Murray Ross

Hail, Dionysus!

.  Here is he is, our god, the god of theater. Also: the god of wine, the god of ecstasy.  A terrific kind of god to worship, no?  Absolutely.  But not always a good guy. In The Bacchae, now showing in a vigorous student production in our theater, Dionysus is a handsome, cool ironic sort of cat. He's also a killer.  He shows up at the top of the show, dressed in mortal flesh, telling us he's come to Thebes, his birthplace, to correct the slander spread by his aunts that Zeus was not his dad. He also plans to introduce his rites into the community.

But we learn soon enough from a chorus of ecstatic ladies of the town those rites are already well established, accepted not only by young women but by old men.  In fact there is actually only one person in all Thebes who's a hold out, Pentheus, the arrogant young king of the city.  The action of the play is Dionysus' revenge on the leader who refuses to accept him for a god. And It is vengeance with a vengeance, the most appalling imaginable, including murder, mayhem and a whole lot of body parts.

Violence and dismemberment are essential to Dionysus' identity.  He was ripped from the womb by lightning, and later torn apart by the Titans--and then put back together again.  His association with the grape vine, which must be regularly and severly pruned in order to yield its fruit, is clearly relevant here.  So is his association with ecstasy and inebriation, getting "ripped" as we say---dismembered from our normal lives, and then carrying on in a fabulous thrilling way we might regret in the morning.  We were really torn up last night .. . The link between theater and dismembering is a little less obvious---but it is true that theater too is reality dis-membered and then reassembled in an artful way by playwrights, actors and designers; and furthermore, good theater is something we re-member even after it is gone. Dionysus is our god for a reason.

Will that make you feel better about all the blood and torn limbs spilling all over the stage in The Bacchae?  I very much doubt it.  Nothing makes you or anyone else feel better at the play's end--the god gets his and the rest of us lose.  The play is often thought of as the exiled and embittered Euripides exacting a kind of vicarious revenge on his city, and I suspect it is.  But it must be said that many of the gods in Euripides are jealous gods.  The one thing they really hate is you not worshipping them.  Just ask Hippolytus when he refuses to honor Aphrodite-- she gets him good. For Euripides, love and ecstasy can lead to trouble, but nothing like the trouble you'll find if you avoid or resist their divine force.  Aphrodite is going to punish you, Dionysus is going to tear you up. Better a wild fling than abstinence, because abstinence is denial--it leads to death.

So take heed all you Thebans who ignore the living stage. Take heed all you teetotalers. You refuse the charms of the grape and the religion of the theater at your mortal peril.  I am an old man dancing. I say the god has come! I say do not let what happens to Pentheus happen to you. I cry, hail, Dionysus! I say open a bottle, and subscribe now!

  

 

plays, plays, plays

In London early this year some of us saw a play about a play in rehearsal written by Alan Bennett called The Habit of Art.

 

The play was set where it was performed, in the Royal National Theatre, a hulking concrete complex on the city's South Bank. People hated the National when it was first built in the 1960's. It was not as architecturally impressive as Colorado College's new Cornerstone theatre, but it was at least as unfriendly.  One prominent director suggested the theatre company should just leave, and its three theaters should be rented out as a skating rink, a billiard hall, and a boxing ring. Then after 20 years, with the pretension beaten of out of it, the space would have become human and the actors could sneak back in. But as the stage manager of Alan Bennett's play says, the director was wrong.

"Because what's knocked the corners off the place, taken the shine off it and made it dingy and unintimidating--are plays. Plays plump, plays paltry, plays preposterous, plays purgatorial, plays radiant, plays rotten--- but plays persistent. Plays, plays, plays. The habit of art."

Anyone lucky enough to hear this speech delivered at the National could only agree. The great theatre is no longer intimidating, and that's because so much work, so many plays have been done there. Plays, plays, plays.

I thought of this speech last night going to the first reading of Arsenic and Old Lace in the second floor of University Hall.  When I walked down the hall, in the music room, I saw several fetching girls in leopard skin tops writhing about happily, warming up. They were the Meneads from the student production of The Bacchae which opens tonight.  Excited, writhing, happy young women in leopard skin tops are never to be to be denied, and I found myself plunging myself amongst them, practically begging to be torn apart, a willing sacrifice. "No, no,"they said, "we're the good bacchantes--not those crazy women who rip people from limb to limb." Disappointed yet grateful to be alive, I went off to the first reading of our screwball comedy featuring two of the dearest, sweetest serial killers you'll ever meet--- with 15 good actors around a table, Teddy Roosevelt blowing his bugle and his psycho brother imitating Boris Karloff.  At the end of our first act we took a break, and found the cast of yet another play, produced by Theatre 'd art, rehearsing in the adjacent Osborne studio.  There I met a fine actor I had not cast in a leading role in Arsenic (he was great, but I went with a younger man). I was worried he might be distressed about not being in our show, so close and far away, but it turns out he was quite happy now playing Bob or Ray in the Kurt Vonnegut extravanganza. When our reading was done I walked out again and found a colleague who had just had a very hard night upstairs in the final dress of our Greek Tragedy. She just needed to go home she said, walking sadly away, a dejected queen. The director was agitated and would have been tearing his hair out if he had any.  The production which he had loved the night before looked sluggish in final dress (this is an old story, and not a bad one--the actress will be fine, and so will the show).

Last night, for the first time in my memory, there were three productions in full rehearsal at the same time in University Hall. The building has never been really intimidating, but neither was it designed as a theater. But last night, tonight, and for many nights to come it is not only a theater but three theaters.  Three entirely different worlds are being constructed, and in the seams actors, students, techies, designers, musicians, teachers pass each other, exchange greetings, weep, laugh, and commiserate. Who needs the Royal National Theatre, when we have something ever cozier right here, and just as busy, just as full of the eager, fabulous, absurd energy of the theater?  And what makes this all possible? Plays, plays, plays. The habit of art.

There's nothing like it.

 

Deranged by Rotozaza

It took me much to long to hook up with Rotozaza, and that's not all my fault. For Etiquette you needed a date, and for Guru Guru you needed a gang of five, and all these turned out to be harder than expected to arrange.  But I finally got there, and I'm very glad I did.  The claims for Rotozaza are not modest, nothing new these days when a transformational revolution is just a click away. But I had been better prepared for the experience by a dinner with Ant Hampton, the young founding genius of Rotozaza.  He was theater trained but also theater repelled--bored by the predictablity of traditional theater, and dissatisfied with the way it marginalizes its audience. In "normal" theater we are rendered passive and therefore easily disengaged--there's no real need to pay a lot of attention to the butler serving tea; for us out there in the dark nothing much is at stake.

Rotozaza began by recharacterizing the audience, converting passive spectators into active "witnesses."  One of their first projects involved a non actor, a visual artist they liked.  He wore headphones on a simple stage and followed simple instructions that were delivered into his headphones ("stand up," "move to the cross on the floor," "smile," etc.).  The trick was that these instructions were written on supertitles so the audience could read them as they were being spoken into the performer's head. As a result the audience began to participate and anticipate in a way not usual in traditional theater: because we imagine ourselves performing the same tasks, and because we know the performer is performing them only right here and now, we become much more attentive and engaged.  We find ourselves looking at human actions and decisions in ways in which we normally and cannot do. All of a sudden we are experiencing a new kind of theater.

I found this description, over a good two bottles of wine and decent pasta, absolutely compelling.  I was ready to go, ready to become a new kind of audience, and even a new kind of performer.  And did Etiquette and GuruGuru deliver as advertised?  Not entirely.  I was advised to go to Etiquette with someone I liked but didn't know so well, and so I did.  Sitting at the Sugah's cafe table we slipped on our headphones, listened, spoke and acted according to the clear and specific instructions.  I found myself repeating some lines from a Godard film. Then we collectively mapped out on the table the last scene from an overheated spoken version of Ibsen's Doll House, where Nora famously walks out of her marriage and slams the door. Then we were launched into a surreal fable about a man and a woman and a hill of unspoken thoughts.  We were dutiful, we were "good."  We manipulated the little objects placed at the side of the table. We reached the end. And so what?  Not much, really. A lot of the time I felt was going through fussy motions to a fragmented and not very interesting end.

Except, except .... at one moment my tablemate looked at me and told me she was a prostitute.  Afterwards I realized this instruction gave my Etiquette partner a lot of choice: she might have said it seductively, matter of factly, awkwardly, with shame, etc.  She chose to say it rather slyly, with a tilt of the head and the wisp of a smile.  She looked a bit like the Cheshire Cat.  It was suddenly uncannny.  I also liked it when she held a small notebook in front of her face and raised and lowered it, revealing and concealing different parts of her face. And it was a big deal to be told to take a small dropper, hold it high over her hand while she was sleeping on the table, and try and drop three drops of water on the little x marked on her palm. Hitting that target was of immense importance, and then watching it splash on her palm.  A drop of water splashing on a palm is quite a thing to create, and to see. These are things that just don't happen between people--but they did to us at Etiquette--and we were both their only witnesses and creators.  I suppose others in the cafe might have been looking---but it didn't seem so,and it didn' t much matter either.

GuruGuru was another trip entirely. We were directed to the unfinished 11th floor of the Plaza of the Rockies--extraordinary space with huge wrap around windows; extraordinary view.  I just wanted to hang out there. But an efficient office person I dimly recognized asked us each a few questions, gave us name tags, told us to follow the signs to Guru Guru when the buzzer rang. It rang, we followed---into a small room where we were grouped around a television set.  Head phones went in, and off we went, each assuming a character, and following instructions delivered sometimes individually and privately in our ear,and sometimes collectively from the television screen where a group leader's face and voice were assembled bit by bit. He was the perfect therapist, balding with white hair, beard, sharp but kind smile, full of positive reinforcement-- so what if he smoked and had one panda eye (which my character proposed)? In the next forty five minutes we were guided through a group therapy session in which one character got to cry, another to confess stage fright, another to curse,and another to get up and leave the room.  I have to say I found myself with too much and too little to do.  I spent too much time trying to be a good group member--making sure I followed my instructions and performed my character.  I found this and the insistent but tedious face on the screen (the screeen always wins) distracted me a little too much from what I would have liked to have been doing more--watching other people perform their characters.  And on the other hand I had too little to do, and with really not much choice in the matter either (I remember long ago as a child my disappointment at Disneyland when I realized that every ride I saw would be exactly the same whether I was there or not.  There was no chance of audience interaction, no opportunity to dent or impact the machine--the one exception being the rope and plank bridge on Tom Sawyer's island, where you could jump and sway: I bounced and bounced). It seemed to me that Guru Guru was not giving us enough opportunity to actually perform much of anything, and offerred really no choice at all.  And I know enough about what that is like already.  My hypertheatrical group had this pretty well figured out right away too, so we all playfully overacted, we all floated above the session, we were there and not there.

But once again there were moments that were out of the ordinary.  At the end, when we were told we could take our headphones out, we did--and we sat there still.  The television therapist had deconstructed, the sounds in our heads were chaotic malfunction.  And we sat there.  And we wanted our headphones back.  We wanted more instructions. We didn't know what to do without them.  We put our headphones back on---nothing but chaos. We realized it was over.  We got up, giddy.  One of my partners walked around the room yelling and beating his chest like Zorba the Greek.  I went over to the television and mimed a doggy hump of revenge on the televison set.  Our teenage girl companion giggled. And one of us continued to sit in his chair, either poleaxed or pretending to be poleaxed. Then we all got up and left, laughing. Free at last! When I think back on it, it was quite a scene.  Not the way we usually behave after a show. And afterwards, we all agreed we would like to see what other groups did, or did not do.  Surely we were under constant surveillance--everyone must be in Guru Guru. I look forward to future revelations on youtube.

The aftershocks continued in the brief discussion on the ride home.  One of us said that the most fun he had was watching the rest of us,especially the non actors, perform our characters.  We agreed,and we all wanted more to do, and perhaps a few more actual opportunities for choice--though part of the point may have been to deny us any choice at all, reminding us that many of our real life interactions actually are preprogrammed, offering only the illusion of choice.  Another one of us had a little meltdown--he was the real actor in our group and he didn't have enough to do in the show, and now everyone was speaking and he couldn't get a word in edgewise.  He was all hot and bothered.

Rotozaza is clearly on to something.  Some of their assumptions and claims I find exaggerated.  They are skeptical about the possibilities of genuine conversation, hyper aware of how we perform ourselves for others.  Which we certainly do. But that all sounds very European, very French to me--if you are Jacques Derrida perhaps it is impossible to have a spontaneous unperformed conversation.  But if you are a Henry James American, still innocent, fresh, unsophisticated in performance, you can have such conversations all the time--we can be ourselves and live fully in the moment quite a  lot (I believe even Ant Hampton was having such a conversation over dinner, forking down his pasta, sharing his enthusiasm and ideas with full authenticity and spontenaiety). Wine always helps.

By offering its participants the chance to speak and act spontaneously while carrying out another's instructions, Rotozaza does allow us a transgressive fantasy, free from responsibility.  I found I wasn't quite as free as I wanted to be, since I was acutely quite conscious of my responsibility as a performer--a responsibility I instinctively felt I owed my unseen "director"and most of all my partner(s). It was the opportunity to witness that I most cherised: watching another person confess, attack, choose to hide or reveal, knowing they were themselves and not themselves.  In the end I wanted more space to witness, and I wanted to be less rushed with everything. I have to say I would gladly do it all over again.  As with any game we get better with practice: next time I'll be more relaxed and committed as a performer, and more attentive as a witness. As with everything else I will master my roles. And then I will truly play well--though by then I might have missed the point.

As for the lucky 50 of you of you who played with Rotozaza while it was in town, I would only ask if it was good for you too.  Do tell!

The Audience Talks Back

I have been reading the wonderful correspondence between Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper.

 
  
He's the playwright, living mostly in Yalta, which is better for his fragile health (he has TB and will be dead in four years); she's onstage with the Moscow Art Theater, often performing in Chekhov roles.  He tells her about his garden; she tells him about life in the theater. And you get the feeling going to the theater was quite a different thing in Moscow in 1900--- perhaps it still is.  There's a huge sense of occasion.  And the audience sometimes talks back in a way they rarely do now.  One of Chekhov's characters in the Seagull has a good joke about going to see a famous basso profondo at the Moscow Opera who sang "bottom C," after which the bass from the local choir, speaking from the gallery, cried "Bravo, Silva," a whole octave lower. It would be the kind of thing you'd remember.

Knipper also writes Chekhov about a benefit performance of Seagull with a 4 year old boy in the audience, who talked the whole time. In the first act he said, for the whole house to hear, "Mummy, let's go into the garden and run about."  Compliments to the realism of Stanislavski's set designer. 

On January 13, 1900, they played Uncle Vanya and Knipper writes:

"After Act 4, in the midst of thundrous applause, we heard a voice calling for the director.  Vishievksi was the first to realize what was happening and told us not to bring the curtain down. When the audience quieted down, an emotional voice rang out from the first circle, thanking us profoundly on behalf of Moscow audiences for everything they had experienced in the theater: that this had happened only previously at the Maly.  Then a voice rang out from one of the boxes in the grand tier---'here's better, here's better!'

How do you like that?"

You'd think Chekhov liked it very well--who wouldn't?  I'm sorry to my knowledge say this hasn't happened yet at THEATREWORKS-- but our audiences are occasionally heard from. One particularly lively night at The Mystery of Irma Vep, Lady Enid established such a rapport with the house that they felt almost if they were in the same room with her.  When she entered distraught in the third act, wondering aloud if her mind had been affected, she looked out to the house in depair and a man's voice called out, "Do you wanna talk about it?" And of course she did. This has remained my favorite line, my favorite moment, of the whole production.  And I think Olga and Anton would have liked it too.