Change is scary. Even "good" or "happy" change. It makes you a stranger to the people who love you, a stranger to yourself. Rituals exist to make the strange feel safe. And thank god for it. I sleep next to my fiance every night, I love him with every breath in my body...and still, there have been nights when I lie awake wondering who this man is, who I am, what are we doing and what have we done.
Which is why I need the ritual of marriage. But it's also why I need theater.
Because theater -- ah! theater! -- theater exists to make the safe feel dangerous...or to show us the danger in ourselves that ritual, and the civilizing influence from which it springs, exists to contain. What does theater do, if not show us the extremes of human potential for good, evil, love, lust, terror, jealousy, cruelty...etc? The most important theater, the most immortal theater, might speak to its particular moment, but it is always aimed at these much, much larger questions -- questions that go beyond politics, beyond historic event, to our darker, deeper, more reptilian (or maybe most human) impulses.
Mark Chemer, in his book "Ghost Light" begins by talking about the tradition -- or ritual -- of a ghost light in a theater. He says:
"The ghost light's lonesome existence is dedicated to protecting us, just in case we wish to venture into the dangerous space." (9)
I love that quotation. Because, as anyone who has ventured into a dark, empty theater knows, an empty theater is both literally and figuratively a dangerous space -- there are seats and steps and set-pieces and ladders to trip over, there are pits to fall into and a stage to fall off of. More than that, a theater is the place we go for moments of catharsis -- it's a place that exists to contain and reveal our most extreme emotions, the shadow versions of ourselves we most admire and most fear (think Lear, Gabler, Medea). An EMPTY theater -- well, it holds the MEMORY and the POSSIBILITY of all those shadow selves at once. OF COURSE people think theaters are haunted. EVERY theater is haunted by all the dangerous, disruptive power of all its past and future productions.
You might call out the irony of theater's "danger." Most theater, at least most theater in the United States, happens in beautiful buildings with lobbies and M&Ms and plastic wine cups and plush seats and coat checks and subscribers with the inevitable cellophane lozenges to unwrap. Most theater-goers are coming from or headed to a lovely dinner, maybe with a prix fixe menu. They'll debate whether they have time for the molten chocolate cake, then decide whether they want "to be bad" or just grab a brownie at intermission. What on earth is dangerous about chocolate cake and coat check?
But what are all these things -- the dinners, the plush seats, the intermissions -- but the shrink-wrapping of theater's inherent danger inside layer upon layer of (say it with me:) ritual. What is a (traditional) theater but a temple, what do temples exist for except to create a sacred space for our rituals? What is theater, if not its own very special ritual?
Yes, plays and performance exist to create a dangerous, liminal space where we can collectively experience the most dangerous, the most unutterable, the most disruptive facets of our own shadow selves. And the People Who Know About This Stuff have been wise enough to know that such a space must be a BOUNDED, FRAMED space, buffered on all sides by the rituals that will pull us back OUT of that dangerous space, that will put us back together in such a way that we can put our masks back on, collect our coats and go back home to pay the babysitter, lie down next to our spouses, and sleep through the night without screaming in our sleep.
And if, sometimes, we long to leave the mask off...if we want to tear off our clothes and run out of the theater into the streets, if we are moved so far past the edges of ourselves that we can't find our way back from the shadows...well...
...that, of course, is where theater gets sticky. And interesting. Where you begin to have activists calling out for "new forms," where you begin to hear very smart, very engaged people pointing out that the "dangerous" ideas on most stages often feature people who look very much like our hypothetical audience full of wine and molten chocolate cake, and is written by people who ALSO look very much like* our hypothetical audience full of wine and molten chocolate cake and (AND!) (MOST WORRYINGLY!) is curated by an artistic staff who looks very much like our hypothetical audience full of wine and chocolate cake...you begin to foster the theatrical equivalent of "Sunday Morning Christian,"someone who can go to the theater, walk out feeling elated, disturbed, and inspired...and shake off any lingering sense of unease before he or she reaches the car.
Because Here's The Thing about those People Who Know About This Stuff. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe we're not supposed to pay the babysitter. Maybe we're SUPPOSED to scream in our sleep. Maybe there are things that are WORTH causing us to scream in our sleep. Yes, politics, yes, corruption, Yes, Injustice with a Capital I. We need plays about oil spills, we need plays about Katrina and 9/11 and we sure as hell need plays about Occupy Wall Street. But we ALSO need plays about lust, horror, good, evil, etc...even when it doesn't come attached to something topical or easy to market.
And that's where it behooves us to move away from the Steps of the Temple, to grab some of that holy fire and run like hell down the alley, to break away from those comforting, comfortable frames that let us be moved but only as far as the edge of our seats. And we see it -- the Hypocrites' "promenade" productions, displaced's theater in a motel room, Jaclyn Pryor's "Floodlines," Shakespeare in the Parking Lot, Exit Pursued By A Bear theater's loft performances, dinner included...not to mention "events" like "Sleep No More."
Maybe we've reached a time when life's too comfortable as it is, when we need to be a little bit more afflicted, when we've all got insomnia anyway, when we want the permission to scream, to tear our clothes off. Maybe we've reached a point where the boundaries imposed by our temples to art are doing more to protect the art from US than US from the art.
* Please, please note: when I say "looks like" I *am* talking about skin color. And I *am* talking about gender and age. But, even more, I'm talking about sensitivity and school-larnin' (all those "Yale Mafias" and "Brown Mafias" and "Columbia Mafias" that we joke about); when whole generations of taste-makers train at the same places and attend the same conferences and are inspired by the same few brilliant, inspirational teachers, whether they're taught to deify Aristotle or taught to that it's groundbreaking to speak stage direction or encouraged to write plays shaped like a feather, starring snack food and inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, you're still tightening the noose around the question of what sees the light of day. "Quality" and "Taste" are slippery, slippery ideas, dangerously (that word again) easy to elide.
...that, of course, is where theater gets sticky. And interesting. Where you begin to have activists calling out for "new forms," where you begin to hear very smart, very engaged people pointing out that the "dangerous" ideas on most stages often feature people who look very much like our hypothetical audience full of wine and molten chocolate cake, and is written by people who ALSO look very much like* our hypothetical audience full of wine and molten chocolate cake and (AND!) (MOST WORRYINGLY!) is curated by an artistic staff who looks very much like our hypothetical audience full of wine and chocolate cake...you begin to foster the theatrical equivalent of "Sunday Morning Christian,"someone who can go to the theater, walk out feeling elated, disturbed, and inspired...and shake off any lingering sense of unease before he or she reaches the car.
Because Here's The Thing about those People Who Know About This Stuff. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe we're not supposed to pay the babysitter. Maybe we're SUPPOSED to scream in our sleep. Maybe there are things that are WORTH causing us to scream in our sleep. Yes, politics, yes, corruption, Yes, Injustice with a Capital I. We need plays about oil spills, we need plays about Katrina and 9/11 and we sure as hell need plays about Occupy Wall Street. But we ALSO need plays about lust, horror, good, evil, etc...even when it doesn't come attached to something topical or easy to market.
And that's where it behooves us to move away from the Steps of the Temple, to grab some of that holy fire and run like hell down the alley, to break away from those comforting, comfortable frames that let us be moved but only as far as the edge of our seats. And we see it -- the Hypocrites' "promenade" productions, displaced's theater in a motel room, Jaclyn Pryor's "Floodlines," Shakespeare in the Parking Lot, Exit Pursued By A Bear theater's loft performances, dinner included...not to mention "events" like "Sleep No More."
Maybe we've reached a time when life's too comfortable as it is, when we need to be a little bit more afflicted, when we've all got insomnia anyway, when we want the permission to scream, to tear our clothes off. Maybe we've reached a point where the boundaries imposed by our temples to art are doing more to protect the art from US than US from the art.
* Please, please note: when I say "looks like" I *am* talking about skin color. And I *am* talking about gender and age. But, even more, I'm talking about sensitivity and school-larnin' (all those "Yale Mafias" and "Brown Mafias" and "Columbia Mafias" that we joke about); when whole generations of taste-makers train at the same places and attend the same conferences and are inspired by the same few brilliant, inspirational teachers, whether they're taught to deify Aristotle or taught to that it's groundbreaking to speak stage direction or encouraged to write plays shaped like a feather, starring snack food and inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, you're still tightening the noose around the question of what sees the light of day. "Quality" and "Taste" are slippery, slippery ideas, dangerously (that word again) easy to elide.
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