Theatre of the Real

C. Martin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137295729
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This book proposes a new way to consider theatre and performance that claims a special relationship to reality, truth and authenticity. It documents innovations in devising and staging theatre and performance that takes reality as its subject, cultural shifts that have generated theatre of the real, some of its problems and some possibilities.

1

Theatre of the Real: An Overview

Then he undertook an existentially complicated task: he tried to pinpoint, very precisely, on the actual highway, the spot where the fictional Aomame would have climbed down into a new world. ‘She was going from Yoga to Shibuya,’ he said, looking out the car window. ‘So it was probably right here.’ Then he turned to me and added, as if to remind us both: ‘But it’s not real.’ Still, he looked back through the window and continued as if he were describing something that had actually happened. ‘Yes,’ he said, pointing. ‘This is where she went down.’ We were passing a building called the Carrot Tower, not far from a skyscraper that looked as if it had giant screws sticking into it. Then Marakami turned back to me and added, as if the thought had just occurred to him again: ‘But it’s not real.’

Sam Ander writing about Haruki Murakami

At the beginning of a performance of Is. Man by the Dutch writer and director Adelheid Roosen, presented at St Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo on Sunday, 7 October 2007, Youssef Sjoerd Idilbi, the lead actor, had a problem with his microphone. Idilbi shook his head and broke text for a moment but then uttered ‘Ah, there’ as the sound system resumed working normally. After a moment, the problem returned; then disappeared again. Things went well until the middle of the performance. Then, just as the dramatic arc was building toward the brutal murder of a woman and her child – the central performative moment in the production about Kurdish honor killing in Holland – the sound system again broke down. Idilbi (Illustration 1.1), who carried most of the dramatic weight of the performance, playing a son searching to find out what happened to his mother and sister, took his headset off and continued without amplification. Idilbi’s voice was now much softer, so to hear him, the audience leaned in toward the stage at the end of the deep space of the warehouse theatre.

Illustration 1.1 Youssef Sjoerd Idilbi as the son with Oruç Sürücü as the dancer in Is. Man, written and directed by Adelheid Roosen. Photograph by Ben van Duin

After less than a minute of speaking without amplification, Idilbi threw up his hands, walked upstage, tossed aside a piece of drapery that was part of the set, picked up a plastic water bottle, and left the stage. The audience heard the door to the theatre slam shut behind him. Had Idilbi walked out of the theatre in the middle of his performance? For several moments the audience sat in undecided quiet, not knowing whether the events that had just taken place were part of the performance or a rude eruption of real life into a play about a real event. Following a hushed commotion in the tech booth, someone rushed through the audience to a silent amplifier in the wings. Then another person ran across the stage. Was this a staging of a murder interrupted by the failure of technical devices in order to make a point about theatre’s intervention in the outside world? Or was this an unsanctioned outbreak of the real exploding the realm of theatre? For my part, as a member of the audience, I was in a state of performance theory ecstasy – a state interrupted when one of the freshman honor students who had accompanied me to the theatre turned to me and asked, ‘Is this for real?’ After a pause, and at great risk of losing face for the rest of the semester, I whispered definitively, ‘I don’t know.’

After some moments passed, Brader Musiki, performing the roles of musician and grandfather, started singing. Oruç Sürücü, the dancer in the production, calmly walked downstage and began a whirling dervish dance. The performance seemed to be continuing, but was this the performance that was meant to continue? We heard shouting coming from the lobby. A woman a few rows in front of my students and me stood up and yelled, ‘The playwright will not permit the actor to return to the stage.’ How would she know? She must be a plant, I thought. It seemed anything might happen from here on. I was quietly hoping for a theatre riot of riled-up spectators whose real anger could only be quelled by the definitive resumption of the theatrical.

As the house lights went up, it seemed certain that the real had raised its unruly head in the midst of the theatre. The stage manager stopped the dervish from twirling and announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we will need a few moments to make some adjustments. The playwright is preparing to take the stage. You are welcome to move around, but please stay for the rest of the show. We want to tell you this story.’ At that point I thought that the playwright wanted to be a performer and had devised this whole crazy thing in order to get on the stage. When the stage manager announced that the play would now continue, to my thrill and horror an audience member stood up and yelled, ‘We want to know what happened!’ The stage manager replied, ‘The performer kept saying his stomach hurt, that’s all I know.’ So it was real, I thought. But then director/playwright Roosen appeared in the wings and walked downstage with a script in her hands. ‘We must tell the truth here. The same thing happened last night with the sound system. And it was opening night. Today the performance was being filmed. The performer just got fed up.’ So it’s staged, I thought. But neither I, nor anyone else in the audience, knew for sure.

This overlap and interplay between ‘theatre’ and ‘reality,’ the blurred boundary between the stage and the ‘real’ world, is the subject of this book. I discuss a variety of international performances that, although by different means and to different ends, claim specific relationships with events in the real world. My aim is to portray a shift in the pattern of understanding the representation of the real as necessarily involving verbatim and documentary sources to one that includes a variety of forms and methods and acknowledges a paradigm, a perspective, a subject, and the development of different methodologies. This will hopefully become clear as I examine the problems and possibilities of the ways theatre of the real seeks to ‘get real,’ to access ‘the real thing,’ to represent reality, and to be part of the circulation of ideas about our personal, social, and political lives. My methodology is to discuss and analyze specific performances of international authors, directors, performers, and theatre companies in a variety of contexts rather than the body of work of a few specific artists or companies. The focus of my analysis is more on performance, the meanings produced by the live works on stage, rather than the abundant and important dramatic literature composed of letters, diaries, court records, depositions, interviews, and histories. To consider the ways in which theatre of the real enacts social and personal actualities by recycling reality for the stage, I sometimes theorize audience reception – occasionally including my own, because I have seen most of the performances I discuss. Performances with Jewish subject matter recur throughout the book because the fateful experiences of Jews in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been at the center of discussions of one of the most important subjects of theatre of the real – social justice.

In Get Real, Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson discuss the nomenclatures used to describe theatre that cites reality by putting aside the question of definition in favor of specific critical approaches that ‘probe the utility and viability of these terms’ (2009:2). While there may be no universal agreement on individual terms, there is an emerging consensus that theatre of the real includes documentary theatre, verbatim theatre, reality-based theatre, theatre-of-fact, theatre of witness, tribunal theatre, nonfiction theatre, restored village performances, war and battle reenactments, and autobiographical theatre. All of these types of theatre claim a relationship to reality, a relationship that has generated both textual and performance innovations. The array of terms indicates a range of methods of theatrical creation that are not always discrete, but may overlap and cross-fertilize. These methods include, but are not limited to: theatre created from the verbatim use of transcripts, facts, trials, autobiography, and interviews; theatre created from reenacting the experiences of witnesses, portraying historic events, and reconstructing real places; theatre created from the Internet including YouTube and Facebook; and any combination of these. In this kind of theatre, there is an obsession with forming and reframing what has really happened. There is the desire to produce what Roland Barthes dubbed the ‘reality effect,’ the result of a form of citation that confers the status of legitimacy upon the artwork with the concomitant sense that what is represented is real or has a relationship with what is real (Van Alphen 1997:21).

The phrase ‘theatre of the real’ identifies a wide range of theatre practices and styles that recycle reality, whether that reality is personal, social, political, or historical. In using the phrase, I aim to note theatre’s participation in today’s addiction to and questioning of the real as it is presented across media and genres.¹ With the unprecedented growth of virtual entertainment and personal communication technology, our ubiquitous cultural experience of the real results from both live and virtual performances of the self and others in a variety of media. Facebook, YouTube, and reality TV serve as personal performance vehicles. Theatre of the real is born from a sea change in archiving brought on by digitization and the Internet. The proliferation of websites ranging from group and individual homepages to Facebook and YouTube have democratized the exchange of images, both still and moving, as literally millions of people gained heretofore specialized skills in making and processing audiovisual information.

Of necessity, throughout this book I engage history and historiography, because theatre of the real participates in how we come to know and understand what has happened. Arguably, some theatre of the real can even be understood as intervening in history – as changing, or trying to change, history itself. In his essay about the changing critical response to The Investigation by Peter Weiss, Robert Cohen reminds us that ‘history has no language and that the language of history is the language of men and women who relate it – an institutionalized discourse with all that that implies’ (Cohen 1998:49).

History, too, is an act of the imagination. Both the historian and creators of theatre of the real ‘select events from an uninterrupted stream and invent meanings that create patterns within that stream’ (Van Alphen 1997:31). The process involves not only imagination but also traces of evidence that both provide an account and have to be accounted for.² ‘Historians, that is to say, proceed inferentially,’ writes Paul Connerton in How Societies Remember:

They investigate evidence much as lawyers cross-question witnesses in a court of law, extracting from that evidence information which it does not explicitly contain or even which was contrary to the overt assertions contained in it. Those parts of the evidence which are made up of previous statements are in no sense privileged; a previous statement claiming to be true has for the historian the same status as any other type of evidence. Historians are able to reject something explicitly told them in their evidence and to substitute their own interpretation of events in its place.

(1999:13)

In ‘Portrait of An Enigma,’ the brief essay that accompanies his play I Am My Own Wife, Doug Wright states that one of his breakthrough moments in trying to figure out the structure of his play came when he decided that he would chart his changing relationship with his real-life subject as part of the play (2004:xv). Wright assuaged his fear of charges of narcissism by making clear the parallel between the subject of his play, the transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf who publicly donned a dress in the face of both Nazism and Communism, and himself: von Mahlsdorf as a curator of nineteenth-century antiques and Wright in his self-designated role as curator of von Mahlsdorf’s life (xv). The result was a 35-character play, with all the roles performed by one actor. Wright’s idea was that ‘the whole piece could be a rumination on the preservation of history: Who records it and why? What drives its documentation? Is what we come to know as history objective truth, or the personal motive of the historian? When past events are ambiguous, should the historian strive to posit definitive answers or leave uncertainty intact?’(xv). Including himself as a character in the play enabled Wright to implicitly pose these questions. The play is about, among other things, Wright’s own process of infatuation, love, disillusion, and then acceptance of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf as a flawed transvestite heroine, first praised for preserving a Weimar cabaret in her basement and then reviled for being a liar and an informer for the Stasi (East German secret police). As performer Jefferson Mays, author Wright, and director Moisés Kaufman worked together on the script, they frequently reminded one another that they were not making a play in the conventional sense and thus were not obliged to observe the rules of classic, Aristotelian dramatic structure. The operative idea was more a mosaic.³ Wright states that the first meeting of Charlotte and Alfred in I Am My Own Wife was based entirely on conjecture, that he felt no need to be bound by fact. The play’s main character, created from interviews that Wright conducted with von Mahlsdorf as well as Wright’s inclusion of himself in the play, is both fiction and nonfiction. When spectators left the theatre they saw a photograph of von Mahlsdorf as a boy, sitting with two lion cubs on his lap – the very image mentioned in the final moments of the play as the photo that von Mahlsdorf sent Wright shortly before s/he died.

Mays’s skill as an actor was also a key factor in determining the dramaturgical structure and histrionic interpretation of I Am My Own Wife. When working on developing the production at Sundance Theatre Lab in Utah, Mays created a scene with dollhouse-size furniture, making Wright realize that there were ‘countless new ways of dramatizing my existing text’ (2004:xx). Mays played 34 of the 35 characters wearing a simple black dress with pearls (Illustration 1.2), and thereby making all the characters, save one, appear cross-dressed. In this transgendered pageant, Mays played everyone as if they all lived in one person and by performative extension the audience was asked to consider an analogous kind of incorporation. Wright created the eleventh-hour number in I am My Own Wife as an act of homage to Mays, giving him a chance to show off his virtuosity. In rapid succession, Mays played Charlotte, Wright, a German News Anchor, Markus Kaufmann, Ulrike Liptsch, and Ziggy Fluss as a whirl of commentary on von Mahlsdorf being found out as an informer. In writing this section of the play, Wright provided Mays with something like the solo ‘pure dance’ variation performed by the prima ballerina in a narrative ballet. To further the sense of the spectators’ relationship with antiquity, history, and period, the off-Broadway premiere that I saw in 2003 at Playwright’s Horizons had a magnificent upstage wall of all kinds of antique clocks.

Mays never met Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. But after her death in 2002, he performed I Am My Own Wife at her Gründerzeit Museum. There is a moment in the play where Charlotte recalls seeing through the window of her aunt’s home her violent father walking in the snow. During Mays’s January 2006 performance at the Gründerzeit Museum, he realized that the couch he describes in the play was the same couch actually present in the room where he was performing. When Mays walked to the window of the museum and pulled the curtains aside, saying, ‘and I looked through the window and it was snowing,’ he was, in fact, looking through a real window at an actual snowstorm outside.⁴ At this moment, von Mahlsdorf’s memory, as played by Mays in the real Gründerzeit Museum, was duplicated and confirmed by the real couch and window mentioned in the play. Was Mays’s performance history, fiction, nonfiction, or something else and not quite either? In a seeming trick of nature, the real snow seemed to take its cue from the play. The world of the play was actually happening in the real world. It was really snowing outside, and the snow could be seen through the window. But the snow is also called for by the drama. So the snow was both ‘real’ and ‘theatrical.’ At that moment, the real inhabited the theatrical, providing spectators with an uncanny spectacle of double vision, an inherent pleasure of the theatrical.

Illustration 1.2 Jefferson Mays as Charlotte Van Mahlsdorf holding a miniature replica of Van Mahlsdorf’s antique phonograph in I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, directed by Moisés Kaufman. Photograph by Joan Marcus

Intrusions of the real into the theatrical, whether unplanned – as with Idilbi leaving the stage or with the serendipitous duplication of real snow outside a real window in Mays’s performance at the Gründerzeit Museum – or effected by deliberate artistic intervention displays the closeness and the distance of the real and the theatrical. Attilio Favorini reminds us that Herodotus, who referred to himself as speaking – what we would surely refer to as performing today – rather than as writing history, reported that the playwright Phrynichus was fined a thousand drachmas for writing about the Persian War too soon after its occurrence, thus traumatizing the spectators anew (1995:xii).

Before people grew apprehensive about the proximity of the theatrical to the real, there was first a tension between imitation and authenticity. In The Real Thing (1989) Miles Orvell argues that the high value Americans put on authenticity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, marked a shift in the arts from imitation and illusion to showing and doing ‘the real thing’ (xv). As credible machine-made replicas of all kinds of goods became readily available, a culture of authenticity arose in ‘an effort to get beyond mere imitation, beyond the manufacturing of illusions, to the creation of more ‘authentic’ works that were themselves real things’ (xv). The culture of authenticity that was integral to modernism was formed alongside the mainstream culture of aesthetic imitation (xv).

According to Forsyth and Megson, ‘much documentary theatre has complicated notions of authenticity with a more nuanced and challenging evocation of the ‘real’ (2009:2). In addition to a growing number of reflexive performance techniques, which focus the spectator’s attention on how the performance is made and therefore acknowledge the complexity of the performance’s reality, is the shift away from single-perspective notions of truth toward ambiguity and multiple viewpoints. ‘The one trenchant requirement that the documentary form should necessarily be equivalent to an unimpeachable and objective witness to public events has been challenged in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Theatre of the Real: An Overview
• 2 The Theatricalization of Public and Private Life
• 3 After the Fact: Memory, Experience, Technology
• 4 Apart from the Document: Representation of Jews and Jewishness
• 5 Occupying Public Space
• 6 Seems Like I Can See Him Sometimes
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index