I Can Only Take So Much Realness

In The Velveteen Rabbit," by Margery Williams, the Rabbit asks the Skin Horse what "real" is. To which the Horse replies,  "Real isn't how you are made, it's a thing that happens to you." In the theatre, "real" is a thing we hope happens to the actors we are watching. Some kind of mystical transformation that allows us to experience the story as if it were truly happening before us. However, even under the best of circumstances this kind of transformation is impossible. The play will never (and I would argue, should never) be so real that you truly believe what is happening to the actors is actually happening. In interesting paradox: actors and audiences alike are hoping for immersion and realness, and yet not so much that it distracts from the act of being at the theater. There are steps that can be taken to facilitate this; whether it be staging, or lighting, or music...little things that clue us into the fact that what we just saw was in fact a story, and not real.

I was fortunate enough to study abroad in London for spring semester of my junior year of college, and during that time I saw Judi Dench in Amy's View, by David Hare.

A large thrust of the play is about an aging stage actress butting heads with her daughter's husband, who is a film director/producer. She is concerned about how technology and film are eroding the sacred nature of the theater, and he is dismissive of the theater being able to deliver a story as real as a film can. At the end of the play, the daughter has passed away and Judi Dench's character is having a surge of popularity. She is doing a play and her now son-in-law comes to visit her in her dressing room. She sits before her dressing room mirror applying creme to her face to get ready for her show.

She goes through the entire process of cleansing her face, both with creme and water, hair pulled back, until she is ready to go on stage. All the while having a difficult conversation about the death of her daughter with a man with whom she has never found common ground.

Except that there is no mirror. She sits at a dressing table facing front to the audience, as if the mirror where between her and us. It remains one of the most beautiful moments I've ever seen on stage: an aging actress grieving the death of her only child, forced to relive painful memories because of the presence of the son-in-law, yet studiously preparing her face for a show. And we, the audience, in effect became her mirror. It was both intensely real, and yet obviously "not" real at the same time. We couldn't not be aware that there was no mirror, and yet we believed in the moment that we were watching. The strength of the talent of Judi Dench combined with the choice to not have the scenery be 100% "real," actually worked together to draw the audience in in a way I don't think would have been possible had she had a physical mirror to work with. For one, staging it that way would have forced her to angle away from the audience, and so by taking the mirror away and having her "pretend" it was there, we were able to get every nuanced reaction and emotion as she felt it, because there was nothing between her and us.

I think this illustrates the idea that you can only be so real on stage before it starts to get in the way of story. Yes, we strive for naturalistic truth under imaginary circumstances, but always in such a way that the story is being faithfully served. In the case of the scene from Amy's View, the best way to illustrate the "realness" of the scene was to set it in a way that was actually less than real.

I hereby solemnly swear that you are damned to read this blog post

Welcome to this week's brain-liquefying word stew: Performativity! Whoo-hoo! Or, if you're in the same place I've been in the last few days: Whoo-huh? 

I feel like I've written several different drafts of this post in my head and each time I mentally erase them because I'm stuck. That's right, inter-web people, I am intellectually outmatched by the likes of Judith Butler and J. L. Austin. Don't even get me started on that Derrida dude. However, in the interest of fulfilling my weekly word output (have I hit 500 yet?? No? How 'bout now? Still no? Grrr) I will push forward and drag you all with me. Below find all of the ideas I had, then discarded, then came back to. 

My first offering is the sage advice of the most interesting man in the world: 

The performative phrase here is, "Stay thirsty." Our silver-foxy friend is ordering us to remain in a state of under-hydration. He is attempting to create the reality of our needing a drink by ordering us to require one. What makes this statement infelicitous is that actually has no control whatsoever over how thirsty we may or may not be. And the ironic element is that he is in fact a shill for the beer company Dos Equis. Which I guess isn't ironic at all because, to him, his statement is completely happy and felicitous. He wants us thirsty because he can help. He has the solution! And the solution is beer. (Bonus word play: is it me or does Dos Equis sound like the Spanish Language sequel to a Peter Shaffer play? Think about it. You're welcome.)

Offering number two comes to you in the form of one of the more banal and terrible movies of the last few years: 

The performative utterance in this gem of a movie is " I now pronounce you Chuck & Larry." Someone, somewhere, has decided they have the authority to marry these two bozos. (Full disclosure, I couldn't bring myself to actually watch this movie. But here's a link to the synopsis, should you care...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Now_Pronounce_You_Chuck_%26_Larry

Anyway. The performative quality would be marrying the two guys. Where the movie people are messing with our sense of tradition is that they are taking a well known phrase: "I now pronounce you...,"and instead of concluding it the "traditional" way, i.e. "Man & Wife," they are concluding with "...Chuck & Larry." The irony being that the person asserting the authority presumably isn't actually naming them Chuck & Larry, but marrying them. So on several levels the poster is tweaking our expectations of the phrase "I now pronounce you" along with our expectation of who will be getting married. In this instance, too goofball firefighters trying to skirt the system by getting married. 

Finally, I've struggled with how the idea of a tweaked or queered interpretation of a performative phrase isn't simply satire or parody? Like, if the person uttering the utterance knows that it will be interpreted in a way that goes against the traditional interpretation, is that not parody at it's basest level? In that vein, my final offering comes to you from the well-warped and satirical mind of Mel Brooks...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD5eqBDPMDg

If you click on the above link it will take you to a longer version of the scene, where we see the president literally tell them, "Comb the desert!" Cut to these guys in the desert...you get the joke. But it seems like a good example of how performative utterances can, in the hands of a genius such as Mel Brooks, become instant fodder for humor. It's a fairly mundane and well-known idiom. And Brooks tweaks our expectation by taking it literally and playing it out as such. The extra layer of course, is the third group of men being black men using an Afro-pick. It plays on our preconceptions of culture to get the laugh, but there really isn't a bar too low when speaking about Spaceballs. 

And that's all I got for you. Check back next week, if only to see if I've dragged myself back to a level of semi-literate discussion. Until then, I leave you with of the more famous and gag-inducing performative utterances of the last two years: 

Performance vs. Theatre

Having read the articles by States and Carlson, we are left to ponder and question the difference between performance and theatre.  I think it’s best to start with the idea that “performance” is a much broader term, applicable to almost every aspect of life and society. Indeed, Richard Schechner, in the introduction to his Performance Studies textbook, outlines eight separate areas where performance occurs:

1) jn everyday life

2) in the arts

3) in sports and other popular entertainments

4) in business

5) in technology

6) in sex

7) in ritual — sacred and popular

8) in play

If we accept that he’s right, and that we might be performing in many different ways throughout our daily lives, then we can say that “theatre” is a more specific term. And it’s precisely in that specificity that this conversation gets interesting. And I apologize for letting my brain wander, but…isn’t that the point? 

One might be performing in different ways almost constantly. The way you perform on the phone when having the obligatory conversation with a parent; the performance you give your boss when explaining why you are late; the acrobatic performer you become when caught in a lie you don’t want to explain to a lover. Yet the performance you give in the theatre will almost always be with one overarching aim: to tell a story. It makes the brain go to jelly a bit, because those theatrical stories you tell will include all eight of Schechner’s overlapping situations, yet there is undeniably a difference. You are not employed to perform for your family or co-workers in the way an artist feels employed to tell a story in the theatre. Plays, movies, performance art…these things are specifically designed in a way that makes them theatrical. There is some kind of producer who commissions the story to be told, there is an author who crafts the story, and there is an actor who interprets that story for an audience. Sometimes all of these can be the same person. Including, I suppose, the audience. But it is that deliberate agency of creation that makes it theatre, as opposed to an everyday performance you create as a means of navigating the ups and downs of daily life. 

To take it a step further, I would argue one could also delve into the difference between theatre with an -RE, and theater with an -ER. To me, the former is the artistic endeavor, and the latter is the physical space the endeavor occurs in. A theater can be everything from a Broadway proscenium to a collegiate black box, an open green space in a park, or even a street corner. And you can perform theatre in all of those spaces as well. As long as it is done with artistic intent and a desire to tell a story you are a theatre artist performing in a theater.

At the end of the day, I don’t really believe it’s necessary to draw a distinction between these ideas. Actors and writers and directors are probably the ones who would concern themselves most with making sure they are labeled correctly. I think what is important is to make sure that the necessity of the theatre doesn’t get swept under the rug with the large vastness of what constitutes performance. Yes, there are many ways all of us perform in our daily lives. But this doesn’t make all of us artists of the theatre. That distinction should be reserved for, again, those with the intention of telling a story so as to affect an audience.