the presence of someone who had watched Meyerhold and Stanislavsky rehearse. *** Because theatre cannot change the world. Because theatre can change the world . . . well, no, theatre cannot change the world, but it can, by changing people’s hearts and souls and understanding, help begin to change the world, just a little. *** Because my mother—when asked about the years of financial straits her family endured during the Great Depression, when her widowed mother, after living with breast cancer and its recurrence, finally died, leaving my mother an orphan at 17—would, dry-eyed, choose not to describe her experience at all, but invariably chose instead to describe a scene at the end of I Remember Mama, when the daughter, after watching her mother for years dividing up the coins and bills in the weekly pay packet and hear her say that she was setting aside “a little for the bank,” discovers that the family never had a bank account; and as my mother would describe that scene, she would weep. *** Because I like the fact that I cannot make a piece of theatre alone. ***

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Because theatre is a spectator sport, and we theatre scholars and artists get to watch not only the product but the process by which it is made. Because, unlike laws in legislatures and sausages in meat-processing plants, it’s fun to watch the product being made. Because, when we work with our collaborators making a theatre-piece, and likewise when we teach (and, may I add, when we parent), we can’t actually control what we are making, just as, when we teach, we don’t actually teach our students anything; but all we can do is create the conditions: the conditions under which the theatre piece made, and the conditions under which our students learn (and the conditions under which our children become full-grown people). And we get to watch that happen.

EPILOGUE “Yeh, Boss” Sidney Homan

I was trying—there’s the operative word—to stage a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as part of a program called “Shakespeare, Summer, and Kids,” and had expected our usual group of pre-teens and teenagers, but here in one of the poorest areas in Gainesville, at Porters Community Center, we found ourselves with a group as young as 6. I had cut the play by about 60% to make it more accessible to my young actors, but it was immediately clear that this abridged text was too difficult for them. So, I brought in an actor friend, and he and I redid A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a level we hoped the kids could manage. As they struggled with even this version, we came up with the idea of giving the actors just the basic story, and letting them improvise the scenes. We also added something that would win over our young company. Backstage, along with a large poster outlining the plot and basic content of each scene— shades of the commedia dell’arte!—we arranged brightly colored scarves on the prop table, each scarf with the name of a character: Oberon was purple, Hermia pink, Old Egeus black, Puck a bright green, and so on. The actor could pick up a scarf, carry it into the scene onstage, and, so identified, create his or her own dialogue for the role. One diminutive 6-year-old girl, Kayla, chose Puck. Our Puck had three scenes, all with Oberon, where he gave her orders to fetch a magic flower, confuse the lovers in the darkness, and change Bottom into an ass. Oberon, a tall, skinny teenager with dreads, towered over the tiny little girl who was practically covered by a green scarf. In her first scene with Oberon, he barked out an order, and Kayla, staring him right in the face, cried out, “Yeh, boss!” as she spunkily exited for Puck’s first errand. The audience laughed heartily, and this was not lost on Kayla as she came offstage, found me, and giggled, “They laughed, Mr. Sid. They laughed at

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me!” She was ecstatic. Confined to a single line, she had made an impression on the house. Three scenes later, she said the line again when Oberon gave his second order, but this time she took a look at the audience as she left the stage and they laughed even harder. She came offstage and hugged me. Puck had one more scene left. So I said, “Kayla, the audience expects you to do it just the same—so, this time surprise them. Do the line that got the laughs but not in the same way—make it a little different.” I could see her young mind working. As Oberon demanded Puck obey him, she turned, paused, said her line, and as she exited, put her hands on her hips, finger wagging, clearly mimicking her Momma’s “Can you believe this?” The audience erupted into laughter, the loudest and most sustained of the night. We had set up some cookies and punch in one corner of the room, and of course all the kids were clustered around, talking about how much fun they’d had. My wife and I saw Kayla and her mom approaching. As Kayla moved toward me, I, instinctively, crouched down so we could be on eye-level. With the wonderful freedom of a child not constrained by the social distance that adults might consider proper for a conversation, she put her face mere inches from mine, and said, “Mr. Sid, this has been the best, the best, best night in my whole life.” As the two mothers teared up, I joined them. Now I wish I could tell you that that little girl, with such untrammeled innocence and joy of youth, had grown up to be a teacher, an actress, a surgeon, but the truth is I haven’t a clue what happened to her. What I  do know, what this memory has confirmed for me, is that for one night a 6-year-old girl, a troupe of young actors, and an audience, most of whom had never heard of Shakespeare, were swept into the world of the theatre by a handful of scarves and the imagination of a long dead playwright. And that is why, years later, I would offer for this collection a title that is both a question and a celebration—“why the theatre.”

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Joseph Candido is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas. He has

published extensively on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama and is currently editing the King John and Henry V volumes in the forthcoming Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition series (Bloomsbury/Arden), for which he also serves as co-general editor with Brian Vickers. Most recently he has edited The Text, the Play, and the Globe: Essays on Literary Influence in Shakespeare’s World and His Work in Honor of Charles R. Forker (Fairleigh Dickinson/Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). S. P. Cerasano is Edgar W. B. Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University and the editor of Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. An historian of the early modern English theatre, she is currently at work on various projects, including a biography of Philip Henslowe, who owned the Rose Playhouse, built in 1587. Alan C. Dessen is the Peter G. Phialas Professor Emeritus of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of eight books, four of them with Cambridge University Press: Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (1984); Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (1995); Rescripting Shakespeare (2002); and, with Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (1999). He has been the editor or co-editor of the “Shakespeare Performed” section of Shakespeare Quarterly. Jerry Harp is Associate Professor of English at Lewis and Clark College. His books include For Us, What Music? The Life and Poetry of Donald Justice (2010) and Constant Motion: Ongian Hermeneutics and the Shifting Ground of Early Modern

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Understanding (2010). He has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which is Spirit under Construction (2017). Patrick Hart is Co-founder and Editor of the Journal of the Northern Renaissance,

and Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He is currently working on European film adaptations of early modern literary texts, and has also translated Elsa Morante’s long poem, La canzone degli F.P. e degli I.M. in tre parti, as “The Song of the Happy Few and of the Unhappy Many, in three parts” (Transference, 2008). At Bilkent, he has participated in a number of dramatic productions involving both faculty and students. Sidney Homan is Professor of English at the University of Florida and his uni-

versity’s Teacher/Scholar of the Year. The author of eleven books and editor of five collections of essays on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights, he is also an actor and director in professional and university theatres. His most recent book is Comedy Acting for Theatre: The Art and Craft of Performing in Comedies, with the New York director Brian Rhinehart (Bloomsbury/Methuen). He has written the librettos for two operas, by composer Paul Richards, The Golem of Prague and Lady Mary’s Cure. Joanne Howarth  is Actor and Director, playing three seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company, including  Twelfth Night  with John Lithgow, and the award winning  The Pull of Negative Gravity  Off-Broadway. Her long relationship with Shakespeare’s Globe includes directing the pioneering Playing Shakespeare productions for schools from 2005 to 2008, touring internationally in Nell Gwynn and Much Ado About Nothing, and leading hundreds of courses on playing Shakespeare for all ages in the UK and abroad. Joanne is on the faculty of Florida State University, has directed in the Conservatoire courses at GSA/Surrey University, Rose Bruford College, E15/Essex University, at Duke University NC, Shenyang University in China, and UIMP in Spain. Her screen appearances include Wallander and Spooks (MI5). Nick Hutchison is Freelance Director and Lecturer. His directing credits include

shows at the Sam Wanamaker Theatre, Wilton’s Music Hall, the St James’s Theatre, Bread and Roses Theatre, the Man in the Moon in London, the Aldeburgh Jubilee Hall, Folger Theatre in Washington DC, Tmu-na Theatre in Tel Aviv, the McCoy Theater in Memphis, and the American Shakespeare Center in Virginia. He is Associate Tutor at RADA and Course Director of several courses at the Globe, and he directs for LAMDA, the Lir Academy, Case Western Reserve University, and NYU. Nick lectures worldwide on Shakespeare, had a paper published in Shakespeare Bulletin in 2014, contributed to How and Why We Teach Shakespeare, and is working on a TV project on Shakespeare with Libertyo Productions in New York.

200  About the Authors

Frederick Kiefer is Distinguished Professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson. His published work includes Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy (1983), Writing on the Renaissance Stage (1996), Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters (2003), Masculinities and Femininities (2009), and English Drama from Everyman to 1660: Performance and Print (2015). Kristin Kundert is Artistic Director of UGA Theatre and Associate Professor of Acting and Voice in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia. Professionally, she has worked as a producer, director, vocal coach, and actor with companies such as: the Lunar Stratagem, the Kingsmen Shakespeare Festival, the Warehouse Theatre, the Atlanta Lyric Theatre, 7 Stages, and the NC Shakespeare Festival. She served as the dialect coach for Dolly Parton’s Circle of Love on NBC and for Lionsgate’s Step Up: Hightower. She is the co-author of Action! Acting Lessons for CG Animators. Her most recent project was directing a new reading of The Bronte Girls trilogy for the Bechdel Project in NYC. Gary Lagden comes from Port Talbot, South Wales, and trained as an actor at the

Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Since graduating in 1994, he has acted in over 80 productions. He has toured nationally and internationally, including work in Russia, Denmark, and Azerbaijan. He has written and performed a play about a Welsh working-class rugby player, Fly Half, which received Critic’s Choice 2018 from both British Theatre Guide and British Theatre.com, as well as 5-star reviews. Fly Half continues to tour theatres and rugby clubs in the UK. Gary is Associate Tutor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art where he has directed many of Shakespeare’s plays. Gina MacKenzie is Professor of Writing, English, and Theatre at Holy Family University. She is the author of Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, Sondheim (Ohio State, 2006), has co-edited (with Daniel T. O’Hara) the Barnes & Noble Classics Edition of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (2005), and is an advisory editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. Her most recent book is Maternal Representations in 21st  Century Musical Theatre Stage Mothers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Cary M. Mazer is Professor of Theatre Arts and English at the University of

Pennsylvania. He has directed the plays of Euripides, Shakespeare, Webster, Strindberg, Shaw, Barrie, Pinter, and Beckett. He is the author of Shakespeare Refashioned: Elizabethan Plays on Edwardian Stages (1981), Double Shakespeares: Emotional Realistic Acting and Contemporary Performance (2015), and Great Shakespeareans XV: Poel, Granville Barker, Guthrie, Wanamaker (2013). His play, Shylock’s Beard, won the 2016 Association of Theatre in Higher Education Award for Excellence in Playwriting.

About the Authors  201

Katherine McGerr is Assistant Professor in the Syracuse University Department

of Drama. Her directing work has recently been seen at Syracuse Stage, PlayMaker’s Repertory Company, and Chautauqua Theater Company. She is the associate director of Roundabout Theatre Company’s Birthday Candles, opening on Broadway in April 2020. Katherine is a graduate of Columbia University and the Eugene O’Neill National Theater Institute and holds an MFA in directing from Yale School of Drama. Paul Menzer is Professor and Director of the Mary Baldwin University MLitt/

MFA Shakespeare and Performance graduate program. He is the editor of Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage (2006), author of The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts (2008), Anecdotal Shakespeare: A New Performance History (2015), and Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center. His plays Anonymous, The Brats of Clarence, and Shakespeare on Ice have appeared on the Blackfriars stage, and his Invisible Inc. at the Long Center for the Performing Arts in Austin, Texas. David O’Donnell is Professor in Theatre at Victoria University of Wellington. David is an award-winning director whose productions have been staged throughout New Zealand. He has published widely on New Zealand and Pacific theatre, including co-editing the book Performing Aotearoa (2007) with Marc Maufort. With Lisa Warrington, he co-wrote Floating Islanders: Pasifika Theatre in Aotearoa (2017), which won the 2018 Rob Jordan Book Prize. Since 2010 he has edited 20 books and play collections as editor of the Playmarket New Zealand Play Series. He is Regional Managing Editor for the global theatre portal The Theatre Times (https://thetheatretimes.com/author/d-odonnell). Daniel T. O’Hara, Emeritus Professor of English and in 2005 the Inaugural Mellon Term Professor of Humanities at Temple University, is the author of nine books on modern literature and critical theory, including Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime: The Invisible Tribunal (Palgrave/Macmillan: 2015). He is also the editor or co-editor of six other books. Most recently with Donald E. Pease and Michelle Martin, he has edited with an introduction The William V. Spanos Reader: Humanist Criticism and the Secular Imperative (Northwestern, 2015). Currently, Professor O’Hara is the co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, contributing editor to American Book Review, and advisory editor for symploke. Robert Price is Senior Voice Tutor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and

Lecturer in Voice and Text at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He holds a master’s in Voice from the Central School of Speech and Drama. He worked during the 1990s in Ireland as an actor during a particularly exciting time for theatre, performed leading roles in the Abbey and Gate Theatres in Dublin, and was nominated for the Irish Times award for his performance as Bosola in The

202  About the Authors

Duchess of Malfi on the Dublin fringe. In the UK he has worked in the West End, the Traverse in Edinburgh, and the Soho Theatre, as well as touring extensively. Ralf Remshardt is Professor of Theatre at the University of Florida. A native of Germany, Remshardt received an MA from the Freie Universität Berlin and a PhD in Dramatic Art from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Remshardt is an experienced director, translator, and dramaturg who has lectured nationally and internationally. His publications have appeared in many journals and in several edited collections. He recently co-edited Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2018). His book, Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Performance, was published in 2004. In 2014, he co-produced a documentary film about Latinx theatres, which was shown in New York, at the Library of Congress, and at several Latinx film festivals. He has directed at university and professional theatres, including plays by Euripides, Shakespeare, Brecht, Beckett, Stoppard, Dürrenmatt, Bernard-Marie Koltès, and Roland Schimmelpfennig. Brian Rhinehart is Actor, Director, Fulbright Scholar, and Lecturer at the Actors

Studio Drama School at Pace University. An expert in devised theatre and collaborative playmaking, Rhinehart has worked as a freelance theatre director for the last 24 years. His productions have been seen in seven countries, and he has taught seminars and workshops on acting, comedy-improvisation, and devising in the US, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, China, Japan, and Thailand. He holds an MFA in Directing from the Actors Studio Drama School, and a PhD in English from the University of Florida. June Schlueter is Charles A. Dana Professor Emerita of English at Lafayette

College. Her most recent book, with Dennis McCarthy, is A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels by George North: A  Newly Uncovered Manuscript Source for Shakespeare’s Plays. With James P. Lusardi, she published Reading Shakespeare in Performance: “King Lear” and edited Shakespeare Bulletin for 20 years. Avra Sidiropoulou is Artistic Director of Athens-based Persona Theatre Company and Academic Head at the MA Programme in Theatre Studies, Open University of Cyprus. She has directed, taught, conducted workshops, and delivered lectures in different parts of the globe. She is the author of two monographs: Directions for Directing: Theatre and Method (Routledge, 2018) and Authoring Performance: The Director in Contemporary Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Donna Soto-Morettini has served as Director of Drama for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Head of Acting and Dance for Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, and Head of Acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London. She has worked extensively in television working as casting director and performance coach for Andrew Lloyd Webber, and as a casting director for

About the Authors  203

ITV’s The Voice. Her books include Mastering the Audition: How to Perform Under Pressure (2012), Popular Singing and Style (2014), Mastering the Shakespeare Audition (2016), and The Philosophical Actor (2010). She has published numerous articles and has presented workshops in acting, singing, and auditioning throughout the US and the UK. Fran Teague is Meigs Professor and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Georgia. Her principal area of research is Shakespearean performance history and theory. Teague often serves as a dramaturg for productions by the university, as well as local theatre companies. Her books include Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties and Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage, and her articles have appeared in Theatre Survey, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Shakespeare Studies. Erica Terpening-Romeo is Director, Actor, and Writer in Western Massachu-

setts. She is the co-founder of the Shakespeare company Anon It Moves Theatre in Portland, Oregon, former Literary Manager of Portland Actors Ensemble, former Managing Director of the Strain Theatre in New York, and co-founder of Singing House Productions in Lafayette, Colorado. She is the playwright of a new adaptation of Measure for Measure currently being developed at Boston University entitled Measure at Thornbrooke. Yokko (Yoshiko Sienkiewicz)  is  Actor,  Butoh  and  theatre artist, Artistic

Director  of the  Butoh theatre group  Ren  Gyo  Soh, and is on the faculty of the New Group for BFA Acting Program at Long Island University, Brooklyn. Her  Butoh  Medea  has been touring nationally and internationally  since  2015 and  has  received eight awards. Her works include, among others:  the awardwinning Hide Your Fires, BALDY, and SHINKA, whose choregraph, movement, and ensemble work has been recognized by the Planet Connections  Theatre Festivity and the New York Innovative Theatre Awards.

INDEX

24-Decade History of Popular Music, A 194 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The 128 actors: breaking the fourth wall 57–61, 69–75, 106–108; collision between audience and 29–31; making their entrances from the seats 82–83; process of becoming a character 73–75; rehearsals by 137–139; stage movement by 17–22; voices of 50–51, 58–60 African American theatre 116–117, 168 Alcott, Louisa May 128 Alexander, Bill 19 Alfreds, Mike 13, 16 All Our Yesterdays 74 All’s Well That Ends Well 47–49 amateurs 95–98 Amazon 185 Anderson, Michael 163, 164 And God Said 139 Annis, Francesca 11 Antigone 77–80 Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts 77–80 Antigonick 77–80 Aotearoa/New Zealand theatre 106–113 Aristotle 36, 84, 125, 161, 162 Armstrong, Louis 167, 184 Artaud, Antonin 84, 149, 150, 152 “Art of Healing, The” 85 Ashcroft, Peggy 48 As You Like It 18, 58

Auden, W. H. 85 audience, the 2–3, 40–41; actors’ emerging from 82–83; actors’ stage movement and 17–22; breaking of the fourth wall with 57–61, 69–75, 106–108; collision between actors and 29–31; digital natives in 158–164; excursion and immersion of 153–155; need for 12; reactions by 45, 72, 137; relationship between performer and 12–16; sense of community of 15–16; Shakespeare professor as 32–37; teacher as 47–53 avant-garde 108–109, 149 Bailey, Brett 154 Baird, John 58 Barker, Howard 152 Baron-Cohen, Simon 161 Barrymore, John 51 Barthes, Roland 95–96, 182 Bay-Cheng, Sarah 185–186 Bazaka, Themis 137 Beale, Simon Russell 42, 51 Beckett 26 Belz, Albert 111 Benford, Steve 162–163 Bernadette 12 Beyonce 94 Billington, Michael 26–27, 47, 50, 53 Birds, The 26 Bishop, Eleanor 112–113 Black Monk 26

Index  205

Black Watch 14 Bloom, Katya 59 Bloom, Paul 161 Bond, Kate 15 Bookbinder, The 110 Borba, Michele 159 Bottom, Nick 192 Boyd, Neva 63 BOYS 112 Branagh, Kenneth 52 Brando, Marlon 194 Brecht, Bertolt 109, 151 Breton, Andre 109 Brook, Peter 38, 39, 43, 84–85, 151–152, 191, 193 Brown, Michael 77 Brunton, Alan 108 Butoh 87–91 Butoh Medea 88–91 Cabaret 53 cabaret theatre 109 Candido, Joseph 171–177 Carlson, Marvin 168, 194 Carson, Anne 77–80 Cerasano, S. P. 17–22 Chaikin, Joseph 191 Chairs, The 69 Chekhov, Anton 192 Chorus Line, A 126, 131–132 Cieslak, Ryzcard 194 Clark-Gaynor, Morgan 80, 81 Clinton, Hillary 77 Clytemnestra’s Tears 137, 146 Colicos, John 33 collaborative creation 63, 108–110 Comedy of Errors, The 11 Coming Together 72–75 Constant Prince, The 194 Cookson, Sally 14 Corrigan, Alan 167 costuming 49–50 Covid-19 pandemic 24–26, 83, 115, 149–150, 184–189, 193 cruelty tourists 149–156 Cumming, Alan 53 Dadaists 109 Daily Telegraph, The 50 Dandridge Sisters 167 Daniels, Ron 38 Dansey, Harry 110 Death of Tragedy, The 151 de-colonization of theatre 110–112

Dee, Ruby 116 DeMille, Agnes 167, 168 Dench, Judi 11, 35, 36 Dessen, Alan C. 32–37 devising: Dispersal: A Gentrification Story 64–65; play and 62–63; rehearsal 66–67 Dickinson, Emily 29 Die Hard 50 digital natives and the theatre 158–164 Disney 129–130, 185 Dispersal: A Gentrification Story 64–65 Dixon, Steve 162 Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? 127 Doll’s House 135 Donnellan, Declan 38, 44 Doran, Greg 19 Down, Angela 47 Dream 166–170 du Rand, le Clanche 33 Durmaz, Derya 137 Edinger, Lars 26–27 Edmond, Murray 108–109 Edmondson, Jim 33–34 empathy 118–119, 160–162 Empty Space, The 84 Encounter, The 155 End of the Golden Weather, The 109 Engine Room, The 110 Everyman 169 Eyes Wide Shut 53 failure, learning from 120–124, 134 Far From the Madding Crowd 93–94 feminist writing 112–113 Fields of Ambrosia 12 film adaptations 186–189 Finn, William 129 Florida’s Madding Crowd 71–72 Fly Half 57, 59–61 Flyn, Jerome 58 Foreskin’s Lament 106–108, 112 Formalism 32 fourth wall, breaking of the 57–61, 69–75, 106–108 Foy, Claire 186 Frakes, Eliza 79, 81 Freeman, Bud 167 From Art to Theatre 171 Gane, Lucinda 25 Garrick, David 151 Gatz 15

206 Index

Gerrard, Matthew 130 Gesner, Clark 131 Ghost Rite 109 ghosts of the theater 76–81 Giannachi, Gabriella 162–163 Gibson, Mel 52 Giles, Freda Scott 167–168 Giménez, Carlos 38 Ginka, Kama 26 Glass Menagerie, The 194 Godspell 98, 130–131 Gold, Eli 53 Gold, Shana 173 Goldeneye 53 Goodman, Benny 167 Good Wife, The 53 Grace, Nick 11 Grandma Sylvia’s Funeral 69 Great Gatsby, The 15 Greenfield, Susan 159–160 Greig, Noel 57 Grotowski, Jerzy 109 Guardian 26, 50 Guillaume, Robert 116 Hall, Peter 49 Hallam, Skye 60 Hamilton 13, 194 Hamlet 13, 17–18, 50–53, 151 Hamlisch, Marvin 126 Hansberry, Lorraine 116 Harp, Jerry 76–81 Hart, Patrick 184–189 Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare 18 Haunted Stage, The 168 Heeley, Desmond 39 Henry, Martha 33 Henry IV 18, 20–21 Henry VI 34–37 Hetty Feather 14 Hide Your Fires 88, 91 High School Musical 129–130 Hijikata, Tatsumi 87 Hocker, Marcia 167 Homan, David 74 Homan, Sidney 69–75, 196–197 Honigsbaum, Mark 161 Hostage, The 29–30 Houghton, Norris 194 Howarth, Joanne 101–105 Hughes, Langston 116 Hunting of the Snark, The 12 Hurston, Zora Neale 116

Hutchison, Nick 11–16 Hytner, Nicholas 15, 38 Ibsen, Henrik 135 improv 63 Intimate Apparel 171–177 Into the Woods 126–127 Ionesco 69, 71–72 I Remember Mama 194 Jäckle, Uli 64, 69 Jameson, Fredric 186–187 Jane Doe 113 Jans, Alaric 127 Jelliffe, Rowena 116 Jelliffe, Russell 116 Joe Turner’s Come and Gone 117 Johnson, Celia 47 Julius Caesar 15, 18 Kalyanova, Alisa 186 Karathanos, Nikos 26 Kelly, Jude 38 Kernodle, George 171, 177 Keyishian, Harry 39 Kiefer, Frederick 47–53 King, Brian 95 King Lear 21–22, 33–34, 40, 137, 183 Kleban, Edward 126 Kneubuhl, John 112 Kouka, Hone 110–111 Kouyaté, Sotigui 43 Kraus, Karl 109 Krznaric, Roman 161 Kubrick, Stanley 53 Kundert, Kristin 115–119 Kureishi, Hanif 77 Kushner, Tony 192 Lagden, Gary 57–61 Lahr, Bert 33 Landesman, Rocco 121, 124 Langham, Michael 33 “Lapis Lazuli” 178–183 La Tempesta 38, 45 La Tempestad 38 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 152 Le Page, Robert 26 Lewanski, Michael 72 L’Homme Qui 151 Liakata, Mikaela 145 Lindy Hoppers 167, 168

Index  207

Lingafelter, Rebecca 77–80 Linklater, Kristin 137 Little Women 128–129 Lloyd, Morgan 15 Lowry, Marya 78 Lungs 186 Lusardi, Jim 38, 39, 45 Mabley, Moms 167 Mac, Taylor 194 Macbeth 13–14, 35 MacKenzie, Gina 125–132 Mahabharata 151, 193–194 Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, The 151–152 Māori theatre 110–112 Marat Sade 71, 193 Marlowe, Christopher 20 Martin, Tom 60 Mason, Bruce 109 Masque of the Red Death, The 155–156 Masterpiece Mystery 53 Mazer, Cary M. 190–195 McBurney, Simon 155 McCowan, Alex 42 McCubbin-Howell, Ralph 110 McGee, Greg 107, 112, 113 McGerr, Katherine 120–124 McInnerny, Tim 13 McIntyre, Loren 155 McKellen, Ian 35, 36 McQueen, Butterfly 167 Measure for Measure 11, 170 Melville, Sam 73 Mendes, Sam 38, 42 Menzer, Paul 93–98 Merchant of Venice, The 53 #MeToo movement 112 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 151 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 15, 96–97, 166, 167, 169, 192, 193–194, 196–197 Miller, Jonathan 38, 41–42, 53 Miola, Robert S. 51 Mnouchkine, Ariane 26 Moliere 26 Moore, Marianne 94 Morris, Tom 14 Moshinsky, Elijah 47 Negroponte, Nicholas 163 Nelson, Paul 38, 39 Netflix 185 Nevil, Robbie 130

New Criticism 32 New Zealand theatre 106–113 Nga Tangata Toa 111 Nicholas Nickleby 15, 194 Nicholson, Eric 137 Ninagawa, Yukio 49 Noble, Adrian 38 No Man’s Land 153 Nottage, Lynn 171–177 Nunn, Trevor 11, 35, 47, 49 O’Donnell, David 106–113 Oedipus 150, 161 Oedipus at Colonus 137 Oedipus Rex 142 O’Hara, Daniel T. 178–183 Ohno, Kazuo 87 Oida, Yoshi 151, 152 Old Historicism 32 Olivier, Laurence 20, 53 One Third of the Nation 194 Open Door, The 39 Oresteia 151 Ostermeier, Thomas 26–27 Othello 13, 60 Palmer, Robert 59 Pamela 19 Patch Adams 89 Patton, Pat 34 Peep Show 184 Pellone, Elena 145 Performing Mixed Reality 162–163 Peter, John 20 Phaedra I 144 play 62–67; devising and 62–63 Playing Offstage: Theatre as a Presence or Factor in the Real World 70 Play That Goes Wrong, The 12 Plowright, Joan 53 Poe, Edgar Allen 155–156 poems, death 178 “Poor Theatre” 109 postdramatic theatre 152 Price, Robert 24–31 production process 67 Promise Endings 137 Puigdemont, Carles 141 Purgatory 180, 182 Pyramus and Thisbe 97–98, 167 Quince, Peter 192 Quinn, James 127

208 Index

Rabold, Rex 33 Rees, Roger 35, 36 rehearsal process 65–66; devising in 66–67 Reid, Christopher 25 Remote Mitte 153 Remshardt, Ralf 149–156 Rhinehart, Brian 62–67, 87–91 Rhinoceros 71–72 Rice, Emma 14 Richard III 19–20, 26–27, 34 Richardson, Samuel 19 Rickman, Alan 50–52 Rodwell, Sally 108 Rokison-Woodall, Abigail 51–52 Romeo and Juliet 82, 85–86, 150 Rosencrantz and Guildensten Are Dead 12 Rutherford, Malcolm 20 Rylance, Mark 13 Rzewski, Frederic 72–75 Sacks, Oliver 151–152 Sanctuary 154 Schlueter, June 38–45 Schneider, Rebecca 168 Schwartz, Stephen 130 Seagull, The 192 Seven Streams of the River Ota 26 Shakespeare, William see under individual works Shakespeare Bulletin 38 Shakespeare Quarterly 19, 20 Shakespeare Survey 166 Sher, Antony 19–22 Sidiropoulou, Avra 133–146 Sienkiewicz, Yoshiko see Yokko Sinden, Donald 47 Six Characters in Search of an Author 191 Sleep No More 155 Smith, Hannah 110 Smith, Matt 186 Smith, Zadie 94 Sondheim, Stephen 127 Sophocles 77, 137 Soto-Morettini, Donna 158–164 Spencer, Charles 50 Spolin, Viola 63 stage movement 17–19 staging, scene 41–43 Stanley, Audrey 33 Stephens, Toby 49 Stewart, Patrick 43 Stone, Bianca 78

Stoppard, Tom 12 Stovepipe 154 streaming services 185 Streetcar Named Desire, A 194 Strehler, Giorgio 38, 45 Sullivan, Maxine 167 Sunday Times 20 Swallows and Amazons 14 Swingin’ the Dream 167 Tamburlaine the Great 19, 20 Taylor, Laurette 194 Taylor, Rangimoana 111 teachers of theatre 47–53, 115–119, 125–132 Teague, Ben 169 Teague, Fran 166–170 Te Karakia 111 television 187–189 Tempest, The 17, 38–45, 49–50, 171 Te Raukura: The Feathers of the Albatross 110 Terpening-Romeo, Erica 82–86 Thacker, David 38, 44 theatre, the: African American 116–117, 168; amateurs of 95–98; in Aotearoa/ New Zealand 106–113; around the world 133–146; as art of social proximity 94; avant-garde 108–109, 149; breaking the fourth wall of 57–61, 69–75, 106–108; Butoh 87–91; challenges and difficulties of 93–98, 135–136; as collective experience 83–84; creative collaboration in 63, 108–110; creative process in 62–67; creative role of the audience and 2–3; de-colonizing of 110–112; digital natives and 158–164; Disney musicals and 129–130; effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on 24–26, 83, 115, 149–150, 184–189, 193; empathy in 118–119, 160–162; as essential 149–151, 153; failure to translate into other media 28; feminist 112–113; ghosts of 76–81; given form onstage 6–8; importance of 1–2; influencing teaching 47–53; learning from failure in 120–124, 134; life of the actor, director, and playwright in performance in 3–5; Māori 110–112; mixing cultures and languages in 139–144; moving beyond the stage into the real world 5–6; outdoor venues for 32–33; reasons for

Index  209

teaching 125–132; teachers of 47–53, 115–119, 125–132; view of hack playwright on 93–98 Theatre and Its Double, The 149 theatre of catastrophe 152 theatrical pleasure 171–177 theatrum mundi 178–183 Theory of Mind 162, 164 Think of a Garden 112 Thompson, Ann 51 Thompson, Sophie 49, 58 Threepenny Opera, The 194 Three Sisters 26 Time of Your Life, The 32 Trojan Women 141 Trump, Donald 77 Tugangui, Amanda 80 Twain, Mark 149 Twelfth Night 171

Waiora: Te Ūkaipō: The Homeland 110–111 Waiting for Godot 70 Waler, Harriet 48 Walker, Timothy 44 Walker-Merritte, Britney 175 Wall, Fraser 60 Warhol, Andy 162 Weigel, HElene 151 Why? 151 Wicker, Tom 88 Williams, Jayne 60 Williams, Robin 89 Wilson, August 117 Winnicott, D. W. 62 Winter’s Tale, The 33, 34, 35, 37 Wolfe, George C. 38, 43 Wolf of Wall Street, The 15 Wordsworth, William 171, 172 Writing Degree Zero 182

Unselfie 159

Year of the King: An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook 20 Year’s Best Plays 166 Yeats, W. B. 178–183 Yokko 87–91 You Me Bum Bum Train 15 You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown 131

Valentin, Karl 109 van Heusen, Jimmie 167 Van Lieu, Ron 121 Velz, John 169 Verhoeven, Dries 153 Vision, A 180 von Sydow, Max 41

Zero Degrees of Empathy 161