"Make Them Sit Forward!"

Hi, all!  Busy here in Burbank, and with the madness of the holidays I've been out of the soup for a bit.  (Oh, and I should also say: Happy New Year! - if a little belatedly.)

I'm taking an online playwriting workshop via Gotham.  The week's discussion is about how to make theater viable in a TV, film, and internet age.  I've been thinking a LOT about the "what the heck are we doing this for?" question, so I thought I'd post some of my thinking on that topic.

One of my classmates told a story about how her daughter, on a Peace Corps assignment in West Africa, saw children use sticks, tires and scraps as dolls, since they had no actual toys.

That image encapsulates to me a basic human impulse - even a human NEED: some of us are compelled to take an object which is visibly, obviously one thing and NOT another thing... and to WILLFULLY MAKE IT that other thing. Such transformative power is the basis of both shamanism AND art - which are, when it comes down to it, siblings (perhaps even conjoined twins).

I love that story. It reminds me that theater (and I think art in general) is sometimes more fulfilling when our minds have to fill in some gaps - or willfully work to suspend disbelief.  

Some examples:

• Tony Kushner (in his notes on "Angels in America") says something along the lines of: I've seen the angel's flight done with a big budget, and I've seen her fly in on a shoestring budget, with the wires showing... and I think it's better when the wires show.
• Julie Taymor's amazing designs for "The Lion King" deliberately expose a human being operating a puppet animal...
• ...as do the designs for "Equus" - the half-naked men in horse masks so succinctly encapsulate Shaffer's themes of the god in the animal, and the sexual nature of Alan's crime.
• Consider even"Death of a Salesman," a play that in memory might seem the most traditional of American Realist Classics.  But remember this: Arthur Miller's notes call for a sketchy, dreamlike set, rather than a Loman house detailed down to the tiniest minutia.

Even in the most traditional play, theater on some level makes us WORK more than most TV or film because it's expressly NOT like real life.  And I think that's a great thing. 

I believe that wherever WE have to use our intellect as part of the process of creation (when we have to, in effect, add our own selves to the stew) - then we are more stimulated, more engaged, and more ALIVE than when we have everything handed to us, wrapped up in a neat little bow - a la the experience of watching a silly romantic comedy in which everything is obvious and comes to us ready-made.  As is the case in so much TV.  (Not that I'm biting the hand that feeds me, mind you...)

So I guess I'm saying that to survive and thrive, we creators of theater should consider making plays that are LESS like TV or film (grand, photo realistic sets; ordinary soapy / rom-com / sitcommy stories and characters) - and more like... well, Theater.  We should revel in what theater does really well:

• provide mysteries and conundrums for the mind to puzzle out.
• provide a space for an audience member to make an actual connection with another live human being onstage.
• provide striking images for the eye to see, and great language for the ear to hear.

Realism has its place, sure.  But it's not an end in itself, and it's not all theater has to offer.  After all: we can't compete with film and TV for realism... but TV and film can't compete with theater in providing something that is actually, literally, really REAL.

2 quotes: 

1. Lorca: "A play is a poem standing up."
2. Stuart Hecht (my theater professor from undergrad at Boston College): "When a movie gets suspenseful or overwhelming, you sink down into your seat.  But at the same type of moment in a theater... you sit forward.  So?  Make your audience sit forward!"

Yes, indeed.  Sit forward. Happy 2009.

Comments

[Chance D. Muehleck]

1.

Well put. And it's the independent theatre that continues to make the most of its resources. Broadway is far more two-dimensional than most of the movies I saw last year.

[Amy Friedman]

2.

Love this post; I never participate here, though I'm often moved by what people have to say, but love this idea of making an audience sit forward. Now, as someone trying to finish (year 7) my third memoir, how does the idea apply? Any thoughts from out there?

[Ed Valentine]

3.

Hi, Amy! Thanks for writing back. Am I right in understanding you've written two memoirs already? Wow, I'm impressed, whether or not you decide to finish the third.

I think it's harder to make an audience 'sit forward' with a book... but I think the same rules apply. I mean, why do we go to other people's art/fiction/theater, anyway? I think it's because we want a human connection, and we respond when we feel an artist imparting his or her own self directly to us, through the artwork.

So if you're focusing on communicating as honestly and directly as you can through your words, then you're probably already adept at making your reader rise to join you as they share in your work. Sound reasonable?

[Ed Valentine]

4.

Hiya, Chance! As you know, I am often susceptible to Broadway's charms (Jazz Hands!).

But it is a joy of its own to know that I'm going downtown to see, say, a play about Hannibal crossing the alps... and to know that the company can't afford life-size alps or actual elephants. (It's what Jonathan Goldberg and I often talk about: the Hannibal Test.) I find myself thinking, how the heck will they do the elephants? How will they make the alps?

It's so exciting to see artists come up with theatrical solutions to budgetary problems. Erik Ehn calls it "Theater of the Impossible," and I'm smitten with that phrase and that idea. Put the impossible onstage and make it real (even 'realer' than realism). It doesn't take a lot of dough - just a lot of imagination.