100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (12 page)

83. Children as dramaturgs

One problem with the word
dramaturg
: it is so terribly serious and so terribly German, and theater is not always terribly serious or terribly German. Sometimes I think children make good dramaturgs because they are not terribly serious and their boredom mechanism is finely tuned. That is to say, they are bored by plays that aren’t theatrical, and we know they are bored because they scream. (Adult audiences use the subterfuge of coughing or looking at their programs when they are bored.) But children can’t read, so they scream. I do believe that young children can tolerate a lot of language on stage if there are theatrical moments—for example, if someone flies or rides in on a bicycle or if there are large puppets. Bringing children to rehearsals can tell you quickly whether or not the play is theatrical.

I brought my six-year-old daughter, Anna, to my rehearsals of
Melancholy Play
(in which a woman turns into an almond). I wanted to see if she got bored. “Oh no,” she said. “It’s the best show I’ve seen in years.”

Then she said, “Your plays balance on air I mean they are air I mean they are performed in air so they are air.

“If a whole city could balance on a seed then a city could balance on a play because a play is air and everything is air.

“Your next play should be about a seed because a seed is smaller than an almond. Or maybe your next play should be smaller than an almond, about nothing, about air.”

84. Democracy and writing a play

Making a piece of theater is a democratic act. Writing a piece of theater is not a democratic act. The development process has confused this issue. Making and rehearsing a new play means that every voice counts; it is a collaborative process. Writing a play means that the author is often collaborating with invisible or dead people. When the writing process becomes months of developmental workshops, the play becomes more like something Congress would turn out—baffling, cognitive, and legalistic.

Writers should be even lonelier when they are meant to be lonely (when they are writing), and they should be more surrounded when they are meant to be surrounded (when the play is ready for production). This is the natural rhythm of those odd creatures, playwrights, those misanthropes who love people; who desperately want to be alone and then, two weeks later, when they have finished a play, desperately want to be with other people. The development process has turned everything into a strange hybrid where writers are always collaborating, always surrounded, but never produced.

I have noticed lately that young playwrights often speak of the development process in the passive voice: “I was developed at X theater.” Or, “I would like my play to be developed at Y theater.” I think both language and practice would be improved by saying, “I would like to work on my play at X theater.” Or, “I rewrote my play at Y.” For development is really nothing more and nothing less than playwrights doing something fairly old-fashioned—their rewrites. Perhaps there could be less democracy in the imagination, and more democracy in the room.

85. What about all that office space?

I was a founding member of a theater called 13P, which stood for 13 Playwrights, and we wanted to do thirteen plays by thirteen playwrights and then implode. Which we did. The artistic director of every production was the playwright, and there were no offices, and we didn’t have a theater, and all our meetings were held at a coffee shop in Brooklyn before we all ran off to our regular jobs. When I did my play with 13P, I was heartened by how a theater could be run virtually out of a coffee shop. We did not require an office for the literary manager, or a costume shop, or an office for the marketing director. And yet most institutional theaters have a great deal of office space.

All of this office space and what does it do at night? When the lights go down in the offices and up in the theaters, I imagine these offices blinking and gaping in the great cityscape, awash with sadness at their own wasted potential. The emptiness! With real estate at such a premium, especially in New York, should homeless actors and writers be sleeping at theater offices at night? Perhaps they should!

These days, audiences have homes and the artists do not. That is to say, audiences and patrons have seats named for them, but actors, writers, directors, and designers generally do not. Marketing people have jobs and health insurance and chairs, but artists generally don’t. A couple of exceptions to this rule: the Goodman Theatre has a dedicated room for the writer called the August Wilson Room, with a large desk. Arena Stage and the Public Theater are now giving health insurance to writers and making office space available for them. Playwrights Horizons has a writer in residence, Dan LeFranc. But generally, as ensemble theater disappears and theater artists become more nomadic, institutions become more still, more corporate, more steady.

How can we redress the imbalance of artists having no seats? Should artists not have seats, because the job of the artist is and always has been primordially nomadic and non-bureaucratic? Or should we make the offices work for us at night? Put site-specific plays in offices. Have health insurance for artists. Have chairs and desks and Murphy beds for wayward writers to sleep in at night.

86. Ceilings on stage

Lately I have noticed a trend in theater design to put ceilings on stage. That is to say, to put ceilings on sets, completing the frame in the set of a living room, for example. Does having ceilings on our stages make us feel that we are having a more filmic, or a more real, experience on stage? I have often enjoyed these fake ceilings, though I take pity on the lighting designers (there’s nowhere to hang the lights). But I am also suspicious of ceilings on stage.

Theater used to be outdoors and had outdoor subject matter—forests, battlefields, castle exteriors. Then we moved indoors and showed indoor subject matter. But the continued lack of a ceiling in the theater created, I might argue, a primordial connection with what used to be the sky; light poured in, and one understood that a room wasn’t really a room, but had a connection to some ancient playing space, by some ancient rocks.

In film, it’s almost impossible to imagine an interior with no ceiling. It would be surreal. Imagine a living room on film with an open sky above it. The meaning that gets made is that the living room is actually out of doors. Whereas a living room on stage constructed without a ceiling is not surreal; it is an accepted mode of not finishing the image, of understanding that theater has an automatic traffic with metaphor.

And so I wonder if by putting ceilings on our stages we are trying to compete with film in a way that will make us automatically fail, making our stages smaller, and making our connection with the sky historical.

87. Storms on stage

In the old plays there were storms.
Lear
.
The Tempest
.
Iphigenia
. Perhaps we don’t have storms in our plays so much anymore because our plays don’t take place out of doors so much anymore. But I think we also don’t have many storms in our plays because of a larger dramaturgical preoccupation with characters learning lessons that make emotions rational. And a sudden wind defies this smooth, cognitive version of emotion. A sudden wind is event rather than lesson.

On one hand, a sudden storm in a play is entirely naturalistic—unexpected storms happen all the time in life (more and more lately). And yet somehow the use of storms on stage became symbolic rather than a mirror of nature when theater moved indoors. Why?

Perhaps because storms defy explanation, and emotions in naturalism are explicable, the irrational is relegated to the world of the symbolic rather than the mimetic, though life certainly seems irrational much of the time.

The Greeks seemed correct when they assigned the natural world the irrational personas of the gods. In the wake of a tsunami, what is reason?

In the wake of a tsunami, what has happened?

Water.

Why has it happened?

Water.

What of justice?

Water.

Why anything?

Because water.

88. Snow on stage

Snow is the only thing that comes down from the heavens and stays awhile.

On stage, the verticality of snow reminds me of a kind of grace that is temporary but has some staying power, like theater itself. In life snow can melt, but in theater it is swept away by stagehands. In either case, it is impermanent.

In
Three Sisters
, Tuzenbach says, “Look, it’s snowing out. What is the meaning of snow?”

I think he means that snow simply is. Snow reminds us of is-ness. In meaning nothing much, it means everything. On stage, snow reminds us of verticality and of the fact that light things can fall slowly. Snow falls slowly rather than falling with a thump, and so snow is
with
gravity and also against it. Snow appears to slow gravity, so that we can see falling happen.

If rain on stage might be said to be God’s tears cleaning away human dirt, misery, and memory, then what is snow on stage? A revelation that dirt can be covered by something clean from the sky? A revelation that cold does not last? That warmth does not last? That in order to make snow on stage, human hands have to stuff paper in a little box and shake it down, pretending to be God in black pants?

89. Gobos, crickets, and false exits: three hobgoblins of false mimesis

Why do gobos,
1
the sound of crickets on stage, and false exits on stage make me sad? I think it’s because they are borrowed from the memory of other mimetic plays. If the world might well be an illusion (as the Buddhists say), then theater is definitely an illusion. And if theater is definitely an illusion, how sad to record real crickets so that they sound like fake crickets pretending to be real. If one’s goal is to reveal what we think of as the world to be an illusion, then false exits and crickets won’t serve.

What would have happened to the history of drama if Meyerhold, the highly visual director, had been the accepted interpreter of Chekhov rather than Stanislavsky? Chekhov, irritated by Stanislavsky’s unnecessary sound cues, once said, “I shall write a new play, and it will begin with a character saying, how wonderfully quiet it is! There are no birds to be heard, no dogs, no cuckoos, no owls, no nightingales, no clocks, no harness bells, and not a single cricket.” If the sound of crickets makes us feel that the night is more real on stage, it is more real with reference to a real night elsewhere, somewhere else recorded, someone else’s memory of a cricket-drenched childhood, someone else’s shorthand for night.

90. Oh the proscenium and oh the curtain

When I work at a theater with a grand proscenium or a grand curtain and walk backstage during intermission, the whole enterprise reminds me of Plato’s cave. I am aware of the grandness of the arch and the seeming impermeability between the watcher and the watched, yet all that is required to burst through the illusion is to slip behind a curtain and use the facilities. Slipping through so easily from one state to the other calls to mind the seeming impermeability between different states of being and how quickly they are punctured: between the sick and the well, between the state of being alive and being, well, dead—where the divide seems absolute but the crossing is as swift and simple as passing behind a curtain.

Perhaps that’s why I find it inexplicably moving to walk backstage while the audience is still in the house, talking (perhaps wildly and nobly excoriating my play) and buying candy. It is often the back of the tapestry that turns out to be more beautiful than the front: being able to see all that work—the waiting, the drudgery, the pricks of blood …

Some might charge that the proscenium creates a less communal approach to theater because of the separation between the watcher and the watched. This is perhaps true. On the other hand, the proscenium is an attempt to replicate the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave and then make the illusion disappear at the end. For the purpose of creating a Platonic illusion and then laying the illusion bare, prosceniums and curtains are serviceable. If a world without curtains is a world without illusions, then perhaps we should hold on to the curtains.

91. Exits and entrances and oh the door

Exits and entrances are important and always have been. “Exeunt,” they once wrote. Lately I have noticed that when my four-year-old plays, she madly opens and closes doors. The entrances and exits in a four-year-old’s play are actually more important than scenes of conflict. A person enters, and the scene is transformed. A witch enters, a witch exits. A sailor enters, a duck exits. End of play.

One effect of film on theater is that theatrical exits and entrances diminished. An exit has little power in cinema because the camera cuts away before a person actually closes the door. In film, a character’s entrance is often edited away. The camera
becomes
the door. In the theater we have doors rather than cameras. They are both openings and closings, cameras and doors. But in the theater, a live person is in charge, whereas in film, the machine, and an editor after the fact, are in charge.

In our desperate and unconscious desire to be more like film, we contemporary dramatists often end our scenes as though we were cameras. And it can be sad to end a scene as though a camera were cutting away when what really has to be cut away is an entire set. It lacks magic. And it makes me rethink the magical possibilities of the door.

Oh the door! Made of simple wood, standing wobbly on a fake frame, it opens, it shuts, it slams or is quiet, people, things, or animals come out and come in, a person comes out, an ostrich comes back in, oh the door!

92.
Theatrical
as a dirty word for architects