Sarah Ruhl: Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write (Part 2)
[This is a continuation of Sarah Ruhl's series of short essays about which she says, "If anyone would like to finish any of them for me, consider them all fair game."]
2. On the Loss of Sword Fights
We lost sword fights somewhere in the 20th century and it has meant a new accepted standard of dramaturgy: drama is conflict, conflict is drama. Because our primal bloodlust requires a good fight on stage. But it is one thing to fight with our bodies and swords (it requires skill and virtuosity) and another to merely bicker with words. The gun-fight on stage will not do, it will not do (because it has no virtuosity and because we all know guns are fake on stage so there is no real fear with a gun on stage) but swords have a reality on stage even if they are fake. Fake swords make a better sound than fake guns for one thing—they come from the object itself rather than being dissociated from the object with a sound cue and no real bullet. And so Shakespearean sword fights became in the 20th century Hedda having to bicker with her husband and then shooting herself off stage. (But that brings up the question of suicide with a gun or with poison or with a knife which is another question entirely—the protagonist’s monologue before the death can be better heard on stage with poison than off-stage with a gun-shot, which means the primacy of language itself fades with death by gun.) But going back to the duel…fake swords are mano a mano whereas fake guns are merely: did you remember to bring your gun or didn’t you? If you remembered your gun, you win the battle—if you forgot your gun, you die. Of course there is the matter of the quickness of the draw, but that is better captured on film than on the stage.
Which brings me to: perhaps people have gone to the movies instead of the theaters at this point because their bloodlust is more accurately satisfied at the movies because there gun fights really do inspire fear and anxiety—as do car chases. Because gun fights and car chases are really no good on stage. Which leads us to think that technology itself is really no good on stage. (Should actors be trained in karate or some other fighting art? Should they be trained in a physical fighting art rather than in the art of the verbal duel—i.e. I have an obstacle?)
3. On the Loss of the Curtain
Speaking of technology on stage. We have lost the curtain going up and down and so we have scene changes marked by lights and sound. Scene change: lights sound! Go. Rehearse, rehearse, then bring in the technicians and forget about the acting for a week and then bring back the actors. What has this done to our process? Is the contemporary theatrical transition, with all of our seamless technology, in fact a hypnotic state? A non-Brechtian state? We are so used to our scenic transitions that we forget that what we are watching is actually a failed attempt at the cinematic on stage. We are so used to “tech week” that we forgot to inquire about what it does to a process to spend a week on technology before opening a play before a live audience.
What if we brought back the heavy curtains? Or some other form or device? Why not lights and no sound? Or sound and no lights? Or a monkey on a pole flipping a flip book with the titles of each scene? Why always the same? Well, it is always the same because the designers are paid only for a week in the process. They are only there for the week so the event cannot be sculpted in an individual way by the company. What is the answer? Fire the dramaturgs and pay the designers more? Use more paper and more found objects and pay the designers more? Have one’s own company and rehearse longer and do fewer plays a year? Plays with no tech? Plays outdoors? Plays with lighted candles? Or moving forward with more complex technology that is more integrated into the artistic process from the first day of rehearsal?
4. On Titles with Participles
Many titles of plays, movies and novels these days are participles and gerunds. For example: Leaving Las Vegas, Remembering Ernest Hemingway. It would be crass for me merely to say that I hate these participle titles, even though it would be true. It is perhaps more interesting to think about why we are in a land of the perpetual present, with no action having happened, or about to happen, it is happening, unfolding, all the time, with no subject! What of these alternative titles: “I Left Las Vegas” or “I Remember Ernest Hemingway” or quite simply “Las Vegas”. I Remember Mama would now be called “Remembering Mama”. Was Beckett the first with Waiting for Godot? But Beckett was specifically looking at the act of the participle, it was not incidental, or in vogue, plus in French it is En Attendant Godot and does not the En make all the difference? More nouns and fewer participles! More event and more nouns, more nouns, and less becoming out of time.
5. The First Day of Rehearsal and Bewitched
The first day of rehearsal at most theaters in this country puts me in mind of the television show Bewitched at an advertising presentation by Darren, the ad man. The money is in the room, respectfully, the Board, and the designers and directors must present the play to the room. On the first day of rehearsal I often find myself thinking: what is being sold to me? Oh, yes, the play is being sold. But the play already has been sold! It is already going up! Why then are we selling our process too? Process is dark, it is smudgy and murky, do not shine too much light upon it the first day.
How can we tell the Board what we plan to do in each scene with the design before the actors have arrived? Why do not the actors influence the design and the design influence the actors? Why is half the organic process already accomplished before the actors enter the room? If we think the actors are artists then they should affect the art instead of being moving parts being put to use in service of the directorial vision that has already been conceived.
More witchery please and less ad agency. Why have the great minds of our generation gone into advertising rather than into the theater? Because they get paid more to make ads on TV than to make ads in a rehearsal room. No need to sell the play on the first day. Have someone else sell the play later.
6. The Language of Clear Steps
When did the language of clear steps become an aesthetic vocabulary for the minstrels, bohemians, jugglers, puppet-masters, flying machinists, divas, clowns, burlesque dancers, and theater artists who are meant to channel the inexplicable? In other words “I just want to make sure that the steps the character is taking on his or her journey are absolutely clear.” When did “clear steps” make for a good story? Here is Hamlet taking clear steps. “I’m going to kill him. Now I am about to kill him. Now I have killed him.” Characters take a step and then a back-step and then a leap and then a strange bedeviled jump and then they fall over. Clear steps? They are for a manual on how to put together furniture from another country.
What I mean to say is: whatever happened to the Dionysian. (See Nietzsche on The Birth of Tragedy.) Our theater is now almost entirely made up of Apollos. Whatever happened to the irrational—to the notion that brilliant practicioners of an art form have pipelines to the irrational, are accused of being madmen by Plato, are almost banished from the city, because they are jealous of the irrational, hold it close to their breast—they do not need to justify every intuition to artistic accountants. They do not need their pencils sharpened. If you are one of those people who played school in the summertime (raise your hands, I was one of them) perhaps it would be good to learn a theatrical skill like sword-fighting before coming into the theater and inflicting the role of schoolmarm onto what used to be the life of the passionate vagabond.
Words like “liminal” and words like “unpack” should go in essays about theater and get banished from rehearsal rooms…where are the jugglers? The fire-eaters? Do we all need a masters degree to put up a play? Whatever happened to the garage, the basement? Someone, send in the clowns. And free us from pedigree. Actors used to be akin to prostitutes in the public mind. Now we are akin to professors. I blame this on the Germans. With the rise of the director and the dramaturg, alongside the rise of Heidegger and the deconstructionists. And let us not forget Heidegger’s allegiances during the war…
I do not exempt myself. I went to a university, more than one, I played school in the summertime, and I cannot juggle, hula hoop with flames, belly-dance or even sing very well. But were I to choose a course of study for future playwrights, it would include juggling and it would not include literary theory. Why do young people not go to the theater? Young people do not enjoy seeing things that read like grant proposals…they would rather go to a rock concert…really, do you blame them?
[To be continued.]
November 6th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
I think a strong case can be made, if this is in part what you are arguing, that MFA programs have done considerable harm to theater. Essentially they take talented writers out of the real world and put them in an environment where they have to please a group of professors who tastes run to the abstract and esoteric. The disconnect between what an academic wants from a play and what an audience does is profound. And it becomes a hard habit to shake once you leave the academy, which is why I think we have too many plays today that seem written by playwrights to please other members of the theater community, the audience be damned. Obviously there are exceptions to this–some theater professors want nothing to do with the theoretical approach of their colleagues in other departments–but in the aggregate, I think it’s still true.
I hear you on the need to write from the unconscious or our Dionysian impulses, but for me at least it’s comes down to this–a play has to have an emotional impact. I don’t care if it comes from laughing uproariously because of the jugglers or weeping because of the death of a character, it’s got to be there. This doesn’t have to take the form of catharsis–wonder and awe are also legitimate as far as I’m concerned. I just need to feel something, that’s all.
How did theater become seen as such a cerebral art form? I began writing plays because going to the theater was for me a visceral experience. That’s the huge advantage you get from it being live–you can go for and get to the jugular.
November 6th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Oh yes, full disclosure: I have an MFA in playwriting.
November 10th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Success has a strange way of changing one’s perspective on the state of the arts. Just because one no longer sees what they pine for, doesn’t mean that others aren’t still practicing it. Losing touch with the jugglers doesn’t mean they stopped (nor stage fights - http://www.vampirecowboys.com/past.htm).
November 13th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Art is, at its core, a con, a lie, a game. It is a sculpted, refined, considered thing, which must appear to be wild, improvisatory, and thrown together with heedless passion. There is no need to choose between the Apollonian and the Dionysian–the artist contains both. To throw upon the stage something that was truly dashed-off and haphazard would ultimately bore audiences, because they would sense (consciously or not) that there was no guiding authorial hand, no captain steering this vessel. However, to present something that is nothing but schematic plotting, where every ounce of spontaneity has been drained from the piece in the service of some overdetermined result would also leave audiences cold, for there would be no place for them to insert their responses into a hermetically sealed event.
Thus, I can’t help but feel that the idea of writing from a place of reckless wild abandon is just a faux-naive pose. If you are an artist, you are not some holy fool who stumbles into profundity while in the midst of some orgiastic trance; you are a thoughtful, deliberate craftsperson who is in touch with your unconscious but who can also shape what emerges from that dream state into something that can stand the repeated scrutiny of strangers.
November 13th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
I laughed out loud over Hamlet’s ‘clear steps.’ Why is it that human beings are so unclear, and yet characters MUST be clear? Why do we act unexpectedly every day, and yet sometimes actors say - ‘my character would never do that.’