100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (7 page)

We live in the age of the eye and the hand—one touch, and visual imagery is created, with no word mediating or intervening. We are coming closer and closer to the illusion of being able to eat the image as opposed to contemplating the image. The iPhone makes images feel almost edible. So do food blogs. Simone Weil thought it was important that purveyors of the sacred learn to contemplate the object rather than eat it. Some spiritual training teaches the eye to behold rather than to devour.

Is theater, then, a holding station, a site of resistance, to this feeding frenzy of touch and image consumption? The stage is almost a physical marker preventing us from touching the object of contemplation. Because there are real people acting, we cannot own their image; we cannot
have
them. Perhaps that is why movie stars come back to the stage: to be, without being had.

44. Dogs and children on stage

Recently, my daughter Hope was asking who works. “Do grandmas work? Do grandpas work?” “Sometimes,” I said. Then I asked her, “Do little kids work?” “No,” she said, “they play.” Then she laughed and said, “Do dogs work, Mama?” “No,” I said, “dogs don’t work.”

And it got me thinking about that old adage: never put dogs or children on stage. A dog can’t act like a dog; a dog is a dog. Children can’t act like children; they are children. And therefore unpredictable. A dog doesn’t work; a dog plays.

Is the mimetic function, then, always a form of work? Is that why I find it refreshing to see dogs and horses and small children on stage? Because they are what they are and they are automatically in a state of play rather than in a state of work? (My teacher Joyce Piven has spent a lifetime trying to get both adults and children to be in a state of play on stage.) Why is it so horrible to see certain professionalized child actors on stage? Is it because they are in a state of premature work rather than in a state of play? I recently saw a production of
Annie
and preferred seeing the dog on stage to seeing the children.

45. On fire alarms

When I was working with my friend and collaborator Mark Wing-Davey on
Passion Play
, during our first preview in a church in Brooklyn a fire alarm went off during Act 3. The audience was evacuated, as were all the actors, dressed in biblical clothes on a windy night. On that night in June, one could see a man dressed in a loincloth on the steps of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn. After some milling around on the steps of the church, when it was clear we would all be outside for a while, the actors decided to go on with the play.

First, Mary Magdalen began singing a song about a tollbooth, from the scene where we’d stopped in the play. I thought perhaps we’d just have the song as an interlude, but slowly the audience quieted and gathered round, and somehow, one after another, the actors performed their scenes with no blocking, no props, no nothing, in silent agreement. A stage manager improvised a lighting cue with a flashlight, pretending to be a car; a cross was improvised with two actors hoisting up another actor; a sound cue was somehow found on a computer. I kept thinking one of the actors would stop, but in silent agreement they simply kept doing the play. When boat puppets were called for and a wind machine, the actors pretended to be boats and made the sound of the wind. (I thought that once you got your Equity card, you refused on principle to ever make the sound of the wind again … but no, these actors made the sound of the wind.) Eventually, we were led back into the church and finished the play, but I longed to stay out on the steps of the church.

I was so moved that telling the story was more important to them than the fear of exposure. I suppose that’s always the playwright’s hope—that telling the story outweighs the very real fear of total public humiliation. Often there are things for actors to hide behind—costume changes, sound cues, pillars, beautifully painted drops, props, and the like. But on the steps of the Lafayette church, they had nothing but each other, the audience, and the story. And for half an hour, I was as transfixed as I’ve ever been, remembering that theater is at its roots some very brave people mutually consenting to a make-believe world, with nothing but language to rest on.

Part Three

On People Who Watch Plays: Audiences and Experts

46. On sleeping in the theater

I have enjoyed watching people sleep through my plays. I have enjoyed the sensual fullness of their heads lolling, leaning back, sometimes almost onto my lap. I have wanted to hold their heads as they loll onto my seat, give them a short hair massage. I hope that the play gives them the fullness of a dream. I would like to write a play that purposely puts people to sleep. I would like to import beds into the theater, and couches, and to write a very long play, for a very long nap. If members of the audience woke for a brief second, they would see something extraordinary on stage, like elephants balancing on horses, and they would drift back to sleep, and the dream of the elephant would merge with their more private dreams. And no one would feel guilty, and no one would blame me, because they were meant to fall asleep, a small gift from me to them.

47. Wabi-sabi

I cannot pretend to be an expert in the ancient Japanese aesthetic called Wabi-sabi. In his seminal work
In Praise of Shadows
, Tanizaki praises the hidden, the dark, and the oblique in art and architecture over the bright, the gleaming, the rational. He goes on at length about the pleasures of using a traditional Japanese bathroom, which is dark, quiet, and full of shadows. He defames the Western toilet, with its gleaming white tiles. Are our Western theaters, like our Western toilets, too bright? Too gleaming? Too painted with light?

It often seems to me that our Western theaters, the big ones, in terms of design, do not necessarily resemble brightly lit commodes but
do
resemble airports. (Some of them are currently named after airlines.) Sometimes it seems to me that the whole world is becoming an airport, with more and more glass, with fewer smells to distinguish one place from another, and with nowhere quiet to sit in the dark, or sleep. And yet, of course, the theater is one of the few places left in the bright and noisy world where we sit in the quiet dark together, to be awake.

48. Is one person an audience?

Is one person an audience or is it not an audience? Does being an audience depend on the act of watching a thing, or on watching a thing with others? In a class I taught called Big and Little, devoted to the study of big plays and little plays, we began by writing plays for one audience member. Many students were disconcerted by being an audience of one. When you are an audience of one (in a live theatrical experience, as opposed to a recorded one), you become an actor rather than an audience. No one to laugh or cry along with, you have reciprocity without the possibility of catharsis.

It is wonderful to go to the movies alone. You are with strangers but essentially alone, having a novelistic but highly visual experience. But in a live court performance for one, what is the experience? Part peep show, part therapy session, part forced improvisation on an unsuspecting citizen … and yet, part intimacy, part gift.

I determined at the end of seeing many audience-of-one performances that an audience of one was not really an audience but instead a form of intimacy, a form of listening. The audience can be small, but perhaps no smaller than, what? Seven? Ten? In Judaism, a minyan (at least ten people) is required for certain religious rituals. Is there something about ten people that offers spiritual consolation, a sense of groupness, for the neurotransmitters to do the things they do in a group that they do not do alone? To weep from the belly, or to laugh without embarrassment?

49. Chimpanzees and audiences

There was an experiment with chimpanzees and humans recently. Humans were asked to make absolutely no facial expression as they watched chimpanzees. The chimpanzees, without a facial response in their audience, went crazy. And so, when the audience offers no affective response at a play (as often happens), it is well within the actor’s DNA to go, as it were, ape-shit. The audience helps to create an aesthetic object through a process of biofeedback. This is why there needs to be a revolution in the concept of subscriber audiences.

50. On pleasure

Lately, I was in rehearsal and I said to the director, “Can I invite my husband and Paula Vogel to rehearsal because they can’t come to the performance?” And the director said, “Oh, of course, you must want their feedback at this point in the process.” And I said, “Oh no! I had hoped to give them pleasure!” And he laughed with surprise.

Our contemporary theater is at times so feedback mongering that I fear we have lost the pleasure principle. And by extension the notion of reciprocity. Do you remember the old-fashioned notion that artists give audiences pleasure, and so audiences give them money? That notion now feels outdated. There is now the prevailing notion that audiences give artists ideas and feedback and also money—a completely one-way exchange—no wonder playwrights feel so constantly in debt: we are the world’s succubi!

I seem to return again and again to the primary roots of theater in childhood. The child puts on a play for parents or neighbors. The child gives pleasure and in return gets applause. A simple enough equation. How long have we been giving the audience responsibility for helping us to write the play rather than the freedom to enjoy it?

51. Reading aloud

Reading was once something we always did out loud, and to someone. Solitary silent reading came into vogue around the time of Augustine (the 350s), when privacy was invented. Augustine gives an account of Saint Ambrose reading to himself: “His eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.” It must have seemed terribly antisocial, even for a monk. Now all of our acts of reading and writing are instantly transmittable, in silence. In the digital age, we read and digest texts and silently text back, never having read them out loud.

Theater in its most basic form is a kind of reading aloud. When children are small, we tell them to make a circle and we read to them. When they grow up, we tell them to sit in a corner and read to themselves. In the theater, we ask adults to be children again, to sit in a circle and be read to.

I enjoy the sensation of being read to in a theater as opposed to watching people behave behind glass. Sometimes, however, because of the aesthetic of a particular production, I feel as though I were watching people from behind a pane of glass.

I have occasionally watched my own plays from the sound booth, where there is a pane of glass between me and the production. When I do this, I am turned into an observer-criminal. Putting glass between the observer and the observed almost seems to imply the possibility of violence.

So to break the fourth wall, or the implied wall of glass, for the actor to read to, speak to, sing to the audience, is an ancient form of communication, which now seems almost revolutionary. Don’t make a wall of glass between your play and the people watching. Don’t forget they were once children, who enjoyed being read to, or sung to sleep.

52. Buber and the stage

Martin Buber writes in his book
I and Thou
, “I consider a tree. I can look on it as a picture … I can classify it in a species and study it as a type … It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer
It
 … relation is mutual.”

How to give an audience an I/Thou relationship with the stage rather than an I/It relationship with the stage? That is to say, how can the audience exist
in relation
to the stage as opposed to watching the stage as object? Can the play itself encourage an I/Thou relationship? Can a production? We know that a production can transform an I/Thou relationship into an I/It relationship, but perhaps a production cannot transform an I/It text into an I/Thou relation. Or is it up to the audience members and their glorious free will?

If one is to enlist the audience in a mutual relation,
how
? Must one live in France to do that? I remember the experience of watching Mnouchkine’s company come on stage during an intermission. The children from the play came quite naturally on stage and poured lemonade for the audience (it was a long play). The audience came onto the stage and shared lemonade and bread with the performers and their children, and the stage was no longer an “it”; it had become a “thou.”

I’m not sure if this desire to create a “thou” in the theater is shared in the contemporary American climate, where it seems we put all our efforts into becoming more of an “it”—glossy, cinematic, bold. But I do know when I have been swept into a mutual relation at the theater, my knees always tremble from the effort; my knees know something that my brain does not.

53. God as audience: a non-syllogism

If the proper audience for poetry is God, then the proper audience for the novel is people.

Plays have both stories and poetry.

Therefore the proper audience for plays is: people and God.

But: what is the audience for poetry in a godless universe?

The audience for poetry in a godless universe is the academy.

Or perhaps: other poets and therefore God?

And what is the proper audience for plays in a godless universe?

Is there no proper audience for plays in a godless universe?

Must we invent our own gods?

54. Do playwrights love the audience and should they?

During previews in New York, many playwrights develop a strangely hostile relationship with the audience. It is as though the audience were a tactless dinner guest of slight acquaintance who has arrived at 3:00 p.m. for an evening dinner party. The playwright is still drying her hair, still washing the vegetables, there is no toilet paper in any of the bathrooms, children are wailing in their cribs, and we try our best to make polite conversation while we braise a flank of meat. The dinner guest, sensing our confusion and hostility, stakes out a corner in the living room and, having been given no pistachios, appraises the eager-to-please furniture. The relation is one of mutual mistrust. From the playwright/host: I wanted to please you but you came too early and I know you don’t like me so I hate you. From the audience/guest: I came early to be supportive and your house is a mess and you’re not a good host and I hate you and now I will take my leave of you and blog about you. Immediately.